#tbt RIP Hugh Hefner: My Unlikely Connection

The original playboy himself is dead. Long live the king.

A strange story about the Playboy mogul: back in 2007 I met this girl in a bar. We'll call her SL. She was incredible- blonde hair, great body, gorgeous face, superb fashion sense. From how she held herself I thought if I ever approached her she'd bite my head off, so I never bothered. Besides, I'd heard she was going out with some huge meathead steroid abuser.

SL had a gay best friend, a skinny guy called CH who used to flirt with me. He told me SL liked me, and wanted my number. I didn't believe him at first, but I got talking to SL and found out she'd dumped her boyfriend recently. I realised she was everything I'd never have guessed she was- kind, sweet-natured and timid. We started seeing each other, but both of us were waiting for the other to make the first move. We kissed once in a month of dating, then it fizzled out. We were both quite well known in the town, and gossip had started flying back and forth between the bars we'd visit, and neither of us were confident enough to rise above it. After we ended things we kept in touch, but we both seemed to learn from our respective hesitancy: before long we were seeing other people and having much more success with dating.

We lost touch for a while, but in 2011 SL added me on Facebook. She was still modelling, and still with the man she'd met after me. (The girl I'd got with had long since disappeared.) After a few months it emerged she'd landed the jackpot, as far as her ambitions went: she'd been invited to LA by Hugh Hefner to visit the Playboy Mansion.

During her trip she posted pictures on Facebook of her with Hef himself, with her arm around his shoulder, and with the other girls, sat watching a movie in his home cinema. It seemed like SL and the rest of the girls were being treated very well. SL posted later to say she'd been given a lift to her hotel by Hef's mate Ron, a scruffy-looking 'actor.' She googled him when she got to her room- she'd been riding around with porn maestro Ron Jeremy.

SL dropped off the social media scene a while ago, and I've not had much contact with her. I gather she's moved on from modelling these days. I wish her all the best, whatever the case.

#tbt New York, 2000

I went to The Big Apple in April of 2000, a family holiday with my parents, sister and aunt. Amazing weekend. It just happened that then British heavyweight boxing champ Lennox Lewis was taking on American challenger Michael Grant that weekend, and we found ourselves outside Madison Square gardens while the fight was taking place.

The security guard would not let us in.

I've done some digging around and found a few souvenirs from the trip, so I figured I'd insta a few of them and upload them in a few Throwback Thursday posts. Here's the first one.

Guggenheim Museum gift bag. New York, April 2000. #tbt

A post shared by Matt Tuckey (@matttuckey) on Sep 7, 2017 at 2:51am PDT

Top of the World. World Trade Center tickets. April 2000. #newyork #tbt

A post shared by Matt Tuckey (@matttuckey) on Sep 7, 2017 at 2:48am PDT

I realised here that I still had a fear of heights. The observatory of the WTC was one flat floor with huge windows, and the edges of the floor dropped down into seating benches so that your knees were almost against the glass. There's a picture of me somewhere where I'm looking back and smiling, pretending I'm not totally shitting myself.

Postcards from New York, April 2000 #tbt

A post shared by Matt Tuckey (@matttuckey) on Sep 7, 2017 at 2:41am PDT

#tbt I won £250, BTW

Just over a year ago, this happened. As the article suggests, I did spend the money on festivals, although seeing as I forgot to actually buy a ticket to the first one in advance that money disappeared much quicker than I had planned it to. Good times though. Thanks FCHO!

#tbt: An Urban Legend about the Manchester IRA Bomb

Back in 2006 when I was doing agency work getting nowhere with my life, I was working in a postal room in the old CIS tower in Manchester doing a very tedious job for minimum wage. I remember a conversation surfacing about the Manchester IRA bomb on Corporation St, which had happened a decade beforehand. It was probably the tenth anniversary, and the radio news would have been discussing it retrospectively.

One of the people working in the post room- some guy, he may have been young or old, I dunno- he claimed he knew one of the ambulance workers who'd been called to the scene. The ambulance worker had entered the Marks and Spencer, its glass panels smashed by the explosion. The detonation had ruptured the sewage works under the building, and this had led to rats scurrying out of the split drainpipes, some of them as large as small cats, grown obese on the city's waste.

After evacuating the building, the ambulance worker then emptied the shop's tills and walked out with fourteen grand stuffed into the pockets of his overalls. And fourteen grand in 1996 would have got you a fair bit more than it would today.

Talk about perks of the job.

Is this a bullshit rumour, or is there some truth to it? Drop me a comment if you know. I'd love to hear from you.

#tbt My Name is Earl

Who remembers US comedy series My Name is Earl, first broadcast on Channel 4 in 2006?

I tuned in for a couple of shows and enjoyed them, but I don't have the patience for TV series. What grabbed me about the show was the idea of fixing your life with a list. Earl (Jason Lee) had messed up badly. He'd slept with his friend's fiance, he'd stolen beer from a golfer, ruined his friend's wedding, punched a professor in the gut and failed to pay his taxes, among many others (sometimes worse). In each episode he attempted to cross something off the list, but being accident-prone (and generally an arsehole) he normally finds other things to add on. But, by the end of most stories he whips out his crinkled list and scribbles off a numbered item with a biro- and with satisfaction.

What grabbed me about the show was the idea of fixing your life by laying it out in list format and ticking it off. Normally when we make a task list it's a hideously mundane affair regarding housework and chores. In Earl's case, it was a list of fuck-ups to be resolved, which led to a series of comedic adventures. A question: Why does a list have to be dull? Why can't it be something that will surely lead to a better life? It's possible that this show laid the seed that led to blog posts like The Hit List, a selection of Manchester food-and-drink places to check out, or The 11 Top Nightspots in Manchester (both of which would be slightly different were I writing them today).

My lists are also about fixing my life: plans for the future, things that scare me, things that will be cripplingly hard. I have an issue with shyness. I need better note-taking skills to compensate for my memory difficulties. I'd like to be using my skills in writing in my actual career, as opposed to leisure. And I'm struggling with all of these. Putting them in a list format, like Earl does, makes them less intimidating. I've written these lists in the OneNote app on my Windows phone, the same app I keep my Tesco list and my weekend chores. When I open my phone, all my ambitions are laid out in as simplified a manner as my mundane tasks. So, some things I need to do are easy (or would be if the drive-in car wash was actually open as advertised), and some are a lot harder (like: approach an attractive woman without physically shaking and feeling slightly sick).

Like Earl, though, life changes and I add things to these lists as time goes on. I probably always will.

#tbt Subject magazine

In around February 2001, towards the end of my time at Tameside College, I spotted something unusual in the newsagent round the back of the Ashton campus. It was a new men's lifestyle magazine, like countless others that I'd not paid much attention to. This one was different, however: there were no scantily-clad women on the cover. In fact, there were no cover pictures at all.

I gave it a shot and bought on impulse. My mates were confused as to why I wouldn't just go for FHM like the rest of them, but the answer to that was simple: if you want porn, man up and go buy some. If you want to READ a magazine, buy one with some actual journalism in. Y'know, without the distraction of tits. Time and a place, man.

Subject magazine was well-rounded with articles on travel and fashion, but also on upcoming TV shows, comedians and films. Comedian Dave Gorman starting out on his stand-up career and a trip to Ireland for St Patrick's Day find their way into the pages. Did you know Leeroy Thornhill from The Prodigy went solo as Flightcrank? Me neither, although Subject's 2-page spread suggests. It was similar to most other lads' mags, if you'd filtered out the sex. The publication appeared not to have lasted long.

Because the magazine had such an everyday word as a name- as opposed to an unusual acronym like FHM- it's very difficult to find any evidence of it online. I've only seen this and this. It looks like I've got hold of something quite rare.

It's possible that the publishers: Stable Publications- are now Stable Media, focusing more on trade publications for the building industry.