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Guinness World Record Attempt - Barefoot!

7/21/2018

By my guest blogger, Matthew Strange

Shortly after spring has sprung in March 2019, I will be attempting a life-long dream – to have my name in the Guinness Book of World Records.

I will be attempting to break the record for the “Longest Barefoot Journey.” The current record stands at 1,292.54 miles.

Every year since 1998, back when the book used to be number 1 on my Christmas list, I collected the Guinness Book of World Records. From the tender age of 6 years old, I would spend hours on end staring with amazement at the incredible individuals and their bizarre talents. People breaking records for the most beans eaten with chopsticks, most toilet seats broken with the head and the heaviest weight carried by the tongue – I admired every single person who was the world’s best at their talent, no matter how obscene.

So, about 8 months ago, after returning from the worst experience of my life in Dubai, I decided the time was right for me and I wanted to do something amazing in memory of my late step-dad Simon, in aid of St Catherine’s Hospice.

To fully understand the reason, the route I’m taking and significance of the journey first we need to rewind back to 2015.

Simon had been diagnosed terminally ill with cancer and was later admitted to St Catherine’s Hospice in 2015 after taking a significant turn for the worse. I was living in Spain and working in Gibraltar at the time. That is one phone call I will never forget.

The race was on; I needed to get home in the shortest possible time. I booked a same day, direct flight from Gibraltar to Manchester… You didn’t think it would be that easy did you?

Of course not, due to the infamous winds circling Gibraltar all flights were cancelled, a lot later on in the day after numerous delays. A full day wasted.

Not to worry, surely there are many different ways to get back I thought to myself... No flights from Malaga for the next 3 days. Not ideal at all.

I needed to think outside of the box, how else could I get back?

By boat!

At 2 a.m. I found a ferry leaving first thing in the morning, only an hour’s drive away and taking me to the south of England. Far from perfect but the best option available. Without hesitation I booked it. Only after payment was taken I was informed the ticket must be printed and they wouldn’t accept the E-Ticket that was sent to my email. My heart sank; I didn’t have a printer due to the number of internet cafes in the area, it had never seemed worthwhile. None of these opened before departure.

Damn, surely it was just a warning on the website I thought, to make it easier for them. Once they hear my struggle and see the time I purchased the ticket they will understand. It’s not like I haven’t paid for a ticket…

They didn’t, I was refused boarding and watched the ferry sail away in to the distance. I sat and cried for a while, letting it all out, I needed to get my head straight.

Returning to Gibraltar I knew I needed to find a plan Z and fast. I looked at every possible mode of transport, with planes still not taking off from Gibraltar and another 2 days until any departures from Malaga.

This is how I returned home, the fastest route available at the time believe it or not!

3 hour bus from La Linea to Malaga
2.5 hour train from Malaga to Madrid, Spain
1.5 hour flight from Madrid to Brussels, Belgium
1 hour flight from Brussels to Manchester, England.

Exhausted, emotionally drained and fatigued I arrived in Manchester, but crucially I had arrived in time! I got the train directly to Preston and was reunited with my family at St Catherine’s Hospice. I was so grateful to have had the precious time I was given.

The staff at St Catherine’s Hospice astonished me, the genuine love, care and attention they provide is astonishing. Simon commented himself, how amazed he was with the staff and the facilities. Remarkably they even had us laughing at a time were laughing seemed so hard.

I will be forever grateful to St Catherine’s Hospice and I intend to fundraise on their behalf throughout my life, having already completed a sponsored Skydive!

Surprisingly, my application for the “The Longest Barefoot Journey” was accepted the day before the anniversary of Simon’s passing. It felt like Simon was giving us some good news and positivity with the timing. It also felt to me personally that he was giving me his approval and wishing me the best for the upcoming challenge. They sent me a massive “Book of Guidelines” that I need to follow, but in short, there are 7 rules I need to follow in order for my record to be accepted. They are:

I must be completely barefoot for the entirety – Prohibiting the use of plasters, bandages and walking aids.
I must have the start and finish attended by two independent witnesses, both completing full witness statements.
To carry a witness log book and have further independent witnesses complete witness statements daily.
I must carry a log book and update everything, encounters, witnesses, distances travelled.
I must track the entire journey using a professional GPS tracking device, showing timestamps, distance travelled and speed of movement.
I must film the entire journey, every single step.
I must take a photo of the exact moment when I beak the current World Record.

I did my due diligence – hours and hours of research – So I could find a route linked to my experience that breaks the world record. This is the route I’ve had accepted by the Guinness World Records:

Gibraltar
Madrid, Spain
Paris, France
Brussels, Belgium
Calais, France
Dover, England
St Catherine’s Hospice, Lostock Hall, England.

The route is a total of 1,720 miles, it will take 3 months, walking 20 miles per day, six days a week. That’s if it goes to plan! Otherwise it could take up to 6 months if I only manage 10 miles per day. I have completed a 20 mile walk in training so that will certainly be my target.

With only 8 months to go until the first step, I’m now deep into my training and pretty much live barefoot now.

I set myself 10 Barefoot Challenges to complete in the 10 months leading up to my Guinness World Record Attempt to help raise awareness, additional funds and give me training that I will need if I am to be successful.

All my challenges, training and the attempt itself will be uploaded to all my social media channels. Just search @MrMatthewStrange on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram or @MrMStrange on Twitter to stay up to date.

I have already climbed England’s Tallest Mountain, (Scafell Pike) barefoot and had a St Catherine’s Hospice tattoo across my feet!

This is just the beginning; together we can do something special.

5 Countries | 4 charity | 3 months | 2 bare feet | 1 Guinness World Record.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A graduate from the University of Life, and owner of MrMatthewStrange.com, Matthew Strange has encountered situations that most people wouldn’t even dream of, not even in their nightmares.

Whether removing leaches from his genitals in a rainforest in Thailand, or being held (wrongly!) captive by the working girls of Amsterdam, Matthew Strange always seems to end up in unusual situations.

Follow his journey here:
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

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You Really Don't Want To Get Hold Of The Wrong End Of The Stick - Believe Me, You Don't.

7/14/2018

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Wishing my daughter well for her recent dance show with the usual phrase: “break a leg,” got me thinking. Where do some of our enigmatic sayings and phrases come from?

Such as: “Got hold of the wrong end of the stick,” “fell off the wagon,” and indeed, the origins of that wonderful word “cliché”? We all use them without really thinking. But what is their true meaning from the dim and distant past?

I’ve actually held a cliché in my hand. Well, a cliché tray, anyway, in the mid 1970s. While it originally stemmed from a 19th Century French verb "clicher", which roughly means to stereotype, the word became popular in the printing industry. Newspaper typesetters realised that certain journalists used the same phrases over and over again, and kept them in a special tray of type, which they simply pulled out and slotted in while they were making up the page.

No-one really knows where many of our everyday sayings came from, but here are a couple of popular theories or myths:

Break a leg has many possible origins, including the quaint belief that by wishing someone bad luck, the opposite will occur. The most plausible, however, seems to revolve around encores. In traditional stage curtains, the legs of the curtain were constructed from long wooden rods. In the case of many encores, curtains would be lifted and dropped numerous times causing them to break.

The wrong end of the stick: I’ll leave it to your imagination to finish the end of the story. Toilet paper hadn’t been invented in Roman times, so they used a sponge on a stick…

Falling off the wagon: During Prohibition in 19th century America, men often climbed onto wagons and took an oath they would give up alcohol and drink only water. This gave rise to the expression ‘to be on the wagon.’ And when they broke their pledge and started hitting the bottle again, they were said to have ‘fallen off the wagon.’

I’ll drink to that.

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The House That Hid

7/8/2018

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As you all know by now, I have more than a passing interest in ghosts and the supernatural, which is why a lot of my fiction revolves around other-worldly matters.

But, as they say, fact is often stranger than fiction.

My guest blogger today is fellow novelist Marta Moran Bishop, who has extensive experience in this fascinating field. I'm sure you'll be blown away by her post here, The House That Hid.

The House That Hid, by Marta Moran Bishop

It was an odd period in my life, the night I first met Mike and his sister Sarah and saw ‘That House.’

You see, I had friends one might call a bit different, though on the surface most of them would appear to be very down to earth types.

D, was a Chicago probation officer, who worked in the court system for the Cook County Sheriffs office. She had long black hair, was ultra-thin, spoke six or seven languages fluently and by all appearances was a normal young woman rising in the sheriff’s department. I don’t remember how or where I met her, but she introduced me years earlier to Nikki, a musician. Nikki is one of the kindest women I’ve ever met, with a heart of gold, but if I was feeling a bit of a weirdo, all I had to do was hang around Nikki for a few hours and I’d feel and if I was the most normal person on the planet.

The night D, introduced Nikki and me to Mike and his sister Sarah, was a warm, humid Chicago night. Mike was a contractor, you know the type of person who ‘if I can’t see it or feel it,’ it doesn’t exist. He was of average height and on the stocky side. But nevertheless, a nice unassuming man. I guess he took Richard Crow’s ghost-tour that night because of ‘That House.’ Things had changed for Mike after he bought ‘That House,’ though one could debate whether it was for the good or not.

The stars shimmered overhead, and the ghost tour on Lake Michigan, began quietly enough, each of us waiting to see something odd as we chatted and got to know each other. An uneventful, and fun as any get together on a crowded boat with perfect strangers could be. Perhaps, as Richard said, Ghosts don’t usually make as many appearances in warm weather, though I don’t know this to be true.

After the tour, Richard invited the five of us to have a late-night bite to eat at the Billy Goat Tavern; which was frequented by reporters and television stars. Among them Mike Roko, and many from the crew of SNL.

The Billy Goat Tavern (pictured below) was located between the Chicago Sun-Times and The Chicago Tribune buildings on the lower level and what one would definitely-call a dive. The food was so-so, the atmosphere definitely old Chicago, it was built in 1934 and said to be the beginning of the Cubs Curse.

Our conversation revolved around ghosts and those that Richard had researched and became famous. The ghosts included Resurrection Mary (pictured below) as well as many of the most haunted sites in Chicago including the Red Lion Pub (pictured below).

At about twelve o'clock the subject of Mike's house came up.

Mike had bought 'That House' about six months earlier. It was built somewhere around the late eighteen-hundreds to the early nineteen-hundreds and was rumored to have been built on top of an old Native American burial ground and once owned by Al Capone’s gang (pictured below).

Standing on a large lot, white with a porch and a smallish second story, but the basement floor was dirt and not quite deep enough to put a hot water tank or furnace into it. That house was in quite a state of disrepair and needed much updating as none had been done since around nineteen hundred and forty or so.

When Mike bought it and began the renovations. Sarah, was living in the one completed room in the house and though nice enough, seemed overly quiet. Not in a shy sort of way, but in a not quite themselves way. It was difficult to pinpoint the oddity of her shyness, but by all accounts, it had begun when she moved into that house.

As with many homes built in that era, the basement was dirt and quite shallow. Too shallow to install today’s water heaters and furnace units, so the first thing Mike had to do was dig out a portion of the floor to allow for the taller units. It was during this that he found the lime pit with the remains of human bones. Of course, he called the police, who determined that the bones were both too old and due to the lime, degraded past being able to identify them. But, it was suspected their origination was during the years that Al Capone’s gang used the house.

It was during this time that things began to get really crazy in that house. Mike was the sort that laid his tools out in the order he would be using them. But that changed as the tools began moving, he’d reach for one and find another in its place. Frustrated with this, Mike began double checking his layouts, all the while believing he must have laid them out incorrectly. And he began to look at them all the time. At first, he couldn’t believe his eyes, when he began to see them moving of their own accord. Though it would only get weirder. No longer were they moving, but as he worked they began flying around the room. It was as if some unseen people were playing toss the ball or something similar. It was after that that Mike and Sarah invited the first psychic investigator to the house.

As I had never met either Mike or Sarah before, I was skeptical of his story, though did attempt to keep an open mind. If he hadn’t asked us back to the house that night, I would probably have remained skeptical.

But for what came later at the house. The first thing I noticed during his tour, was the cold spots in the house, though I did put them off to the possibility of drafts. Though it was a warm evening with little breeze, my mind wanted to believe it was drafts or the result of all the ghost story talk. It wasn’t until we finally got to the basement that I knew it was not drafts.

There were no windows in the basement, no access into it other than through the main house and it was no cooler than any other basement at that time of year. After Mike showed us what remained of the bones after the cops had removed most of them, Nikki, Mike, and I stood and talked about all that Mike had experienced since he bought that house. As we talked an icy-cold breeze swept in and around the three of us. I spooked, and just hiked it up the stairs, leaving Mike and Nikki to follow.

It was all I could do to even say goodbye to Mike and Sarah. I barely thanked them and turned to Nikki and said we must go now! I know I was being a chicken. I’ll tell you honestly, I couldn’t help it. There was something or things that meant harm in that house.

I must have appeared very rude, when I hightailed it to Nikki’s car, leaving the three of them standing on the porch chatting.

As I sat in the car waiting and watching them on the porch, I noticed the figure upstairs, sitting by the window in Sarah’s bedroom, and the string like light that seemed to join that old woman to Sarah. I admit, it was the strangest thing I had ever seen, and I believed I must be imagining things. I would have put it onto drink, but I hadn’t had a drink that night, nor am I much of a drinker.

I just sat there and watched for a few minutes, until the old woman turned her head, her gaze left Sarah and she looked straight at me. The moment our eyes met, I was filled with such horror, something so alien to anything I had ever experienced or even thought of, seemed to be in her eyes. It felt as if my energy was somehow being tapped, to give her strength, leaving me empty of what was me. I was being robbed of life and I knew it.

Panic set in, as I managed to pull my gaze away from her and laid my hand on the horn loudly. I didn’t think about whether-or-not I would wake the neighbors, cause a commotion or anything except to get Nikki over to the car. I had to leave and NOW. Luckily for me, Nikki did come and quickly, I think I just said, drive. I don’t remember much until we were off that street, though I felt the presence of that old woman in the car with us as Nikki drove me home.

I felt the presence of that old woman throughout the night and couldn’t shake it. The next morning, I told my mother about the experience and she wanted to at least drive by the house. After a while I agreed, we would that afternoon, after I had done some research to find out what that old woman might be.

It was during my research that I learned of Sentinels, they are a sort of spirit that keeps the most malignant of the other ghosts in a place in check. The problem is they grow old, though it usually takes decades or sometimes centuries for that to happen. From what I read, how long it takes is usually decided by how many people they can draw energy from, and she had been alone for a very long time. She needed a replacement and I feared from what I witnessed she had picked Sarah. By all accounts, before Sarah had moved into that house, she was an outgoing young woman. Not at all like the quiet, introverted woman that I met.

That afternoon, my mother and I drove to the house, or at least to the place where that house should have been. But it took three or four circles up and down that street before we could find the house. It just wasn’t there, the first few times we drove by it. It only took my mother one minute and one look at the house, before she said to me, “get out of here.” It was during the trip home that she said, she believed there was not just a few, but many, many malignant spirits in that house and that it needed an exorcism badly. She wasn’t even sure that would work, but without it, people would die, at least Sarah would for sure. Sarah would be trapped in that house forever if it wasn’t done. I called Mike and told him what I suspected and gave him my advice on the matter. I didn’t hear back from Mike for nearly a year. It had been late summer when I first saw that house and early the next summer, when I finally received a call from Mike, inviting me to a barbeque.

Apparently, he had finally finished the renovations and yes, they had, had the house exorcised. Not once but by three different groups of people including a Catholic priest.

The day of the barbeque, I re-met, Mike and Sarah. Sarah was a completely changed woman, gone was the quiet, introverted woman and in her place, I found a normal, young woman, interested in men, dating, recipes, the new baby that her sister had. In other words, Sarah was herself again. The house was bright and cheery, without a hint of a ghost of any kind, nor did I feel the presence of that old woman again.

Believe it or not, this is a true story.

Connect with Marta Moran Bishop:
Website: www.martamoranbishop.com/
Twitter: twitter.com/moranbishop

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Guinness World Record Attempt - Barefoot!

You Really Don't Want To Get Hold Of The Wrong End Of The Stick - Believe Me, You Don't.

The House That Hid

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