Lizard Breath Types

View from the Top

2012-01-06T21:23:00.002Z

I don't feel the urge to blog anything like as frequently as I used to. Nor to write in the journal in my bedside table, nor to take photographs.

I enjoy writing, and I love photography but just now, they're not imperatives for me. I realised that I needed to do those things before but at the moment they don't have that same hold over me.

More than anything, I've realised that my mind has calmed itself a lot. I used to walk for hours and take photographs because the concentration that photography requires shuts outs all other thoughts and stops the "what ifs" and "what next" thoughts from spinning out of control.

Along with this, my urge to read is returning (currently "The Book of Dave" by Will Self) as is my desire to cook properly...even just for myself. To the extent of making my own wheatflour tortillas to go with the chilli I took out of the freezer because I couldn't be arsed to cook.

I've been musing on this change for a few days and wondering why.

My life certainly isn't any more settled than it's been for the last few years. I haven't got religion, gone vegan or started meditating.

Of course, there have been changes - mostly incremental things - in my life. I see more of some people, and less of others as their lives and circumstances change too. Of course, there's S who entertains me on a regular basis: dragging me up hills, forcefeeding me beer, widening my musical appreciation and carrying my camera bag for me as well as making the best steak and kidney pudding in the northern hemisphere.

...and this is the key, of course, it's incremental change over...TIME.

Change takes time to adjust to. I must admit I thought that the "adjustment" was about getting used to sleeping on my own in the house, learning how to change tap washers, taking responsibility for chopping wood and stuff like that.

But I'm learning it's more subtle than that.

2011's was a good year: seeing new places, meeting new people, doing new stuff and remembering what it was like to enjoy old things with new people, and on my own.

2012 promises to give me more change, more challenges and more fun. I'm looking forward to it hugely.

I hope that anyone reading this who's had an unpleasant change wrought upon them can take a bit of heart from the probability that things will get better and sometimes you've gotta dig in and ride the shit out.

Yep, there are bloody difficult hills you have to climb...but when you get some encouragement the view can be worth it.

Bring it on.

x

.

Hands on

2011-11-29T12:34:00.003Z

DSC_1660 Hatfield Moore, a photo by Lillput on Flickr.

So, it's my second date with - let's call him Bob. We swap pleasantries and catch up a bit - it's been three weeks since we last saw each other.

He suggests I remove my top. Now, I'm not in the least confident in being only partially clothed around other people but knew this was likely to happen so I comply and I stand there a little awkwardly.

He smiles and asks me to move whilst he stands behind me and watches. This does nothing to improve my self-consciousness.

I lie on the bed, then he asks me to lie face down (and very politely took my glasses from me), then asks me to adopt a position on my hands and knees and arch my back.

All this time Bob's very polite, encouraging and complimentary.

Finally, he asks me to stand up and he stands behind me again. He places his left arm across my upper chest and places his right hand on my right shoulder blade and massages the muscles there very hard.

This date has been just about as physically intimate as is possible to imagine - and yet it's totally asexual.

Bob's my NHS physiotherapist.

I'm thoroughly impressed that, whilst locking his limbs around mine, he manages to make me feel completely comfortable.

I'm not that good with people. I'm considerably less good when I'm reduced to underwear. So his manner, professional but warm, is an exmplar of how to deal with patients.

Thank you Bob...

When Life Imitates Art

2011-08-01T22:09:00.004+01:00

It's a strange time to post a blog which is a cultural critique but I could resist no longer - even though this is a TV series that ceased being broadcast over 5 years ago.

I've just finished rewatching the TV series "The West Wing". I've got the entire thing on DVD and I rewatch episodes on a regular basis because I simply love the pace and language of the writing.

Obviously I find the storyline - that is: the everyday story of Whitehouse Folk - interesting too, but for the most part I would previously have been unable to recount, with any accuracy, most of the political points it was making.

Whether I've just taken more interest in politics in general recently, or whether something else is at play, I'm not sure. No matter. What has shone out - fluoresced, even - is the sheer prescience of the storylines.

For those of you who haven't watched it here's a an overall idea of what it's about.

Josiah (Jed) Bartlett is a Noble prize-winning economist turned politician who has become the democratic president of the US (aka POTUS).

He has a staff around him of similarly clever people - Leo McGarry (Chief of Staff), Josh Lymon (Deputy CoS), Toby Ziegler (Comms director), Sam Seabourne (Deputy Comms Director), CJ Cregg (Press Secretary) and Charlie Young (Personal Aide/Body man). There are others, of course, but these are the main people you see and learn to love.

Bartlett is a compassionate and decent man - but he's also deeply flawed and this is where all the drama comes from and where the storylines become believable.

I think what I like best is that even though it's drama, it generally doesn't simplify the issues around running the most powerful nation in the World.

It was generally lauded as a great series with even "people in the know" being reasonably complimentary about its general accuracy even if some people found the characters to be a bit too morally pure or naive. Then again, it was fictional so I don't think we should be too harsh.

What has stunned me, however, is how stories told in WW have been played out in the real Whitehouse long after the TV programme was shown.

SPOILER ALERT
If you haven't seen it, and plan to you might want to stop reading now...

Storylines include:

Bartlett being suceeded after two terms in office by the first ethnic minority president (Latino) who succeeds less on his colour than his popular following.

The Whitehouse and the two elected houses getting their knickers in a knot over whether they can raise the deficit ceiling.

A nuclear power plant (OK in the US, not Japan) suffering potential meltdown after cooling water system failed. Radioactive steam first escaping into a containment building and then requiring venting into the atmosphere when the pressure in that building got too high.

POTUS agonising over the need to carry out a state killing of a foreign terrorist of high standing without due process.

...and there are others.

Maybe an infinite number of plotlines and real life stories will necessarily generate cross over...maybe Aaron Sorkin and the other writers, together with their advisers were just very good at what they do.

In any event, if you find US politics in some way interesting but maybe need some lessons on how it works, or like snappy (if too good to be true) dialog, or even the occasional slapstick moment and you haven't experienced WW yet I commend you to get to it.

Warning - the style is very fast and you sometimes feel you've been dumped in the middle of the action, even though the opening credits have only just finished. My advice is to treat it like a Shakespeare play and stop listening so hard. Relax a little and let it flow through you - it'll be well worth it.

In pursuit of a sound-bite

2011-07-01T21:14:00.006+01:00

When did being a company automatically make you evil?

I'll sidestep, for a moment, the local figure of hate: Tesco in favour of another example.

This evening's "Any Questions" on R4 turned its attention to the public sector industrial action this week and discussed whether it was reasonable to strike because of an enforced change in people's pensions.

The commentators included Billy Bragg who - and I'm paraphrasing now - indicated that private sector workers should be asking after their pensions too since their employers took funding holidays for years thereby boosting their profits at the expense of their employees' future well-being.

I guess Mr Bragg is talking about the pension glory-days of the 1980's and 90's

I can't claim to be a pension expert but in the 1980's I was busily running Final Salary Pension schemes for my employer.

It's true, many funds did have funding holidays but they didn't general do it for fun - they did it because the law changed.
This particular change reduced the funding margin that pension funds were allowed to run.

Prior to this change there was a really good incentive to heavily over-fund the pension scheme. The tax regime was such that an employer could count their pension contributions as allowable business expense and any increase in the value of the fund was tax free.
This sounds good, no?
A really good way to secure the future income for your employees and Inland Revenue blessing to do so.

Except that this was abused - you're shocked, aren't you?

A number of unscrupulous companies busily squirrelled away vast funds in the pension scheme for a number of years, making use of the tax incentives and the favourable ecomonic climate. After a few years, they liquidated the companies, laid off their employees after securing the absolute minimum paid up pension for them and swiped the rest of the pension fund. OK, the disbursement of the fund was then subject to tax but it still proved to be a good money spinner for them.
All this was perfectly legal.

At the time there was other legislation in place that made company pension schemes far from perfect in some cases...

There was the ability - possibly encouragement - to make the joining of the company pension scheme compulsory. So if the benefits that it provided were sub-standard (but legal) an employee could find themselves hobbled in a scheme that wouldn't really provide for the future.

At the time there were no such things as personal pensions, or stakeholder pensions so employees' choices were heavily limited anyway.

All this changed in the latter part of the 80's with so-called "Fowler" pensions legislation. Compulsion to join the company retirement plan was removed and individual pensions came into being, and were blessed with a favourable tax regime.

The idea was not to encourage people out of good pension schemes but to give them the option to set up their own where they didn't expect to be with an employer for very long, or when the company plan wasn't very good or where there was no company pension scheme.

Around the same time, the allowable funding margins were tightened to reduce the incentive for unscrupulous companies misbehaving.

What happened? Companies had to stop paying into pension schemes to reduce the over-funding because removing the excess from the fund would have lead to them being heavily taxed on the money removed, only for them have to reinvest eventually anyway.

Now pension providers turned their attention to sexy new personal pension products. There was a large population of un-pensioned people out there. So in order to encourage salesfolk to sell the new individual plans to a new audience rather than encourage the churning around the market of existing occupational plans they made the commission on these new arrangement very attractive.

What happened? The pensions mis-selling scandal, that's what. Instead of targeting the individual plans at the uninsured they applied a scatter-gun approach and sold to anyone and everyone.

So much for the pensions regime for a moment...let's come back to the evil that is the Corporation.

The second half of Mr Bragg's statement was that the evil coporporation took the reduction in the pension contribution to their "bottom line". Ummm...well, that's what companies are there to do. Make a profit. Actually, public limited companies have an obligation to their shareholders to maximise the return on their shares.

Now I can hear you saying that shareholders are also evil capitalists who are only there to screw the poor downtrodden worker into the ground.

I need you to come out of your Dickensian nay-saying for a second.

Who are the major shareholders in public limited companies? Large-scale investors...such as insurance companies, banks and pension funds.

So if you're wanting good levels of return on your building society account, or your unit-linked pension to provide you with a good income when you retire, or your Open Ended Investment Contract to return sufficient dividends to pay off your interest-only mortgage then you have a vested interest in PLCs making a profit.

Only when these companies make a profit can they declare a dividend on the shares you effectively own in them thereby paying you for the use of your money.

You see what I'm getting at?

I'm not for a second saying that the financial regime is perfect - it's not. It never has been. Each change in legislation removes some of the abuse at the expense of introducing some other abuse.

What I'm saying is that financial issues, like economics as a whole, can't be condensed into a couple of simple headlines.

As for Tesco - I'm not a big fan. I seldom shop there but them being good at turning a profit - providing they act within the law - is what they're there to do. And there's a reasonable chance that quite a few people reading this, as well as some of the people who protest against them, are financially better off because of this.

So please, Mr Bragg, stick to being a reasonable singer-songwriter...and leave the pensions to someone else, eh?

Travelling Precisely

2011-05-16T19:46:00.007+01:00

You thought travel precision was simply about arriving at the right place at the right time, didn't you? I'm about to tell you how wrong you are.

I looked with a degree of incredulity at my friend and neighbour, MrB-H, when he told me that when he was in Japan he derived no small amount of satisfaction from tailoring his daily commute on the train to make his journey as step-perfect as possible.
I thought that this was just MrB-H being a little quirky and gave it no further thought.

Imagine, then, my surprise (well, that sounds so much better than 'horror', doesn't it?) when a trip with S from Hitchin to Brighton was peppered with precision requirements about where one gets on and off a train in order to faciliate the next leg of the journey.

I'm pretty easy-going with such things and took these minor things in my stride, but gave S a wry smile.

Since then I've made the journey to and from Hitchin a number of times and had to build in variations due to engineering works on London Underground.

Something happens when you make the same train journey a lot...especially when it involves travelling on the underground. You start to notice that where you get on the train affects how stressful the next leg of your journey will be.

You see the typical tube train is maybe 6 carriages long and there are several entrances and exits along the length of the platform.

For maximum potential space in the carriage the usual widsom says get on at one end or other of the platform - avoiding the mid train (and last minute joiner) crush. The only problem with that approach is that if you get on at the wrong end it can make your onward much more tricky.

By tricky I mean longer and with greater exposure to people moving VERY SLOWLY with wheelie cases. If you're in a rush to get across the city, then that can make a big difference.

On the Hammersmith and City platform at King's Cross St Pancras the choice of platform end means the potential of an extra 5 minutes of fabulously obfuscating signage and the probability of missing the next connection north.

So it was with a great deal of satifaction last Friday when I found the prime spot to get on my underground train on platform 16 at Paddington, making my egress at Kings Cross a pleasant, and stress-free experience. A mental note has been made.

It's filed away with the local knowledge that there's a sweet spot on Hitchin platform 1. You get on the train south (as long as the train is an 8 carriage job) from here and when you arrive at Finsbury Park you will find yourself right next to the steps that lead quickly and efficiently to the Victoria underground line. Get out first and you'll be on the tube with no queueing, no wheelie suitcases or bikes having attacked you.

Next time I make the journey I shall be turning my attention to the return journey transfer at Oxford Circus...

...what? Don't look at me like that - you would too...trust me.

Repeat after Me

2011-04-23T21:30:00.003+01:00

DSC_1230 Rippled, a photo by Lillput on Flickr.

At last...after four years I'm reading again for fun.

I always used to be a reading fanatic but when the boy departed, so did my concentration.

Over Christmas, I asked S if he'd mind encouraging me to get reading a book whilst we were on holiday. I took one of my all-time favourites "The Midwich Cuckoos" by John Wyndham. A little archaic, perhaps, but short enough to seem achievable.

He also brought along a book and one afternoon, we sprawled in companionable silence on the comfy sofa with mugs of tea and read for a couple of hours. It might not have been a big deal for S...but it was for me.

...and Cuckoos is still spine chilling...

Then a few weeks ago, S sent me a book by the power of Amazon. As I mentioned in a post at the time, it's a great book all about the history of football tactics. Instead of a joint reading session, though, I read it at night, in bed, at home. It took me a couple of weeks, but I finished it.

So I decided that the time might be right to buy a few new books and see if I could keep the momentum up.

A couple of months back I went to see a production of "Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell" - which is brilliantly funny but with lingering pathos that left me quite moved.

It's based on a real-life journalist/writer and so I tried to find some of his writing.

I found it in "Reach for the Ground". It is a collection of some of his columns for the Spectator and so is effectively arranged into very short chapters.

I get the sense he's very much a man of his time and profession - although I might be wrong.

Some of his attitudes to women and alcohol, gambling and smoking seem quite shocking but I found him quite endearing and very funny.

He had very many failed and dysfunctional relationships with women but never stopped being entranced by them.

Even though he suffered from pancreatitis, pneumonia and diabetes - eventually having a leg amputated, and many falls and accidents he seems to keep his wit about him to the last.

As a result even the sad chapters are able to provoke a smile or two...sometimes a real laugh out loud moment for me.

So, in summary ...thank you Jeffrey Bernard for a splendid read and thank you S for pushing me gently back on the road to reading.

x

Renaissance woman or girl with ADHD? Discuss

2011-03-27T16:28:00.007+01:00

Whilst typing this I'm simulataneously watching a live feed of a football match and writing emails about biomass.

You see, I'm not what you'd call a 'specialist'.

If I listed my interests, it would run to a couple of pages of A4 and would include things I haven't done for years, yet continue to retain an "interest" in (chemistry, for example).

If you started to tell me why you found the breeding of yaks so incredibly fascinating I would probably listen, totally entranced, then go and read up all there was on the internet on the subject and possibly even buy a couple of books.

I have a mind that just loves stuff.

It's usually easier to engage me in stuff I have a history with, or have encountered before. You ask S. You might remember from a previous blog entry that he took me to a home match a while ago. I loved every minute and now I find myself fretting ever so slightly about how Brighton & Hove Albion are going to manage the last few matches of the season and maintain their lead in League 1. Actually, that's why I'm watching the coverage of today's Huddersfield game - they're second and although they're a good few points behind the Albion...you can't take anything for granted, can you?

It extended slightly further when S sent me a book as a gift. I'm trying to get back into reading and so anything that will make me make time to read is a good thing. Many of my friends were slightly taken aback to learn it's a book called "Inverting the Pyramid" and that it's about the history of football tactics.

I know nothing of the technicalities of football (although I now know Inigo Calderon plays at right-back and I know where to find him on the field) but I sometimes have fun muttering about the "demise of the sweeper system" whilst not having any idea what it is. I like watching the game play out on the field and I like the macro game played out in the league table.

Back to the book - I'm not reading this just to ingratiate myself with S. I don't need to. We're good friends, and if I didn't want to read it I'm capable of thanking him for the gesture and not actually reading the book.

I'm about half-way in and I'm finding it extraordinarily interesting. I won't remember an awful lot of the detail and I have no frame of reference for some of the information in the book - but I'm enjoying the read. It's great learning something new.

And that's it with me...it's all about the learning - but it's also usually about the bonding over a subject with friends.

Photography, architecture, art (to an extent), history (on a good day, with a following wind), chemistry, football, HTML, Linux, Cookery, campanology (learning what Plain Bob Minor was was a real eye opener for me), beer...you name it...it's all interesting.

A while ago I even made CJ explain, in some detail, how PFI deals work for things like hospitals and then spent a happy hour or so arguing with him as to whether it's a good idea.

If I have to describe myself (and I've had to do that for various reasons over the last couple of years) then I tend to say that I'm not very good at anything other than being quite good at a lot of things. It sounds like a bit of a self-deprecation thing...and perhaps it is but it's true.

Over lunch with my friend, AB, yesterday we talked about this. He's very similar. He loves to learn new technical things but admits to losing interest once he's cracked it. I empathise.

It's not something that's particularly well rewarded in the job circuit so you have to make up for it by being disciplined and putting in extra graft.

So is it this personality trait that lead me to only ever be moderately successful in work? Yes, possibly, but the last 8 or so years of my insurance career saw me find my niche...project management.

Many project managers are specialists who fall into management. There's a comfort thing in this because they know the subject. People like me (and my ex-boss) are more the "PM of all trades" kinda folk.

We could argue the toss about whether a good PM can manage any project (I think they can but most specialists disagree) but stepping into managing the set up for a large beer festival a couple weeks ago has reminded me that I still have it.

I went into the room on the first day knowing literally nothing about the technicalities (and there are many). I had a list of jobs that needed to be done and I had an appreciation of the critical path.

Mostly I let people get on with their jobs...but when a decision needed to be made, I asked people to explain the technicalities of the decision to me and together we came to a conclusion.

So I now know how beer is racked, vented and tapped - and why you do each of those things. I have a better appreciation of the conditioning process of beer and how you can tell whether beer is ready to serve.
I even know why a hoist with fewer than four turns on a cable drum is not really fit for purpose but that the mass of the thing you're lifting, and the height you're lifting things to can play a part in your safety decision on whether to use it or not.

The jury's out as to whether I made a positive difference to the set up (I might find this out next week) but I realised that it's my basic curiosity that allows me to take on these sorts of tasks and get up to speed fairly quickly.

I'm afraid it also makes me go a little geeky and try to start to explain to anyone who'll stand still long enough to listen (and a few who attempt to run away) how the 2-3-5 formation pre-dates the passing game and how England's dogged attempt to continue to play W-M was so ill fated as they pitched against sides with more flair and flexibility.

Where are you going...come back...don't you want to hear about the flat four?

Persistence of Memory

2011-03-21T12:02:00.005Z

Well, then...

Here we are.

First day of spring. First day of the rest of your life. First day of the fifth year of my life "After".

Loathe as I am to mark seemingly random waypoints in life - I always feel moved to acknowlege this one. One friend tells me it's because some events are simply strongly imprinted on our memories and, sadly, these events are typically not the nice times.

With that in mind I've been running over a list of the things that stay with me although he's now long gone. Overwhelmingly, these are good things.

These things shape who I am now and so even my friends who never met him actually experience a tiny part of the person who was the centre of my "before".

So - indulge me for a second - and when you see these things in me, you'll have an idea where they came from.

1. Philip Glass.
Repetitive, intense, distinctive music from one of the most prolific modern "classical" composers of the minimalist school.
You will have heard some Philip Glass music over the last month, of that I'm sure. He's been used in BBC documentaries, adverts, films and dramas.
I never really liked most of what he did - but we did agree on one set of music he composed. Amazon River.
Haunting, technically stunning and makes you listen on several levels.
You can count beats in the bar in many ways - 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12 and the way you experience the beats changes what you hear.
Give it try...

2. Beer
I moved from being a cider drinker to a beer drinker and was tutored by him.
First beer he ever gave me was Theakstons Old Peculiar.
His taste moved from dark to light beers whilst mine persisted around the mid-brown.
That was until the local pub started selling beer in four-pint jugs and he usually did the beer buying. Once converted to Bath Ales Spa, I've never really looked back from the hops.

3. Richard Feynman
Physics was never my thing at school. I didn't find the subject engaging and so mostly dismissed it out of hand once I didn't have to take an interest any more.
He handed my a copy of one of Feynman's books when I was bored one day and it brought me into the world of a man who not only loved the subject but wanted to make you love it too.

4. Curry
He took me for my first curry when he moved to Bristol. Ummm I had melon as my starter because the other things scared me.
Chicken tikka was a total revelation.
This weekend, after being inspired by another of my favourite people, I manufactured a curry from scratch, and made onion bhajis to feed houseguests.

5. Digital SLR cameras
He bought me mine after I repeated tried to use the one I'd bought him, and had fallen in love with.
That camera (Nikon D50) continues to live a useful life in the hands of my brother.
His camera (Nikon D70s) continues to live here with me - sometimes being pressed into service.
Photography kept me sane for a period of time I thought I would lose it completely.
Some of my favourite people - my lovely business partner TD, my fab Flickr friends DrP, DM, DrC, AB, MS, and all the others came into my life as a direct result of that camera.

6. Proper Coffee
My first trip to stay in Leeds was marked in my mind by a visit to a cafe (way before mass-market chain cafes were over-priced and over here). Cafe long gone now, sadly, and I can't remember precisely where it was.
In it you were served coffee in a cafetiere and it felt like the height of sophistication and extravagance.
His ever increasing quest for the perfect cup of coffee culminated in the purchase of a coffee roaster.
The legacy lives on because I now roast the coffee and grind the coffee and make the coffee with an espresso machine that needs 10 minutes warming-up time.
There is no instant fix of coffee in my place...

7 Home Cinema
Partly my fault, I'll admit. I brough home an LCD project from work to "mind" over a weekend's office move.
It was a calculated guess that the boy would have a little bit of fun with it over that weekend.
Six months later saw his 40th birthday and this was marked by the purchase of a projector, screen, new DVD player etc, etc

8 Space, the final front-ear
Both of us avid Star Trek watchers as kids...we experienced ST:TNG as a "couple" and have watched every episode countless times.

The start was always the same, though...As Kirk or Picard seriously intoned "Space, the final frontier" he mimed an ear in the middle of his forehead with his hand.

When alone and catching a sneaky episode on some junky cable channel - I still do it.

9 Klaatu barada nikto
From "The Day the Earth Stood Still" best of the 1950's B-movie sci-fi films. Nuff said.

10 Resistor colour codes
I can't even remember which colours they are, or how the knowledge of them turns into knowing what the rating of the resistor is.
But the mnenmonic persists...
Big Blondes Rip Off Your Garments Behind Vivid Grey Wagons.
He won 10p in physics class for that, I'll have you know.

I miss him dreadfully, of course, but there's nothing I can do about that.

And as I make tea in a teapot, listen to the Ting Tings, the Fall, or Maximum the Hormone, or read my books on the history of football tactics, or church architecture whilst remembering that Edward II was killed with a poker up his arse, or take pictures with my M8 and edit web-pages with a text editor I realise that the influences from people I like, love and admire continue.

Good innit?

x

Enlightenment

2011-03-10T23:18:00.009Z

Funny, isn't it?

When I first started doing project management for a living I couldn't understand why you have to be trained in that stuff...and why people get it so badly wrong.

After all, it's just so much common sense, no? I do it naturally when I'm running things - surely everyone does.

I said as much to my boss, CNG, who was the epitome of the craft, as far as I was conerned. When he managed a project, it stayed managed.

"Shhhh...don't tell people that", says CNG, "I've been peddling common sense for nearly 20 years".

Nevertheless, the more work I managed the more I saw that, despite it mostly being common sense people mostly didn't do it. It's why poorly managed projects go over time, over budget and/or don't deliver what people expected.

Our company has excellent project management skills and excellent technical (architecture, landscape, design, construction) skills but we both agreed we're a bit under par on the selling ourselves front.

It's particularly important for us to be able to get our message over because we sell a service that most people don't even know they want.

We've been told that we talk engagingly on the subject and our enthusiasm defintely gets people on-side but we have a website that doesn't get the message across nearly as well as it should.

So, today, we attend a design/marketing workshop.

I was waiting for mind-blowing insight; big ideas that identified exactly where we've been going wrong.

So, after three hours or so, three discussion groups and some presentations did I have enlightenment?

Oh yes. Yes indeed.

What I learned was...ummm...common sense.

Each of the discussion groups broadly said the same thing as far as we were concerned.

1) Understand who your audience is
2) If you've got more than one group in your audience, make sure they get a tailored message.
3) Understand what your audience is looking for - and give it to them.

Well, duh...

I really don't understand why two intelligent, capable people couldn't aready have worked this out and put it into practice, but the fact is, we haven't.

We've been looking at our website for ages wanting to make it better and yet couldn't put our collective finger on what was wrong with it.

Now we've got a starting point to do our much overdue rewrite - but we're not starting with colour, fonts and pictures this time - we're starting with a strategy. And looking at it - it feels quite embarrassing that we needed to betold that by someone else.

But that's the thing, isn't it?

One man's common sense is another woman's revelation.

Due respect to all of us who peddle common sense...or, rather, not-so-common sense.

Aga Saga

2011-03-06T21:01:00.003Z

A salutory reminder that nothing lasts for ever came whizzing into my life a couple of weeks ago.

A few months back I got a certain amount of satisfaction from replacing the elements in my oven myself.

How does my oven repay me for £70 worth of hardware and a couple of hours of my love and attention? It failed again.

I finally decided that my relationship with the cooker was over. Another tricky decision to make, another decision to make on my own. Not only that, I have very little enthusiasm for cooking for just myself. I still love cooking for friends but that's not a daily event.

I wasn't much in the mood to do research but I learned from the impulse purchase of the outgoing model and started to surf to look for alternatives.

What became clear is that cookers of the right size are not cheap.

When we'd had the "new" kitchen installed (about seven years ago, now) we'd investigated a top of the line range cooker but dismissed it on the grounds we couldn't really justify the extra expense when the cooker we had was working.

In my research I discovered that a local department store was having a sale of range cookers - so I decided to go and scratch and sniff and see if I could pick up a bargain.

I came out of the shop some fifteen minutes later quite a lot poorer but with a new cooker of the exact type that I'd yearned after. It was the display model and a third off and it ended up priced only a little more expensive than the other cookers I was grudgingly considering from my research on t'Internets.

I have to say that the delivery and fitting of the new cooker did, at times, seem to be like the punishment of Sisyphus. Then again, it only took exactly two weeks from choosing to having it working - albeit via a day of no heating, some delivery angst, blown electrics and a discovered electrical fault with the new device.

On the way I've learned:

That Mercury can be solid at room temperature - very solid indeed, in fact. You ask the poor buggers who delivered it

That an MCB is not the same thing as an RCD but both may trip at the same time when your cooker has a wire with stripped insulation.

That a modern gas cooker connector has a built-in cut off valve - you don't need 24hrs without hot water when you disconnect your old cooker

That I could have predicted my old cooker was going to blow elements on a regular basis - it's their USP, apparently

That the make of cooker recommended by the wonderful "Steve" (he who mended my new cooker) is Rangemaster. Remember that if you're shopping for cookers at the weekend.

That there are some bloody good workmen out there

I'm pretty chuffed at the whole episode, truth be told. Panic and angst were kept to a minimum for once.

...and most importantly, when I have houseguests in a couple of weeks, there's a better than reasonable chance I'll be able to cook for them.

result

.

Valid Discrimination

2011-03-01T23:48:00.004Z

DSC_6475 Skyline
Originally uploaded by Lillput

So, the EU have said it's illegal to charge women less for their car insurance than men.

That's a good thing, surely? Stamping out discrimination wherever we find it...yay for the advancement of society.

Actually, I happen to think this is a bad judgement. It over-simplfies what is a fairly complex subject.

So, for anyone who's interested, here's Insurance 101...and by insurance I mean pure risk stuff - push investment into the equation and life gets more fraught still.

My explanation is beyond simple and shouldn't be taken as based on actual statistics.

Principles of Insurance
1. Insurable interest
This means that you can only insure against an event happening if that event occurring causes you financial loss.
This means you can't take out life insurance on celebrities or on your neighbour's house.

2. Utmost Good Faith
This means that, when taking out insurance, you must disclosure relevant facts you're aware of to the insurer even if they don't ask for them.
This allows the insurer to price the risk fairly and accurately and stops you from insuring against something that you know is pretty likely to happen.

3. The cost of the premium must relate to the risk
So you wouldn't charge someone £20 premium for the potential loss of a £1 biro. You would refuse the insurance.
Also you take into account risk factors for the risk being insured.

4. Premiums for similar risks are to be pooled
So you keep the monies for life assurance premiums separate from those for household insurance.

Pricing the Risk

This is the crux of the soundbite story...and it starts with large numbers, claims experience, and a knowledge of statistics - or ready access to an infinite supply of actuaries with an infinite number of abacusses. Or something like that.

Let's ignore motor insurance at the moment and examine life assurance.

We all want to insure against the risk of us dying in the next year. We want to insure for £1000 just to pay for our funeral. There are 1000 of in the group.

We're going to do this as a sort of mutual arrangement with no profit, admin charge or anything like that.

We check with the ONS (I haven't, BTW) and determine that the mortality rate for the whole of the UK population is one death per thousand per year.

This keeps the maths nice and simple and we each put £1 in the fund a year.

During the ensuing 12 month period there is one death and the fund is paid out.

This carries on for a few years. Sometimes the fund lies untouched because no one died, some years two people die. But on the whole the fund meets claims as required.

You have an uneasy feeling that because you're 27 the chances of your family benefitting from the fund are are smaller - actually, much smaller than 99 year-old Doris who is also in the pool.

You start to feel that your £1 stake in the venture against Doris' £1 is rather unfair.

No one wants to start the year having a doctor poke them about, check their health and ask them loads of annoying questions about the amount they smoke, drink and go to the gym. But you all agree that 99 year-olds should be charged more than 27 year olds for the £1000 insurance.

So the pool is restructured, more people are recruited and now all the 99 year olds are pooled together and charged the same amount of money as each other. The chances of them dying is calculated as 1/10, therefore 100 claims are expected so the premium for everyone is £100 for the year.

In the 27 year-old's pool the claims rate is calculated as 1/10,000 and therefore the annual premium is £0.10

(I'm praying I've got the maths right here).

We can acutally put all the pools together and the premium charging will still be fair as long as keep the differential pricing.

I can't imagine that anyone reading this thinks this is in any way discriminatory.

The bigger the pool gets, the more accurate our prediction become and the chance of there not being enough money in the pool to pay claims reduces considerably.

I don't even have to prove the statistics to you, you know them already.

What if I was to factor in smoking? We're all used to smoker/non-smoker premiums. Why should non-smokers pay the same insurance premium as smokers?

What about drinking?

What about racing drivers?

What about miners?

What about Glaswegians?

What about people with high Blood Pressure?

Still reasonably comfortable with this?

OK, lets move on...

What about people with a family history of breast cancer, or cardiac disease, or Huntingdon's disease?

Hang on...this isn't about the people in the pool any more. People can't do anything about their family history - it just gets handed to them.

I would argue that, try as I might, I can't do anything about being 47 either but you were happy that I paid more towards the fund than you at your mere 27 years...

So, you're grudgingly on my side on that.

We're 50 years into our fund now and I've kept scrupulous records of everyone in the pool and, more importantly, how old they were when they died. For some reason, I included information about hair, eye and skin colour. Religion, musical taste and sexual orientation.

I can prove to you that fair-skinned, gay, Roman Catholics with a penchant for Judas Priest survive, on average, 5 years longer than the average population - no matter where they live and whether they smoke.
I have no idea why, but the numbers demonstrate it.

Should we charge them less?

Or are the straight, dark-skinned protestants going to feel discriminated against?

And back in the real world

Yes, that last example was preposterous. Nevertheless, this is where "Sheilas' Wheels" comes in.

On the whole, insurance isn't a matter of morals - it's a matter of numbers. Charging premiums according to risk is NOT discriminatory (leastways not in the way that word is usually used). It's about us paying our fair share for the risks we bring to the pool.

The problem is, some of these factors that affect our risk are rather emotive and the transition from factors we're comfortable with to factors we aren't isn't so much a grey area, as a big muddy quagmire.

So what are we to do?

I don't think the EU needed this particular sledgehammer to deal with this particular nut.

In the UK, proper monitoring of existing principles-based regulation - with particular reference to "Treating Customers Fairly" would have gotten the job done.

I honestly believe that the age-old principles of insurance are sound and generally work to ensure that insurance as a whole is calculated fairly.

But insurance has to existing in the outside world, too...

One of my friends, TT, made a very good point about the divisive nature of differential insurance premiums and this needs to be considered but it's not about insurance risk, it's about the way society expects us to behave.

Take compulsory insurances - the most readily understood example of which is motor insurance.

You're not allowed to drive without it but if you're a 17 year-old male Scouser you probably pay considerably more than your female counterpart in Surrey, even if you're both driving the same class of car.

The cost may be so great that it's unaffordable, or you may even be denied insurance through the normal route.
These are the cases when legislation has to come in to protect the minority of the population and "Act only" insurance comes into play. Time was, when your existing insurer couldn't refuse you insurance completely, but at a minimum would have to offer you "Act Only" insurance which provided the minimum requirement to make you road legal.

So the state can step in to provide a framework to reduce the level of disadvantage for some quarters of society.

And if you think it'll stop insurance companies charging differential rates for different risks, you're probably wrong.
Experience tells us (and, let's face it, insurance is all about experience) that the financial bods will find a way to skirt around legislation they believe to inappropriate.

I'm not condoning this, only suggesting that the legislation itself is likely to be largely ineffective - as well as very heavily flawed.

...oh and for the comments I've seen on news sites on the matter - women don't get all insurances cheaper, and never had. Long term disability insurance (or Income protection as it's also known) is significantly more expensive for women. I'd hazard a guess that medical insurance is too.

.

Bandwagon

2011-01-26T23:13:00.001Z

DSC_4488 Well?
Originally uploaded by Lillput

Yep, I'm sorry, but I'm jumping on one.

What's the difference between these two situations?:

A woman goes to a League 1 football match with two male friends. Two seats are together, one seat is on its own.
Being the visitor, the woman suggests that she's happy to sit in the single seat.
One of the men comments - "no, you sit with M because, you need someone sitting next to you to explain the offside rule in a loud and patronising manner"

and

A pair of professional sports presenters suggest that someone should go and explain the offside rule to one of the assistant referees at a premership match because she's a woman.

Let's face it, they both say the same thing.

But the first was made between close friends and was actually a joke on sexist men everywhere.

The second? Not so much.

With the exception of Rachel Hey-ho-hey-ho, the world seems to have been outraged on Sian Massey's behalf.

The quieter story was that she was subsequently removed from officiating at a match a few days later because of the shitstorm kicked up which was not of her doing. I think this was the one that made me more cross.

I didn't know much about how much training FA referees underwent, nor how much they got paid...so I went and had a look.

It takes at least 20 hours of formal training and countless matches to get to the top tier of FA refereeing. Most, if not all of this, will be done at the person's own expense and remuneration seems to start at tenner a match (rising to £250 for the Football league matches).

I have no doubt that Sian Massey has earned less than a pound for every time the offside rule quip has been made in her hearing. Let's face it, an awful lot worse gets levelled at referees.

I think what's galling when it comes to professional presenters - and especially those with a history of playing the game - is that there's a crisis of qualified officials, especially for women and girls in the game - and without these folk, the matches (certainly those at lower levels) simply wouldn't happen.

Like my grandmother said, I believe:

"I don't mind when you shit on me. I don't even mind when you rub it in. It's when you tell me I stink that I object".

.

Going Equipped

2010-12-19T22:29:00.003Z

homeward
Originally uploaded by Lillput

The journey should have been simple enough.

Cambridge via Victoria coach station for ma, Victoria coach station and return in a day for me.

Yeah, yeah, the weather was always going to be a risk. That's the very reason I wore my new mids and my proper outdoor jacket with fleece lining and took a change of clothes and a toothbrush. There was always going to be a possbility of an overnight stop in a service station on the M4 or something like that.

I hadn't expected quite the delay going out though.

So, a journey to London that should have taken a bit over two hours took well over four, scuppering connections to Cambridge for ma and a speedy return to Bristol for me.

S offered accomodation in Hitchin if required, having had his weekend plans altered by the weather. As much as I love S's company, I really needed to get home because I had something like 8 people arriving at my house for various reasons on Sunday.

Nevertheless, London Victoria was pandaemonium, trains didn't look any more certain to take me the whole way home, news was that the M4 was worsening by the minute and the thought of getting somewhere comfy and inside as soon as possible was seductive and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea whilst all the while feeling like it was a bit like taking the easy way out.

On the journey up my ma had told me something her mother had said - along the lines of "the sooner you realise that God sends the weather, the happier you'll be".
She didn't mean that we had to believe in God - she meant that there are some things in your life over which you have no control and you might as well surrender to the idea and deal with it.

So I trekked across town to Kings Cross, bought a ticket and set forth for Hitchin. It took a little longer than usual because that service had started to suffer weather-related problems, but after about an hour, we were sitting in the Nightingale with a couple of pints for all the world like the journey was planned.

A few text messages and calls to make alternative arrangements for the people supposed to be arriving at my house on Sunday and then a call from my sister to tell me she and ma were stuck in London but were holing up in an hotel for the night.

The walk to S's house was in a winter wonderland of vigin snow and cold crispness. As the snow fell harder the stress of the day retreated because it felt like I'd made the right call and I was surrendering to weather I couldn't change. Even the thought that I might not be able to get home the next day didn't bother me particularly. If worse came to worst, I'd have to go shopping for one or two things but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

The light of day on Sunday revealed that no further snow had fallen, both road and rail conditions had improved a bit.
Then the agonising started again. We both had things to do, places to go and yet it would have been nice just to have gone for a walk in the snow and then to the pub for lunch and not worry about anything else.

Ultimately, we planned our respective journeys for the day and S dropped me at the station. My journey back home was relatively painless, albeit it a bit crowded and a bit longer than usual.

I'm home now and S is safely at his planned destination. All's right with the world.

I guess my Grandmother's wisdom has merit - as did much of what she said, so I'm led to believe.

So - I'm going to try and go with the flow and accept the odd fucking up of my plans and know that it can sometimes lead to a pleasant evening passed with a friend, some beer and "Life of Brian". (thanks, again, S)

...and maybe the wisdom I can pass to my nephews and nieces is "always carry spare underwear - you just never know..."

.

Under Pressure

2010-12-01T11:33:00.006Z

Every time I think I've just about got things under control, they seem to slip away from me.

Remember the incident with the failed tap washer? No? Oh, well, read about it here if you like.

I've had a few more recently...

My vacuum cleaner stopped picking up as well as it should and was making an odd whining noise. Some fiddling to dismantle the brush head and unclog it was necessary. I was pretty pleased that I'd done it but didn't really think any more about it.

Then a load of light bulbs failed - well, I say a load...four, actually, but they were odd bulbs in awkward places. When I was looking in the cupboard under the stairs for something else I discovered that I didn't need to source new bulbs, there was a handy supply there already for me (thanks, Idiot Boy - I'll stop mocking your hoarding instincts now...though what's with the thirteen boxes of matches, eh?). It then just took me to get my shit together sufficiently to get the stepladder out and then to accept the fact that all eight shades on the light fitting in the lounge would need to be cleaned in soapy water.

Then I had a problem with the oven. After being on for about 10 minutes it tripped the RCD and turned a couple of ring mains off. First time I put down to gremlins, second time I realised something needed to be done.

Twitter is a wonderful thing and after bleating about it I had helpful suggestions from two friends (Dru and TT) both of whom suggested elements were at fault.
TT went on to suggest sharing the delivery cost on replacements for me and some stuff for him.
Then Dru mailed me to say if I needed help to let her know...although her default assumption was that I was both confident and competent to do the job myself (actually, I don't believe I was either of these things).

I whined to my friend S, too. He, like the others, was pretty certain an element was at fault.
It took a while to identify the right model of cooker and therefore the correct elements but I ordered them and they duly arrived.
There are no instructions anywhere that tell you how to replace them. Maybe it's obvious, maybe I'm just dumb, or maybe there's an expectation that you'll always get a "professional" in to do the job.

Thing is, my dad always had a go at fixing things himself, so did Idiot Boy (in fact he replaced elements in this cooker about four times) and so does my brother.
So I did the obvious thing and took the back off the cooker. It became obvious that I'd need to do something inside the cooker too...but it took me a while to work out what.

However, I got there eventually.

Then the bad news...the element design had changed. The spares website had warned me of this and had detailed the adaptations necessary. What became clear, however, was that my cooker was older tham the model to which they referred and the adaptations needed wouldn't work.
I was left with earth connectors that I couldn't connect.
I agonized for a while, stamped my feet a little, too and then had a think.
Then I jury-rigged something that I hoped would be good enough.

Problem for me with earth is that I only half understand it and what it's there to do and they do say a little learning is a dangerous thing.
Both elements replaced, complete with makeshift earth connections I turned the oven on. It worked. I was amazed. Better yet, when I touched the outside of the cooker I didn't die.
When S arrived to stay for the weekend, I asked his advice over the earth wires and his opionion was that what I'd done was good enough. Phew.

So - all fixed, then?

Yes...and no.

My house was freezing at the weekend and S was on the verge of hypothermia a couple of times so he offered to bleed my radiators (I sort of knew they needed doing - CJ had suggested a while back that the cold radiator in my bathroom was probably to do with air). Sadly I had neither the correct tool (radiator valve key) nor a substitute (long-nosed pliers). At least I was pretty certain I did have both things but could lay my hands on neither.

S tried some improvisation with the tools to hand but to no avail. I suggested that I'd get a heating engineer to service the boiler and take a look at the radiators. S said I was perfectly capable of doing it myself - he's clearly got more faith in my than I have. He explained what I needed to do.
I went and bought radiator keys and a pair of long-nosed pliers and came home to find I did, indeed have both already, but hey...

I bled a couple of radiators and was gratified to find it was easy and the results were immediate. The third one, however, wasn't so easy...it became apparent that the water pressure had dropped in the system and I'd have to let more water into it. Problem is, I had no idea how.

I let TD know that I'll be absent from my desk for a while longer and he, as ever, encourages me not to panic, gives me a bit of advice (if the system's warm then let the water in slowly) and then says RTFM or Google.

I pull out my tumble drier to let me get at the underside of the boiler and find that an unrelated pipe has a leak from a strange connection. Irritation and panic come at the same time but clearly this is the more pressing problem. First I make the problem worse, then I fix it...well sort of.

I exchange texts with S who alternates between advice and concern.

It's not clear how to let water into the boiler and it takes an hour of surfing for documentation and reading and watching a video to finally understand what needs to be done. Once understood the process took only ten minutes.

OK, I'm pretty pleased with myself on the whole but the nagging feeling that I'm more comfortable with a spanner, rather than a mascara brush in my hands returns to haunt me and I slink off to bed under a bit of a cloud.

Today I'm feeling a bit more defiant. I'm irritated that I'm letting myself feel pressure for being a bit sub-girlie. Then I realise that several of my perfectly capable male friends wouldn't have been any more confident than me to do these jobs. Also, there's a nagging annoyance that clear instructions for simple maintenance jobs should be more easily come by.
Then I re-read the blog post I mention above and see the comments - it makes me smile and gives me heart.

I'm not out of the woods on this whole saga, of that I'm sure but if I concentrate on how bloody useful it is to be able to fix my own stuff (with help, and encouragement of course) perhaps I'll stop getting cold sweats when faced with M&S adverts for perfect women in slinky dresses.

Maybe...

.

Mmmmmm beer

2010-11-17T23:04:00.002Z

IMG_0446
Originally uploaded by Lillput

I like beer.

I was introduced to it about 20 years ago when I learned that cider didn't generally travel much, nor well.

In a conversation with S and some other friends at a beer festival, I had to admit I didn't like Belgian beer, at least not the stuff I'd tried. The admission was greeted with some surprise and the assertion from all present that there would be Belgian beers I like, I just had to find them.

So, S suggested we amble over to Brussels by Eurostar to try and find beer I might like. He's nice like that.

CJ tells me that he's never been there and would appreciate an appraisal of the place. So this seems as good a place as any to do it.

I'm going to try not to ramble...

Friday
Last minute change of plans sees us meet at the Betjeman Arms in St Pancras.
Much better than the usual run of station bars serving well-kept Doom Bar and Betjeman (both Sharps).

Eurostar check-in is like "airport security lite" and soon we're aboard the train.

Travelling at up to 180mph is a bit disconcerting when the journey is so smooth and it's dark outside so you get little sense of what you're travelling through.

Two hours later we arrive at Bruxelles Midi - in the rain.

We find the apartment (Apartments Manneken) dump our stuff, change into dry clothes and head back out to find food...and beer.

'Le Falstaff': Well-known in the right circles. Service awful, food a bit m'eh (Carbonnade for S, Lapin ala gueze for me).
Beer: Hoegaarden - standard fare, perfectly good - a good introduction to get my palate in.

Next A la Mort Subite.
Beers: Morte Subite Kriek, a lambic and a couple of others I can't remember. Kriek was a high-point for me - bright pink, fruity but not sweet.

Saturday
More rain.
Visit to La Grande Place and the museum there. Interesting place - a good introduction to the history of Brussels - includes architectural artefacts, maps, ceramics, paintings and tapestries.
Oh, and the wardrobe of 'Le Mannequin Pis' - seriously, weird.

Refreshment needed so S recommends A la Becasse.
Lovely interior (Arts and Crafts, maybe?) with friendly service.

Beer: sweetened Lambic beer. Served in a jug to share. Followed up with a mix of Lambic and Kriek in an even bigger jug.
I think the kriek/lambic mix worked particularly well.

Time to find something to eat and luckily right opposite was a cheese shop and a bakery. Back to the apartment to eat and have a bit of a rest.

Refreshed, we headed back out around 9pm and found Poechenellekelder.
Lively but easy-going atmosphere, excellent service and beer served with a little bit of ceremony.
Beers: Taras Boulba (yummy yum, yum). Kwak (nice but in a silly glass) and probably four more that I can't remember.

Sunday
Culture: Notre Dame de la Chapelle church. Quite restrained by Roman Catholic standards but has a completely OTT pulpit. Definitely worth a visit.

Parc de Bruxelles was a little sparse but would probably be a green oasis in the height of summer.

Musical Instrument Museum was fab - if you like musical instruments. Floor after floor of every instrument you can imagine and several you can't.
You get a set of headphones that pick up sound samples whilst you're walking around to illustrate the exhibits. Not perfect but a good idea.
Really enjoyable couple of hours spent and we didn't see everything. I can pretty much guarantee you'll never see so many accordians or bagpipes in any other place.

So it was time for more refreshment.

Toone is famous for its puppet theatre and should be notorious for its service. Not exactly hostile but definitely didn't get the impression they cared about whether we were there or not.

Beer: Hopus (tall glass and a shot glass for the bottoms to be added if you like). Very nice indeed - better with the bottoms added.

We decided to go to one of the many fishy restaurants in Rue des Bouchers. Sole and Monkfish were greedily eaten and washed down with Leffe (blonde for me, brune for him).

Thence to Delerium which our beer guide told us had 2000 beers to try.
We think it's changed set up since the book was written but it was a nice place.
No table service - but something like 30 beers on tap at the upstairs bar. Oh and a very tall bar.
Beers: Floris Fruit beer (possibly Kiwi flavoured?) very drinkable but not very beerish (pictured)
Guillotine: Dark but quite bitter.
There were a couple of others too...but their names escape me.

Upstairs bar was full of young trendy things and it was very noisy so we tried the downstairs one - this one had more people the same age as us but the crush was greater and the noise level higher.

Instead we escaped and went to Soleil which was just around the corner from our apartment. Very quiet and clearly a locals' bar. Nice place with the grooviest toilets you can imagine.

S had Rochefort which was dark, chewy and strong. Can't remember what I had.
We then had time for one quick closing - something draught, but I can't remember what.

Mionday
Our last day so a bit of an early start which was something of a shock.
A walk north following a trail of building-side cartoons which seem to be prevalent around the city.
The area is rather unloved and it's a shame they don't make anything of the canal but we did stumble on the interesting 1930's church of John the Baptist in Molenbeek.

A walk through the Marolles area with its antique shops and flea market ended with a trip to the utterly charming gueze museum/Cantillion Brewery.

Here we learned about real, traditional Lambic brewing methods. We were given a booklet and sent to amble around the working brewery learning about how it does its stuff.
After about an hour we were invited to sit in the bar and try their beers.

Gueze is not to everyone's taste - it's very acidic, almost cider-like in character. I wouldn't want to drink it every day but after three small glasses of it, my tastebuds had become accustomed.

Then it was time to head towards the station but time for a couple of glasses of "Palm" in a station bar.

The journey home was as smooth as the one out and before we knew it we were back in St Pancras.

In conclusion
A great place with many further possibilities.

I was wrong about Belgian beer - it's not all sweet, sickly and dark. There's probably a beer to suit everyone. I found loads to like.

Having a beer guide (in the person of S, and a copy of a CAMRA book) was extremely useful but it's not hard to work out how the various bars work if you pay attention - some are table service, others are bar service.

Making the effort with French (in most places) was rewarded with smiles and help.

One surprise was that smoking is still allowed in some bars - it might sway your choice of venue.

Go there! Drink beer.

Thanks, S

x

Campaign for pointless activities

2010-10-25T17:36:00.001+01:00

L1002586 What's the point?
Originally uploaded by Lillput

I had the perfect morning, this morning.

I walked a couple of miles in the cold autumn sunshine and attended a meeting for ExtraVerte with TD at council offices in South Bristol.

The meeting was everything we could have asked for - upbeat, helpful, generating more potential contacts and an answer in the affirmative. After the meeting we repaired to a cafe to discuss the outcome of the meeting, next steps and to prepare a strategy for the project.

After that, TD noticed that the water level was low in the river so we strolled around taking pictures in the sunshine and, it has to be said, dropping stones and other small, heavy found objects into the gloopy mud. We both chuckled with childish satisfaction at the activity. We're middle-aged professional people, for goodness sake. What the hell are we playing at?

This has happened a few times recently.

I visited Hitchin a few weeks ago and on my walk into town from the train station I was horrified (yes, horrified is definitely the word) to see that under a horse chestnut tree was a pile of fallen conkers. In my day, a hoard like that was like finding gold. It was all you could do to stop us throwing sticks into trees to get conkers out of the trees so you'd never ever see that many shiny conkers just lying there on the ground.

There was something deep inside me that couldn't pass by...so I guiltily scooped a dozen or so up and popped them in my coat pocket.
I rediscovered them later when I was at S's house. So I gifted them to him. He chuckled and graciously accepted them and we both bemoaned the lack of conker competition today.
We never got around to playing conkers so he's either quietly thrown them away or they're still there in a pile on the side in the kitchen.

Last weekend I went for a walk with M and her kids. She has a son of 7 (pictured) and a daughter of 11. We passed a big pile of dry fallen leaves. Naturally I kicked them (yes, naturally...that's what dry leaves are for).
M eyed me with some horror..."there might be dog poo!". True enough. I hate poo as much as the next person, but the risk of finding it in a pile of leaves can't overcome my innate desire to kick leaves. The risk is worth it.
So her son, also M, and I kick leaves for the next few minutes.

When we get to the old dockside rail tracks M and I play on the tracks for a while. Balancing on the rails, jumping over sleepers, and then trying to move the points.
M's mum and sister leave us to it.

Why the hell do I think that playing on railway lines, kicking leaves, dropping stones into mud and scooping up conkers is a valuable activity for me, and for my friends?

Because for the short time we do them, our focus is entirely on the now. The now of simple pleasures.

There's time later to think about the fridge that seems to have developed a fault, the cooker element that blew at the weekend, the fact that the bathroom radiator no longer gives out any heat at all...and how the hell am I going to pay the bills if no bugger will pay me to pretty up the urban landscape.

For the next 20 minutes I can just concentrate on not falling off the railway track and into the stingers, scraging my knees on the way down.

After that, the other things seem less unmanagable because I've just given my brain a rest.

So go on...let your inner seven-year old out on loose for a bit and to hell with life's dog poo!

.

Nostalgia readjustment

2010-10-10T22:58:00.002+01:00

Lillput in Lilliput
Originally uploaded by Lillput

Firstly, you need to get over the picture, OK?

Yes, yes, the littlest one is me.

I have siblings who are a fair bit older than me - my brother is eight years' older, my sister eleven years' older.

Anyhow - this was the only vaguely relevant picture I have relating to the subject at hand. For what it's worth I'm thinking that this picture was taken in the mid-late 1960's.

It was my birthday this week and although I generally don't make that much of a fuss of it, other people do and my friend M said she'd like to take me out by way of a birthday gift. How lovely.

I asked her to take me to "Made in Dagenham".

It's a film about women working for Ford in Dagenham who fought for equal pay in the late sixties.

It's not the best film ever made, hell it's not even the best British film made in the last 10 years but I enjoyed it immensely.

The story isn't that hard to guess (most of it is a matter of record, after all) and in fact the story arc is something of a cliche and yet I found it totally compelling.

Maybe it was some of the opening footage of 1960's advertisements for cars, possibly it was the reconstruction of the world of my childhood.

The casual sexism was shocking and caused gasps in the audience. That was quite amusing in itself.

At one point in the film the heroine's husband tells her what a good husband he's been because he didn't drink excessively and had never raised his hand to her.

She rails at him and says that's how is should be. Of course she's right - she should be able to take decent treatment for granted.

Women should be able to take equal pay for equal work for granted.

Nevertheless, those of us women who have always been paid equally and have treated that as a right need to remember the women who who fought to make that true.

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Plus ça Change

2010-09-27T21:46:00.002+01:00

First Time in about 25 years
Originally uploaded by Lillput

So, S invites me to take up a spare ticket for Brighton's home match.

I don't support any team of any sport. I have a dabbling kind of interest in major competitions under certain circumstances. Nevertheless, I started watching live football around the age of five.

After a whistle-stop tour of the town (I'd never been there before) and lunch at a good pub we head off to the ground.

The last time I'd actually been to a match was when Bristol City was in league division one (in today's money, that's the Premiership) and Brighton's current home ground is far state-of-the-art (that comes next season) but on walking through the ground to take up our seats, I got a powerful sense that despite a different team at a different ground, football matches are somehow a universal constant.

S had been a little concerned that I was attending out of politeness - he needn't have worried. I had a whale of a time.

The football wasn't the best in the world but there were moments of sheer elegance. There was plenty of action and three actual goals and about four nearly ones.

According to the home crowd, the referee was of questionable parentage and visually impaired at that. It was also asserted that he got his ya-yas at his own hand. I can't really comment on the veracity of any of these statements - but he did seem to make a few school girl errors. Then again, I had a better vantage point than him so maybe I should cut him some slack.

I'd been warned that the regulars in the seats behind would be vocal in their opinions throughout the match - and this was certainly the case. If only all these people's opinion on the best way to arrange the team, or to press home the advantage were taken - surely the resulting squad would be near-perfect proponents of the craft. No?

You can argue that it's a fairly low, tribalistic form of entertainment but I have to say that the enthusiasm of fans for their chosen team is quite infectious.

Best of all is to hear about five thousand people crying "Oooooh!" in unison, with no conductor or instruction but as a visceral reflex at a chance made but not converted.

I'm not about to start watching regularly again but it was brilliant to be reminded of what being at a live game is about.

It was also a lovely reminder that there are things in your life that are largely unchanged by time and that despite changes in rules, and in styles and in the length of shorts, the spectators of a football are one of those things.

Thanks S, thanks MP and thanks Seagulls - it was fun

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Seasonal Shift

2010-09-16T20:01:00.004+01:00

IMG_0383 Seasonal Shift
Originally uploaded by Lillput

There's been a slight shift in the season.

Not enough to radically change things. Not enough to put the heating on.

Just enough to see me putting a jumper on from time to time.

A few days ago my winter coal delivery was made. Another waypoint in the year.

This evening I was supposed to be meeting friends in a pub in Bath. I was really looking forward to it - I haven't seen some of the guys for a couple of months and it was going to be nice to catch up over a pint or two...and maybe some camera talk.
But plans for tomorrow changed a bit during the day meaning I've got to be up super-early in the morning. Added to which I seem to have had a headache thing for four or five days and it's getting kinda annoying.

All in all, then, it's probably best to spend the evening in.

But the chill in the air is causing brisk draughts to fly around my Victorian house and it's one of those days when I just want to curl up somewhere cosy.

So, what's a gal to do? Light a fire, that's what.

It's more than warmth. It's glow and safety and comfort. It perfectly fits my slightly subdued mood.

I love the summer and I can still almost feel the warmth of sitting outside with a pint and a friend earlier in the year. But I'm relishing the move into autumn with its different light, its change in the colours outside.

In a couple of weeks when I hear the rain lashing on the window and I really don't want to run across to my garage to get some logs I might briefly yearn for sun and warmth and the ability to get by in a short sleeves, but the resulting fire will easily make up for the unpleasant 50 yard dash.

In short, the season I like best is the next one.

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Into the Known

2010-08-31T16:19:00.003+01:00

L1002170 Leap
Originally uploaded by Lillput

So...it was crunch time.

I quit my paying job around nine months ago with about 12 months' bill-paying money in the bank.

It was decision time.

So - how has my foray into entrepreneurship been?

Well, I guess that all depends on how you measure it.

Just a recap (or possibly 'cap' if you're not aware of what it is that ExtraVerte do): We want to take empty pockets of land such as building sites that are lying idle and turn them temporarily into pleasant spaces for people to look at and be in. A simple enough dream.

Are TD and still speaking to each other? Yes.
We've had a few heated disagreements. Both of us have overstepped bounds but both of us have been big enough to apologise and move on.

Have we managed to do the things you need to do in order to get a company up and running? Yes. A few hiccoughs here and there, some work and rework on things like the website, but on the whole it was a mostly straight forward process (mind you we haven't done the end of year accounts or company return yet so I'll withhold final judgement).

Have we managed to get people to talk to us on the subject? Yes, eventually. It took quite a long time and quite a few emails but we are getting people to at least talk to us. We've spoken to a leading architecture practice, a large county council in the South East amongst others and we have meetings in the pipeline.
We've been quoted in a couple of trade publications and our website is getting an amount of traffic.

Have we managed to raise the profile of the subject out in the field? Difficult to be sure, but I'm pretty convinced we have. We're not the only people interested in the subject but we're probably one of the few practices that have given the subject and the issues around it quite so much thought.

Have we made any money yet? No.

This last one's a bit of a killer, really...because we both have bills to pay.

So it's bearing all this in mind I had to sit down and think about my next move. Go look for real work or speak to my bank, dig in and keep going.

Tricky

No one other than me has a stake in my financial security. So there's no permission to seek, no one whose life will be adversely affected by a change in my financial circumstances.

I have a couple of meetings with individuals who renew my faith in the idea and reinforce my original view that it's a good thing to do for the good of urban communities.
Both of them have passion for the idea of caring for people who are less fortunate than ourselves. One is a little older than me, the other is considerably younger - at the start of her working life.
I also read a report that has compelling evidence of the effect that access to green spaces has on those in poverty.

TD has a stake in my decision, of course - we co-own the company and share the workload but this isn't a decision it's fair to burden him with.

I've plenty of other friends who have been cheering me on from the sidelines - or helping where they can (thank you DM, GBH, M & S particularly for practical things you've done for us) but they can't help with this.

Where does this leave me? Single, and alone in the decision. Sad, huh?

Well, kind of, but then I realise that it's also a liberating force. There's only me who will be adversely affected if I make the wrong decision.

That realisation and letting go of a little more of the baggage of things past suddenly made things clear. It would be foolhardy to give up now...it would be a waste of everything we've done so far.

I'm going to stick with it.

I have to shuffle financial plans and I'm pretty sure my bank manager won't be thrilled at the prospect, especially as she's already acutely aware of my lack of interest in making money (for me or them) for its own sake.

I can also hear metaphorical rumblings from the 'beyond' and these are trickier to deal with than a pleasant lady in a smart suit, but that's all part of me growing up and moving on.

So, in the style of true project managers I've gone through a rigorous change management process, shifted dates and resources, turned the project back green again and am moving on with it.

It'll be up for another review this time next year.

So - has this all been a success?

I think I'd like to make my success crtieria for the last year about learning about the development and constuction industries; about understanding how the built environment affects profoundly those who interact with; about putting myself and TD in the line of fire with people who know more than we do and us holding our own.

Whaddya mean you can't change the objectives of a project after the event?

I'm a project manager, and I think you'll find I just did.

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Toast as a Statement of Gender

2010-08-19T16:51:00.003+01:00

DSC_4488 Well?
Originally uploaded by Lillput

If you've read earlier blog entries here...or if you know me at all, you'll know that I find gender difference quite interesting.

For those who don't know me, and can't be arsed to read the rest of the blog I'll summarise...

I'm a straight, cisgendered, middle-class (there, I've admitted it), widowed, white woman in my mid-forties.
However, I'm bookish, geeky, prefer bitter beer to white wine, don't own a handbag, or a pair of heels. As DrC would summarise I'm "not very girlie".

Because I work from home I frequently hear Radio Four's Crackpot Hour...sorry, Woman's Hour and slices from the Today Programme - together with whatever's on between 9am and 10am.

Frequently these programmes cause me to grumble at the radio (but not turn it off because ranting's far too much fun).

Anyhow, one day this week the delicious Stephen Fry was doing an English Language programme and although I didn't hear most of it, I know that gender-specific language was mooted.

Then ~~Crackpot~~ Woman's Hour talked for a while about the plasticity of gender without making any real point. In irritation levels, this was beaten only by the ariticle they did last week about women and Real Ale (oh, please...don't get me started again).

Today the age-old accusation of women earning less than men was touched on in the Today Programme with shoddy reasoning, muttering and "it's so unfair" by the interviewee. It may be true but you need to make your point without whining and with some, you know FACTS!

Anyhow, as I was making my toast this morning I realised there's an untapped research piece for someone to do...

It's about gender vs toast colour.

Me? I like mine a delicious blonde colour, please. Or as the late, much missed, Idiot Boy was wont to call it "warm bread". Yes, that's right...just wave it for a while in the general direction of the toaster and that'll be lovely.

Idiot Boy, on the other hand was of the "If it isn't black it's not done yet" school. I thought it was a Northern thing but long term friend and neighbour MrB-H likes his toast similarly whereas MrsB-H likes hers like mine. Hmmm...

The reason this came to mind was watching TD get excited at the prospect of the hotel having a "make your own toast" machine so that he could toast his twice to get the desired amount of brown. When having lunch at my place a while ago, he swapped my over-dark toast for the blonde bit I'd given him.

On holiday S declared he liked his mid-brown.

So, in my limited experience I see patterns emerging. In the continuum of toast brown-ness would we see guys generally on the browner end of the spectrum?

Will it make a difference if the people we surveyed were gay, black, lesbian, tall, trans, straight, working class, or had degrees?

I think the good people in Radio Four land need to know so that they can make fatuous statements about how important it is to preserve a person's God-given right to toast of the right colour.

I'm sure there's got to be Crackpot Hour slot in here somewhere, don't you?

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Do not go gently

2010-08-10T20:44:00.004+01:00

L1002313 sq

Oh look, a big gap in my blog again.

Reflective of busy times - for both work and leisure.

This picture was from the highlight of the last couple of months - a holiday in Norfolk with a friend, S.

It was one of the many, many new things I have experienced of late...I feel a list coming on (and in case you were wondering, there's no significance to the order of these things)

1. North Norfolk coast as holiday destination. Fantastic: great light a lot of the time; relatively quiet; and in good company even a 10km walk in the rain is fun.

2. Beer festival on a railway station. Ours was in Sheringham. There are others around the country - including Minehead, I believe. If you like beer and don't hate trains then do it.

3. Adobe InDesign. I don't really like giving a company that has caused me so much grief in the past the air of publicity but I have to say InDesign is a nifty piece of software. Shhh...don't tell them I said that. However, their policy of making you pay more for downloading rather than getting a DVD of the software sucks big-time.

4. Kent and the Medway. A meeting for our company saw TD and I hacking our way east to visit the area around Maidstone. I'm still trying not to take the 4am hotel fire alarm, and the roundabout that employs at least three extra space-time dimensions to confuse the unwitting traveller too personally. Actually, I think I could like the county - I hope we get some work there to ensure we have to go back.

5. Marsh samphire. The trendy foodstuff du jour. Looks unprepossessing, tastes rather nice.

6. s215 of the Town and County Planning Act (1990). Could be useful in our work, if we can get local authorities to use it.

7. The Ting Tings and The Go! Team. Music that I'm surprised I like - but I do.

8. Andy Serkis as Ian Dury in Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. Utterly convincing.

9. Cribbage. This isn't actually new to me, having learned it as a kid and I remembered loving it. TD re-taught me over a couple of beers on our Kent trip. Best card game for two players.

10. Thornbridge Jaipur IPA. I've only had one pint of this but I've been trying to track it down on draught since. Stupidly strong but doesn't taste like it is. Falling-over water of the most lovely kind.

More new things in forthcoming months, please...

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Life is...

2010-06-28T20:17:00.002+01:00

DSC_6864 Life is
Originally uploaded by Lillput

More new things, more memories. Some ups, some downs...

So, just a typical couple of weeks for this gal, then.

TD and I improving our meeting techniques. More people open to listen to us.

Another gig. This time "Mostly Comedy" at the George in Hitchin. A little rough in places but featuring Spandex Ballet and James Acaster amongst others. Venue was far from plush but the company was good and the atmosphere was friendly and warm.

A visit to the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain; a lack lustre football performance against Algeria watched in a crowded pub with a friend and some good beer.

Another city visit to Liverpool and some time to sit and ponder things in the Metropolitan Cathedral. A display in the foyer listed the names of ordinands from the English College in Rome (Idiot Boy studied there) and it brought a little lump to my throat.

I also had to do a fair bit of thinking about what I want from life - not something I've really ever done. I didn't actually come to any real conclusions but I guess sometimes it's something we all have to consider.

Then the neighbours and some old friends came round to share a bottle of Penfolds Grange that was bought as a gift a couple of years ago - and we toasted to the absent friend and shared silly stories. Another tough thing to do but the wine and company were both perfect for the occasion and on the whole memories were positive ones.

More excrutiating football at the pub...this time initially on my own and then joined by DrC and CW. The football was bad, the exchange of messages with S was smile-inducing and the company was excellent.

Then today a chance amble down the garden revealed the extent of the fruit of the cherry trees' labours.
The trees were a joint project and have been largely ignored along with the rest of the ~~jungle~~ garden as my inclination to work there on my own evaporated along with other aspects of my life.
The last few years have seen a small quantity of fruit form and ripen, only to be snaffled by the abundant blackbirds.
The other day, whilst sitting on the back step and chatting to TD I noticed a blackbird taking a lot of interest in the tree - he mocked me for being so easily distracted but it was that thought today that sent me down there.
The older of the two trees was groaning with just about ripe fruit...a couple more days and the rest will be perfect but I picked a few to be going on with.
The boy would have been delighted with the fruity haul - I bought him a cherry stoner a long time ago when he acquired a taste for the fuit - and I stoned a bowlful for my dessert this evening.

Good times, poignant memories...

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Musical Youth?

2010-06-08T17:52:00.004+01:00

So...Sunday sees me having to be in London for an early-starting conference the next day.

S lives tolerably close to the Big Smoke so he consented to keep me entertained.

We had a good wander up the canal, then into Regent's Park. Thence to Camden and the markets, therein.

Most of them were selling t-shirts whose slogans would get old pretty quick but there was plenty there to induce smiles.

Naturally, we then found ourselves in a pub with decent beer (Deuchars IPA on draught, for anyone who's interested) and we sat and nattered in the sun, as is our wont.

Then more walking around the market to slightly more varied and interesting stalls (old pianos, old vinyl, a school desk full of cheap and cheerful film cameras) and then we decieded to get something to eat.

The old Horse Hospital part of the market has a stunning array of food stalls. Every style of cooking, from every continent and all housed in a series of what amounts to wooden sheds.

In the centre of the area are sturdy tables and benches for communal eating.

If you examine what was there it has the same components as the typical food plaza in a mall and yet I would rather have my left arm pulled off than eat in a mall.

One foil container of chickpea curry and rice, and another of chicken curry and rice cost us less than a tenner and left us feeling full. So we sat amongst the varied array of people and had what was the just about the nicest eating-out experience I've had in a while (OK, Zazu comes about equal).

How can malls get this thing so wrong? Or is it about the clientele? Or was it just my frame of mind? Who knows...all I can say is next time you're deciding where to eat in London, seriously consider visiting Camden.

After eating, and wandering a bit more we decided on an impromptu gig visit at the adjoining Proud venue. We were both miffed to find that, not only was there no real beer on offer, but the wine was marked up to rates that approached daylight robbery. Still the gig was, in fact, free so maybe we should have taken that on the chin.

What a fantastically quirky venue!

Horse stables have been turned into small lounge areas all in different styles and the main "hall" is a decent size with a small stage.

From our chosen stable we could hear the various acts doing their thing. Mostly they were fine, but not mind-blowing but then we went in to hear the "main" act...Tim Ten Yen.

A revelation.

This is not music I would normally be willing to listen to and yet his natural charm and fine-line treading between taking it seriously and being a total parody of...something...was utterly captivating.

I put it down to the liquor and the convivial company and almost wrote it off.

Then S sent me a link to his MySpace page and by early this afternoon I'd bought the album from iTunes.

Another revelation, then...taking a flyer on music you've never heard of can sometimes pay off.

OK - there are hardened gig-goers reading this and saying "well, like, duh..." but the last gig I went to was Nitin Sawhney and I was willing to put up with having to stand because I knew his music. Before that it was David Byrne and there were comfy seats, too.

I fully expect the next gig I go to will be rubbish, but I know that there are gems out there to be had so the only question is "where next?"

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I couldn't possibly do that!

2010-06-05T12:45:00.003+01:00

Most of my family comment that I've changed.

It's not surprising, really, we all change over time and then we get shaped by events that happen to us.

So they're probably right, I probably have changed.

I still feel the same (about 17 and geekily awkward and not fully at ease with myself) but I know the evidence is there...on the outside to anyone who has known me for more than a couple of years.

However, bits of the "old" me are now popping up again. The one who likes to fiddle with bits of code to get things to work; the one who will sit and play piano, guitar or cello for a while just because I feel like it. To be honest, I'd almost forgotten that those parts of me ever existed. There are other things too. It's come as a bit of a surprise.

Also a surprise was my apparent willingness, and ability to pull off something TD has been worried about: my credibility as someone in the landscape/architecture industry.

A visit to stay with S turned from all social to a mix of social and business when we attended a public meeting on a proposed development in the town.

Not only was I happy to put myself in someone's face to talk about the development in quite forthright terms (that's new me, that is) but after about five minutes of talking the chap I was speaking to said "you're in the business, aren't you?". This was repeated with the other two people I launched myself at. Phew.

Since then I've attended a networking breakfast and I'm about to go to a sustainability conference which means travelling up to London and staying there overnight. Old me would have been terrified at the prospect and, given the choice, would have just avoided it but I'm not even really thinking about it.

I guess the oddest thing is that I'm not really doing this consciously. It's instinctive.

I've still no idea where I'm going and I'm generally not looking more than a couple of weeks ahead but I'm feeling more in control and more able to deal with the slings and arrows of....well, whatever, really.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is "good" or "right" I'm saying this is how it is for me at the moment. Maybe it's a facet of my age and situation. Maybe enough things have happened to me and those I love...good things as well as bad...that truly make me believe that you might as well get on with the now because you really don't know what's around the corner.

Then again...maybe it's just a phase I'm going though.

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Secret Smiles

2010-05-21T22:08:00.003+01:00

So today I notice several people out walkingwho were smiling.

They're not smiling at the other people they're walking with, or other people in the street.

They're smiling secretly at a virtual something-or-other.

A text, an email or a song on their iPod...I have no idea...but their smile makes me smile.

I spend a fair bit of time on my own these days but am usually in touch with friends electronically. I realised that I spend a fair time with a secret smile on my face too. Sometimes out and about, other times at home quietly in the house.

So what made me smile today?

A series of tweets with the hashtag "#lesserfilms". My favourite being "Breakfast at Ratners" from DM.

Some of the lyrics from "God Shuffled His Feet" by the Crash Test Dummies - " ...that a parable or a very subtle joke..."

That my downstairs loo and utility doors now have beautifully fitted door catches and handles

Making a cake and it looking like it was supposed to

Seeing that loads of people had valiently tried to put their rubbish in the bins on Castle Green and when they couldn't, they stacked their trash neatly next to the bin.

Seeing a fig tree that has planted itself in a wall in the harbour in full leaf and with loads of fruit.

The smell of wallflowers.

Learning that TD may have got some temporary work to tide him over.

A text saying "...tweets and photons..."

Drinking beer with ex-colleagues.

The prospect of a sunny weekend away with a pal

Listening to Ian Dury singing "Reasons To Be Cheerful Pt3" which is full of the most mundane things imaginable and hearing that "Cheddar cheese and pickle " with "Vincent Motorsickle" are set as rhymes.

This is not an entreaty to look on the bright side, or some worthy "aren't we lucky" thing...what I'm saying is that should you see me in the street with headphones on, perhaps reading a text message and grinning goofily..I'm probably not ready to be sectioned...I'm just enjoying something.

Hope you do too...

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Re-awakened

2010-05-15T22:47:00.005+01:00

Time was (back in the early cretaceous) I was quite politically aware and interested.

Rampant socialist, having been influenced by my much-loved aunt.

I was also influenced by some of the General Studies lessons we had when I was in the sixth form at school.

A visit by the three major parties to talk to us had its effect...although I only remembered Dawn Primarolo - but that's at least in part because she was a Tony Benn protégé and in part because she was married to a teacher a the school.

My antipathy to proportional representation definitely dates from that time.

But once I settled down with Idiot Boy, my interest in politics took a back seat. I don't really know why. I still believed in the socialist ideal. I still voted (generally Labour but drifting towards Lib-Dem as New Labour drited rightwards) but I didn't actually take an interest.

This election has been different.

I enjoyed the leadership debates not for the rhetoric - none of them said much of interest - but for the interesting debate it sparked amongst my firends via Twitter and with other friends in person, by email, by text message...whatever.

For the first time I can remember, I actually looked forward to listening to the results coming in.

Obviously it wasn't going to be a good result for my political preferences...but I was wholly taken aback at the rage I felt when I picked up a text message from S during the interval at the theatre. "We have a new PM...".

I was so upset, that when I got to ma's on Wednesday I had to ask her to turn off the TV news and stop her when she started talking about immigration policy.

Now there's just a dull annoyance and an uncomfortable feeling that whilst the regime for the last few years hasn't been entirely to my taste, there may be tough times ahead for anyone who isn't white, middle-class (or more), straight, married or possibly even a man.

They're right "May you live in interesting times..." is a curse....

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Plans and Expectations

2010-05-05T13:53:00.002+01:00

A while ago now (more than a year, in fact) I blogged on the subject of life plans.

There's been a fair bit of soul-searching - no, wait, that sounds far too dramatic and angst-wridden...errrr...'musing' probably fits the bill a little better - on this subject of late.

Since I wrote that blog-post my life has changed yet again. This time entirely my doing.

These days, instead of bickering about whether The Fall are a work of genius or of a misreable and derranged mind, TD and I are far more likely to exchange our daily emails on the subject of our company's literature and website.

I've learned a little about XHTML and CSS and too little about Javascript.

Even compared with this time last year, I'm far less likely to be freaked out by having to meet someone, for business or pleasure, for the first time - I've done it so much that I can sometimes kid myself I'm even getting good at it (I'm not, of course, but my fakery is getting more convincing)

I can talk about s106 agreements, stormwater drainage attenuation and the implications for property owners willing to let an arts organization use their empty shop for a while. What's more, I can almost sound convincing about it...well, if you don't listen too hard and if you squint a bit.

I honestly think that the work TD and I are doing is important and engaging and is an idea coming of its time. Even if we get no work from it, the idea was visionary and something to be proud of. So we plug away with developers and authorities and with the media to try and make the urban environment more pleasant and inclusive.

I have about another 9 months before I seriously have to be making enough money to pay my bills. It would also be nice to splurge on something frivilous, too (a new lens for my Leica, or a skeletal cello, perhaps), but that's very low down in the list of Important Things.

So I might sound like a 'woman with a plan' again. Actually, no.

The last plan I had was wholly derailed by something over which I had no control. So I'm loathe to shape my life expectations to things that can be so easily fucked-over.

My nature is to be a shaper of things, not a visionary. This is why the TD/me combo works so well. Well, I think it does - you'd have to ask TD if he felt the same.

My nature is also to be an analyst and to pick apart who said what and who did what and what that might mean for whatever...thus you'd think I'd have a very clear idea of what I want from work, life and for everything else.

Again, no.

I'm relaxing into the idea that whilst sometimes having very clear ideas of what you want from life can give you something to strive for - possibly even to live for - that not having a pre-supposition can be kinda fun.

Everything from watching a pal chuckle like a kid because he's found that the points on an old railway line still work, from having a spontaneous coffee or beer with a mate you've not seen for a while and just catching up; to playing with the two-year old daughter of a friend for whom the future is the next 25 seconds can be pleasures in and of themselves.

I'm still uncomfortable when I don't have a reasonable idea of what's going on with stuff (and to be honest, that's usually people-stuff)...but instead of instantly trying to nail it down or bend it to my will, I'm much more likely to shrug and go with it for a bit.

Don't think, for a minute, that I'm now 100% satisfied with my life. There are things I love about my living on my own and things I hate. I enjoy being time rich...whilst being cash poorer has taken some adaptation. I relish the flexibility that comes with working for my own company - but there are challenges in not having "staff who do that" that need to be faced.

I think the most important lesson in the last few years has been that opening yourself to possibilities that are not too closely tied to convention is as scary as a gigantic house-spider but a hell of a way to have fun.

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Old Haunts

2010-04-15T13:39:00.003+01:00

Hasn't it ever been the eventful week?

A long conversation with M early in the week has us conspiring to find ways to make her feel better. We're trying a daily email in which she tells me three ways in which the day just finished doesn't completely suck. She thinks it'll be very hard and yet every day this week she has found the required three things. I love seeing her list because she's finding pleasure in relatively small things - and I think that's important.

Then lino was fitted in the downstairs hallway. This is a good thing, isn't it? Well, yes but Tuesday night still finds me in a metaphorical crumpled heap sobbing in a way I haven't for a couple of years. I mean, WTF?

Yesterday I travel to Leeds for the day so that my cousin and her daughter can see the university. It's Idiot Boy's Alma Mater and I think it'll be nice to reacquaint myself with the place. Oh how wrong can I be?

The city itself stirred up enough ghosts and then a visit to the students' union pretty much did for me, since it hasn't changed one iota in the 24 years since I went there on our "first date" to see George Melly.

A telephone message from my elderly ma saying she's got to have more medical treatment than expected was just about the seal on things for the suckiest day for a while...

Then an exchange of text messages with a pal has me weeping...this time with tears of laughter. The memory of it this morning made me wake with a daft grin on my face, having slept exceptionally well.

So with mood much improved I let the lino guy back in to finish the job - now the lino's all good. No reservations.

Seeing TD get stuck enthusiastically into our latest website rewrite and sound upbeat is uplifting in itself.

The icing on the cake is going to help some friends hang an exhibition and playing silly games with my friend's two-year old daughter, C.

It's funny how relatively small things serve to cheer so much in the face of something that yesterday seemed insurmountable.

So thank you TD for continuing to inpsire, thanks M for sharing with me the good things, thanks C for giggling and greeting me with such enthusiasm today...and thanks to S and your silly new phone.

x

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Are we nearly there yet?

2010-03-21T11:52:00.005Z

Three years on.

This song has been buzzing in my head for a few days now. One of my favourite singers. A little gloomy sounding, maybe, but with a sense of hope.

Sometimes it takes a while to realise that the journey's as important as the destination.

My 'just another day' three years ago sucked. Big time.

Today so far I've had a relaxed, pleasant time over coffee and breakfast with friends, a walk in the sunshine, emails and text messages from friends. Today is shaping up to be a good day.

Tomorrow should be fun and the rest of the week ought to be quite busy but hopeful for our new company.

Even if the unplanned happens I'll deal with it and move on. Apparently, I've gotten quite good at that now.

I couldn't have done it without the upbringing I had which was of the "I cried and cried because I had no shoes until I saw a man with no feet" school of philosophy.

I couldn't have done with without family and existing friends who provided support, encouragement and practical help.

I couldn't have done it without new friends who mix with old friends and my family seamlessly.

Looking over my shoulder I'm amazed at what's happened in three years - and yet all the time it was happening I was just trying to get on with stuff. The journey has been harrowing and fun in roughly equal measures and I had no choice in the starting point.

I have a choice in the destination but I don't know what it is yet...maybe I'll keep going for a bit and decide later. Maybe something will waylay me and slow the journey down - I dunno.

"Let me know when we get there - if we get there"

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Inappropriate Laughter

2010-03-08T16:13:00.002Z

So...we're having a conversation over a Lego limo, a couple of pints and some nice food.

There were some comments about the photographic possibilities of said limo...and let's just say some people would have found our conversation in somewhat poor taste.

I am at one with the friends I'm giggling with...even though part of me knows it's all a bit naughty, really.

On Saturday I meet up with a pal in Birmingham - that's his leg you can see in the picture - he falls into the category of people I've labelled as "Felt like an old friend from the moment we met"...I'm hoping for a nattier title but that pretty much encapsulates it.

There are quite a few people in this group and I simply love spending time with them. Whether it's drinking coffee or beer, eating a burger or gathered round my dining table over a big pot of "slop". Time flies, silences are not awkward laughs are many and, most crucially, the humour is dark but not cruel.

On Saturday I agree with my pal that life cannot be taken seriously. Other people's lives ought to be - so designing a roller-coaster cannot be done in haphazard fashion - but life in general...largely ludicrous.
I like conversations like this - it reassures me that my snap decision to put my friend in "The Category" was a sound one.

On Sunday I spend part of the day with another friend and her daughter walking in the sunshine, playing in the park whilst dad did other stuff back at my house. I've not known L for very long either - in fact I've met her precisely three times and yet, the few hours we spend together are relaxed, comfortable and fun (for me, at any rate...and I do hope she had fun too).

Later that day I meet up with M for a walk, some photos and a drink. We discuss tragic stories, political correctness, social exclusion on the grounds of colour or sexual orientation and all the time giggle like naughty school kids. We are comfortable in our giggling.

I had the most lovely weekend - with people of whom I'm immensely fond - none of whom I've known for more than a relatively short time.

So - what about the people who don't get labelled like this?

Hmmmm... there are a whole load of people who I'm happy to spend a bit of time with but whose company I don't necessarily desperately crave. This is quite a big group of nice, decent OK kinda people.

But I have to admit there are just a very few (that is, probably less than 10) people I've ever met who I've pretty much hated on sight...or shortly after. I'm not proud of this but, even when I've tried to overcome my apparent irrational dislike and made a bit more effort, my feelings have only been reinforced. I have no doubt that the feeling are largely mutual.

Once, someone asked me why I had made such a snap decision to dislike someone...to be honest, it's because it saves time.

Life is short. Life is ludicrous. I want to spend more of my time with the people who I can label FLAOFFTMWM and less that would be labelled considerably less charitably.

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90% Perspiration

2010-03-01T09:53:00.002Z

If you've read earlier postings of this blog then you'll know that a TD and I started a company a couple of months ago and it's kinda hard going.

We knew it would never be easy but we've been a little bit disasppointed at the lack of engagement in the idea by local authority bodies whose brief we will be contributing to.

Nevertheless we press on in the hope we can start to spark some interest around us.

The chance of maybe setting up a relatively small project cropped up last week and so I arranged a meeting with someone I've known for a while and to whom I pretty much knew the idea would appeal.

June runs the Pierian Centre in Portland Square. She bought the house, rennovated it and runs it as a centre for learning and support for all sorts of people and things. As well as her time and energy June has poured an awful lot of her own money into the project - a real case of putting her money where her mouth is.

The last conversation I had with June was very much along the lines of "times is 'ard" but with continuing financial support from her the centre carries on.

Today she smiles and tells me that it's not free and clear yet by a long way but things have improved a little.

It would be easy to dismiss June and the centre as bleeding heart liberal, tree huggy nonsense but it would be grossly unfair.

Yeah, there are classes and groups who meet at the centre who would have me running for the hills but the core work of the centre is about social inclusion, support and true equality.

We talk for ages about how things are going there, how far along the plans for Bristol to become a City of Sanctuary are, griping about things political and then she asks me to explain what ExtraVerte want to do.

Then I tell her that she was, in many ways, the catalyst for me leaving work. It was a conversation with her at the back end of 2009 that made me realise that job security may not be everything. She looks a little surprised and then we both agreed that it would be far better going to our graves regretting some of things we did than thinking "I wish I'd tried to...".

We also talked about political correctness and how we hate it and how we got annoyed at tokenism.

We moved on to talk about the project I wanted to work on and she gave it her wholehearted support and offered some practical help too.

Then she annouced that later in the week she would be having dinner with two people who would be extremely useful contacts for me and she'd chat to them about ExtraVerte and our aims. This is more than I could have hoped.

She asked if I would go and take some photographs at a forthcoming event - that is, in fact, how I met June - providing volunteer photographers for her events. I happily agree.

I leave the place after a couple of hours completely re-energised, with faith that all things could be possible.

This morning, I realise that June reminds me of my favourite aunt. She was a devout christian who spent her whole life working for the benefit of the community she lived in - from serving on the PCC, fostering difficult children, running Sunday School and Guides, doing the flowers in the church, and, and...

All the while, she did so with a twinkle in her eye and without a shred of piety or political correctness.

She had me volunteering to play my guitar and sing at the church - something I still do from time time - she suggested I look after the church choir until a permanent replacement could be found.

All the while she knew I was an atheist, living in sin with a lapsed catholic (and ex trainee priest) and she cared not a jot.

In a conversation I had with CJ a while ago I said that the "church" was a force for good, in general, because it inspired people to do good things. He countered that these things could happen without the chuch.

June and her centre are proof of that...although a lot of work she gets involved in also features a lot of input from local faith communities. In any case, the work they do is vital to the health of our City.

I say give three cheers, and if you can manage it, a bit of support to organizations that work quietly in the background doing real things for people who are less fortunate than the rest of us.

Surely an example to everyone...

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Oh, so that's what networking is about

2010-02-10T23:58:00.003Z

I guess I'm returning to the theme of celebration of "the internet" or rather communications technology.

Once again the other day I heard the accusation of people who surf the internet a lot are less well balanced than the rest of the population, suffering as they do from greater levels of depression.

It's entirely possible that the study to which the news was referring was perfectly well carried out and a proper causal analysis done but the bite sized media story was, once again that "the internet is a bad thing".

Actually looking at the story on an NHS website they are taking a more considered, complex view.

However, it does all bring a wry smile to my face. I can't say that the internet and associated technologies were exactly a lifesaver after "Idiot Boy" decided to take his leave of this world, but the people I met via various means on the internet since that time have very literally made my life worth living again.

The picture at the top here shows four of my very dear friends. Were it not for the internet, it is extremely unlikely I would have met any of them. What a shame that would be.

But this is a vague point that I've made before. However, this week has been the epitome of seamless integration of my "real" life with my life on line...and the gossamer thin veil that separates them.

So let me examine the three weekdays this week so far:

Monday: I wake late and check my email on my iPhone. I reply to a couple of the mails - they're mostly catching up kind of things but one is important. It's from my business partner, TD.
He's telling me that his internet connection has been on the blink but he's back on line now and if there is any rework to do on the handouts we're giving to potential clients at a meeting in the afternoon he's now awake, connected and good to go.

I met TD via the photo-sharing website Flickr. We commented on photographs, chatted by email and eventually met for lunch because at the time we were working at nearby offices.

We have been pals for a while and last year we decided to set up a business together. That business is mostly done electronically - from geographical information on maps, to technical research to information about planning regulations. We work in our respective homes mostly keeping in touch by email...although there is the occasional phone call.

We're sharing files via an internet filesharing and synching service. It makes collaboration relatively pain free without having to invest in an office to share and dedicated hardware for the job.

We complete our papers and I do a rare print job so we have something to present to our prospective clients.

We agree to meet in Bath and both have mobile phones to contact each other if there are problems.

I pick up further emails on my train journey and read up on some aspects of our work by using my mobile's RSS feed reader.

I also "tweet" and read people's tweets to me wishing us luck for our meeting.

On my journey home I read and send more emails.

My evening was a typical one of some surfing - work related and other things - some chatting to a friend on Facebook and reassuring her I'll meet her to go and fix her computer and set up a network in her house.

I read the comments friends and family have made on photographs of my niece's wedding at the weekend.

There is a lot of general "keeping in touch".

Tuesday: I wake up late again. Check my emails and find that TD has done the job he promised and the file is waiting in our shared space ready for me to email to yesterday's meeting attenders.

This spurs me to get up and start work.

All morning I'm keeping in touch with a number of people - by text, email, twitter, and various networking sites.

In the afternoon I go to Keynsham to meet up (separately) with two friends. I check the bus times on the web.

Both these friends are people I met in real life - one a school friend, the other a work friend.

On my walk to the bus station, I see a site we'd been interested in and see that it is being built upon. I take a picture and email it to TD. We can cross this off our lists.

I use the GPS and mapping facility on my phone to guide me to get off at the appropriate bus stop - I don't know that side of Keynsham very well.

Again, I read my RSS feed on the bus and find some useful articles that I email directly to TD to take a look at.

I have a pleasant, largely technology-free, couple of hours with my friend and we catch up. When it's time to leave she offers me a lift to my rendezvous with my other friend. She fears I can't find my way there unaided.

But I am aided - my phone guides me easily to my destination.

I then spend the afternoon an evening installing stuff, setting up networks etc, mostly so my "non geeky" friend, M, can do her social networking in her lounge of an evening.

When I fail to get her PC working I check the internet on my phone to find some technical fact out...then I work on plan B.

A couple of times, a friend had phoned but I was tied up so vowed to contact him later.

After a lift home I catch up with firends (all met via the internet) by email, text, twitter and facebook. Some of the catching up involves gently affectionate mockery...much as you get when you know a group of friends quite well.

I text the friend, MR, who'd been tryiung to get hold of me, apologising for my lack of availability.

Wednesday: I am woken by the arrival of a text message. It tells me the BBC has a news story that should be of interest to me, professionally. It's from DM - I'm planning to meet him for lunch, later.

Ten minutes later another text arrives - from my cousin - she's seen the same news report and thinks I'll be interested in it.

I email TD and ask him to investigate whilst I prepare an email approach to another potential client.

Then I get up and dressed, make my coffee and start work.

More emails, lots of research (on the internet), some sleuthing (by TD, not me).

Then I leave to meet DM. Before he arrives MR phones me to tell me that the evening before he'd attended a meeting that might well be of interest to me. He's right - it is. We vow to meet and have coffee and a catch up later in the week.

I lunch with DM and he gives me some information and we chat about stuff in his professional capacity which is related to mine - and we talk about an exhibition we're putting on.

All the time I'm out emails are arriving including one from another old friend who passes on a mail for something that I ought to investigate for work.

I'm amazed that so many leads have come through today. I'm also touched that my friends think to pass on this information to me - and persist so much to do so.

This evening I've been maintaining friendships by email, comments, Twitter, Flickr and text message. It's all really low effort stuff but enough to maintain the bonds and to know the stuff that's going on with people.

So - there's my week so far.

Dominated by the internet and associated technology.

I'll come back to an earlier point. I would never consider myself to be a "people person". I don't natually seek people out or engage in Networking activities and yet my life is full of people of people I have met by that very means. Not only that - I actively seek their company.

I'm even considering going to networking breakfasts to extend that.

The world at large can conclude nothing from one woman's steady change from inward looking, isolated geek to willing Social Networker and entrepreneur.

Idiot Boy would not recognise this woman - after all, with him around I really didn't want or need anyone else, for the most part.

Yes I made all this happen by "putting myself out there" but it is the internet as medium for communication that has been the means to make all this happen.

So I say "Yay" for people
I say "Yay" for the internet
and I say "Boo" to people who don't understand the medium properly who blame it for everything.

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The Usualness of Unusualness

2010-01-16T20:40:00.004Z

A long time ago (I was about 16 at the time, so practically aeons ago, in fact) I was the only one amongst my regular group of friends with both parents married to each other.

My ma said "I expect you're glad that you're the only one with a normal family".

Being something of a pedant, even then, I pointed out that it might be considered to be more "normal" to be a child of divorced parents, since the numbers kinda stacked up that way.

My ma took comfort from the idea of "normal"...I didn't.

It's been dawning on me that my circle of friends, as it has widened, has become less "normal" (by my ma's definition, not mine) and as my range of companions has become more diverse, I have felt more at ease with myself.

As I've met more people I've stopped worrying whether or not they'll think I'm a bit odd for being bookish, geeky, lacking the housework gene and refusing to wear grown up shoes. Don't get me wrong, some people I meet undoubtedly think I am odd...it just doesn't really bother me any more.

At the zoo the other day, one of the most well balanced, sanest, funniest people I've met tells me how they'd had a troubled teenage. "How come?" I ask... "Small village. Gay" V replies, in a matter of fact way.

I have to admit I'd almost forgotten that being gay was anything other than reasonably usual - yeah, I'm straight, but so many of my friends aren't that I barely notice it any more. It brings me up short.

Then I realise that's exactly what I like about the people I spend time with. Diversity.

In interests, in skills, in living circumstances, in sexuality, gender and gender identity, in age and size, in background in occupation...

How could I fail to be comfortable with this lovely bunch of folk who only ask me to turn up and be me?

How lucky am I?

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Pointing at the Glass Ceiling

2010-01-10T20:35:00.003Z

So - I'm now an unemployed person...or, officially, a self-employed person.

I've spent the last couple of weeks regrouping and with my business partner, TD, sorting out the legalities of our company.

We have a lot of hard work to do to get our potential clients to learn about us and to take us sufficiently seriously to actually employ us.

It's gratifying that everyone I've explained the idea to - from the bank, to friends, to a Businesslink advsor - thinks it a wonderful plan. But these are not the people we need to convince.

Fortunately, 50% of the company directors has a lot of experience in the industry. The other 50% is less well endowed with knowledge of architecture, landscaping and construction.

The other slight disadvantage I have is, let's not put too fine a point on it, that I'm a woman.

Back in the day (in the late 80's) I was full of rage with how badly women were treated in the workplace. Insurance wasn't the most sexist industry to be in but even so the number of women in senior management jobs was vanishingly small.

As I moved away from the operations side of things towards working with IT folk it became more noticeable that it was hard to be taken as seriously as my male colleagues.

It's a simple fact that there are fewer women working in IT disciplines than there are men. It was the same at school and in my studies for my degree. I can't opine, with any authority, as to whether it's nature or nurture.

What I can say is that in my relatively limited experience that women in IT management-type roles tend to play one of two parts. They either get down and dirty with the boys or they turn into bitch-queen and shriek their staff into submission.

I'm a down and dirty kinda gal. I mean, I've been a geek my entire life. Nevertheless, you are received with a mixture of suspicion and patronizing tones, quite often.

Towards the end of my career in insurance, I totally forgot that there had ever been a time when I wasn't respected by my male colleagues for my ability and knowledge. I could walk into a meeting and be taken seriously.

BW is a network engineer. He says that women have to be at least twice as good to be taken seriously in the industry. It makes him angry. BW is a rarety, I believe.

I can't imagine that the industry I'm moving into that I'll have an easier time of persuading the some of the men I'll have to work with that I've anything to contribute. I will have to work damned hard to get enough understanding and technical knowledge to bridge my credibility gap.

I fully expect to have to be at least twice as good as I would need to be if I didn't wear a bra...

So I could bleat on about it. I could rage against the injustice. Or I can just suck it up and prove that women can perform well in these sorts of jobs.

Maybe the more of us do that and the fewer of us whine on "Woman's Hour" about how hard life is, the quicker it'll be the norm to take us seriously.

Wish me luck, eh?

Oh, and wish TD luck - he's got the job of educating me sufficiently to not let him down.

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Readjustment

2009-12-17T22:58:00.006Z

It's all been rather a whirl since I finished work. A couple of work-related social engagements; Christmas shopping and a school reunion.

I've had no time to miss my old job. Actually, it just feels like I've not been in for a couple of days.

M asks if I feel OK about it. I'm non-committal.

The seminal moment for me was at the school reunion...or should I say, an informal gathering of people who went to the same school.

This is the second such meet-up in about as many months. This time there were a few more people, including someone I used to hang out with, and play music with. It's been 27 years since I've seen him.

We sit and chat. 27 years pretty much drop away as we catch up with what we do now and how it relates to how it was then.

Wandering off and talking to other people was pleasant and polite. I suck at smalltalk but we all got by.

Once I got home, still smiling from the pleasant evening, I realised that none of us had changed all that much.

The popular girls were still the popular girls. The outsiders were still on the edge a little but the differences were a lot less marked. I still found the guys a little easier to chat to than the girls.

What struck me is that the difference for me is that I no longer care that much whether or not I fit someone else's definition of "normal".

It was a timely realisation in that the one school friend I kept in touch with told me her teenage daughter seems to be having a bit of rough time of things - and it seems to be in part to do with the pressure to conform.

Today I go out with my business partner for a survey trip for work. We've been pals for a couple of years and part of the reason I find him easy to be with is his lack of coventionality. He's told me that he didn't really fit in at school either.

It was a pleasant afternoon. A coffee, a sandwich in the car...a drive, a look at some land, some photos, no hidden agendas, no subterfuge. Just a couple of mates doing some work.

My 16 year old self wouldn't believe I could do this. My 22 year old self was striving but failing to fit in so much that she wouldn't have even seen the opportunities.

This 46-year old says that you know who the real friends are. The ones who love you just for you are. Who, even when you're pissing them off, would never ditch you for someone else just because someone else "better" or "more interesting" came along.

Despite the uncertainty I have in my life at the moment, I've never had so many real friends. 27 years seems like a long time to learn what's important...and no time at all.

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The view from up here

2009-12-08T23:12:00.004Z

So...there we go.

27 years in the financial services industry ends with a low key presentation (at my request) and a quiet exit with a few hugs.

Some conniving by a couple of colleagues with an ex-colleague/friend with an entirely un-work-related friend (through the magic of Facebook) sees me with a gift token from my camera provider of choice.

Messages flow in, people pop to my desk to see me...promises to see me at the pub on Thursday. All saying I'll be missed.

I have a note from the department boss - low key, appreciative & understanding of my reasons for leaving.

So just remind me again why I'm doing this?

It no longer fits. It's difficult to get passionate about financial services. It's very important, it provides a vital safety net for people...hell, I've even been on the receiving end of the benefits and I can attest to the peace of mind it gives.

But passion?

Nah...

I didn't leave to do something else specific...I left because I needed to leave.

I guess all of this started with the loss of "Idiot Boy". Suddenly I needed to look around me again and take stock.

I suspect this is the natural culmination of having more time to look around at things and think; more new people to be inspired by and seeing the world again with new eyes.

It's not all good and it's not all bad. It just is.

The question remains..."any regrets?"...

The answer is that I don't really do regrets - and haven't for about 20years...regrets are largely pointless.

This might all go horribly wrong but a wiser man than I said "I'd much rather think that didn't work, having tried it than I wish I'd tried..."

So thank you all I've worked with and for over the last 27 years. Thank you everyone contributed to my leaving gift - and for the connivers SK, JAF, MD and TD for getting it just right. Thank you to "the boss" for respecting wishes with just enough pushing of boundaries.

Thank you for all the friends and family who didn't say "how stupid are you?" but instead said "Go for it".

Oh, and thank you my new business partner for grunting the words "it'll not happen unless you're involved" over coffee one day...

Here's to all the frustrations and difficulties ahead...

x

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The geek shall inherit the earth

2009-11-30T15:17:00.006Z

It won't come as a surprise to anyone reading this who knows me but at all...

I'm a geek.

Meeting people and making small talk is most definitely not my forte. I'm always anxious if I know about it in advance. In fact, I used to avoid it altogether if I could.

These days, I make more of an effort and most of the time the effort is well worth it (we'll leave aside a couple of cringe inducing incidents, shall we?)

So yesterday, the combined desire to get somewhere new to look at taking some stock photos and to meet up with someone with whom I've shared the odd email, tweet and Flickr comment saw me on the train (and replacement bus service) to Birmingham.

I have to say, Brum is a place I only travel through and would never have considered as a destination so when M lists some of the places I might consider looking at I have to re-evaluate.

I arrive at New Street and locate M...or rather, he locates me.

Naturally, first stop is coffee/tea and I fear my lack of ability to talk about the weather, Big Brother and whatever else is often a good common starting place will hamper flowing conversation. I needn't have worried...

M is a programmer. We were soon geeking away like old pals. His enthusiasm for his work is apparent and once again I'm envious of anyone who is so caught up in what they do to pay the bills.

Then we have a wander around the city. I am transfixed by the place. Far from dingy tired image I had of it, I got the impression of a lively and vibrant place.

We stroll down to the delightful "Gas Street Basin" a regenerated part of the inner city canal system. The place is clean and tidy without being sterile. The bridges and brickwork are original but not looking tired. James Brindley would have been pleased, I think.

It's possible that there was some canal geekery on my part at this point. I make no apology for it but I probably got nearly to seal-clapping territory and I forced M to listen to me enthuse about the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.

Fewer pictures were taken than I'd planned but I'm perfectly content to wander and chat and then go and drink more coffee.

Over coffee we chat about how neither of us have lifestyles that would be considered entirely conventional - I mean, we spend our time happily fiddling with bits of machinery, taking photographs and chatting to people on the internet. We also agree that we like it that way - golf and car obsession being largely over-rated, an all.

It was very, very relaxing to not have to spend time feeling the need to explain away some of the aspects of my life in the way I so often do.

I did squeeze a few minutes "new" work into the day but mostly it was about good company and strolling and looking at a new city. A city I'll undoubtedly return to because it's clearly got a lot of photographic potential.

A big win all round for me...

Thanks M

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The meeting of two minds

2009-11-07T19:38:00.002Z

At the moment the perpetual question from friends, family and colleagues is

"So, how are you feeling about leaving work?"

With about a month to go until my last day in the industry I've spent the last 27 years in...I would say I'm in two minds.

Mind one says "can't wait" and mind two says "Holy crap! What have you done?????"

Mind two had been winning.

Then a week or so ago, TD makes a suggestion to kick start the business proposition we'd been steadily working up for the last couple of months. What followed is a flurry of actvity to get from almost a standing start to a point where we almost have an organization to work within.

I've learned about domains, webhosting, HTML, limited companies vs LLPs, VAT, corporation tax, and, and...

It's all been a bit of a blur.

Voice one got a little louder in my interview at the local Business Links office. As I explain to the advisor what it is we're trying to do, I see that I've made myself understood...and he thinks it's a great idea.

I'm even surprised, when he asked me some pertinent "feasibility" type questions, that they are questions I've already asked and we have answers for.

Then today TD and DM come round to my place for a discussion about another potential project. Listening to two of my favourite people enthuse over design, and architecture and stuff like that is a treat in itself. Then they include me in the conversation like I have something to contribute beyond nailing them down for dates and agreeing who does what. Bliss.

It was hard work and, damn it all, this is the weekend. But if this is what work can be like - at least some of the time - then bring it on.

As I sit here fiddling some more with website stuff I barely understand, and trying to get more soon-to-be-work stuff going voice two ain't getting a look in.

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Small Acts of Kindness

2009-10-05T17:20:00.005+01:00

Picture by
Mike Stimpson

There has been a theme in my life over the past couple few days - I have been knocked out by people performing small (and large) acts of kindness in my direction.

Last Thursday GJ emails me in advance of the monthly Flickrmeet which was a little more far afield than usual - and in a place where some people (women?) might feel nervous to walk on their own on a darkening evening. He asks if I would like company for the journey.

After the meet, I was content to get a bus hom and was waiting at the stop when PG, another one of the Flickrfolk offered me a lift. Knowing that it was a fair bit out of his way I thanked and declined the offer whereupon he declared that he was perfectly capable of standing in the road and arguing to the point I'd miss the bus. So, I accept the offer.

Today is my birthday and although I keep forgetting and generally don't pay it much heed, other people have been more attentive. I had cards from the usual people who send me cards but also from CJ, who doesn't generally do the whole remembering of anniversaries thing. TD finds me some wholly inappropriate YouTube clips to send me despite the fact he's stressed and rushed off his feet.

My closest friends (they are also my neighbours) can't think what to get me for my birthday and so take me out to a comedy gig and for a meal...much the nicest way to mark the occasion.

Several emails, SMS messages, Tweets and messages on Facebook...including one from someone I've never met but we comment on each other's pictures - it's his picture at the top of the page and I haven't smiled so broadly for quite some time because it's a rendition of me taking a photograph that he liked in my photostream.

What's my point?

That in a world of people and businesses where human interraction is getting rarer, and where the Daily Mailists out there insist the World's going to hell in a handcart, and the Internet is a Bad Thing full of Bad People, it's heartening to know how people there are out there who still make the effort to be thoughtful and caring. Small kindesses which make a huge difference.

Thank you everyone...

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Look out below!

2009-09-27T23:06:00.003+01:00

A while back I blogged about the urge to quit my job.

Things have moved on a-pace in the last nine months.

I've got interested in new things. I've met yet more new people. The shift in working environment has continued.

So a little over a week ago I told my boss I'd be leaving.

Date yet to be decided but most likely by the end of the year.

Do I have a cunning plan?

No, not really.

The maths has been done and I can get by for about a year without earning any money. Obviously there won't be much in the budget for dream-holidays to far flung places, or to buy new cameras but I've thought, and re-thought through all the possible consequences of me leaving a steady job...and, more importantly, the likely consequences of me continuing where I am.

The latter consequences are far less pleasant to contemplate than the former.

If I were sensible I'd probably get something sorted before quitting - in fact someone has already suggested this as being a more appropriate way to approach the issue. However, I know me...and that means I'd never quite find the time to do it and that would leave me getting more and more disatisfied with the situation.

I've a few ideas, a willingness to do contracting, an iStock account that generates a very small amount of cash but could doubtless be tapped for some more, given a little effort on my part, and a naiscent plan with a friend that could be something we could both be proud of.

I'm not expecting to earn anything for a good few months - indeed January will most likely see me sorting out things that have been on my to do list for a number of months.

In a year's time I may have to go and get a conventional job again but even if I fail to pull the "alternative" off, it'll be good to know I tried.

Meanwhile if you know anyone who wants a meeting facilitating or a project managed...I do know someone who'll be becoming available soon.

Watch this space.

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Worse things happen at sea

2009-09-04T18:38:00.004+01:00

The work on the house continues.

The decorator left having completed two bedrooms, landing, stairs and hallway.

On Tuesday a nice man will arrive to fit curtains in the two rooms.

The builder and his various colleagues have been beavering away in the basement remodelling the utility area.

Only today, they hit a snag...where "snag" = gas pipe which was buried in a concrete floor they were digging up to do something with a soil pipe.

There was momentary fluster, alarm and quite a lot of smell.

The decorator was concerned...he looked a little bit scared.

I was summoned down to hear the tale of woe. The builder was ready with reasons why they hadn't known it was there, couldn't have been expected to know it was there. He looked fed up and a bit anxious.

I shrugged. I wasn't that worried. He was right, sticking pipes in a concrete floor seems like a stupid thing to do.

He said he'd called someone to effect a repair and said the gas would be off for a while.

I couldn't drum up any emotion whatsoever, but I'm not really sure why. I'm sure I should have at least felt a bit of annoyance, or something...but...nada.

I've had a rough week at work for one reason and another, and other stuff's going on in my head and maybe there's no room for anything else just now.

But I figure in the ups and downs of owning an old house that needs a bit of TLC shit happens. Maybe this is the shit they refer to.

I'm reminded that worse things happen at sea - and probably a broken gas/fuel line would be much worse at sea.

Just as well I'm on dry land, then, innit.

Oh there is just one thing...following some rejigging of electricity circuits I discover some of the downstairs lights aren't working. Slightly annoying, but as I amble around in the dark a fair bit, I daresay I'll cope until Tuesday when the builder's back.

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In praise of the humble shop

2009-09-02T19:05:00.004+01:00

My builder wasn't too comfortable buying some of the fittings and finishes I want for the utility/loo.

So it was agreed (ie I was left with no option) that I would buy them.

Armed with TD's helpfully detailed specs I set about making what I assumed would be a series of simple purchases of a sink, a loo, some taps and a radiator online.

I was thwarted at every stage. Did the loo come with a frame or a mounting bracket? What about the cistern...and the "button". Who knew? The websites certainly didn't help any.

The sink, I couldn't find on line at all.

I became disheartened and sought advice from TD.

He wasn't sure either but agreed to meet me in a "shop" that sells bathroom stuff, not far from he is working.

We rolled in more or less on spec and immediately were greeted by a friendly chap called Steve. We introduced ourselves and started explaining my needs for sanitaryware.

At every turn Steve was helpful, knowledgeable and willing to phone the manufacturers for further advice. At no point did he try the hard sell. He was happy enough to give me prices and for me to go and think about it.

He carefully laid out price options and at no point even tried to force me down the "expensive" route.

After the prices were written down I just said - 'yeah, go for it' or something similar.

I'd only gone in to source the sink and maybe the WC but I was so impressed I suggested we check out the taps. Sure enough, they had those too.

Then as the finale I muttered to TD that that just left the radiator for which I'd have to go to Bath. Steve immediately apologised for being forward and asked what radiator I wanted (me saying Bath was a pretty big cue for a particular brand of radiator). When I told him he said "Yes, we do those too". Job done.

OK it took an hour and I probably owe TD more than the takeout coffee we were left with getting before going back to our respective day jobs but I have to say the whole experience was a salutory lesson in customer care.

The guy clearly gave a damn. He knew his subject and seemed genuinely interested in finding me what I needed.

For the prices I knew, it wasn't the cheapest option...neither was it the most expensive. However, I see the slight premium as a small price to pay for the service...indeed the excellent service.

TD's not a man to praise lightly and even he was impressed.

In our defence, we did provide the guy with a little entertainment as we stretched the normal boundaries of professional practitioner and client as we bickered and TD criticised my skill with a tape measure (I still don't know what's wrong with cm as a unit of measurement). Steve wasn't to know we're pals who regularly bicker on a non-architectural basis.

What Steve also doesn't realise is that when I do the bathroom (some time next year, I'm hoping) that they'll probably be my first port-of-call rather than the refuge of a desperate woman.

A good day for proper retail.

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Anonymity breeds contempt

2009-08-30T21:06:00.003+01:00

I follow my friend Dru's blog. She has a wicked way with words and an understated sense of humour.

This post has had me thinking for a while now.

The controversy over the gender testing of Caster Semevna has bothered me a fair bit but I knew little about the biology involved until it prompted me to do some reading.

Far from being just a matter of some chromosones, a bit of anatomy and some brain function, it seems that not only is gender medically complicated but is also fairly plastic in terms of psychology.

In fact - it seems almost as though imposing just two genders on the human race is almost arbitrary. Yes, yes, I know you're saying that the two genders are really about procreation but life's more complicated than that these days.

Or is it?

I have several friends that my father who, lovely though he was in many ways, would have struggled with if discussed in the abstract. However, had my dad met my friends he would have liked them.

So how is this related to an athlete whose gender is being questioned?

Well, as TD said with a tone of exasperation and anger, laced with compassion.

"She's a person".

...and that's the most important thing of all.

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The difference between empathy and knowledge

2009-08-21T22:15:00.002+01:00

Bit of an mind opening experience this week.

A long conversation on the phone with a friend. We live a long way apart so we don't get to generally natter over a coffee or a pint very often.

Recently both of us have been feeling a bit blah. For me, the work to clear space and dispose of old stuff had taken its toll.

A stuffed koala, made by me a long, long time ago had me in a crumpled heap on Sunday afternoon. By Tuesday, it was just a soft toy with a couple of associated memories that made me smile.

WTF?

Whilst telling myself it was probably normal, I couldn't truly shake the feeling that I should have got beyond this point by now or that this was not a normal reaction.

I explain this to my friend.

"I know what you mean", he says.

He doesn't mean 'I can imagine how that feels, and isn't it awful'. He means he felt like that last week, yesterday or possibly 2 hours ago.

We chat about stuff for a while longer.

I feel the tension slipping out of my shoulders and I look at the koala and smile. Now I know I can put it in the spare room and not think I'm mawkish or stupid.

Don't get me wrong - I've lots of friends who will happily support me through the bad times. They give me a hug, they give me beer or coffee and they empathise with me. They have helped me in my lurching from highs to lows to highs again.

But until the conversation on Wednesday, it hadn't struck me what a huge difference knowledge and shared experience makes.

Furthermore, it finally explains to me why my best chemistry teacher wasn't the one who was the most brilliant. When I didn't understand the concept of the mole he patiently and sweetly explained and re-explained it to me without once getting impatient...and yet I always knew that deep down he had no idea why I found it so difficult.

The teacher who had clearly struggled with his own development in the field proved to be a much more effective teacher because he knew what it was like to struggle with a concept and in passing that side of his knowledge on, allowed me to relax and learn without feeling I was in some way uniquely stupid.

It's a paradox - you wouldn't wish the difficulties you're suffering upon anyone else and yet their suffering eases yours and you hope that yours helps them.

Nothing I can do about it other than be grateful for a friend who understands. Thanks.

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Discovery

2009-08-12T21:53:00.004+01:00

My house is full of junk.

The decoration is well underway and that means that rooms have to be emptied.

This is my hall before the addition of a box of technical books, a box of electronic components, and a large laserprinter.

CJ is a veteran of clearance. He tells me short, sharp bursts of sorting things out and getting rid of things is the way to go.

When I mention getting a skip to junk stuff in to make my life easier TD clucks in a disapproving fashion and tells me to 'freecycle'. "You'll be amazed what junk people will take off your hands", quoth he.

I didn't believe him that anyone would want the rubbish that I was looking to dispose of, and yet it would take an age to get out in the fortnightly rubbish collection.

So - I dipped a toe. Put a Palm Pilot IIIc and a Laserprinter on the local freeserve group. My hand was practically bitten off.

In addition to stranger freecycling, I've put the word around a few friends who have asked their friends.

To date I have managed to offload:

A printer
An obsolete hand held computing device
A keyboard stand
2 CD racks
2 old, tatty cartwheel back chairs
Loads of tools
Electronic components
Reels of various cables.
Countless books

The best bit about this is there really is no downside.

The people taking the stuff off my hands are as enthusiastic about receiving it as I am at getting rid of it.

Buoyed by my success so far I'm going to continue simplifying the contents of the house.

Who would have thought that a 30cm x 30cm space on the carpet in the music room could be so satisfying?

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Simplicity itself

2009-08-02T18:24:00.002+01:00

Once again I was amazed at how simple some pleasures are.

Twice in as many days, I've had a guest for a meal.

My ma is a firm believer in letting guests relax whilst she buzzes around the kitchen getting stressed.

Often I follow suit, but on Friday, when the meal preparation was a bit of a rush job, I accepted TD's "Shall I chop the avocado" offer, with gratititude.

We spent the next ten minutes or so nattering happily enough over shared food preparation. I relaxed, TD seemed relaxed...and there was food to eat at the end of it.

Then yesterday DrP - who stayed with me for a few weeks earlier in the year so knows his way around my kitchen pretty much as well as I do - in almost unspoken agreement looked after the quesadillas whilst I made a cuppa.

I realised that this is the thing I probably miss most about living alone. Comfortable co-existence whilst doing mundane, shared tasks.

A highly underrated pleasure.

Love at first sight

2009-07-29T22:30:00.002+01:00

I had some processing time yesterday so I went through a few of the pictures I took on my first proper trip out with my M8.

Inside a dark cathedral with a 50mm is probably not the natural habitat for the wee beastie.

We had fun my M8 and me but I didn't really expect much more than an opportunity to learn how to focus and maybe set the exposure more quickly.

Then I turned over this photograph.

It's not perfect, not technically, not aesthetically but I loved it the second I took it...and looking at the raw file I loved it all over again.

Now I'm aching to get out there with the camera again. That's a good thing.

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You're my M8 you are...

2009-07-27T21:25:00.002+01:00

Short post today.

A pleasant feeling remembered. That of wandering alone with a camera.

I had an errand to run. I wanted to get out of the house for a bit. I wanted to make the most of the sunshine. I needed to properly check the upgrade of my Leica's firmware.

I haven't gone for a proper photographic wander just around my hometown for ages.

It's a very different experience than when I go somewhere specific with a friend, or if I do an event. I'd almost forgotten how much it blocks out the stresses and other noises in my head.

Worth remembering.

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Subborn Cow Syndrome

2009-07-26T19:46:00.008+01:00

Decorator is due tomorrow. My bedroom had to be cleared for him to do his work.

The bed, thankfully, is staying where it is but the other piece of substantial furniture - a chest of drawers made from reclaimed wood - has to move into the spare room.

I was told, the other day, that I'm a "stubborn cow" because I have a tendency to do things without asking for help.

It's not that I don't know there are loads of people who would help me, if only I were to ask. Thing is, for some reason I don't ask.

So, today, faced with a chest of drawers that is about 4' wide & 4'6 tall (and I'm 5'3") do I ask for help? What do you think?

This is the beast in question. Shown with the drawers already removed and some of the contents consigned to the recycling.

It had to be moved to here

The chest is much lighter when it has its drawers removed. Even so, it's awkward.

So, faced with this what does a single gal do?

She employs a dolly. Not Tiny Tears, not Barbie nor even Action Man but...

Something "Idiot Boy" bought a long time ago and I couldn't see the point.

Employed like this

It makes the task of moving something somewhat easier.

There's the coefficient of friction between the surface of the dolly and the surface of the item versus the inertia of the wheels on the wooden floor (and more so on the carpeted surfaces) which can add a frisson of comedy but, on the whole, the whole job becomes a veritable piece of cake.

So, a few moments of manoevring and a tiny bit of colouful language later, we have the furniture in its new home.

For those of you (mostly my lovely male friends) rolling your eyes heavenwards and thinking "why on earth didn't you ask?" I know you're happy to help. I know I could ask. But sometimes there are things this girl has to do by herself...just to know she's coping.

Have no fear. Now I know I can do it, I've no real need to move it back without help. What are you doing in about 10 days' time?

Oh, and a belated comment to Idiot Boy...OK, you were right, buying that dolly was a bloody good idea....

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Bump!

2009-07-24T23:21:00.002+01:00

I've come down to earth.

A couple of days' playing with CJ's M8 a few weeks back, and the technical quality of the images I came home from Scotland with lured me into changing the item on the top of my photographic wishlist.

Then in a fit of "you're a long time dead" I employed the JFDI project methodology and bought a Leica M8 of my very own.

The lovely people at Ffordes supplied me with camera at a reasonable (all things being relative) price and provided excellent customer service. I would heartily recommend them as they were heartily recommended to me.

I've found the reaction of people to the camera slightly odd.

CJ smiles - well, it sounds like he smiles when he's chatting to me on the end of the phone, or in email. He was uneasy about my swift conversion (Saul, Damascus...you get the idea) from secondhand film Leica to brand new digi. He's a little concerned I'll hate it and lose money on the deal.

One professional photographer stopped mid-way through berating me for giving photographic services for free to a community interest company and said "is that a digital Leica?"

We then had a short but stilted exchanged about the build quality of digital cameras vs film cameras but I couldn't shake the feeling that he didn't think I was worthy of the camera in some way.

A couple of other people who know of the reputation of Leicas have sighed in a wistful fashion. Tonight, one friend got very excited when I told her I had it with me...she also found it intoxicating to use.

There have been hints of "stupid amount of money to spend on a camera" and "we are not worthy" in roughly equal measures.

I particularly like the studied indifference of one pal who merely asks if I used my "new toy" for a particular excursion.

There's a brand kudos around Leica that I'm not sure I like, to be honest. It's interesting to note that the M8.2 has a snapshot mode. The implication is that some people who want to own the camera will value such a feature.

I have to say, if you're not an enthusiastic photographer...and actually quite a serious one...this is a daft camera to choose.

There is no autofocus.
The auto white balance settings are rubbish - far, far worse than my Nikon D300 (apparently an outstanding firmware fix I ought to apply improves things with WB...but it still sucks)
There is no autofocus (I'll just say it again for effect).
The metering is just about adequate but it won't win any awards.
The sensor is quite an old design (I'm told it's Kodak) and has a "mere" 10.3MP
High ISO performance is OK but hardly cutting edge.

Using a rangefinder is a distinctly strange experience if you're used to an SLR.
It's perfectly possible to shoot shedloads of pictures blissfully unaware that you've got the lens cap on (hint: Have image review set on)
It's perfectly possible to shoot loads of pictures completely out of focus because you forgot or just got it really badly wrong (beware shooting anything with repeating patterns).

Ergonomically, the camera isn't cutting edge. It largely looks like every M-series Leica. Workmanlike design with few comforts.

So why on earth would anyone who isn't interested in brand showing spend so much money on a camera that does so little and punishes so much?

For me, one look at a RAW file off the camera is enough to do it.

Whether it's the lens, or the sensor, or the rendering of the file, or a bit of all these things, the files that come out of the camera are luscious.

By way of example, I've pushed three images up to iStock to see if they get accepted. I needed to do no noise reduction on them and yet all three images got accepted.

The framing of a shot where you can see not only the picture you're going to take (ish) but also a reasonable margin around it is very different to the induced tunnel vision of an SLR. Just now I'm not sure if it's a good, bad or indifferent thing but it's a marked change that requires concentration as I shoot.

I do know that I've NOT taken a number of pictures with the M8. That is to say, I've seen something I think will make a good photograph, put the camera to my eye and then decided against it.

There's also something less intrusive about the more slender design of the camera - this reduces the barrier between the photographer and human subject.

So is it "better" than the Nikon?

No. Not universally.

My gut feeling is that I might take some of my very best pictures with the M8 but also some of my very worst.

The Nikon is a more biddable beast. If you're not in the mood to work really hard, the D300 will probably deliver a larger percentage of perfectly nice pictures. But, I'm guessing, fewer that make me go "wow".

Am I happy with my camera?

Abso-bloody-lutely, I am. From the feel in my hands, to the fantastic rendering of the out of focus areas of a picture, I love it.

Is it the right camera for you?

How would I know that? I honestly didn't think it was the right one for me when I was standing in the road in the Highlands of Scotland failing to get the damned picture in focus, and (apparently) hunching awkwardly.

Would I like the camera less if it were more mass produced? I wouldn't give a damn as long as the build quality is as good as it is with mine. More of them around, cheaper? Bring it on.

Will it make me a better photographer? No. What will make me a better photographer is using a camera (almost any camera) more and assessing the results. Using a rangefinder may improve my ability to see better pictures - but only if I get out there and use it.

So, I'd better get out and use it, hadn't I?

Rescuing from neglect

2009-07-17T11:17:00.002+01:00

Another busy few days.

Still reeling from clearing the room for the builders (who didn't start this week...but should do next week) I seem to have arranged an awful lot of things to happen this week.

Locksmiths, dishwasher engineers, paint delivery...and other stuff too

Today the last of the planned arrivals arrived.

The paint. A palletload of paint.

Here you see it lined up in my hallway.

Exhausted though I am from the week's excitement, I feel an amount of satisfaction that these things have finally been done and that, for the most part, I dealt with them myself.

The problem with letting things go like I have is that when you finally open your eyes and realise how much it bothers you, there's just so much to do.

The benefit of getting people who know what they're doing, in whom you have confidence is that all the details become their problems and you can watch the house being rescued from a safe distance.

Builder starts work in the basement next week, the decorator starts at the top of the house the following week.

Bring it on

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It's just a phase...

2009-07-13T19:50:00.004+01:00

Busy, busy, busy, busy week.

Everything in my life has been almost overwhelmingly busy.

Building work; every day home things; work; photography; it's been all go.

A lot of all this is "the cost of doing business". The price of the pleasant position I'm in having a reasonable sized house is that it requires ongoing maintenance. Whether that's the garden or the appliances or the front door deadlock wearing out to the point of failing. I've looked at a lot of these jobs and never quite got around to getting them fixed.

So this weekend I made a list and worked my way through it. The hardest of these jobs in every sense was clearing out a room full of "stuff" ready for building work to start.

It took a total of about four hours, and pretty much every bit of mental stamina I had. In some ways it's disposing of elements of the past. This makes me feel like I'm not so much disposing of things but of a person.

In its way, this is also the cost of doing buisness. It's another step in properly taking over the house. It's hard but simply continuing to avoid the issue doesn't really help in the long term.

In the words of someone who understands better than most, it's not about obliterating the past but in recognising that the past and the future are different places.

When I finally finish I report progress to the friend who is overseeing this building project. Today he comes round and inspects my work. He approves.

Our usual chat and coffee on the back step's a little less riotous than usual. I'm pretty subdued. He's sorry he can't say anything to help - like he says, if there was an easy thing to offer, it would have been offered already.

Then he gently teases me for buying a new camera as a consolation.

I wonder how much these fine friends realise that no matter how insignificant it might seem, just showing you give a damn helps. It helps a lot.

Thanks guys.

As for the consolation...it's on its way. It won't make it better quicker...but it'll distract me whilst the passage of time knocks the rough edges off the feelings.

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I can see the slippery slope from here...

2009-07-09T20:52:00.003+01:00

This all started a few months ago. Innocently enough.

A discussion between two photographers.

Of course I'd heard of rangefinder cameras but I didn't have a clear idea of why they were different to SLR cameras like mine.

Then there was the film vs digi debate. I've mentioned this before.

I wanted to give film (specifically B&W film) a go but was concerned at changing technology at the same time as medium. So, I got my film fix by using a borrowed Nikon SLR camera.

I liked. I liked very much.

I wouldn't change my primary medium from digital. It's not just the convenience, but the cost too. I act as a voluntary photographer quite a bit and the speed of turnaround that requires, together with the cost of film and processing means digital is simply the pragmatic choice.

So, film good.

I explained to the film-shooting friend that the reason I didn't really need a really expensive new lens for my dSLR was that what my photography lacked more than technical lens quality was good, strong composition.

"Ah..." says the wise one. "You'll be needing to try a rangefinder."

He pointed me in the direction of The Online Photographer and, in a partcular article, the idea of Leica as Teacher.

He tried to explain to me what it feels like (looks like?) to look through a rangefinder (such as a Leica M series) viewfinder.

Coincidentally, one of the Bath Group Flickr folk brought his film Leica with him to the June meet. He kindly allowed me to take a peep. Sigh.

So, in a trip to visit the rangefinder user in the highlands I am offered a try of a digital rangefinder camera with a view to maybe buying a second hand one for film if I get on OK with it.

The good news is, I loved using the camera.
The bad news is, I loved using the camera.

The nature of the viewfinder is such that you can see around the frame of the picture you're taking. This allows you to see the potential around the frame you're looking at.

Also, because you're not looking through the lens (and SLR lenses are wide open until you press the shutter or DoF preview) you get a more-stuff-in-focus view which should help you notice glaring intrusions into your shot ('should' being the operative word in my case).

It's not a style of camera that lends itself to macro shots but for "street" photography, landscape, and event type photography, it has distinct advantages.

Having looked at the picture quality from this camera I've found myself considering the digital rangefinder possiblities.

Actually, there aren't all that many possibilities. The market is not awash with digital RF cameras like it is with SLRs.

It needs some more thought. A bit of risk assessment. Some budgeting considerations.

But I can definitely see the top of the slippery slope...look...it's just over there.

Home Sweet, Scruffy, Home

2009-06-23T21:53:00.002+01:00

Heck!

That's it, then.

M helped me choose lovely fabric for the curtains in both bedrooms. She went on to help me choose paint colours too.

A post lunch stop into Exclusive Tiles on the way home tipped up a suitable number of tumbled travertine tiles at a bargain rate. Archifriend approves of the purchase.

I've negotiated a fixed price contract for the decorating of the upper part of the house and I have a date for it to start.

I've been measured for carpet and lino and colours have been chosen.

Curtain measurement will be done on Friday

This thing's really happening, then...

Would appear so

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A Reason for Staying in Bed until 9am

2009-06-22T10:24:00.005+01:00

Non working day today and I've been trying, in vain, to get up earlier.

This morning I had vowed to get up at 8.30. I failed, and heard the Today programme to the bitter end.

I'm glad I did because I learned that my favourite bit of architecture/engineering may become a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Neither words nor pictures can do justice to this feat of engineering. A sturdy cast-iron trough with lead, sugar and Welsh flannel joints sits atop a series of elegant archways made of stone and ox-blood mortar.

If you don't like heights then travelling over it by boat or on foot will be a scary experience. On one side there's a railed towpath but on the other side, just a 3" (ish) turn of cast iron.

Then there's a a drop to the valley floor over 100' beneath.

I loved it. Other travelling companions were less enthusiastic, I seem to remember.

Straying back to an earlier thread in this blog, it's probably not very feminine to get quite so excited about an aqueduct, nor about the engineer that designed and built it (Thos Telford) but if I tell you I squealed like a girl when I heard the news...would that make it any better?

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What is happiness?

2009-06-19T11:52:00.002+01:00

M had a bit of a moment, yesterday. Everything she's going through at the momemt clearly piled on top of her and for a moment it became unbearable.

We played hooky for a bit and went and had a cup of tea.

We chatted about emotional things, about practical things, about personal things and about how things might turn out for her, for me, for her kids, for others...

Then she asked a question that stopped me dead in my tracks.

"but are you able to feel happy, these days?".

She probably wanted reassurance that, at some point, she would again be happy, and maybe my past and present would give her some reassurance about her future. That and fulfilling her role for the last couple of years as great friend and monitor of my mental health.

I'm not a great one for platitudes and I think M knows that...so I assume she was after some measure of honesty.

Not wholly content, I concede. My life ran away and changed and I have probably been trying to track it down again. At some point, I'll sort myself out a replacement life, until then I'm kinda stumbling around trying things for size...

But happy in moments. Coffee and a natter on my back step; tea and sympathy in Starbucks; photography in a park with a friend; photography at an event on my own; dinner and an episode of the Sopranos with the neighbours; trips to Scotland in planning; having new reading glasses and the prospect I might be able to start reading in bed again; being greeted by an enthusiastic border collie; being taught something I don't already know; the list is virtually endless.

At these times the old sadness takes a back seat, stops being in control. Then I realise that these moments are not once a week moments, but several times each day.

How could I not be happy with this much to be happy about.

So, M, I know you read this from time to time. The actual answer to the question you asked me is "Yes" but just not 100% of the time. Then again, I never was happy 100% of the time.

...you will be happy again.

x

Slippery Slope

2009-06-18T23:32:00.006+01:00

A little while back I decided to try and play with some black and white film.

It was following a conversation that started innocently enough with a question "have you ever used a rangefinder?".

We went on to discuss the nature of film vs digi.

The question asker gently encouraged me when I suggested that I might try film in a familiar format (SLR) before I looked at other types of camera.

I have other filmy friends and they continued the encouragement. Told me I'd love it.

It would appear they're not 100% wrong.

There's something about the range of tones in B&W film that's intoxicating.

Even though this picture has been scanned which will probably have reduced some of the subtleties, the light in the sky would have been wholly blown out to whiteness by my D300 - even though the D300 has a better dynamic range than most DSLRs.

There are disadvantages, however: cost, time, lack of immediate feedback. These will dictate against it being my exclusive type of photography...but I can see me using it more, and more.

So...the next question is, do I try and source a rangefinder?

.

The more different, the more the same?

2009-06-15T18:16:00.003+01:00

"I don't know what your father and I had in common", Ma muses during my visit to her last week.

She then proceeds to list all the things that she and my father didn't agree on, or didn't have in common. She was right, it was a fair old list.

Nevertheless their marriage lasted for well over 50 years and ran the full "till death us do part" course, as it had set out to do.

Despite all differences, ours was a happy family and my sister, brother and I were brought up in an atmosphere of mostly unspoken love and utmost security.

My own relationship of 20 some years was founded on a mutual love of geekery - but outside of that, were I to examine it, there wasn't all that much that we shared - at least not obviously.

Musical taste was very different - when we got together the only two LPs we had in common were a very obscure album of Bach music transcribed for a Belgian guitarist, and Bronski Beat "Age of consent". He liked Glass, Anderson, Gabriel, Byrne. I liked Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Bach, more Bach.

Literature - he: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Arthur C Clarke. Me: Christopher Brookmyre, Michael Crichton, Jasper Fforde.

He: Indian. Me: Chinese.

Me: Blue. Him: Green.

The more I think about it, the more difference I can find. And yet...and yet...we meshed.

I've been musing about the differences between my close friends and I - those people I spend most time with, those I email and Twitter to. About all the things that separate us: age, background, profession, musical taste, style of photography, political leanings, film preferences, play preferences, whether hills are good or evil, well you get the gist.

Then I spent a chunk of my weekend taking pictures at some events for Refugee Week. This put difference in some context, and witnessing an unfortunate incident on the bus did so still more.

I realised that I like being introduced to new things, I love being shown the world through someone else's eyes - I like that I don't always agree with my friends. It gives us something to debate.

OK, I miss my friends getting my slightly obscure references to science fiction films ('ah, he wears it desert-style') and programmes but it's really a small thing.

I try and explain to one friend how I've been feeling. He wisely points out that core values are the important thing.

Today another friend, who is going through a fair bit of soul searching herself says the self same thing.

My life is better for being introduced to new things. It always was (25 years ago I had no idea how to solder things) and I should remember that.

Difference is far less important in friendships that the things that bind us.

.

I love it when a plan comes together

2009-06-07T12:20:00.007+01:00

I'm having some building work done.

I think I'm finally at peace with my decision, having realised just how stressed I've been about it.

A fair bit of my blog has been devoted to how I'm coping as a single woman again after the death of my long-term partner a couple of years ago.

Aside from all the obvious things there have been a raft of things that maybe most people (me included) wouldn't have expected to cause so much heartache.

The building work has been one of those things.

It started with a glass roof that has needed replacement since we moved in the house about 11 years ago.

It was a bit of a bone of contention, truth be told, in that I wanted to fix it when we had the kitchen done but the more cautious man-of-the-house wasn't keen on the additional change that it would have introduced.

Some heavy rain over the winter reminded me again that the roof needed to be sorted.

Problem was, I had no idea how one went about getting such odd structures replaced. It's not part of the original fabric of the house and was probably done in the 1970's...you can imagine how badly it fits in with a nicely proportioned, Bath stone-fronted, mid victorian house.

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your perspective, an architectural tech friend became available to help me out in working out how the roof could be replaced.

Then scope creep set in. The project killer.

The problem is the whole of the basement has "issues" and it seemed stupid to spend money on one bit and not sort out the other problems too.

The upshot is the remodelling of a utility room; tanking; moving a drain; making a decent downstairs loo and making a special place in the coal cellar (rechristened 'Monsters' in view of the number of creepy crawlies of which I was hitherto unaware) wherein I can roast coffee. Then there's the rest of the house almost all of which is sorely in need of redecoration.

OK - so maybe with the extent of this work perhaps it's not surprising I'm a little stressed.

But there's been more to it than that, I just hadn't recognised it until this week.

We've gone from the abstract phase of the project where I think "wouldn't it be nice to" through the agreeing more or less what's needed. Onto the getting of quotes and now it's down to choosing fittings. Toilet, flooring, lights, radiators...

So with a blank canvas, the cash to get the job done and no one with whom to negotiate on getting exactly what I want, why aren't I feeling like a kid in a sweetshop?

Precisely because part of the joy of projects like this are their shared nature.

My architectural/design/ideas friend has a fair bit of skin in the project simply because that's his nature - he takes a professional and personal pride in things being right and he's going far beyond the usual parameters of this sort of job. Nevertheless, as he says, he won't have to live with the result so he's expecting me to make decisions - he's my friend and he wants me to be happy with the result.

I have to live with the result.

And that's it, really.

This is my house. Mine.

It seemed to take Idiot Boy's best friend removing some promised power tools to make me realise it.

So...meeting with the builder and archifriend planned for Tuesday with the promise that I'll have a rough date for the work to start.

Promised drawings of cloakrooms with potential candidates for radiators tomorrow.

A quote for the decorating expected in the next week.

A trip out with my soft-furnishings adviser (M, another friend) planned later this month.

I'm fairly certain this won't be the last time I have a wobble...but it's another reminder that wobbles come, we learn from them and we move on.

Bring on the Farrow and Ball paint cards...

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The times they are a-changing

2009-05-25T11:15:00.003+01:00

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

2009-05-09T11:35:00.003+01:00

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

2009-05-01T12:30:00.004+01:00

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....?

.

Drinks From Another Angle

2009-04-25T09:27:00.004+01:00

Mocha-drinking pal sits in the sunshine drinking his sweetened white coffee whilst I sup my mug of strong black stuff.

We chatter and bicker. All's well with the world.

At one point I accuse him of being "a big girl". He looked me square in the eye and says that men can't win.

I raise a suspicious eyebrow. Really? You don't think the odds are stacked against women?

"Look," he says "if we do the traditionally strong manly thing you all accuse us of being macho, sexist, mysogenists..."

I'm listening...I think I know where this is going

"...if we show the more gentle side then you called us big girls" We can't win.

I feel slightly ashamed.

He's right (and frankly that's quite annoying) - I have just done to him what I've been objecting to. I've said that his behaviour is not consistent with his gender and I've implied that's a bad thing.

Of course I don't care what coffee or anything else he drinks. It doesn't wholly define him, any more than his love of physical theatre and dance does. Nor his ability to encapsulate the complex technical matter of building plans into a bunch of drawings.

Whilst I'd like to point out that the "big girl" accusation was made in the context of an affectionate mutual mickey-taking conversation...it has made me think again.

I believe it is a man's world for the most part but that's still no excuse...

Sorry, matey

.

This Girl's Life

2009-04-20T16:30:00.002+01:00

"You're not, like, a real woman, are you?", says DrC once.

When I raised a quizzical eyebrow he hurredly sought to undo the insult he felt he'd just levelled at me.

"No...no...what I mean is, you're not very feminine..."

He looked at my face which pretty much asked whether I should take his shovel away.

With one final attempt to get over his meaning without being rude to his friend he grasps at "You're not very girlie"

He thus reaches the appropriate compromise and he finally stops digging.

The reason that "idiot boy" and I got together, ultimately, was that at the age of 21 (more years ago than I choose to admit) I had my own computer and printer.

He was impressed by any girl that geeky that she had her own computer kit.

That was the opener and despite different taste in many things, and some very different interests, it turned out we were a good fit.

He liked that I had no time for Jimmy Choos (in fact he would have had little better idea than me what they are) and that instead of wanting a moderately expensive piece of jewellery for my birthday, I craved an extremely expensive cello.

Weirdly, though, in this house we pretty much fit the stereotypical male/female split of duties:

Me: Washing, ironing (rarely), cooking, food shopping, clothes shopping, cleaning the toilets, choosing plants for the garden, booking holidays and packing, understanding mortgages and pensions.

Him: Plumbing, electrics, lawn mowing, bins, heavy work, digging, paying bills, and managing the bank account...oh, and buying and maintaining the computers.

Yep, that's right, despite our initial "attraction" being partly related to my skill with a computer, I lapsed into "user" mode and let him fix stuff for the most part.

So, last Friday, when at 8pm I was cleaning a washbasin and the hot-tap washer failed in a catastrophic way...I was completely bereft of ideas.

What I wanted to do was call for help...that or lie down and have a good cry.

What I actually did was curse Idiot Boy for not being here; fetch several tools that I was preparing to give away on the grounds I'd never use them and consult some reading matter on the subject of taps.

I Tweeted and emailed and got some encouragement and advice.

I priced up an emergency plumber (£200), then dismantled the tap which had a number of seized parts, and then the next day went and bought a suitable washer and effected the repair with, in the end, a minumum of hassle.

Having done it, I have mixed feelings.

Initially I felt quite proud and I got a couple of "well done you" messages from male friends.

Idiot Boy would have merely suggested that, obviously, I was capable of doing it and he would have expected as much. (He would also have been quietly pleased that his girl was no girlie)

But there is a nagging feeling that sometimes perhaps I should, or would like to, be more "girlie" so that I better fit the mould in a society where girls don't often drink pints, know more about Linux than they do about Gucci or fix their own tap washers.

Thing is, I never thought of myself as a conformist...

.

The Myth of the Ten-year Plan

2009-04-19T20:47:00.003+01:00

"Where was that in your ten-year plan?", asks CJ.

He's referring to a slightly surreal evening I'd had with a couple of friends. That, and the fact that we exchange emails pretty much daily but have never met.

This weekend TW comes to stay with me. We have worked together in the past but her current job with our mutual employer means I haven't seen her for months. It was lovely to catch up and give voice to all our frustrations with work.

She's recently finished her MBA and now she's starting to wonder "what's next".

Also joining us for the afternoon is M. She's having a rough time at the moment and any plans she might have had are up in the air. Her mind is racing ahead at a time when she can only really deal with the immediate future.

Unaware of these conversation TD circulates an ironic and funny, yet sobering cartoon on a similar theme. He's feeling it too.

And today, AB, another friend says on Twitter that he's thinking about life plans.

We vary in age, background, occupation, skills, and marital status.

Yet we're all asking more-or-less the same thing.

I consider, yet again, my plans...immediate, medium and long-term.

A few "appointments" over the next few days...all by choice.
A holiday split between Scotland and Cornwall next month.
An unfolding project at work which may or may not continue. Interesting enough, but it's only work and, therefore, unlikely to be all consuming.

Long term?

Nothing.

No idea.

No dreams.

No aspirations.

No plans.

Is that a bad thing?

Sometimes, yes. It gives me nothing major to plan for, to work towards. Gives me no sense of forward motion, of purpose.

On the other hand it does help me appreciate the now...

A spontaneous walk in the woods with cameras and a dog

Drinking far too much really good gin, chatting about everything under the sun and looking at a book of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs.

Sitting on the back step early in the morning, in the sun, with my netbook and a coffee.

The option to go to the zoo for an hour to take pictures of butterflies.

A bacon sandwich, a coffee and a bicker with a good friend.

Good times spent with a variety of pals in the furtherance of nothing much, other than deepening our friendships.

Surely that can't be bad...

.

Happy Easter

2009-04-12T15:11:00.008+01:00

I apologise, in advance, for the content of this post. If you're offended by someone being offended by the clergy, best look away now.

The BBC reports that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury is planning to use his Easter address to say "There's more to life than money".

Errr

No shit, Sherlock!

Sorry - I know that's no way to speak to an Archbishop...

No shit, Your Grace!

Apparently the top ranking Roman Catholic Archbish, Cormac Murphy O'Connor, was to do pretty much the same thing.

I was brought up to go to church - CofE - and I have a huge amount of empathy with the Christian ideal - in fact in the ideals of most of the Abrahamic religions.

On the face of it there are lots of arcane rules, guidelines, observances from the Ten Commandments to the teachings in Leviticus, to the various deadly and cardinal sins etc, etc

But it seems to me that if you ignore the downright silly ones and, excuse me whilst I sideline Commandment #1 (I am the Lord thy God...etc) then it all pretty much boils down to:

- Live your life not at the expense of others.

- Look after people less fortunate than yourself.

I'm an atheist. I never did believe in God but I believe in both of those principles. I'd like to think I do so because they are the right things to do in any civilised society and not because some omniscient being will give me a slap upside the head if I fail.

Anyhow - back to the Easter message. I don't disagree with what they're saying but isn't it just a little patronising?

It's quite an easy thing to say from the comfort of the Bishop's palace. Yes, I know that when they're further down the greasy pole of the holy pecking order they endure relative poverty and work very hard for their crust. But bedecked in their Easter finery and preaching that others should not want designer clothes is a dangerous thing to do, IMHO.

The people for whom they hope this message will mean something will likely know little or nothing about the entirety of ecclesiastical life and would, understandably, feel there is an element of hypocrisy.

This is the problem with organised religions. Not the core of the doctrine, but the way it's delivered to the masses (pun intended).

We all crave security.

Security in being loved by friends and family.
Security in knowing we can be ourselves and not have to fit someone else's mould.
Security in knowing we can pay our bills and feed our children.
Security in knowing our educational or work experience will give us employment.
Security in our faith, perhaps.

It's very easy for those of us who have that sort of security to sneer at those who aspire to it, or what they feel is a near enough replacement.

I know this is going to sound at odds with my last post where I made quite a big deal about money not being everything...but this is about people with some influence potentially making other people feel bad.

So come on guys...

Encourage new parishioners in by giving them a community they can be secure in. Let's not exclude those people who might need that security most...

Who?

Well, it depends on the church, and indeed on the parish.

For example - those whose sexuality is not exploitative and yet frowned on; those who don't fit the parish template; those who choose not to marry but to live together anyway...the list goes on.

There are great examples of clergy who really create an atmosphere of acceptance and a congregation that gives a sense of place and community to all that attend.

Sadly, it's the other type that cause a disproportionate amount of hurt and alienation.

Let's have less of that, eh?

.

Ready to Snap

2009-04-12T14:49:00.006+01:00

I'm a photographer. There, I've said it.

Today as I lay face down on the thing I laughingly call my lawn, having the sun warm my backside I felt very much at ease.

I had my camera in my hand with a macro lens attached and I was bothering the mini flora and fauna.

It made me think, once again, why I do photography...and why other people do.

Me?

For lots of reasons. Back in 1982 it was to emulate my brother. Something artistic I could do that I might be good at (I wasn't).

In 2006 it was in response to picking up "idiot boy" 's camera and my hands remembering back to 1982. Also thinking it might be something the boy and I could do together.

In 2007, immediately after the boy's abrupt departure it was about sharing something with my much-loved brother outlaw when I needed to keep contact...and a way to still all the thoughts spinning around in my head. Also a way to get out in the fresh air by myself without looking like the sad loner I felt myself to be.

Shortly after, it became a portal to a new bunch of friends and acquaintances.

So what is it now?

To be honest, it depends.

Frequently it's about taking technically good, potentially interesting macro photographs.

Sometimes it's about taking pictures that might sell in a stock library.

Sometimes it's just about looking and using the medium to prove that I actually did see something that once I would have ignored.

Today, specifically, it was about feeling better. I've been feeling very, very down for three or four weeks now and it reached something of a nadir a few days ago. Lots of things conspired to make me feel lousy, and a few things helped me towards an improved demenour - photography being one.

So photography is about mental health for me too...

I know that other people have a different take on the medium

CJ tells me for him it's about the looking and seeing and it's about much more than the result. Many of his photographs are dense...with lots of elements to see. Others are about pattern and form - for me, at least.

DM says he's struggling with the whole thing at the moment. For him, it's mostly about architectural photographs and capuring the spirit of the building in a picture. He's an architect and annoyingly good at getting the unseen angle on the picture.

TD has a very strong visual sense of what he's trying to photograph. He gets disheartened when the picture that comes out is not what his mind saw. He aims for pictures that no one else would see. He often suceeds, but he's his own worst critic.

DrP gets serious withdrawal if he doesn't get out and take pictures pretty regularly. I know nothing of his motivation for photography. I know lots about what he turns out. He can make me look at something mundane in a completely different way.

DrC says he's jealous of the way the other guys see stuff. He's a recent convert to prime lenses and he gets extremely excited about the quality of bokeh he sees. I think he has lots of motivations for photography, a bit like me. Recently he's been looking for the perfect place to take the perfect sunset picture of the city.

Much-loved-Brother-Outlaw kicked in well paid work as a computer programmer to spend his time taking photographs with the aim of selling to a stock library. A calculated but brave move. He's doing pretty well with it and, more importantly, he seems happier for it.

Photography isn't all things to all men (or women) but I love that, in theory at least, it's a democratic medium.

Without it I would potentially be less confident, less be-friended...and $38.90 poorer.

That's some pastime.

.

Simple pleasures

2009-03-30T21:38:00.002+01:00

Today was doing some much-needed housework and "Woman's Hour" was on the radio. There was a battle between the part of me that wanted to replace the radio noise with some music on my iPod...and the other half of me that was rushing to get the work done and couldn't be bother to go and find the iPod.

The latter "me" won. So I stayed listening as I did the washing up.

They were talking about happiness, pleasure and contentment.

The usual platitudes about "money doesn't bring happiness" were touted and I'm firmly of the belief that this is true...up to a point. Money can bring you choices and remove some basic worries and that can help with the whole happiness thing.

Since switching to part time hours (for my own, selfish, reasons - I hasten to add) I have to think more carefully about how I use my income. It certainly hasn't made me any less happy that I can't just go and buy more-or-less anything I want without worrying about the cost.

The times I have been most happy in the last couple of years were times like yesterday - four of us spent no more than £20 (in total) sat in the sun drinking coffee and catching up on the Downs, then going to the Botanic Gardens for a few hours, and taking photographs.

And times like today (post housework) sitting on the back doorstep with a bacon butty in one hand and coffee in the other, putting the world to rights with a friend.

A lot of these latter conversations were a about bad things going on in the world and how it made us variously mad and depressed.

This links back to the Woman's Hour article - when one speaker said "I don't think that humans are on the planet to be happy and content because it's being discontented that gets the bad things changed"

I don't think either my friend or I are going to change the injustices that we got so exercised about today...but I'm inclined to agree that a little discontentment is probably good to stop complacency setting.

On a lighter note, we also surmised what would happen if an alien came and visited and looked at us all typing on QWERTY keyboards, given the dilberate inefficiencies built into the layout.

Such conversations can't be predicted or contrived, in my experience, but gave us both cause to laugh....and that's worth more than money, any day.

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Reappraisal

2009-03-28T20:01:00.002Z

For the last six weeks I've had a couple of friends living with me.

They've been having work done on their house and asked to come and stay whilst the work was carried out.

I was happy to oblige. They're good friends, good company and there's plenty of room in my house.

Today they pretty much moved out.

Several people have asked whether I'll miss them, or whether I'm glad to see them go.

The answer's not simple.

I've been living on my own for a couple of years now, having moved from my parents' house some 20 odd years ago and then living with my partner.

I hear that the current "housing crisis" is, in part, due to the fact that so many people live alone.

I know several people who choose to live alone and other people who live alone for other reasons. Strictly speaking, I'm one of the latter.

Until now, I've not considered whether I like or want to live alone...I just do.

Tonight is my first night back on my own in the house with nothing much to do.

Am I lonely? No. It's kinda nice to perch here, on the sofa, "House" on in the background and snuggly blanket on my lap to keep out the chill of the falling temperature.

Do I miss them? Yep. As DrP gave me a hug as he finished packing the car I had to stifle a bit of a lump in my throat. They were both lovely company and perfect houseguests.

So how do I feel about living on my own?

It's still just what I do. But now I know that I positively like some aspects of living alone, and also that I could share my living space again...given the right housemate.

Good result, I reckon.

.

A change of mind

2009-03-23T20:52:00.002Z

I'm not much travelled and I think I mentioned, in an earlier post that my recent trip to Denver was my first time in the US.

I'd never been particularly interested in going to the States, despite many of my friends having nothing but great things to say about it.

I had been given a choice as to whether I wanted to work on my current project at work - and I said "Yes" in full knowledge that at least one trip to Denver would be required.

To say the least, I was not looking forward to the trip. As it came closer I became more and more agitated and crabby with everything and everyone. I knew exactly what was going on, but I seemed powerless to do anything about my mood.

A friend asked what it was about the trip that was making me so agitated.

I still don't really know the answer to that question but I'm guessing it was mostly fear of the unknown.

Airport security, homeland security, a 10 hour flight, the prospect of jet lag, travelling with the English folk that I don't know very well, and who don't know me...oh, and the prospect of working closely with Americans.

My previous dealings with folk from the US have been mostly difficult affairs - involving insincerity, and a strange sort of patronising of people from "the old country".

Anyway...so I went with a heavy heart.

Airport security was a pain, and felt a little intrusive but was over quickly enough

The 10 hour flight was a lot less physically uncomfortable than some of the short flights I've taken.

Homeland security was strange to say the least. The officers are wholly unsmiling. I mistook a serious question for dry humour (bad move) but scored on the rebound by finally making the officer smile when he realised it was my first stateside trip.

The hotel we were put in was a nice, comfortable, corporate sort of place.

Walking around Denver on the only day we really had to ourselves was OK. The compromise required when travelling with others you don't know very well is tricky. They indulged my wanting to walk and look at architecture, I didn't hang around too long for fear of putting them out and I accompanied them to the Mall later in the day.
The city seemed nice enough but I'd need to go there again to see if it was really worth spending a lot of time in as a tourist.

The real revelation came when I went to work.

Without exception, the folk I worked with were engaging, funny, welcoming, keen to learn, delighted to teach and well up for the project we're attempting to pull off.

The smiles were genuine. They were not shallow, nor money obsessed. They didn't think that the US has all the answers, they were realistic about their place in the world.

In restaurants and the hotel the staff were, apparently, genuinely keen to make sure we had a pleasant experience...from the guy who poured coffee and juice at breakfast to the guy who drove the shuttle car around the DTC and beyond. All seemed proud and happy to do their jobs in serving us.

If the next stage of the work proceeds as planned then there's a fair chance that a return visit will be required.

I can't say I'll be gagging to sit on a Boeing 777 for 10 hours in cattle-class again but I'll reasonably happily go through the wretched security procedures and I'll look forward to meeting the Denverites again.

I'd even go as far as considering extending the trip for some time just to hang out and enjoy the place properly...and even fly on my own in order to do so.

I'd really rather go with someone else to share the experience...after all, it's less fun to see something interesting or funny and not have someone you love (in whatever sense) nearby to point it out to...but if a lone journey is required, then I'd do it. Also, I'd probably not send moping emails to a friend saying what a miserable time I was having...probably not, anyway.

So, there's something else new I've experienced...and something else about which I've had to revise my opinion.

This new stuff is all good, you know...

Well, not all good. By God the jetlag really sucks.

.

The long and winding road

2009-03-21T18:21:00.002Z

Anyone who tells you that grief has five stages and implies they apply to everyone is at best naive and at worst, lying.

At least, that's my experience.

So, at exactly two years since I came home from work to find myself single again all of a sudden, I find myself taking stock.

Stage 1
Denial. Yep, I had that. It lasted approximately 90 seconds.

Stage 2
Anger. Yep. I had that almost immediately after the denial. It lasted for a few days having seen what all our friends and family (let alone I) were going through

Stage 3
Bargaining
Here's where it gets sticky for me.
Bargaining with whom? and to what end? Nothing could have changed the facts
So strike stage 3 for me.

Stage 4
Depression
If I can extend that to mean "very sad" or "down" then, OK, I'll tick that.

But wait...here comes the anger again...

Stage 5
Acceptance
Yep. Very quickly, in fact...maybe after a couple of weeks.

But oh-0h Depression's back, and following hot the heels of that is Anger again.

Oh...and guilt isn't mentioned anywhere in the model and I had (and have) oodles of that sometimes.

I've no real idea how other people handle their bereavement but for me implying there's a "right way" or a "normal way" to handle it isn't terribly helpful.

I was, and am, very lucky indeed. Not only did I have a great family and friend network, but I pretty quickly found myself with a whole load of new friends who deal with the facts in a grown up, fairly matter of fact, way because they know that generally works best for me.

From the Brother outlaw who encouraged me to join Flickr and share photos with him and others to improve my photography, to the neighbours who watched out for me every step of the way and did some gruelling jobs at a time when I simply couldn't function.

From someone who didn't freak out when I felt the need to tell him, even before we actually met for lunch the first time and then went on to give me some insight and told me not to blame myself to "the boys" who are always at the end of a text or email to make sure I'm OK.

All those people, and many more, are helping me to get to a new normality in my life.

But I'm still not fully at acceptance, am I?

Finding one of his jumpers that I'd forgotten I kept as I stow my laundry can still completely undo me.

The inability to reach something in a cupboard, or to change the washer on a dripping tap can send me into a rage with him...that was his job, after all.

Then seeing the daffs in garden can make me yearn for spring Saturdays when along with the bread from the baker's, a couple of bunches of daffodils would invariably be handed to me.

Am I abnormal or special in my seeming cycling of "stages"?

As much as I might like to think so, I very much doubt it.

I would imagine it's a fairly typical reaction to a severe trauma and sudden loss of a much loved one.

So let's be allowed to grieve in our own way, without following a flowchart, eh?

If you're bereaved and having trouble getting through the various prescribed stages - relax, you're not abnormal if you don't follow the pattern...get through it all the best way you can.

One platitude that does work for me, strangely enough, is the one about time being a great healer. The wounds are there but they seem to get less painful over time.

And to anyone who recognises themselves in my descriptions of people who have made my life worth getting up for, then I thank you from the bottom of my heart...you rock!

x

Culture Shock

2009-03-08T03:17:00.004Z

This may make less sense than usual. I'm fighting the urge to sleep. I have been awake for 19 hours now and my body is rebelling.

I having my first trip to the US

I know that at the grand old age of 45 that seems a little insular or xenophobic. Not really. I loathe the whole rigmarole of flying and so it takes a lot to get me in plane.

Rome did it, easily. The Costa del Sol did it against my better judgement. Paris did it but it was more the personal reason than destination.

I landed here approximately 3 and a bit hours ago and it's nearly 8.30pm local time.

In an attempt to stay awake for another hour or so I've read and written emails. Tried to surf on Flickr but Flickr's a little poorly just now.

So I've crawled into bed and put the TV on. I rarely watch TV at home but I thought it might be just engaging enough to stop me dropping off.

What's with the cuture shock, then?

The accents? No...the little TV I watch tends to be US drama at the moment

Is it the NTSC coding rather than PAL? Well, yeah a little...but only a little bit

Is it the frequency with with adverts (or should that be commercials) are breaking up the film? It's annoying but not exactly shocking.

No - it's the combination of the advertisement of prescription medicines coupled by the incredible number of dire warnings.

Erectile dyfunction meds, contraceptive meds, rheumatoid arthritis meds, asthma meds, even aspirin for heart conditions. All have a few moments of pretty people saying how wonderful the drug is followed by at least as much airtime saying how bad it potentially is.

It really is the oddest thing.

I'm all for balance but I'm surprised anyone sees the point of this style of advertising when, presumably, doctors know both side of the tale and they do the prescribing.

I'm sure this business trip to Denver has more surprises up its sleeve but this one has been enough for my travel-addled brain.

I think I'm going to call it a night.

Lack of Critical Thinking

2009-03-02T21:04:00.002Z

Baroness Greenfield has kicked up something of a shitstorm.

It would appear that she declared, in the House of Lords, that the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are likely to lead to "infantilisation".

Either in league with or coicident with this piece of "research". I qualify the expression research because, having read the fuller version of the paper it seemed to be taking a whole load of other research, that didn't seem to be directly related to the subject of people vs the internet.

The conclusion that the good lady and Aric Sigman seemed to draw was that:

A) There is a lot of research that says lonely people are less healthy than not-lonely people. Lonely isn't really explained as to whether it's a psychological or physical state...so it doesn't make any comment as to whether alone = lonely.

B) People who use the internet must be lonely

Ergo

C) Social networking sites make you ill.

Now - all this could be completely misrepresenting both Baroness Greenfield and Aric Sigman but certainly what is being reported, for the most part, is some panicky "The internet will damage your children" message.

Whilst their hypotheses may be not unreasonable, they seem to have made a big leap from several well documented, widely understood and known studies to a conclusion about something that wasn't covered in the studies.

I'm a reasonably intelligent woman (on a good day) with a pretty good grounding in scientific principals. I'm also confident and articulate enough to listen to what others say and appraise it critically. Others are not so lucky and could take what the good Baroness says as irrefutable and not open to question.

The theme was taken up in Woman's Hour on R4 today (I loathe and detest the programme but I was making coffee in the kitchen and it was on). A chap was being interviewed about his opinion about the evil thing that Twitter is.

The implication was that it was potentially rife with paedophillic grooming of the young and innocent and that Twitter were doing insufficient to counter it.

When asked whether young users were a big part of the Twitter populace he said "errr no, not at the moment". When asked if there had been reports of such problems he said "errr no" again. Then when asked whether the measures put in place by the likes of Beebo and Facebook were strong measures (for example age verification and parental permission) that couldn't be easily circumvented by a kid of reasonable intelligence he was forced, once again to say "errrr no". Thereby creating a complete farce out of the interview and his earlier rant.

What a waste of time!

But the point is that in the meantime the Daily Mail style of reporting has already taken hold in some minds and "The Internet" is once again labelled as a bad thing.

On a lighter note, whilst looking up some references I did find this article from the Guardian and that made me giggle.

Why did I post the picture at the top of this page?

Well, a couple of years ago I suddenly found myself needing to find a new and wider group of friends. I have been wholly successful in this and would count about 10 new people as very close friends (two of whom are sharing my house temporarily) and at least another 10 as good, sound acquaintances. Are they people I know "in the real world"? Yes. How did I meet them? Via the internet.

The people in the picture are in that 20 or so people.

In addition to all these people I spend real time with, there are another 4 or 5 people I reasonably regularly chat with by various internet means who I haven't met yet. Do they enrich my life? Hell yeah...why would they not? We share observations, photographs, jokes, articles about this and that...you know, just like real people do. That'll be cos they're real people.

As a shy woman, I can tell you it's easier to meet someone face to face after you've exchanged a few e-mails. There's a bit of common ground laid and you've probably already weeded out the people who you're not going to hit it off at all.

So, maybe it's best to have plenty of contact with real people (that sounds reasonable, after all) but my hypothesis would be that it's better to have virtual friends than none at all and that a virtual hug, might not be such a bad thing if that's the only way you can get your hugs just now.

So let's have a sense of proportion and a bit of rigour in our research papers, please.

.

Drinks vs Gender - Update

2009-03-01T22:33:00.004Z

So, it turns out that I was right. A few of my male friends think I'm exagerating the whole "I get given the wrong drinks cos I'm a girl who drinks boys' drinks" thing.

They don't tell me as much but two further incidents with the doubters in tow caused a simultaneous "I told you so" and giggle.

DrC meets me for a swift evening drink. I umm and ahm quite loudly in the hearing of the new landlord of my local as to what beer I might drink.

After I decide, DrC declares it's his turn to buy and so orders a pint of Golden Hare and a pint of Coke.

Landlord looks me straight in the eye and says "would you like ice in that?"

"In my beer? No thanks..."

DrC catches my eye and we share a moment.

A couple of days later five of us go out for a meal in a local Nepalese Restaurant. When the drinks order is taken "Five beers and one pint of coke, please".

The drinks arrive and the coke is put down in front of me - DrC is sitting opposite.

BW roars with laughter. He admits he thought I was making a fuss about nothing but now he sees it in action, he is contrite.

The considerably more charitable SI says that people's response is not unreasonable. He's an actuary and his work is all about the odds.

He gives sage counsel "in most people's experience, the woman is the designated driver, if nothing else. Also - given a random man and a random woman, the woman is more likely to drink G&T than real ale. It's this knowledge that the various serving staff are relying on".

Does it make me feel better?

Since I first blogged about it, I feel wholly less exercised by the subject. Now I'm just mildly amused.

.

Humbling Stuff

2009-03-01T17:43:00.004Z

I occasionally do some volunteering of photographic services for a local organization - the Pierian Centre , some friends join in sometimes, too.

I don't always have a total affinity with the events and activities that take place - some are a little on the new-agey side for my interests and taste, but I'll defend unto death people's right to follow that lifestyle if they choose.

This week, I got a bit of a last minute request to cover an event to celebrate a local man being awarded an OBE. I'd never heard of the gentleman in question - pictured here.

His name is Paul Stephenson.

He campaigned in the 60's for the Bristol Bus Company to lift its colour-bar on black and asian drivers. He was at the centre of a boycotting of Bristol buses and this boycott got worldwide recognition.

He also indulged in a little civil disobedience, getting himself arrested when he refused to leave a pub in the city centre who had refused to serve him on the grounds of his colour. This was considered to be a perfectly reasonable and legal act.

Also in the picture is Princess Campbell. She was the first black nursing sister in Bristol.

The stories that were being told were of not only overt discrimination, but discrimination so intrenched that it was seen as perfectly acceptable behaviour by the majority white community until a "fuss" was made.

That commonplace acceptance of actions that I find abhorrent happened in my lifetime.
Literally in my lifetime.
I was born in the same year this landmark action was taken.

The rooms I was taking photos in had a distinct majority of black faces and, as a white woman milling around with a camera I was wholly welcomed and accepted by those people who had been so badly treated by people around the same age as my parents.

I'm not a big fan of close quarters with lots of people. I'm not a fan of meeting new folk. I'm not great at candid portraiture so it was all very hard work but, by God, what a magnificent, uplifting but thoroughly humbling evening.

.

Vindicated

2009-02-21T00:17:00.003Z

The last few days have been days of vindication for me.

Not smugness, you understand, just a confidence building feeling that I knew how things were and how they would turn out.

My sad duty, yesterday, was to attend a funeral for a distant relative. A lady who had lived a longish and full life so more a celebration of life than comiseration over a life cut short.
Nevertheless a difficult venue for me so I distracted myself other thoughts on my journey to the service.
I predicted that "The Lord's My Shepherd" to the tune "Crimmond" and "Abide With Me" would be racing certainties for the hymns.

The other day, in my blog, I guessed that TD would have no opinion about my decision to try B&W film photography. Over a companionable coffee today he admits he's seen my blog and that he did, indeed, have no opinion.

Mentally I also predicted that he'd roll his eyes at my decision to buy a 28mm prime lens...

A week or so ago a few people thought I might be twitchy about sharing my house with two friends. I was quietly confident that it wouldn't take more than a couple of days for us to find out feet around each other.

Finally, this evening we introduced B to C. B's not at all sure he wants to meet someone new. He's not had a good day and he's tired and feeling a bit under the weather. I reassure him that he'll like C.

In all these cases I have been correct in my assessment.

These days I often lose confidence in instincts that have generally served me so well. When that happens I run around fretting and picking at things that can be safely left alone.

So these last few days have given me quite the confidence boost.

Hopefully enough for me to relax and enjoy the next few days before I start annoying people with my incessant need to unpick the fabric of the universe.

.

I should be committed

2009-02-17T22:06:00.004Z

Well. That's it.

I've signed up.

I've committed to doing a Solo Photo Book Month project (SoFoBoMo).

What: Go look at the website and see

Why: A friend pointed me in its direction a few weeks back. I've been wanting something to give me a bit of photographic direction and a time-controlled project. No financial gain. Not a competition. Just something to do. Why not, indeed.

It's part of my quest to make me look at stuff differently.

These days I can turn out a technically competent photograph and when I don't I usually know what I'd do to fix the tecchnical problems.

But..and it's the big but...I still, relatively infrequently turn out a photograph that makes me think "that's an interesting way to look at that".

Only this evening a friend sent me an email with some suggested crops of pictures I've posted. As I look at his crops I marvel at how he sees my pictures so very differently to me.

He doesn't say "my crops are better than yours" he offers them as a suggestion for what he's seeing.

I could jsut keep taking pictures (and I will) and put some up for stock, others up in Flickr but a focus (pun intended) for my eyes will be a good thing for me.

So - thank you CJ for the suggestion and thank you TD for continuing to say "what about this".

...come on DrP...decide on your project and let's go.

.

Panic attack

2009-02-16T14:47:00.003Z

Looks like my broadband connection is playing up.

It's been doing it for a couple of days now.

Coincidentally with the temporary lodgers and their computers moving in.

Three of us in one house, not being able to surf.

Panic broke out for the two of us who don't really understand this technology. The other of our number is, thankfully, a network engineer and so displaced his panic by diagnoosing the problem.

Fortunately, this house was long ago "wired": "the boy" having been no slouch in the geek department, himself.

In the electricity meter cupboard there was already a switch and patching sockets. In my workroom, there's a wireless router that takes the internet to the rest of the house by means of said switch.

Sadly, after the network engineer moved in, it soon became clear that the switch was rather beyond EoL (end of life)...it having failed.

So new switch bought, duly installed by network engineer; a couple of other minor niggles fixed and all should have been well. Unfortunately, around about this time the internet connection started playing up and the two non techies in the house started to complain.

Network engineer proceeded to do all manner of signal testing, analysis, diagnosis and more testing. It bothered him that the problem was intermittant and seemed to coincide with his arrival.

Nevertheless the final diagnosis was that it was a problem with the broadband provider.

Today all seemed well, initially but now once again the connection is playing up.

Now there's just me in the house.

As a last ditch proof I have eliminated the whole of the household LAN and connected directly to the cable modem.

Verdict? Well - initially had awful trouble making a connection...but just at the moment it's OK. I think...I think that the network engineer's diagnosis is correct...that it's an intermittant failure in the broadband line.

But how pathetic is this? I'm panicking that I'm losing my connection to the outside world. There are some people I only keep in contact with via the internet and I'm worried I'll lose contact. I'm sitting here, typing and already starting to feel potentially isolated.

It surprises me greatly just how reliant I've become on the connection. A while ago a friend had a similar broadband connectivity failure and they used the expression "frantic" to describe their discomfiture. At the time I thought that was a gross overreaction.

Now I'm not so sure.

I do hope this is fixed soon...

...please...

.

Vegetables as a metaphor for life?

2009-02-13T13:09:00.004Z

I have some friends coming to stay with me for a while whilst they have some home improvements done.

I am the most appalling housekeeper, ever. Never been good at it...and I'm getting worse.

Cooking will be a communal event, in all likelihood, so I feel the need to bring my kitchen up to a bare minimum standard, despite my friends' protestations that I shouldn't go to any trouble.

This morning's work has been to clear out a cupboard and my fridge.

The cupboard had flour with a BBE 2005 date and sugar that dates back to the early cretaceous. You're getting the picture?

My fridge is full of vegetables and I have to wonder why I have so many in there.

They had such potential..either as a complete meal or as an occasional side dish. Nevertheless, I've allowed them to go beyond the point of no return.

Perhaps I expected too much of them. It certainly isn't their fault.

Still, there are some that are beyond saving so a small pile of rank veg were consigned to the compost heap. It's so sad, it's almost criminal.

There are some veg that are on the periphery of rankness...I don't think they're beyond saving but I think I'll have to modify my expectation for them. I hope all is not lost.

So - is this a a metaphor for my life?

Possibly...but more likely it's just a damning indictment of how crap I am at housekeeping.

People are Great

2009-02-10T22:21:00.004Z

I'm shy.

Really, quite cripplingly shy.

It comes from not ever quite fitting in. Not at school, where I liked science over history. I liked classical music over pop music and I played the cello.

Not at work where I was more interested in doing part time study for a degree in computing rather than going out to clubs.

Until recently I'd been in a long term, happy, close relationship with someone who was also shy. We didn't really need anyone else. We had a very small, very select, very special group of close friends. It was good.

That shyness was a real handicap once I was on my own. Fortunately, I've a job that makes me have to "greet people" and it's my job, when they visit my office to make them feel at ease.

I think I'd told myself I didn't like people because other people, on the whole, weren't very nice. I think that was an imperfect remembering of being made to feel the outsider.

Things have improved for me, confidence wise, but I still have the odd relapse to scary intoversion.

Yesterday I was feeling really quite low having started the day listening to the appallingly sad stories of the firestorms in Australia.

I then stumbed over this on TED. So sickened was I watching the first 15 minutes that I sort of missed the point of the last bit a little. I shared it with a friend who feels stuff pretty deeply. It was countered with this. The message was clear - "cheer up - it's not all bad"

Since "the boy" died I've met several people whom I now consider to be pretty good friends. That's in just a little under two years. Add these to the people who were already friends and that's a nice community of people.

Variously they:
Suggest meeting for coffee...just cos
Send a hug by email just because my email to them sounded a little upset
They send links to photographs, to music, to videos or cartoons that I might like or that might make me laugh.
They offer to drive to my house from their just to give me a hug because they know I've just had a little melt down.
They act as "point man" for me when I meet up with someone new. They make sure I'm safe.
They offer to cook me dinner at my house when I'm likely to spend the whole evening doing a catalogue for an exhibition
They cook me meals, invite me to spend Christmas with them.
They have me visit them and take me out sight seeing and taking photographs...they share bits of their hometown that they love.
They share their love of photography, they take me out taking pictures and tell me what they can see.
They teach me about things they love - film photography, history, architecture, stone circles.
They lend me lenses just to see what they're like to use.

It's not a one way street...I do similar things for them.

None of us have to do any of these things. We do it bcause we want to.

The number of good people I've met hugely outweighs the other sort.

But this is what Philip Zimbardo is saying in the bit of the lecture I almost missed. People have a huge capacity for evil if they are put in circumstances that will encourage it...but on the flipside they also have capacity for great good.

In short. People are great...and it's a shame it took me this long to realise it.

On the bright side, if I hadn't taken the first steps, I might still not realise it

Without a Safety Net

2009-02-08T23:22:00.002Z

Today I branched out a little.

I borrowed a film camera from a friend (Nikon F90x for anyone that cares), put a roll of black and white film in it and put it in my camera bag.

I'm a keen photographer and I like to think of myself as entirely non fundamentalist when it comes to media. Amongst my friends I can count exclusively digital, exclusively film and "a little of what you fancy" photographers. Until today, my "serious" photography has all been digital.

CJ says he likes B&W film because of the range of greys it can represent (in the digital world, we'd call that colour depth...and there is always a finite number of levels. In the analogue world that gradation is likely to be as near as dammit continuous and that's a good thing). It was following a conversation with CJ that got me thinking about my disregard for film.

DrP likes film because it's fun to play with. He switches between a high quality digital SLR, a film SLR, and a few less fancy cameras. He'll play with slide film and process it like print film just to see the weird colours happen (aka XPro). He encourages me in my experimentation.

DM raises a metaphorical eyebrow indicating he's not sure why I'm doing it since I've got a perfectly nice, high quality digital SLR. On my Flickrstream he indicates that he takes a dim view of playing with weird film processing stuff like XPro.

DrC shrugs non-commitally and indicates it's neither a good nor a bad thing but a matter of choice. Then pinches his dad's old film SLR and plots to run a couple of films through it just to see. He also tips up at the pub today with a handful of B&W film for me that he'd been given a while back.

TD hasn't expressed an opinion...well not yet, anyway. If he does, I predict it'll be "I can't be arsed with all that but, whatever". If he stumbles over an internet article that's relevant he'll likely send it because that's just the sort of thing he does.

MMcC positively encourages the experimentation and urges me to think about medium format if I really want to fall love with film.

These are all the people whose photographic opinions I trust most...but they don't concur. So what do I think?...ultimately, that's what really matters after all.

It scares the hell out of me. There's no way for me to check that I've got the exposure right immediately so I have to pay real attention to the settings and then work out, in my head, whether that's the exposure I expect. No more sloppy point, shoot and check the shot and then fiddle with settings.

Each shot I take will cost real money to get processed...so suddenly, there's a good reason not to approach this in my normal scattergun fashion.

Now today I took my D300 out with me and used the metering on there to double check what I was doing with the film camera. So I had a little safety net but I was still anxious every time I took a film picture.

So with all this stress, did I enjoy the experience?

Hell yeah. I slowed down. I used my technical knowledge to ratify my approach - not something I normally need to do all that much. I took about half the pictures I normally would, even though I was carrying two cameras and duplicating shots for testing purposes.

In the near future I'll take the film camera out on its own from time to time.

Time will tell whether the film enjoyed the experience...hopefully not too much time because I'm now excited to see the results.

Watch this space

Middle Class Apologist

2009-02-07T19:03:00.007Z

I seem to spend a lot of my time being apologetic - not always out loud but apologising nonetheless.

I apologise for being able to work part time, whilst some of my friends and family work full time for only a slightly bigger salary than mine. Other friends have jobs they hate, or no job at all at the moment.

I apologise for not having a mortgage to pay.

I apologise for living in a nice house in a nice area of the city.

I apologise for shopping in Waitrose, having an organic veg box delivered and choosing Farrow and Ball paint over Dulux.

I apologise that I buy green coffee beans and roast them myself.

I apologise for not having children to worry about.

I apologise for having an elderly mother who doesn't need my daily attention.

I apologise for worrying about people who may or may not care whether I worry about them or not. These people may or may not care that much about me.

I apologise that all I do for my Big Issue seller is to buy a Big Issue when I feel there should be more.

I apologise that I don't drive.

My parents were very poor when they were growing up and when I was growing up. I have a strongly working class background.

For twenty-odd years two of us had a combination of good luck and hard work. Then stuff happened.

The upshot of all this is my current set of circumstances.

I like working part-time, shopping at Waitrose, roasting coffee, caring about people, not driving and I like my house.

I don't thnk this makes me a better or worse person than anyone else I know.

I can't deny that I'm irredeemably middle class (whatever that really means), but in my mind it's of no importance.

So why the hell do I keep apologising...and is anyone really asking me to?

Wittering on

2009-02-05T23:09:00.003Z

Once upon a time letters and personal visiting would have been the sole ways that people would employ to keep in touch. Things were more formal I guess.

Today I was tied to the house because of the dratted snow.

VPN technology gave me a working environment identical to my desktop at work. I used email and text messaging to exchange information with colleagues.

I researched flights, hotels and train travel for a forthcoming business trip on the Internet.

I experienced Stephen Fry getting up, packing for a trip, making purchases in the airport and getting told off for still having his phone on when he was supposed to be boarding.

Later on I used Twitter to quickly (in 140 characters) tell people that I was working at home and what sort of day I was having.

A friend in Scotland used it to tell me and his other friends that he was snowed in and was planning a coffee whilst he considered his options.

The guy who sells me green coffee beans made me a Twitter contact and gently shamed me into cleaning my coffee machine.

At lunchtime I took some photographs and this evening I uploaded them to Flickr for other people to see and to make comments about (if they so choose).

I also used the medium of Flickrmail to chat to a fellow photographer about the snow and the fact that he could get out and take some pictures.

All the while, an email conversation between 6 people was kept going in short, pithy sentences, planning an evening out (that a couple of us didn't make). There were a couple of other emails later this evening too.

Tonight a friend pointed me in the direction of some architectural software tutorials that he'd found interesting and thought I might too.

I've exchanged internet-based cartoons with two people.

Tonight I've played Scrabble with two people exchanged some banter on Facebook and had gently mocking text messages from other people who were at the social that I missed.

So - all in all I've been in contact with

My boss; seven other colleagues; about 15 friends; two people from whom I buy things; one "celebrity" and one family member. 27 people in total.

The only person I actually met face to face was the veggie man but I feel as if I've had a day filled with the presence of people...and nicely so.

I've met all the colleagues I dealt with today - but that's not always the case.
Of the friends I mention:
Four I've never met
One I haven't seen for about fifteen years

Each of the media I've used today fitted the circumstances - email, text message, my blog, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook.

It has seemed like the most natural thing in the world to me but it is a world completely unfathomable to my ma (a spritely 82).

I'm typically an early adopter of technological hardware but a slow learner in the online services field. Maybe I should be braver and invite in the next big thing...whatever that is...

On pedantry

2009-02-04T19:24:00.006Z

Completely random image...

A recent debate with a contact on Flickr who is a teacher of English (amongst other things); a discussion with a colleague today and a caffeine fuelled rant this afternoon has me wondering...

To be pedantic, or not to be pedantic.

Said Flickr contact includes in his photostream pictures of misused apostrophes.

I (and others) join him in his everso genteel raging against the perpetrators of this crime against the language.

Today there was a workplace epistle that used the word "unanimously" where the words "by a majority" should have been. My colleague says she's been waiting for me to read it and make a comment (yep, I'm really that predictable).

Also, I hear the expression "...even more unique..." used on Radio4. I grumble at the radio.

So I ask the guy on Flickr (being a professional an' all...whereas I'm more of a numbers girl) whether, in fact, if the meaning of the message is successfully transmitted does it really matter if the syntax, spelling and grammar don't quite cut the mustard?

His opinion is cautious...yep communication is important but he qualifies it with

"And yet I think there's a beauty to be found in a well-formed sentence, whether it's one of your own or one that you've read"

I've never met this chap but I think I'd like him...for he encapsulates my thoughts in an elegantly turned phrase.

However, I still can't help but wonder whether the arcane rules of spelling and grammar are the equivalent of Latin Masses and Victorian table manners. Are they a way for the elite few to make themselves feel superior to the ignorant masses?

Meanwhile, I'll sit in my elitist, smugness and thoroughly enjoy language well-used in engaging yet approachable writing...even when it's dialogue on the TV like this.

...and Moses saith unto Pharoah...

2009-02-02T20:49:00.006Z

..."let my people go or there will be plagues...

That would be the plague of excessive news coverage of snow...and....and...errrr, a few inches of snow in the Capital.

So let's see...this snow was forecast nearly a week ago. True enough it's more snow than we've seen for a while but it wasn't exactly on biblical proportions.

Everyone, but everyone, is complaining that the capital ground to a halt with barely a bus, a tube or a train seemingly running.

For me, the amusing thing is to see a country so tuned to the idea of Business Continuity planning in terms of terrorist and avian flu threats get laid low by precipitation...and in a temperate climate too.

Business was badly hit today...I'm guessing there will be a lot of accusations flying around.

London council tax payers will likely rage about the lack of gritting, possibly even the lack of snow ploughs.

Problem is, there's never enough money to pay for everything. So do we buy snow ploughs, more gritters or anti terrorist measures like strategically placed concrete bollards?

That's the job of the Business Continuity planners. They should identify all the risks, weigh the impact and likelihood. Then they should look at costs of measures versus the benefits of the measures (or the cost of not putting that measure in place).

If you objectively measure impact/likelihood of terrorist action similar to that seen in 9/11 and 6-10 inches of snow falling the in the capital you might come up with view that snow ploughs are more important than anti-terrorist measures.

But would you like to be the one justifying that after the event?

Analogous

2009-01-31T22:08:00.004Z

Back in the day I had a Pentax K1000 manual SLR camera. I shot a fair bit of black & white film and my brother processed it for me. No matter how many pictures I took, I didn't seem to get any better because I didn't really understand exposure, apertures, depth of field or any of the things I confidently manipulate in my pictures today. Ultimately, I found it all unsatisfying and frustrating mostly because I wanted to get better at it but was failing. Still I loved the feel of the camera in my hands. I probably should have stuck with it, or taken lessons, or taken notes...

We migrated to a compact 35mm camera, then to a good digital compact and all that time I used a camera for obligatory family occasions and holiday snaps only. Then there was the purchase of the first DSLR...for the man of the house...but I didn't take that much interest. At least not until one day I picked up the Nikon D70s to take a picture of the boy at his tiller. Instantly my hands remembered what it was like to have a "real" camera in them.

I took a few pictures and the instant feedback was intoxicating.

There and then I wanted my own camera. A few months later and I was bought a Nikon D50. Smaller, lighter and not quite as highly spec'ed as the D70s but a lovely fit in my small hands.

Took a fair few pictures here and there...started to get to grips with the technical aspects of the craft. Then 2007 unfolded in unexpected ways and I took refuge behind my viewfinder.

Looking at my pictures posted on Flickr over time I reckon that my pictures have improved over the last 18 months or so.

I think it's mostly the volume of pictures, combined with the ease of finding out what settings a particular picture has been taken with that have enabled me to learn quicker what works and what doesn't (at least in my eyes)

I think, however, I may be ready to dip my toe back in the analogue pool.

There's never been any doubt that film is superior to digital in many (but not all) ways and I know loads of people that still shoot film: exclusively or in combination with digital.

A couple of recent conversations, however have made me curious.

One guy sat and took all sorts of ribbing at a recent Flickrmeet. It's his camera at the top of the the page. He sat and smiled all the while and quietly countered every argument we gave him for giving up film. Seeing some of his pictures I can see why. I don't always have an instant affinity with the subject matter or composition but the smoothness of the tones is clear to see.

In another exchange, my previous blog entry was countered with this. So, if I'm trying to improve my photography in general does that mean that trying film again isn't such a stupid sounding idea?

I got thinking.

I've been a musician for far longer than I've been a photographer and I started with acoustic instruments...got rid of them all...replaced them with digital instruments (keyboards, MIDI Wind controller, synthesiser boxes, software etc) because they were easier to get a good result with. What do I use now? Proper guitars, my lovely wooden cello, a beautiful maple recorder, a real Kemble piano and a hand-crafted mandolin. Where are the synthesisers? Up on the shelf. Where's the keyboard? Borrowed and un-missed.

The immediacy of digital instruments helped my music making in lots of ways but the acoustic versions are more satisfying to me at the moment.

Will I go back to digital instruments? Probably when I have a project that suits the digital versions better.

I think it comes down to realising that maybe analogue and digital technologies are different but complementary.

So - will I switch back to film?

Switch...? Probably not.

However, I have a friend with an unused Nikon film camera which will fit my some of my Nikon lenses perfectly. He'll not mind if I borrow it for a bit. His wife will be delighted to stop it cluttering up their house.

There doesn't seem to be any harm in maybe buying a couple of rolls of Ilford B&W film and asking some of my film-loving buddies for advice on getting it developed.

Could I have a film and a digi body coexist in my camera bag?

I think I'm coming round to the idea that maybe I could.

In the meantime, I made an impulse purchase of my favourite sort of lens - fast and prime. In this case it's wide and will suit a film camera just as well as a digital one.

I'm fighting against throwing myself headlong down yet another slippery slope...but I can feel myself edging towards a little exploration.

Leap of Faith

2009-01-30T23:33:00.006Z

Several people I know don't like heights. They say that when they get close to a drop they have an inexplicable urge to jump. They're not suicidal...they're just frightened they'll take the leap...just to see what it feels like.

I felt like that on the way to work this morning. An inexplicable urge to quit.

I don't normally work on Fridays so today was unusual and had messed with my perception of how the week works...but I don't think it was that.

I've got some interesting work to occupy me at the moment; some colleagues were coming to Bristol for the day and I was looking forward to catching up with them. So it wasn't the prospect of the actual work that faced me.

Since I was widowed some 22 months ago I've found it increasingly hard to see work as anything other than a means to pay my bills.

On Wednesday evening a friend and I went to a community meeting for the local carnival. We were offering our services as volunteer "official" photographers.

We were graciously received; we were made to feel welcome and valued; they were grateful we'd come and they fed us.

Some friends & I have dealt with community organizations over the last year or so and, without fail, we've been made to feel like we make a diference simply by turning up and taking a few photos. Often we don't consider our photos to be our very best work but they are probably better than most people would be able to achieve with your usual "point and shoot" camera.

Obviously, the fact that we volunteer makes us quite attractive. There is, after all, little cash to go around in the not-for-profit sector.

Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that they'd be this enthusiastic if they were paying for our services. It's about valuing people and their contibution, and about feeling like you've made a difference no matter how small the thing is you've done.

Do I get that at work? Not often, no.

Is it my boss's fault? No. He's one of the best people I've worked for.

I know they can cope without me, they showed that admirably when I was off work for seven weeks.

It's probably from a little higher up and driven from the beahviour of our customers. They expect more from us than they ever have before, and they expect to pay less. There's less time available for the niceties of life.

It's hard to criticise when most of us buy on price.

Nevertheless, business has definitely become progressively more soulless in the twenty-six years I've worked in the industry.

Could I afford to not hold onto this job? Not long term, no.

I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do but I can't really deny that it's not hard graft in the traditional sense. I'm reasonably well paid and I have decent enough conditions.

So, for me, it's a good balance of return for effort.

You know what, though? If I had to work a little harder in return for a little less pay but I felt like I was making even half the difference that I felt I might be on Wednesday then it would be worth it.

A little while ago I toyed with the idea of flinging the job in and going and doing photography for the Not for Profit Sector.

It would have required me to put some of my savings aside to pay the bills whilst I tried to persuade people they'd want to part with folding money for what I had to offer. I'm lucky inasmuch as I have savings that I could use in that way.

It was just before the bottom fell out of the FTSE and what little money the NfPs had got squeezed even more.

Various things stopped me at the time and it hadn't occurred to me again until this morning.

So will I do it?

I dunno.

If I have many more meetings with people who love what they do and think it's important to make you feel valued...and many more days at work when I wonder why do I f*****g bother then it's entirely possible I'll make the leap.

I think the trick may be to not look down.

Meaningful

2009-01-29T20:03:00.005Z

When we hear the word "average" we know what it means and we know it's a good number to know because it tells us something useful, right?

Wrong.

I work in an industry where numbers are used all day, every day.

Still, we bandy average around far too frequently for my liking.

When we say "average" we generally use it to describe a common value within a set of data.

If we're talking about the number of days a service provider make take to do something for us, we might talk about something being turned around on average in 10 days.

As a customer, that gives us a measure of expectation.

In this example we'd probably calculate the "average" by adding up all the numbers of days that a sample of work took the company and divide it by the number of values we added up. That would be the arithmetic mean.

I don't have a problem with calculating the mean, per se ...but a lot of people forget that in order for them to be useful values the underlying numbers need to conform, more or less to what is typically called a "normal distribution"

The graph at the top of the page shows normal distribution. If you calculate the arithmetic mean of the numbers being graphed here you'll get the number in the middle of the graph - at the place the incidence is most frequent.

However, if the graph of the numbers you're looking at doesn't form this sort of shape then there's little or no point calculating an arithemetic mean.

Imagine for a second that graph is flipped upside down. Now the most frequent incidences of the numbers are at the beginning and end of the graph. If you calculate the arithmetic mean, it'll still come out as the number in the middle of the graph but now it represents almost none of the data in the data set. Ergo...it's just a number that doesn't tell you anything about what you can expect in the real-life stuff underlying the data.

Averages are OK but context is everything

The mystery of the mayonnaise

2009-01-27T23:36:00.006Z

So...there's an advert for Helman's mayonnaise. It's voiced over by Anthony Worrall-Thompson. I think his cooking is m'eh but I guess he knows what he's talking about when it comes to food...right?

The ingredients for this gloopy, unpleasant, ubiquitous sandwich adhesive are eggs, oil and vinegar or lemon juice. A simple enough thing.

Still -given it's pretty much all fat it's high in calories.

So - there's a "lite" version. This is what AWT is advertising.

The gist of the advert is:

"We know it's important to keep the quality of ingredients high so we kept in the free range eggs, the oil (which is naturally high in omega somethings) and the vinegar. So all we removed were the calories"

Errrrr... so now calories are an ingredient?

I know they don't teach proper domestic science at school any more but is anyone really going to fall for that?

/rant

To the Far East

2009-01-26T22:13:00.004Z

Head Office is in Potters Bar. I rarely have to go there but I've been twice in seven working days.

I might have to do it a little more often over the next 18months or so.

It's not hard to get to:
Home to Temple Meads. Temple Meads to Paddington.
Circle Line or Hammersmith & City to Kings Cross. Kings Cross to Potters Bar Station.
Fifteen minute walk to the office.
A few hours in the office, catching up with colleagues I usually only email or chat to on the phone...a couple of meetings then the journey in reverse.

I arrive home, completely knackered about 12 hours after I left in the morning...and in all honesty, I probably only do about 3 - 4 hours work all day. Today's journey had to be done during peak time so cost the company £157 plus paying me for the day.

I know there are many technological solutions to replace actual face to face meetings...and we've tried most of them. Sometimes they're good enough. Sometimes they're all there is.

I'm not really a "people person"...I'm a big fan of email...but today we started to build a project team relationship that would have taken far longer had we not sat around a table.

I guess I need to remember that next time I'm trying to keep project costs down.

The World Did Not End

2009-01-25T20:14:00.005Z

Well...what a surprise!

I've been toying with the idea of installing Windows 7 Beta on my laptop for a few weeks now.

When I bought my laptop, it came pre-installed with Vista. Huge frustration followed as this not very high spec machine lurched and juddered trying to handle the bloatware beast that is Vista.

The picture above is the last time I tried to do a major upgrade of any of my software (in this case Potatoshop) without someone to hold my hand. It was a bad time.

Microsoft made Vista so easy to hate...so, not surprisingly almost everyone did (does)

It wasn't all that long before I'd ditched Vista and installed the altogether more spritely Ubuntu Linux distribution.

For basic surfing and stuff it was fine, but it didn't handle Flash content terribly well, and installing new applications that weren't part of the distribution was cumbersome.

In principle, I like Linux but the fact remains that unless you know what you're doing, it's harder to get things going on it. My days of wanting to be really geeky with my computers have long gone.

So - Win7 - why not? Microsoft typically get it right every-other major version.
I got it here

A couple of hiccoughs with the creation of a boot DVD (my bad, not Microsoft's) but it repartitioned and installed a clean new version in about 20mins.

I was initially disappointed that my laptop's widescreen monitor wasn't catered for, so the display was a bit blurry and the wrong aspect ratio...but after the first download of updates that's been miraculously fixed.

My pal suggests that I like aggravation in my life. He may be right...but it's possible, just possible Win7 will be less hassle than XUbuntu...

Watch this space.

Imposing some discipline

2009-01-24T20:36:00.006Z

Photography is probably the thing I do most these days. Not well, but most.

A while ago I toyed with the idea of buying (yet) another lens. A prime, wide angle, fast lens (something like a 20mm f/2.8 beauty). I sounded out a friend to see what he thought. We don't always see eye to eye but I value his opinion. After some initial "what about this" banter (and a pint or two, I believe) he came clean and said what I really needed to do was look more and better...and to stick with what I had.

It kind of stung at the time but it he was doing what real friends are supposed to do and tell you the truth as they see it. More annoyingly, he was probably right.

More recently I got chatting to another photographer whose photos I rather like. We discussed what photography is about - whether it's the end result or the process of taking the picture. We agreed that the "looking" is the key thing.

As the year starts to unfold and I get out to take more pictures my aim is to look more and better.

To this end, for the trip out yesterday and today I have restricted myself to a single lens with a single focal length. My 105mm lens is my very favourite for a lot of reasons so that's the one I've chosen.

It's fast and crisp and it's a macro lens so I can't blame my lack of good pictures on its technical shortfalls.

It's an odd focal length - on my camera it's the equivalent of about 150mm on a traditional film camera. This makes it too "long" for my usual sort of architectural pictures and too "short" to take pictures of exotic birds on distant buildings. So...what does that leave me with?

Learning to look better and concentrating on what I can see.

Who knows. I might actually get better at it.

Drinks as a Gender Issue - Discuss

2009-01-23T23:34:00.003Z

Never blogged before...don't know if I want to keep it up but I'm trying it on for size.

First post
Controversial subject.

Spent the better part of the day (in every sense) with a female friend. Drinking coffee, walking, taking photographs.

I'm not very girlie. I'm short, dumpy and shortish haired. I don't possess a pair of heels and have no patience for make up and little time for jewellery.

I am however, a middle-class, white, straight, woman.

My companion today has more attractive bone structure; the most lovely liquid eyes; makes far more effort with her appearance and is always better turned out than me.

I frequently look like I've been dragged through a hedge with my muddy jeans and all terrain trainers. Like Timothy Winters, my hair is an exclamation mark.

But it's my friend who was referred to as "Sir" the other day.

I get cross with the world on her behalf (she doesn't ask or need me to do it...but I do, nonetheless)

She's transexual. Reasonably openly so....and there's no doubt when you look at her she is SHE.

In various conversations with her today various aspects of gender identity came up.

I get cross when I'm patronised in a camera shop by people (men) who think that use of a reasonably good camera is only compatible with the possession of a set of X&Y chromosomes. Some of my friends understand and agree. Others think I over-react a bit (they may be right)

I sometimes have a lunchtime coffee with a male friend. Each time he orders a mocha, I order a strong black americano. Without fail, when the coffee arrives I am offered the mocha...he the black coffee.

Another male pal and I frequently go to the theatre together. He drinks Tonic (with or without gin, as occasion demands), I often drink a pint of (real) beer. Again there's always a swapping of drinks.

I really didn't realise to what extent even the food we eat and the drinks we choose in public are gender specific.

My TS friend is cautious how she behaves lest someone calls her sir.

I can stumble wind-blown into a pub with my muddy jeans and tatty tee-shirt; order a pint of Timothy Taylor Landlord and a burger and chips (don't really like burgers...or chips but you get the picture) and I will likely be called "Ma'am" (or just conceivably "Miss" if the landlord's feeling charitable). They might think "now there's an unattractive woman" but they'll not call me sir.

So today at least, I'm counting my blessings and trying my very hardest to remember that I have it easy the next time a camera shop assistant tells me that cleaning my camera sensor is "no harder than baking a cake".