I gave my presentation for the John Logie Baird awards earlier in the week.  I entered this innovation award on the premise that Wobbly Williams is a bit different to other organisations that raise awareness and raise money because we avoid the doom and gloom and try and use a bit of humour to break down the barriers non-wobbly people put up when faced with a difficult subject of a young person having Parkinson's disease.  The presentation involved me talking for 10 minutes couple which was followed up by 10 minutes of questions from a panel.  Simon Cowell has a lot to answer for.  A more grumpy bunch of people you would travel a long way to find, I think they struggled to accept that dealing with adversity through constant giggling is innovative.  Before I went in to the presentation I had a look at the previous winners in my category (Social Enterprise) and, frankly, with regard to innovation, the bar isn’t high.  Take for example last year's winner, the Scottish Seabird Centre.  If it had been based in Stirling then I would have accepted that is innovative.  But locating it next to the sea can hardly sit in the same bracket as inventing television like Mr Baird did.  Allegedly.  "Let's build a tourist attraction right here beside the sea where there are lots of seabirds.  What shall we call it?".  They probably got a consultant in.

I received my pack from "23 and me", the company founded by Sergei Brin of Google, who has the Parkinson's gene, to get my genetic code analysed to see what other medical dilemmas are ahead of me.  I could spawn a whole range of websites.  Sergei is recruiting as many Parkies as possible to see if there are any genetic similarities that have been missed.  It will be interesting to see how they measure my carbon footprint from a test tube of gob.  Or is it genetic footprint?  Or genetic fingerprint?  Not sure.

Speaking of my carbon fingerprint, we did our bit for depleting the ozone layer by driving to Great-Aunt Ailsa's funeral in Leeds in higher gas guzzling Honda.  It really doesn't like to pass a petrol station without at least popping in for five minutes.  It is a tortuous journey along the A65 from Kendal to Rawdon where the cremation took place.  It was a lovely occasion, there was sadness because she will be missed but much happiness because she was a wonderful lady who left lasting impression on many that she met.  It was good catching up with long lost cousins and aunties and, especially, Uncle Colin who has taken over Ailsa's calendar making duties and raised a significant sum for Parkinson's research with his first attempt.

Gareth spotted a sign combination on the way into the crematorium which caused much hilarity.  Beneath the sign at the gates of the crematorium which says "Rawdon Crematorium" is another one which says "One Way Only".  Truly brilliant.

WobblyWilliams.com got some good PR this week with a two page spread in the health supplement of the Daily Record.  The article was written by a very sympathetic journalist who took a lot of time to listen to what I had to say and reported it brilliantly.  The article is here.  The health supplement has a contents page which lists my article under the heading "Lawyer Gets Hit By Parkinson's".  I bet the majority of the Record readers said "Good. F***ing parasites".

We went to the indoor athletics at Glasgow's Kelvin Hall this weekend.  I have always fancied going to an athletics meeting and it is cracking fun.  Our seats were next to the pole vault and every time a vaulter launched himself in the air, Rebecca would squeal and cover eyes.  How do you learn how to pole vault?  Do they start off with small poles and work their way up to the full-length ones?  Surely there must be a certain length a pole has to be before it will bend.  It must be quite terrifying doing that first jump.  I have been thinking about this for three days and still can't get my head around it. 

I remember Billy Connolly telling a Chick Murray joke about a pole vaulter turning up at the gates of the Olympic village with his pole up in an enormous pole shaped suitcase.  The security guard asks "are you a pole vaulter?",  The athlete replies, "No I am German and how did you know my name vas Valter?".