The times they are a-changing

I'm in the second week of my two-site holiday.

Last week I visited brother-outlaw in Glasgow to catch up, take photos, see films and stuff like that. I also took the opportunity to meet up with another friend who lives not exactly nearby but just about within striking distance.

This week I'm with some members of my not-quite-immediate family on our traditional week "with the kids". The kids in question are 17 and 14 and holidays have changed quite a lot over the years.

Once upon a time, idiot-boy and I would holiday on narrowboats in the middle of nowhere and delight in the fact we were far away from other people. In the early days we didn't even have a mobile phone and the internet was just a twinkle in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee.

These days I place a premium on being able to stay in touch with people even when I'm on holiday. So I arranged mobile broadband before I came away and was delighted to learn that the house we're staying in has wi-fi.

As a result, rather than sitting and reading a book when it's raining (like it is today) I'm reading and writing emails to people in Inverness, the Highlands and back in Bristol. I'm also checking out pictures on Flickr and seeing what people are saying on Twitter.

Why?

Actually, I'm not sure.

Once upon a time, if there was just the boy and me, we wouldn't chat much. We'd probably sit largely in silence reading books but enjoying the comfortable companionship that comes with many years together. I don't have that now.

It's possible I'm filling that gap with the "louder" companionship of email and other electronic forms of communication or it could be I've changed how I choose to behave and now need constant feedback from other people to reassure me of something.

I honestly don't know.

So why bother to go to the time, trouble and expense of a holiday in Cornwall and then do similar things to the things I do at home?

Because it's nice to have a change of scenery and new things to photograph. The family I'm holidaying with are excellent company, even if we don't always enjoy doing the same things.

Later we'll probably all play cards and it'll get silly and riotous. The children are growing up so they no longer need constant attention but they enjoy the odd group activity.

Times change and I guess I need to get used to the fact that we all need to adapt as life moves on.

So I'll carry on my conversations with friends and a bit later, even if the weather doesn't clear up, I'll put on my coat and take my weather resistant camera out and enjoy the view of the sea.


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The View from Here

After taking him to my favourite cafe I force CJ to admire the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I've told him it's the law.

Neither of us have cameras with us but we have a brief discussion about what photographs we might take.

For him the picture was of the wire fencing at the side of the walkway.

That had attractions for me too but then I remembered this picture which was one of the first ones I took when took up photography as a way to get a renewed interest in things outside.

It's the first picture I took that really matched up to what I was seeing when I looked through the viewfinder. It was the picture I was making.

I look at it now and I can criticise the flat light and that it was taken with a fairly soft lens but I have to smile at the feeling it evoked when I saw it the first time.

It was a definite feeling of "oh, I can do this".

Yesterday was a day chatting about photography in its philosophical sense, in the technical sense, about economics, bad science, poor understanding of number, of travel, culture, of pasts, and of plans.

Such days are good days.



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Atchoo-Swineflu

One of my responsibilities at work (I work for an insurance company, please don't hate me for that) is helping with Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning.


I fell into this role not by choice, but because I work in a support function in the department and my boss looks after BCP.


Like all risk assessment-type work it feels very much like we're the harbingers of doom because we spend most of our time imagining all the things that can go wrong. That's quite odd for me because, as a rule, I have a bit of a Pollyanna attitude to life.

Before you dismiss this work as pointless, you need to remember that if we can't work, we can't meet our obligations to customers by paying their claims. Not only that, the FSA require us to have BCP covered.

Anyhoo...this week has seen the not-terribly-well-named Swine Flu outbreak in Mexico, and the possibility it might go pandemic float right to the top of BCP agenda.

Thus I've been doing a fair bit of reading on the subject.

Almost everyone seems to be falling into two camps:

The school of impending apocalypse and pestilence

and

The school of I'm ignoring you because this is like the little boy who cried 'wolf'

This was demonstrated beautifully this morning on the Today programme with a "debate" between Simon Jenkins and Professor John Oxford.

The good professor has been cropping up and commenting in lots of places and, as qualified as I'm sure he is, the only message I seem to hear from him is "I'd be really worried if this were avian flu" (see about halfway down)

Isn't that excatly the sort of thing that will likely fuel further panic?

On the other hand Simon Jenkins, whose writing I usually really like, came across as a Dawkins-esque fundamentalist this morning. On the page it sounds more reasonable but still, it's a bit of a shrill cry to that it won't happen because it hasn't happened before. That's just shoddy deductive reasoning IMHO.

Surely, the sensible thing to do is quietly take reasonable precautions.

If it spreads quickly then places of work and education will have problems with a peak of people being unable to come to them due to illness. That will have a disruptive effect.

Therefore, it seems like a good idea to remind people not to come to work if they are genuinely ill and not to go to their doctor's surgery but to phone for advice.

There doesn't seem to be any real evidence that the strain has a higher than usual mortality rate so could we please cast the idea of "Survivors" out of our collective consciousness for a moment.

Flu is a nasty disease. If you've ever had it (rather than the cold that you told everyone was flu) you wouldn't wish it on anyone. It kills people. Mostly people with heart and/or lung problems because it's a respiratory illness. However, for most people, most of the time it makes you feel lousy for a week and then washed out for a couple more weeks. Then you get better.

However, we all live with the risk of flu all the time.

Please can we get a sense of proprotion but without belittling the importance completely, please?

OK, I'm going for a little lie down...I feel a little unwell. You don't think....?



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