7 Reasons

Tag: dark

  • 7 Reasons Not To Have A Staring Contest With The BBC One Ident Hippo

    7 Reasons Not To Have A Staring Contest With The BBC One Ident Hippo

    For one reason – which is why it doesn’t qualify for this site – I had to live pause the TV last night so that Claire and I could watch The Apprentice together. I paused the TV when the Hippo ident was showing. The exact point at which I paused is shown below. Knowing that I had at least fifteen minutes before I could press play, I had a choice. Start the ironing or have a staring contest with the hippo. I chose the latter. This is my story (of why it was a stupid idea).

     

    7 Reasons Not To Have A Staring Contest With The BBC One Ident Hippo

     

    1.  Winning. From the moment I even contemplated staring at the hippo I knew I was going to lose. The only way I could have won is if we had had a power cut. (An unlikely scenario unless I was to attack the fuse box with a cucumber). And yet, despite being fully aware of the highly probable outcome, I still entered the battle. It was pointless, it was a waste of time and I was always going to finish second. Or last. Whichever didn’t come first really. For someone who enjoys winning it was a bizarre and futile decision that did me no favours. When the inevitable did happen a little bit of my aura had been destroyed. I’m was no longer the man I once was. So if you are ever tempted, don’t do it. You’ll never be the same again.

     

    2.  Distractions. A couple of minutes into the contest my phone rang. Now, even if I don’t answer my phone, I nearly always look at the display to see who I am going to ignore. It’s a habit. While on this occasion I was strong enough to ignore it, my mind was no longer on the job in hand. It was on who might be calling me. Was it Claire saying she’d be longer than she initially thought? Was it my Mum wondering where the rest of her Mother’s Day present was? Was it Marc wanting to sell me a baby? To this very minute I am not sure if my line of vision flinched towards my phone or not. It’s impossible to say. What I do know is, it did me no favours. When you are staring at a Hippo – especially a picture of one on the TV – you have to be in the zone and you have to stay in the zone. Distractions are zone killers.

     

    3.  Fish. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt. I told myself that my line of vision had not altered and so, if I was able, I may re-enter the zone. And, after a few minutes, that is what happened. I know this is what happened because my focus began to drift. The hippo was now a blurred hippo. And then the blurred hippo wasn’t a hippo at all. It was a fish. A fish in side-profile. A scary fish in side-profile. I mean this thing was ugly. It had a pair of lips Leslie Ash would have been proud of and a scaly body that reminded me of this. I am not sure this will work for you – in fact I am not sure I want it to work for you – but if you have a spare ten minutes just stare at the hippo above. If you’re unlucky the fish should appear across the lop of the hippo’s head. The lips appear in the hippo’s right eye if that helps.

     

    4.  Guilt. Having rid myself of visions of Piers Morgan and Leslie Ash’s illegitimate child, I then experienced severe pangs of guilt. The hippo was drowning. I had done that. I had paused the hippo and made him tread water. Twelve hours on I am pretty sure he wasn’t drowning at all. I am pretty sure this was pre-recorded footage and all I had done was paused its progress. But at the time, when you’ve been staring at a hippo for approximately thirteen minutes, that type of rational thought doesn’t enter your mind. You really do feel like a hippo murderer.

     

    5.  Terror. This is when you realise that the hippo is staring back at you. And he looks angry. Probably because you have made him tread-water for fifteen minutes. He also looks a bit like a crocodile with his nostrils protruding from the water. And that’s when you start panicking. Are you actually on BBC One? Are you sure you’re not watching – and recording – Animal Planet? Do you even have the Animal Planet channel? Is there even a channel called Animal Planet? So, yes. Staring at a hippo for too long makes you go mad. Really quite mad.

     

    6.  Visions. When Claire eventually arrived beside me on the sofa and gave me an opportunity to end my ordeal, I realised it wouldn’t be over for a little while longer. All the staring at a bright screen in an otherwise dark environment left me looking through those annoying colour blotches that you are only supposed to get when your eyes are closed. As one does in such circumstances I shut my eyes to try and get rid of them. This didn’t work. Instead I was faced with a vision of the hippo. In sort of a yellow and red mosaic. A mosaic that slowly began to disperse. Which is when I decided I was through and settled back to watch The Apprentice. With the occasional appearance from a fish.

     

    7.  Tea. I can barely bring myself to write the words. It went cold.

  • 7 Reasons Blackout Blinds Are Surprisingly Effective

    7 Reasons Blackout Blinds Are Surprisingly Effective

    My wife and I are trying to train our child to recognise the difference between day and night at the moment and the latest weapon in our armoury is a blackout blind: a blind which prevents any light coming through the window.  This, we not unreasonably thought, would prevent our six-week old son waking up at 5am when sunlight streams through our East facing bedroom window and would help him get into a settled routine of sleeping at night.  So far, it has proved effective (after a fashion).

    a black gif.

    1.  Fitting.  As the member of the 7 Reasons team that is competent at DIY I envisaged that there would be no problems installing our blind, and I was almost correct. It was incredibly simple to fit, with only a bit of light drilling required.  And it was simple right up until the moment  – while I was balanced precariously atop a step-ladder – that everything went dark.  Not just dim, you should understand, but dark.  Preternaturally dark.  Darker than spending a dark night in the darkest room of the Prince of Darkness wearing a sleeping mask.  Darker than anything ever.  There was no light.  “Help!”  “Help!” I called until my wife came up the stairs and opened the door, flooding the room with light from the hallway.  “It all went dark”, I explained to a sceptical wife who couldn’t comprehend – or didn’t believe – that something as insubstantial as a piece of material could block out all light.  I climbed down from the ladder with my reputation for DIY prowess, if not my dignity, intact.

     

    2.  Baby’s Bedtime.  In the evening our son fell asleep before we expected him to and, rather than look a gift horse (or a sleeping baby, which is a very similar creature to a gift horse) in the mouth, we decided we would put him to bed right then.  We gingerly carried him up the stairs and swaddled him in his cot.  We began to sneak out of the room and paused to close the blind on the way.  Everything went black.  We couldn’t see a thing.  We partially raised the blind again so that we could find the light switch and turned on the light so that we could see the door and find our way out.  This woke the baby.  Bugger.

     

    3.  Mummy’s Bedtime.  Eventually, we were able to get our son back to sleep and, quite soon after, my wife snuck up to bed.  I have little idea what happened, but after a couple of minutes, from my position in the room below, I heard a loud bang, followed about thirty seconds later by the noise of the baby crying.  Then I heard the sound of my wife trying to placate the crying baby with a cuddly toy, before my parental selective deafness kicked in and I returned to what I was doing.

     

    4.  Daddy’s Bedtime.  Eventually, the baby became quiet again and, having spent the remainder of a fascinating evening reconfiguring the 7 Reasons W3 Total Cache plugin and our email servers*, it was time for me to go to bed.  I went up the stairs and changed in another room, so as not to disturb anyone.  Then I snuck across the landing into the bedroom and closed the door noiselessly behind me.  Where once there would have had been some residual light filtering through the blind to aid my navigation across the room, now there was none.  I knew roughly where the bed was though, and I took several tentative steps toward it before stumbling over something and letting out an involuntary scream as I lost my balance and landed in a heap on the bed.

     

    5.   “AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!” Shrieked a lump in the bed from beneath me as, in the pitch darkness, a screaming and unknown assailant pounced on her.  I groped around for the switch to the bedside light and, finding it quickly, turned it on.  I looked behind me to see what was on the floor.  “Are you drunk?”, the now slightly calmer lump in the bed enquired.  “I fell over an owl,” I replied.

     

    6.  “WWWWAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!” Said a tiny voice from the other side of the room reacting to the sudden light.  Eventually we were able to get him back to sleep.

     

    7.  Sleep.  I was unaware of what occurred during the remainder of the night.  I have since been told that the usual cycle of the baby waking up and requiring feeding and changing carried on unaltered by the loss of the light.  I was told that this morning when, after what I can only describe as the most blissfully tranquil sleep of my life, my rather tired looking wife shook me awake and informed me it was 11am and that we were going to be late for our lunch appointment.  “But it can’t be”, I replied, “It’s still pitch black”.

     

    So there you have it.  Blackout blinds do work, and you can use them to lull the unsuspecting into sleeping longer and later.  They just don’t work on babies.

     

    *I had hoped to watch a couple of episodes of Bergerac.  We sacrifice a lot for 7 Reasons.