Stop FAQing about

Back in February I succumbed to the hype and bought an MP3 player: for the sake of argument, we'll call it a Pony Talkman. It's a nice little thing (much like me, really) - slim, elegant, charming, musically adept if a little quirky, and with a splendid little shuffle monkey that chucks random tracks at me like a hail of ripe bananas.

This weekend, however, things started to go a bit awry. The shuffle monkey was as fit as ever, but suddenly I couldn't select and play a specific album, artist or genre. Indeed, any attempt to do so caused the music box summarily to turn itself off. Frustrated and a bit annoyed (remember, this toy is barely 3 months old), I turn to the leaflet marked "Troubleshooting".

Hmmm! This seems to be written for the Very Hard of Thinking:

Symptom: There is no sound
Cause/Remedy: The volume is set to zero - turn the volume up.

Finally I find mention of a reset button. So I press it. Several times. Nothing happens. At least, nothing to fix my problem.

So I turn to Pony's so called "support Web site". There I find a "Troubleshooting" FAQ. This is basically the same as the aforementioned leaflet. Grrrrrr!

After a bit of ferreting about, I find a way to submit an email support query. Then I wait.

Two days later, I get this reply:

Thank you for your recent e-mail received on 10/05/2009 08.26 PM.

I am sorry to learn of the problems that you are experiencing with your Sony WALKMAN Pony TALKMAN.

Unfortunately, beyond normal FAQ's and troubleshooting found on our website, it is not possible for Sony Pony to offer diagnosis via e-mail and with this in mind, we would suggest that your product is forwarded to Sony Pony Central Service who repair this category of product. For full instructions on how to do this, please go to www.sonypony.co.uk.

Go to the Support section
Select Repair Service
Select the Relevant Article

For products that are repaired at Sony Pony Central Service, you will be asked to fill out the on-line Repair Registration form.

This area on the website provides instructions on how to send your product in for repair and gives fixed cost repair prices where relevant.

I trust that this information is of some help. In the event of any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Yours sincerely
Blah Blah Blah

W!

T!

F!

The depths of wrongness in this email are so profound, I don't know where to start! Why the devil do they have an email enquiry function if they're not going to do anything with the damned query when they get it? And "fixed cost repair prices" - it's less than 3 month old, dammit: I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for it to be fixed, not to mention postage to get it back to their Central "Service". Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

As I fulminate, Best Beloved remarks, "I had a prob a bit like that with my i-pod - think I had to press a combination of buttons together to fix it". Nothing ventured, nothing gained - so I press the "Back" and "Option" buttons together and hold them for a couple of seconds. Job done! Full functionality is restored. I am happy.

And Pony can FAQ off.

Stop FAQing about

Back in February I succumbed to the hype and bought an MP3 player: for the sake of argument, we'll call it a Pony Talkman. It's a nice little thing (much like me, really) - slim, elegant, charming, musically adept if a little quirky, and with a splendid little shuffle monkey that chucks random tracks at me like a hail of ripe bananas.

This weekend, however, things started to go a bit awry. The shuffle monkey was as fit as ever, but suddenly I couldn't select and play a specific album, artist or genre. Indeed, any attempt to do so caused the music box summarily to turn itself off. Frustrated and a bit annoyed (remember, this toy is barely 3 months old), I turn to the leaflet marked "Troubleshooting".

Hmmm! This seems to be written for the Very Hard of Thinking:

Symptom: There is no sound
Cause/Remedy: The volume is set to zero - turn the volume up.

Finally I find mention of a reset button. So I press it. Several times. Nothing happens. At least, nothing to fix my problem.

So I turn to Pony's so called "support Web site". There I find a "Troubleshooting" FAQ. This is basically the same as the aforementioned leaflet. Grrrrrr!

After a bit of ferreting about, I find a way to submit an email support query. Then I wait.

Two days later, I get this reply:

Thank you for your recent e-mail received on 10/05/2009 08.26 PM.

I am sorry to learn of the problems that you are experiencing with your Sony WALKMAN Pony TALKMAN.

Unfortunately, beyond normal FAQ's and troubleshooting found on our website, it is not possible for Sony Pony to offer diagnosis via e-mail and with this in mind, we would suggest that your product is forwarded to Sony Pony Central Service who repair this category of product. For full instructions on how to do this, please go to www.sonypony.co.uk.

Go to the Support section
Select Repair Service
Select the Relevant Article

For products that are repaired at Sony Pony Central Service, you will be asked to fill out the on-line Repair Registration form.

This area on the website provides instructions on how to send your product in for repair and gives fixed cost repair prices where relevant.

I trust that this information is of some help. In the event of any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Yours sincerely
Blah Blah Blah

W!

T!

F!

The depths of wrongness in this email are so profound, I don't know where to start! Why the devil do they have an email enquiry function if they're not going to do anything with the damned query when they get it? And "fixed cost repair prices" - it's less than 3 month old, dammit: I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for it to be fixed, not to mention postage to get it back to their Central "Service". Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

As I fulminate, Best Beloved remarks, "I had a prob a bit like that with my i-pod - think I had to press a combination of buttons together to fix it". Nothing ventured, nothing gained - so I press the "Back" and "Option" buttons together and hold them for a couple of seconds. Job done! Full functionality is restored. I am happy.

And Pony can FAQ off.

Oh, the sun shines bright ...

We're planning a trip to the pictures this afternoon/evening, to see Slumdog Millionaire. I'm not completely sold on this visit. Granted, the films had great reviews and stuff, what with Golden Globes and all that ballyhoo, but I've been put off Danny Boyle somewhat by the execrable Sunshine, a film that, for me, redefined that famous old phrase or saying 'tedious load of pseudo-theologicalising bullshit'. Fingers crossed that Slumdog doesn't go down the same route.

But maybe it's not Danny Boyle that's the problem: maybe it's films with Sunshine in the title. After all I did pretty much despise Little Miss Sunshine. And don't get me started on all the reasons why I think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is really, really not a towering work of genius, but rather a derivative, imagination-free, maundering yawn-fest of epic proportions.

Good job no-one's ever offered to take me to see The Sunshine Boys.

Mile Oak, Mile Oak

I took this photograph by accident. We were on the 1A, going home to Roy's parents' house in Mile Oak after a day shopping in Brighton just after Christmas. I was snapping away on the bus, almost randomly, not bothering to check the exposure or focussing or any of that technical malarky. When I looked at what I'd taken there was, as you might imagine, an awful lot of dross - but there was also this, which I think is pretty groovy.

"To live at all is miracle enough"

Like many folks, I discovered Mervyn Peake as a result of reading Lord of the Rings. Not, of course, that Peake's writing in any way resembles Tolkein's. It was simply that in 1969 there was little in the way of 'follow-on' literature once LOTR had hooked you into literature fantastical.

I'm not sure I even liked the Gormenghast stuff when I first read it - the baroque grotesqueries of Peake's world weren't really my cup of tea. But it was fashionable to be enamoured and so I claimed to be, following up on the 'trilogy' with the (infinitely poorer) Mr Pye and the nonsense poems Rhymes Without Reason. And gradually, what had begun as a mild flirtation turned into something a bit more serious. I read his wife Maeve's biography A World Away and learned that he was as much of an artist and illustrator as he was a novelist and poet (if not more so). So I searched out collections of his drawings and copies of stuff he'd illustrated and it was the art, rather than the writing, that I came to love. One particular drawing summed up for me the utter genius of Mervyn Peake; it's a drawing of Maeve's head in profile, lightly sketched in pencil in a way that is both spare and intricate, a kind of delicate, whispered drawing that still takes my breath away every time I look at it. I've tried to find the picture on tinternet but with no luck, so you'll just have to take my word that it is a thing of wonder.

I loved his book illustrations too (there is no better Treasure Island or Alice in Wonderland in my opinion) and bought what I could, both new and secondhand. I've ended up with quite a reasonable collection of Peake-abilia, some of which I've pored over, some I've barely opened. As with many of my fancies, this one came and went - I no longer seek out the published works, avidly read every biography and newspaper or magazine retrospective, or trek off to exhibitions. But, like all old loves, Mervyn Peake has a place still in my heart. Which is why, on our recent trip to Sussex, Husband and I went to visit his grave in Burpham churchyard:

From Burpham Church and Mervyn Peake's Gravestone

The encounter made me a bit sad, as much for the loss of the person I was when I was a 'fan' as for any other reason. Which is also the way of old loves, I think, to remind us of past selves who were younger, brighter, more enthusiastic, more passionate, but also more confused, less self-assured, less confident of our tastes and affiliations. I don't really miss that old me - I really like what the intervening years have wrought of me. And I honour the small but important part Mervyn Peake plays in that continuing process.

From Persepolis to Damascus

Roy is a big fan of comics and graphic novels, as those of you who read his recent blog post and/or attended the session it advertised will know. I, however, am not. I don't really 'get' graphic novels - I look at those nine-panel grids of somewhat hectic pictures and wonder where all the words went. I know it is as possible to read the text of pictures as it is any other text, but somehow I don't feel I have the knack. So it was with some misgivings that I picked up my latest book group reading, the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

I already had the book in my possession, having bought it a couple of years ago from a comics shop in Brighton. Roy was busy gathering together a stack of items and I wanted something to rest my eyes on, and a comic book about a girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution seemed a novel antidote to the long-underpants-style stuff in the rest of the shop. So I bought it, took it home, read a few pages, left it on the bedside table and moved on, still unconvinced.

This week I picked it up again, not really expecting very much. But, quite suddenly, I 'got' it. The almost-crude, blocky illustrations of the text began to reveal for me multi-layered depths of meaning in much the same way that a line of poetry does, and with the same immediacy. Sure, a written text could have conveyed the same information, but in the time taken to read the words that immediate understanding of the situation and its emotional load would, I think, have been lost.

So here I am, a convert to the world of picture story-telling. This is not to say that I now think graphic novels are 'better' than traditional ones. For me nothing can beat the long-term immersion in another world that a really good read gives you. But, as I have said, I think the graphic novel is more analogous to poetry than it is to the traditional novel, or to film, a medium with which it is also frequently compared. It seems to invite more opportunities to fill in the gaps and thus leave more space for the reader to interpret (or misinterpret?) the action.

Good job Christmas is coming, cos Persepolis 2 is on my wish list.

Mister Roy says ...

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now. Use the closest, regardless of what it is.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions somewhere - blog, facebook, etc.

Here's mine:

Cosmographia introductio was accompanied by a globe on which was marked the continent 'America') and a large map of the world 'containing the islands and countries recently discovered by the Spaniard Americus Vespucius in the western sea' - from Mercator: the man who mapped the planet by Nicholas Crane

I hear music, but there's no-one there

Here's a little something I nicked from kinkywolfgang on The Word blog

How to Create Your Debut Album

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

If you want to do this again, you'll hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.

3 - Go to flickr's "explore the last seven days" http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that's your debut album.

So, pop-pickers, may I draw your attention to my latest opus:

Vistilia

To argue about them



Now you try.

A holiday, a holiday, and the first one of the year ...

When I was 17, Miss Webb took the A Level French group to Paris. This was an occasion of many firsts in my life: first trip abroad, first holiday away from parents, first stay in a hotel, first flight in a plane, and and so on. It was not, however, my first experience of unrequited love: that had happened when I was five and David threw my valentine's card in the bin without even reading it. And that pretty much set the tone of my relationship with lurv for the next decade or so.

Anyway, on the Paris trip the object of my moonstruck gazing was Richard. He - tall, dark and fairly handsome - was however largely oblivious of me - small, mouse and fairly gruesome (it took me a while to grow into my beauty but I did, in the end) - choosing instead to set his cap at my roommate Julie of the dark ringlets and womanly curves (in retrospect, I can see his point).

However, he and I did discover a mutual love of Curved Air (though in his case, I think it was more a love of Sonja Kristina than the band in toto) and fell to talking about music in general. And it was thus that I learned for the first time of Fairport Convention. Richard loved them with an all-consuming passion and, in order to give me a taste of fairporty goodness, taught me the words to Matty Groves. Yes, all the words - well, we were in Paris for a whole week.

When we got home, I went out and bought History of and a lifelong love of folk music was begun.

So I went to Paris hoping for a snog, but instead I got this great, rich, wide musical tradition. I think I got the better part of the bargain.

Cheers Richard.

Meanwhile in Emmerdale ... (4:2 haiasI)

... Dopey Jo, a formerly feisty young woman whom lurv has rendered mindlessly unregarding of her own safety, was finally pushed too far by her meat-fisted lunk of a husband, Andy the Batterer last night.  An unfortunate altercation in the barn, whence Jo had fled for 'safety' (seemingly heedless of the fact that Andy has a propensity to burn alive in such buildings the women he loves) ended with the Batterer battered, or at least impaled on a nasty, sharp piece of farm equipment ...

... thus proving that Jo really needs to reread her Bible.

... all the dead Christmas trees ...

The Unprofessionals

When the worst thing happens,
That uproots the future,
That you must live for every hour of your future,

They come,
Unorganized, inarticulate, unprofessional;

They come sheepishly, sit with you, holding hands,
From tea to tea, from Anadin to Valium,
Sleeping on put-you-ups, answering the phone,
Coming in shifts, spontaneously,

Talking sometimes,
About wallflowers, and fishing, and why
Dealing with Kleenex and kettles,
Doing the washing up and the shopping,

Like civilians in a shelter, under bombardment,
Holding hands and sitting it out
Through the immortality of all the seconds,
Until the blunting of time,

         U A Fanthorpe  (1995) Safe as houses.
            Calstock: Peterloo Poets

Emperor's new Chrome

Had a bit of a go with Chrome today, just to see what all the fuss is about.

Frankly, it'll have to work a damn sight harder to win me away from the mighty Fox.

Bordering on the ridiculous

Ever eager to escape the thrall of that specky bloke, I have elected to eschew Photoshop in favour of GIMP for the purposes of gussying up some of m' photos.

So, software downloaded and installed, I hied me to Borders in Churchill Square in search of a manual or two. Checked the (as usual, monstrously untidy) shelves - no manuals visibly (though rank untidiness made visibility difficult). Accosted sales assistant - sales assistant, haughty and dismissive, responded in a manner that suggested that I (a) am an idiot for daring to want such an arcane item and (b) should be horsewhipped for daring to waste his precious time with such an outre request.

He could, he lukewarmed, probably order something in if I really wanted it. No thanks, says I, I'll get it from Amazon (which, of course, I probably won't, as they are running dogs of capitalism, but he doesn't know that and it gave me a frisson of pleasure to toss this threat in his haughty and dismissive teeth). And so saying, I turned on my heel and consigned Borders to my (increasingly long) list of shops I boycott because they are utterly rubbish.

Then I went to Waterstones. They didn't have any GIMP manuals either, but at least they had the decency to be humble and apologetic about their shortcomings. So I bought coffee and cake and two expensive books about photographic technique.

See, that's how a good bookshop works - they treat me nice, I spend lots of money.

And they gave me extra loyalty points for using my own carrier bag.

That said, I did go back to Borders this morning for breakfast in the Starbucks concession ... but I didn't buy any books, honest!

What ever happened to ...

... The Temple City Kazoo Orchestra

Of spozhinki (7th August)

To the middle of August on the entire Slav earth concludes harvest, hence and the name of holiday - Spozhinki/dozhniki. Last sheaf they reap silently in order not to disturb the spirit of field, which migrates in it.

Thank you Babelfish. And thank you Russian Calendar of Holidays.

The wonderful English language

It's something of a marvel to me that, in the compass of one small island, a single concept (in this case 'the narrow passageway between two sets of buildings') is expressed in so many different words, to wit:

ginnell/gennell/jinnell,
gitty/jitty,
wynde,
twitten,
twitchell,
snicket,
snickleway,
enog,
cutting,
fold

... and many more *with jazz hands*

Oh play me a blue song and fade down the light

You know how it is. You're walking past the radio on a Sunday morning (or a Friday, if you're a lazy slacker like me), a bit of Radio 4 accidentally gets in your ears and, before you know where you are, it's out with the paper and pencil and you're committing your carefully considered 8 discs (plus luxury item and book other than the Bible or Shakespeare) to paper just in case you ever get famous enough to be asked to participate in a long-running British radio institution!

Or is that just me?

Anyway, having long ago failed to narrow down the possibilities of my Desert Island Discs Vanilla to under 1000, I've recently taken to categorising them (being an ex-librarian) into subgroups: Desert Island Folk, Desert Island Patti Smith, Desert Island Classical, Desert Isalnd Kazoo Orchestras and so on.

So today I offer for your entertainment Desert Island Weepies – the eight records which, above all others, make me blart my eyes up (or “cry” as I believe you call it on this planet) every time I hear them . If you have tears to shed, prepare to shed them now:

1. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning – Richard Thompson Not the whole song (though it is damned good) but just the bit where he sings “I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome/ swooping down from heaven to carry me home”. Even typing it now brings a lump to my throat.
2. Bloody Motherf***ing A**hole – Martha Wainwright She sings the refrain with such desolate passion – gets me every time
3. Mama Hated Diesels So Bad – Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen So corny, so cheesy – a real quesadilla of a track – but so very, very touching once you get past all that.
4. Bridge Over Troubled Water – the Johnny Cash version Not got much time for the original, which is far too sweet for my taste, but Johnny Cash plays a blinder and you just know he's singing it for June.
   
5. No Man's Land – June Tabor Quintessential WWI story, quintessential English folk voice. I love June Tabor so much I want to have her children.
6. Bandera Del Sol – Tish Hinajosa Not all my weepy songs are sad songs. This one is beautiful, triumphant, celebratory and makes you want to go “yeah!” very, very loudly
7. Beneath the Southern Cross – Patti Smith What can I say - she is a god, I am her acolyte and this makes me cry.
8. Individual – Rose Kemp 17-year-old scion of folk royalty sings about being as good as anybody else: “Every girl wishes she was/ thin like all the other girls and / pretty like all the other girls and/ smart like all the other girls are”. My own story exactly.

Luxury item: neverending box of tissues. Book: The Nation's Favourite Poems for Funerals. And bring on the blartathon.

OK, I've shown you mine, now you show me yours. You know you want to.

In clubland

Back in 1970 when I was 15, and the only regular entertainment available to us was the weekly Youth Club discotheque in Blackheath, my friend Dangerous Hazel got wind of something special happening in Dudley: a club, she said, a club for people like us - weirdos, prog rockers and crypto-hippies - somewhere we could get to hear stuff other than the chart-toppers and bubblegum pop that was the Youth Club's staple fare.

It took her a bit of digging but finally Hazel tracked it down. It was (and still is) called JB's and, at that point in its history, was based in the clubhouse at Dudley Town football ground. Not long after, it moved up the town to the back of a gents' outfitters near Top Church and, for the next five-or-so years, this became our musical home-from-home.

On Thursday nights there was a disco of sorts, but without the dancing. Fridays and Saturdays were band nights. In those five glorious years I must have seen hundreds of bands, most of whom I've forgotten now, but some standout gigs remain in the memory banks - Richard and Linda Thompson several times (even before they were married and Linda was still Peters), Dr Feelgood at least twice, Stan Webb's Broken Glass and Chicken Shack, legendary bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (yes, I now all bluesmen get called legendary, but this pair really, really were). People say the mid 70s were rubbish for music, but not from where I was sitting, they weren't.

There was memorable drinking to go with the memorable music. The beer of choice was Newcastle Brown, drunk from the bottle. One night John Woodhouse peeled the label off his bottle and gave it to me as a memento - I kept it for years, sellotaped to a peice of card in a box with all my concert tickets from Birmingham Town Hall and the stubs of two joss sticks from a Quintessence concert. At that point in my young life, though, I was not much of a beer drinker, preferring the more girly delights of port-and-lemon (10p) - the infamous post-Sonny-Terry-and-Brownie-McGhee port-and-lemon-bath-staining incident did not please The Mater one bit.

Anyway, in 1976 I headed off to university, discovered folk music, let punk pass me by, started to feel I was 'too old' for that kind of thing and lost touch with The Club (as my particular group of regulars called it). Even when I moved back to the Black Country after university, I never re-established my JB's habit.

I still miss it though.

And I did perform there once, myself, in the early 80s, as a member of Dudley and District CND's Street Theatre troupe - I think the audience was just slightly bigger than the company, but not much.

Hello Dolly

Just reviewing some of my snaps from last year and I came across this, which has to be one of the oddest dolls I've ever seen:





Only in Southport!

... and music, music, music

Because of my great age, I no longer find it easy to access Young People's Things like new bands and stuff. I try listening to popular music combos on the wireless but am more-than-somewhat offoput by the enormous amounts of inter-song wittering that seems to pass for entertainment these days. I mean, John Peel, taciturn though he may sometimes have sounded, was never really a man of few words but he knew when to shut up and play the record, unlike today's mindless yahoos who seem to believe we have tickled our cat's whiskers for hours just to hear their mindless babblings (and, yes, I do number Edge Hill alumnus Stuart Maconie, for all his often excellent taste in music, among the number of the babblers).

So [pausing to draw breath] ...

... where does an aging listener turn for her fix of new beat-musique when the trusty transistor lets her down. Well, lately, I've been doing rather well with cover discs from The Word. Most of the stuff is fairly pleasant (though some is pretty unlistenable) and occasionally there's an absolute gem - like the mighty Decemberists, who've featured twice, and my current keep-playing-track-over-and-over-til-Husband-wants-to-throw-cd-out-of-car-window favourite The Mountain Goats, who I now like so much I've bunged a YouTube thingy in this post, so you can all like them too ('cept you've probably known about them for y' know, like, years! and now think I'm hopelessly jejune for even mentioning them:

The Mountain Goats - Sax Rohmer #1

Reading frenzy

One of the great delights of our two-week summer holiday (which begins at noon tomorrow, so I'm all a-twitter with barely-suppressed excitement) is the opportunity it affords me for a prolonged encounter with fiction, instead of the diet of theology, women's studies and queer theory that usually occupies my reading muscles. Two years ago Best Beloved turned me on to the mighty Joe Abercrombie ("Mighty Joe" - tee-hee) and his fabulously grimy, violent and morally ambiguous First Law Trilogy. That year we read part 1, last year it was the eagerly-anticpated second volume and this year we'll polish off volume three. Cos he paid for them out of his own pocket money, Husband gets first dibs, while I caper round his feet, whimpering pathetically "oo, oo, have you finished yet, have ya, huh, huh?" - but it's worth the wait and no mistake. As I say, I don't get time to read much fiction so when I do it has to be good - and this stuff is absolutely the bees' knees, the ants' earrings and the wasps' nipples - so get on down to your local independent book shop and try it for yourself.

New toys

Umm! Have just added a facebook app that lets me post to one or more blogs simultaneously. Too good to be true. Well, we'll see.

Cor, brilliant!

Our mate Peter has been nominated for a Locus, in the non-fiction category, for his book Shadows of the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe.

What a star!

Placeholder

I know I haven't posted for a while, mainly because when anything worthy of note happens Best Beloved nicks off with the story first and posts it in one of his many,many blogs (well, three then) - as he did with The Tale of the Ghost Campsite this past weekend.

Back here in World of Jen, I am in the midst of the run-up to our annual conference at work, which is a trial to me, being that unhappy work-combo of Boring and Stressful, i.e. all pain and no gain. On the good side, however, conference is only two days away from Summer Holiday - two weeks in Scotland and all the tablet I can eat. So, huzzah for conference and huzzah squared for holidays and huzzah to the power 10 for tablet (or wa-hey, as I believe Johnny Scotsman would have it).

Keep taking the tablet

Scotland is a mighty fine country, with splendid scenery, friendly inhabitants and fabulous food. And amongst the finest of its epicurean delights is tablet, a kind of grainy, soft, vanilla-y fudge that tastes like heaven. Knowing that I find it hard to resist, m' dear friend and colleague Claire, fresh from a short break in the north, has put a not-insubstantial package of tablet on my desk. By this I know that she is indeed a creature from the darkest nether regions of hell and has absolutely no respect for my girlish figure.

Guess I'd better just eat it then and give over moaning.

Mmmmm - tablet!

Josef Stawinoga, the Wolverhampton ring road tramp

In our old home town of Wolverhampton, on the central reservation of the busy ring road, a man called Josef Stawinoga (but answering to the name Fred) used to live. To have called him homeless, or a tramp, or a vagrant, wouid have been something of a misnomer, for all of these terms suggest degrees of rootlessness and Josef was not rootless. He had a home. His home was the central reservation of the Wolverhampton Ring Road.

The way I heard it (and therefore none of what follows may be true) Fred was a Polish airman whose traumatic wartime experiemces had left him with a phobia of being indoors. Afraid that the Nazis, or the Communists, might drag him off to some hideous imprisonment, he preferred the uncertain sanctuary of the roadside.

He was subjected of course to the violence that is visited upon all outcasts. But there was kindness too, and even reverence. An article about him in The Guardian stated:

Some of Wolverhampton's Asians revere him as a holy man who has shunned all worldly possessions. Several regularly pay their respects. Every morning for the past 13 years, a Sikh woman has travelled six miles to leave a flask of hot tea and a sandwich outside the tent. Another Indian woman appeared one afternoon asking the hermit to pray for her family, who had vetoed her choice of husband.

Like Ormskirk's Rollerblading Grandad (though totally unlike in personal circumstances) Fred is an iconic figure, even after death - a symbol of the dauntlessness of the human spirit. And though I would not wish Fred's mental anguish on anyone, I like to think that Wolverhampton (and the world) was the richer because he was in it.

Rest In Peace, Josef Stawinoga.

The ring-road tramp who's become a cult hero thanks to Facebook
Ring road tramp Fred dies
Fans mourn ring road tramp


Technorati Tags: ring road tramp, wolverhampton, josef stawinoga, wolverhampton ring road tramp

The drain now standing ...

"In the middle of all this [in Jeddah] I chance upon the nostalgic sight of a manhole cover made by Brickhouse of Dudley, impressively inscribed 'The Pennine Drain Cover'." from Around the World in 80 Days by Michael Palin

Of all the spoor of the industrial West Midlands that litters our planet, none is more immediately visible and instantly recognisible to me than the Brickhouse Dudley drain cover. These sturdy and unhandsome lumps of iron are embedded into the surface of streets and pavements in almost every village, town and city in the UK, a permanent reminder to me of my beloved Black Country, the home where my heart is.

As I said in a previous post, The Black Country, according to Wikkipedia, is "a loosely-defined area of the English West Midlands conurbation, to the north and west of Birmingham, and to the south and east of Wolverhampton, around the South Staffordshire coalfield". But them's just words. For me, it's a huge part of my identity. Being from the Black Country is more important to me than being a woman or being white or being British. I have a very definite Black Country accent, sometime weak, sometimes very broad, depending on who I'm with, and I wouldn't lose it for the world. It's just bostin, mate.

So, to honour my roots and celebrate the 'iron in my soul' that is the Brickhouse Dudley drain cover, I have started a photoblog called Democracy and Proper Drains - tracking the spoor of the industrial West Midlands across the UK (and beyond?).

The evidence

Here are some con photos.

Four days on Raisa

Got home yesterday afternoon, after a brief post-con interlude with friends in Maidenhead, and now I feel the need to reflect on the whole puzzling Orbital experience. Puzzling because, in the main, I should not have enjoyed this, and the two other cons I have attended, anywhere near as much as I did since I am not in any way A Fan.

This is not to say that I don't like science fiction because I do, very much, and have done since my teens when I read first the excellent John Wyndham and then the less-than-excellent-and-extraordinarily-sexist Edmund Cooper, in some quantity. Fantasy too has been a occassional addition to my literary diet, beginning inevitably with LoTR at the age of about 14 and followed by a looooooooooooong dry spell until Husband introduced me to Tad Williams in 1990. However, I feel that merely liking the stuff and being A Fan of the stuff are two very different things. I can barely remember a thing about a book/film/TV episode/series once I have stopped interacting with it. For me it's all about short-term gratification - read/watch and move on. I can't recount series numbers, episode titles or plot details. I feel no sense of ownership of the characters or their millieu. If a book or episode is bad, I'm likely just to stop engaging with that author/series rather than to agonise about how the writers/producers have let us down. If characters do things that I didn't expect and don't particularly like, I may grump about it a bit but I accept that that's the way it goes with fiction sometimes. For Fans, I feel, things are very different. Which is not to say that Fan-dom is bad, just that I am different from A Fan and A Fan is different from me.

So why do I enjoy conventions so much when the whole premise of the event is that it serves Fans, a group to which I demonstrably don't belong? Answer is, I don't know. Since I am also not a particularly gregarious person, it can't be the opportunity to meet lots of people. I go to the occassional panel but am frequently confused and nonplussed by the content. I don't read an awful lot of fiction at the moment so have few favourite authors whose autographs I would seek out. I'm far too shy to get dressed up for the Masquerade. I did get involved in running the Easter day service this year, which was terrific but not unstressful.

I guess part of what I enjoy is seeing my partner and friends having such a good time - four days in the happy company of these people whom I love, admire and respect is no small treat. And I like hotel life, the self-containedness of it all, the slightly off-world feel*, the free shower caps. And when I do summon up the nerve to make conversation, I always find that very rewarding. Ultimately, I guess, it's about being part of something, no matter how peripherally, that matters to other beings. So while I a not A Fan, not part of The Tribe that Neil Gaiman talked about on Sunday, I like to think I am something of a fellow traveller.

In the world of transgender, where my research interests lie, there is a term SOFFA, standing for Significant Others, Family, Friends and Allies. Inspired by this, but not wanting to colonise someone else's discourse, I name myself a SOFTy - Significant Other/Fellow Traveller. Maybe at the next convention, if there are any other SOFTy around, we can get a drink together in the Real Ale Bar and swap stories about what it's like on our planet. Check us out with your bioscanners as you pass by - I think you'll find us harmless.

* like Raisa, while the world outside the Radisson Edwardian was harsh and forbidding, inside there was everything for pleasure!

The best bits ...

... so far:

• Joe Abercrombie (that boy will go far, mark my words)
• Frank Wu's masterly, funny and moving exposition on the resurrection in this morning's service (and he gave me a dvd - cheers chief!)
• being read to by Neil Gaiman (not alone, more's the pity - though I agree with Husband that Gaiman's leather jacket is a bit dodgy)
  
• a really good argument about the Death of the Author in the Real Ale Bar
• hotteeeze self-heating foot warmers
• men in kilts
• Adam Roberts being secretly funny
• the first half of China Mieville's exposition - and arguing about the second half later
• a nice (if expensive) pot of darjeeling in the Polo Lounge
• magic eye drops

And there's still 24 hours to go.

I like cons.

Breaking orbit

So, the time to depart for Orbital fast approches and the dreaded task of packing must be faced - the shorter the trip, the greater the stress for this clothing commitophobe! Will it be warm or cold, damp or dry? Should I take trousers or skirts and, if the latter, what colour tights? How many cardigans and pairs of shoes? Shoes! What about boots? Which boots - the red, the black, the spanish ones with buttons up the sides, the pearly purple docs? Arrrrghh!

Too. Many. Decisions.

Head!

Will!

Explode!

Small objects of desire

Am thinking of getting one of these.

Buy now or hold out for the 16gb model that is bound to come out about two weeks after I take delivery.

Ah, technology - don't you just love it!