Thinking of Wittering

Stop FAQing about

2009-05-14T19:29:00.000Z

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.~~sony~~pony.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

2009-05-14T18:39:00.000Z

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

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.~~sony~~pony.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

Oh, the sun shines bright ...

2009-01-17T12:10:00.002Z

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

2009-01-09T17:14:00.000Z

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"

2009-01-07T13:06:00.001Z

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

2008-12-06T19:26:00.001Z

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 ...

2008-12-03T21:03:00.000Z

* 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

2008-10-11T14:05:00.001Z

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 ...

2008-10-10T09:24:00.003Z

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)

2008-10-08T15:36:00.001Z

... 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 ...

2008-10-04T15:56:00.001Z

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

2008-09-03T18:53:00.001Z

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

2008-08-27T20:44:00.000Z

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 ...

2008-08-12T08:11:00.001Z

... The Temple City Kazoo Orchestra

Of spozhinki (7th August)

2008-08-06T09:12:00.002Z

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

2008-08-05T12:20:00.004Z

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

2008-08-03T16:19:00.009Z

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:

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.
Bloody Motherf***ing A**hole – Martha Wainwright She sings the refrain with such desolate passion – gets me every time
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.
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.
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.
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
Beneath the Southern Cross – Patti Smith What can I say - she is a god, I am her acolyte and this makes me cry.
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

2008-08-01T14:47:00.001Z

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

2008-07-28T16:02:00.002Z

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

2008-07-27T18:47:00.003Z

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

2008-06-05T19:17:00.003Z

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

2008-06-01T18:13:00.001Z

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!

2008-05-21T10:06:00.001Z

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

2008-05-21T10:03:00.001Z

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

2008-04-24T13:39:00.001Z

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

2008-04-02T15:31:00.005Z

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 ...

2008-04-02T12:04:00.003Z
"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

2008-03-28T14:15:00.001Z

Here are some con photos.

Four days on Raisa

2008-03-27T18:34:00.001Z

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 ...

2008-03-27T17:16:00.001Z

... 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

2008-03-18T16:30:00.001Z

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

2008-03-04T13:03:00.001Z

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!

Le weekend

2008-01-21T16:11:00.001Z

Got back home lateish yesterday after a weekend of not-unalloyed joy in Brighton. Best Beloved and I both have Aged Parents who are finding their twilight years a bit of a misery, as a result not of any major illnesses but rather a growing list of pretty-much untreatable minor stuff, like persistent headaches and dodgy musculo-skeletals, coupled with somewhat of a lack of friends and hobbies. Needless to say, BB and I thus find that visiting with said APs can be slightly spirit-dampening affairs.

Having said that, we did find time this weekend past to: have three very enjoyable meals out; spend an inordinate amount of money on books; exchange presents left over from Christmas (including a rather dandy flexible keyboard on which I am now typing - so rugged that you can wash it under the tap, apparently); and buy enough material to make a couple of pairs of trousers. So not-unalloyed joy though it may have been, it was also not-unalloyed sadness.

Long-livers and floating kidneys

2008-01-15T13:29:00.001Z

While Husband embarked on the first leg of his four-year walk to (a) Brighton and (b) the age of fifty, I headed down south for a bit of a visit to m' dear friend Ben the Curate, a woman born to the dog-collar if ever there was one (and not in a bad way). We had a very girly time, eating far too much chocolate, searching for shoe bargains in Leamington (Ben 0, Me 1 [a rather fetching pair of black court shoes with ickle bows on the front for a mere £12]) and watching the best part of season 3 of Scrubs. Thanks to a rather fine restaurant in Warwick, I was also able to satisfy a lifetime's love of liver, a foodstuff that is beautiful when cooked properly but is very easy to cook badly. This time it was cooked to perfection with pancetta and mash, and I ate so much of it and the pudding that followed that it felt like my eyeballs were floating on food.

And so, combining matters eccumenical and culinary/physiological, here is one of my dad's favourite jokes.

Parishioner: Vicar, would you pray for my sister's floating kidney.
Vicar: I'm sorry, but I don't think that would be appropriate.
Parishioner (chastened): Why not? After all, you prayed for all the long livers last week.

Oh, how we larfed!

Nice cuppa tea for you?

2007-11-29T08:05:00.001Z

Am off to the hospital this morning. Just a minor thing but it involves a general anasthetic, so no food or drink for me until it's all over - which is why I now need a cup of tea and a bit of toast like I've never needed them in my life before!

What larks, eh, Pip!

Lost for words

2007-11-08T21:05:00.001Z

So here's a thing. In our house we have not one, not two, but three Scrabble sets - a small travel set which is my personal favourite since the letters clip onto the squares and therefore cannot be dislodged by a player in a fit of pique; a big deluxe model with a turntable and all the trimmings; and a itsy-bitsy magnetic set that we frequently take with us on holiday but rarely actually play with - and yet, Husband and I sit in the same room, laptops on our knees playing Scrabulous on Facebook rather than making the effort to set up an actual real-life game. Tis madness, I tell ye!

Still, at least we're not wasting eye-power on the telly.

Reasons to love the interweb

2007-10-31T17:15:00.001Z

Have just been messing about on orkut and have found this delightful piece of prose, describing a community called "Feminism is Exerbating Bulsht" (yes, really):

Feminism for long has been considered the poster boy of the upliftment of women and the betterment of society but we are finally realising that it is the plagues upon the ready that's threatening to undo all good things as we know them.

Fortunately for the literate world, this gem of a community has only 3 members. Bless!

Meanwhile in Emmerdale ...

2007-10-19T15:04:00.001Z

... Jack "Born to be Riled" Sugden reels from the fallout of his exploding house - cats are out of bags, pigeons have come home to roost and pipers are about to be paid (probably in dead cats and pigeons) as one of his fire-starting offspring heads for chokey and the other yet again seeks to blame everyone else for her own wanton disregard for the safety and well-being of others (a trait she shares with, among others, our own dear ex-prime-minister Mr Tony Blair).

Still, at least the Woolpack didn't burn down this time.

Can't hold a candle to Turzo Velas

2007-10-07T11:11:00.001Z

One of the many delights of our recent holiday was a visit to a little village called Turzo to buy candles. Turzo is a tiny place - not much more than ten houses and a church, plus the Turzo Velas candle factory and shop. And what a shop! It's full of the most amazing candles, all looking gorgeous and smelling like heaven. Impossible to describe it adequately, but their website will give you a ghost of an impression. And I've put up a few pix of the shop and village on Facebook.

Also, the shop man was great - dead friendly and helpful. Plus he spoke great English, which is always a humbling experience.

Stopping at Psycho Normal's House

2007-10-05T16:04:00.001Z

Husband has written with his usual eloquence about our visit to the utterly lovely Casa Zalama. I meanwhile have posted a few pix of this little slice of heaven.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

2007-10-03T14:12:00.001Z

Sometimes I think it would be better not to go on holiday. I mean, you go, you have a fabulous time and then you come back to, well, normality I suppose. And in my case, normality means emails I should have answered weeks ago, a mountain of transcribing which never seems to diminish, a house and garden in sore need of some serious tidying and the inevitable mound of post-holiday washing.

Having said that, it was an unexpectedly top-notch holiday. Everything was more than a cut above our expectations - great lodgings, terrific location, nice little hire car, yummy (and girth-increasing) food, and a visit to the tomb of El Cid (actually the tomb itself isn't very exciting, but it's a bloody lovely cathedral).

The new camera did yeoman's service - 432 shots in all, of which probably about 40 are any good - not a bad average for me, I'd have to say. Selected shots will be available for viewing just as soon as Husband gives me the flickr password.

Blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles

2007-09-10T12:20:00.001Z

Over the years Husband and I have become occassionally-avid players of boardgames, favouring in particular those of a fantastic bent. Our first love was Talisman (1st edition* I think - the one where the expansion sets come in a wild variety of graphic styles and don't really fit together with the main board in any meaningful way) and we have enjoyed this in many locations with many different friends.

More recently we have become rather enamoured of Arkham Horror, a fabulously complex little beauty that has you battling co-operatively against a different one of H P Lovecraft's Great Old Ones each game. Yesterday we took on Nyarlathotep - a damned close-run thing in the end, what with one of us in the Assylum and two more barely clinging on to both sanity and stamina whilst battling hoards of nasties in the streets of Miskatonic University. With four of us in the game it took about 5 hours and many cups of tea to get the job done. Fortunately it all ended without loss of life, and a hearty and well-deserved curry was enjoyed by the victors.

* A fourth edition is due out in October - you can see an overblown and rather crap trailer for it, if you really want to waste eye-power in that way.

Who needs friends ...

2007-09-04T16:39:00.001Z

... when you've got this:

Visit Friends of Mister Roy

Yep, the world of Web 2.0 sucks me even further into its gaping maw as I now ning and twitter with the best of 'em.

Frank's funeral

2007-08-23T10:25:00.001Z

So, yesterday was the day of Frank's funeral and a hard day it was, but I think we gave him the best good-bye we could manage under the circumstances. My brother Ken oversaw the proceedings and friend Chris spoke with affecting wit of Frank's renaissance-man life, love of Merrydown cider and house full of musical gadgets (many of which he'd made himself), while later at the 'do' a friend from work explained the significance of pink shirts. Afterwards we talked of our beloved friend and of ourselves, swapping family news and gossip, talking about the easy stuff because the other stuff was just too hard.

And despite the utter tragedy of the whole affair, it was a day of strange, almost guilty, pleasures: meeting up with old friends, some of whom not seen for decades, and finding the old connections still intact despite my neglect; being back in my beloved Black Country and hearing my accent echoed back to me in many voices; taking tea and cake on Stourbridge High Street, familiar from the days when Roy used to live there but strangely unfamiliar too; driving through the country lanes of Shropshire, most beautiful county in England, and remembering it as our old stamping ground from the Wolverhampton days; and finally westering home up the M6 with a huge orange sun beside us and Blazin' Fiddles on the CD. Not putting the 'fun' in funeral exactly, but reminding us of our connection to life.

You've got a friend

2007-08-21T09:04:00.001Z

Husband has recently been fiddling around with Facebook in an effort to understand its appeal to the Young Folk. Not wanting to be left out I done got me one o' them critters m' self.

At first I thought the whole thing was a bit (a) fatuous (b) puerile and (c) pointless, but having played with it quite a bit when I should have been transcribing interviews or reading Very Hard Books I'm really beginning to warm to it.

Strangely, since Facebook is a so-called Social Networking Site, its appeal to me is directly related to my lifelong difficulty in making friends. Because I'm articulate and funny, people mistake me for an extrovert (if that binaried nomenclature has any real validity) when I am in fact a much stranger beast, an introvert in search of an audience. This is to say, I find the company of others both frightening and draining (the more so when they are strangers) but I'm driven to perform a version of myself to entertain these fearful entities, in order to feel part of the human race.

This need to 'dance my dance' has resulted in my keeping not one but four, count 'em, four blogs (all with pretty much identical content): A Lull in the Proceedings (LJ), Thinking of Wittering (blogger), The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other (wordpress) and Celia Johnson's Enormous Face (blog.co.uk). Lull was my first foray into the blogosphere and initially the LJ friending mechanism drove me to distraction. I longed for friends but could never decipher the protocols for making it happen. I'd gaze enviously at other people's friends lists, darkly muttering 'nobody loves me, everybody hates me, going down the garden to eat worms'. Things got so bad that I had to lay off the whole blog thing for a couple of years until I'd calmed down. It only got better when I realised what I was doing and came to appreciate that, as in fleshworld, I am a creature who requires a few, close friends and a big audience.

So where does Facebook fit in? Well, with the fear of other people comes the retincence, the feeling that any personal communication from me could only ever be regarded as an impertinence and an imposition. My habit is, therefore, to lose touch with people, even those I really like, rather than engender in them an imagined irritation. Facebook, however, with its poking and message walls, aquariums and gardens, allows me to send gentle and not-very-importunate reminders of my existence that require no more response than the occassional poke back to let me know I'm still human. Furthermore, its endless array of personality-divulging titivations, which inform the world of your favourite books, films, TV show, backpacking holidays, llama farms and so on, have enormous appeal for my Inner Performer.

So now, while I still think Facebook is fatuous and puerile, I no longer think it useless.

MySpace though - that's just ugly!

Plant problems

2007-08-20T08:43:00.001Z

It's a glum old day in the office this morning - everybody else is on holiday, so I am alone with just a fan heater and some ailing plants for company. My aloe vera plant, which was doing so well last year, has suddenly started to develop crispy brown bits. Could this mean it needs water? Odd, since it survived the last twelve-month on barely a teaspoon of liquid. Or am I perhaps overwatering? Eek - how do I tell? Add to this the fact that my trail-y creeper-y vine-y thing is looking a bit the worse for wear and only one conclusion is possible: I am NOT Good With Housplants.

Alternatively they might have Sick Office Syndrome. I do after all work in a location which requires cooling fans in the middle of winter and warming fan-heaters at the height of summer. Not the way to lessen our carbon footprint, is it chaps?

Something big in a small box

2007-08-17T10:00:00.001Z

Last week I wrote that my friend Frank's wife had died. Over the weekend Frank died too. Official cause of death is still to be determined but we all know he died of a broken heart.

I first met Frank (whose given name was Neil) when he was 16, so I would have been 18-ish. A friend of my little brother Ken, Frank was notable for his fierce intelligence, extraordinary skill with maths, mighty sense of humour, encyclopaedic knowledge of what we would now call indie music, and for having, at 16, a full beard which made him look older than most of his teachers.

When I left University in 1979 I was honoured to join the group of Ken's friends of which Frank was a part. Together the group made regular trips to The Trumpet in Bilston, sought out the weird and wonderful pubs of the Black Country, played hide-and-seek at midnight up the top of Clent and, because Frank was married at 18 and therefore had his own place, had many wonderful parties.

Even now Frank-isms litter my speech. Because of Frank I say 'Cheers Chief' (sometimes abbreviated to 'CC'), and 'awroight maaaaayt' (trans. 'Alright mate') in an exagerated Blackheath accent. Because of Frank I call underwear 'unterwegs', and quote one of the best jokes he, or anyone, ever made: 'Ah, the badger's sett ... but the weasel's still a bit runny'.

He shaped my musical tastes as well. With him I went to see The Fall, and The Residents (speculating in the pub afterwards that under those enormous eyeballs lurked Eric Clapton, George Harrison or other rock legends). He lent me bootlegs Elvis Costello tapes and introduced me to Little Feat. And because of Frank I listened far too many times to a rather odd piece of contemporary clasical music called The Sinking of the Titanic, which he used to play as a way of getting rid of people at the end of a party.

In the early 80s he invited me to sing in The Leisure Pets with him and Paul and the drum machine (called Ronnie) - I was pretty rubbish really but Frank let me keep on singing. So, fragments of his songs are part of my consciousness too: 'son, don't vote - they all make you wear funny coloured shirts'; 'something small in a big box'; 'pointless packaging'; and the drum machine programmed to sound like the steam hammer at Lench's chain works.

So, even though I haven't seen him since we moved north, there he is, fragments of Frank cropping up in everything I do - sadly missed but never forgotten.

Frank Skidmore
Rest in peace, m' dear old thing

Big head

2007-08-10T10:06:00.001Z

If you go here and watch the Short Cuts Documentary Video, you will eventually see me coming over all rhapsodic about Celia Johnson's enormous face. Rather confusingly, the preceding bit (shot in almost total darkenss as an accidental homage to Clint Eastwood) features one of our esteemed Film Studies Lecturers talking about the 1979 gang movie The Warriors and the doc is cut such that I appear to be talking about that film and not, as I actually was, Brief Encounter. I am however mightily tickled by the idea of an archetypal icon of the English middle classes going all hard-assed on the gangs of New York. Bet old Celia had a mean left hook, and woe betide if you got on the wrong side of her broken bottle, eh, Trevor!

Surprised by joy

2007-08-08T14:45:00.001Z

So, to banish gloom, I have been working on something to present tonight at my Quaker Meeting. Every month a few of us meet for something we call Creative Listening, taking it in turns to bring a poem or snippet of some writing we think might inspire us all to deep thoughts. Flicking through my poetry books I came on this one, a rare thing in that it is about (among other things) a Quaker Meeting for Worship. Appropriate for its Quaker-ness then but also because both it and a good friend have reminded me that joy is a pretty special thing and not to be sniffed at.

Daffodil Ministry* by U A Fanthorpe

One of the more difficult denominations.
No artless formula of psalms, collect,
And-now-to-God-the-father; unrelenting ministry
Of the solo conscience. Mankind’s cheerless concerns
Can drop in here like friends

And yet the daffodils, she says

And yettishness: a state of mind.

O yes, of course the world is harsh
And suffering, O yes — and yet
This morning, as I walked along
And saw the daffodils, I thought —
And so forth, daffodilling on.

Easier not to meet each others’ eyes.

And yet, and yes, the daffodils
Making their point, in scurfy gardens,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Municipally distributed, like grit.
Wherever a bulb can lodge and multiply,
Long-legged, gape-mouthed, a yellow hop in air,
Daffodils are.
Homelessness, poverty,
Injustice, executions, arms trade, war
Are too.

The stillness isn’t easy with itself.

And yet, and yet.

*Daffodil ministry - every spring a Friend notices how lovely the daffodils look as they come to meeting for worship, and they minister about how lovely the world is. Generally a pejorative term to describe uncritical and predictable ministry.
from Quaker Jargon Buster

Dying - hate that stuff!

2007-08-08T12:11:00.001Z

Am not the cheeriest of mortals at the moment. On the same day my aunty died last week, I found out the wife of an old friend (one of the original Scouts-in-Bondage shareholders) had died of pancreatic cancer. She was no age, not much older than me in fact.

Time was when all the significant life-stage events I celebrated were weddings and birthdays and other happy stuff. Now, the only time I see my extended family en masse is at yet another funeral. And that wedding we went to a couple of weeks ago was the first we'd attended for about 7 years.

2007-08-03T09:04:00.001Z

Aunty Muriel
Rest In Peace

meanwhile in Emmerdale ...

2007-08-02T11:54:00.001Z

(haven't been here for a while)

... Rosemary, The Black Widow of the Yorkshire Dales, has come over all Mrs Danvers on her mournfully baren daughter-in-law Perdy, doping her orange juice, hiding her kitten and bestrewing the attic with baby clothes. Why the sinister old bird is tripping merrily down the Gaslight path to Charles-Boyer-Ville I have yet to determine. Could be she has some sinister outcome in mind or could be she's simply run out of spiders to de-leg.

Damned fine telly, though.

The horror, the horror

2007-07-27T08:39:00.001Z

Off down to Brighton for the weekend to see our friend Stav marry his Russian sweetheart, Anna.

Perhaps foolishly, I have agreed to travel by train. Now, I'm not much of a one for train travel normally, preferring to contribute generously to the destruction of the planet from the comfort of my tiny blue car rather than to suffer the mobile phone conversations and tinny drumbeats of other rail passengers. However, thanks to the ever-generous Richard Branson and his cheap ticket scheme, we had a First-Class journey to Brighton at Christmas which I found to be very acceptable. And so I've agreed to give it another try, though this time we'll be travelling with the plebs (cheap first-class tickets are not as readily available for weekend travel as they are for the dead days between Christmas and New Year, it seems) so the journey may not be the unalloyed joy it was in December.

In solidarity with the lovely Anna, I have packed for my on-train entertainment The Night Watch, described on its cover as 'Russia's answer to J K Rowling', which is absolutely nothing to recommend it in my opinion (but we won't go into my utter loathing of the Rowling Phenomenon here, lest we slip into a darkness from which we may never return). Fortunately I already knew a bit about the book and Xherri Potterski it most assuredly ain't, which is otlichno as far as I'm concerned.

Camera shy

2007-07-26T12:47:00.001Z

I find myself in a bit of a quandary. Having had a substantial birthday cheque from The Mater I have almost decided to buy a new camera but am torn between a DSLR and a compact. I'd love the flexibilty you get from an SLR but am remembereing that I gave up my old 35mm one because I got tired of carrying all the kit around. So I think maybe I should go for a high-end compact, but then I'd loose out on the control that the SLR would give me. And then, I think, if I'm looking at compacts, I couldn't do much better than the Contax T2 (35mm) I already own, so why don't I just stock up on film for that puppy, and then use the birthday cheque to buy a really good scanner for the digitising plus a much better printer (which I'll need whatever I choose to do).

And then I think, if I wait a year, everything will get a bit cheaper or a bit better or a bit lighter or a bit functionalitier (or any/all of the above), so maybe I'll just hang on a bit ...

And so it goes ...

In the meantime I just keep taking not-bad snaps on my camera phone and thinking I could be doing much better if only I could make a decision.

Help!

Hey, big spender

2007-07-25T16:40:00.001Z

Best Beloved has recently been lured into reading my copy of the classic 1930 boys' adventure story by Geoffery Prout, Scouts in Bondage, which has been lurking on my bookshelves for many years. As he describes in his post, the book achieved a minor degree of fame in the late 20th century on account of its mildly comedic title.

How the book came into my possession was on thiswise: many, many years ago a group (7) of us, camping in North Wales one excessively hot August Bank Holiday weekend*, happened upon the volume in a second-hand bookshop in Machynlleth. It was priced at £1.25. Of course, because of the extremely chortle-able title, we all wanted to buy it but, being both penurious and fond of beer, weren't prepared to stump up the readies, thinking it better to hang on to our ha'penny for the coming night's drinkage. Then we came up with the idea of a consortium purchase - divide the cost into 7 (17-and-a-half pence each or thereabouts) and we each buy a share and circulate the book amongst us. So that's what we did (though one of our number, being even tighter than the rest of us, wasn't prepared to shell out, so her more Rockerfellerian husband bought two shares - why on earth we didn't just divide by six instead I'll never know).

Over the years I have made it my business to acquire, by fair means or foul, the shares of my fellow Bondage-ites, ending up with five of the original seven and permanent caretakership of the book. Since good quality copies sell (according to AbeBooks) for anything up to £150, I'd say it's not been a bad investment. Wish I could remember which of us has the remaining two shares though, then at last it could be mine, all mine ...

* this weekend was also noteworthy for the fact that temperatures rose to the high 70s but, in a classic demonstration of my extreme neshness, I remained huddled in my duffel coat complaining that it was 'a bit chilly' I had the last laugh though: everyone else suffered spectacular sunburn and shed skin like snakes for weeks afterwards, while I smugly flaunted my pale-and-interesting-and-I'm- never-going-to-get-skin-cancer-(at-least-not-from-sunburn) look in their red flaky faces.

By the many blogs of Vishnu

2007-07-25T16:34:00.001Z

Have just downloaded an addon for Firefox (ScribeFire) that should let me post to multiple blog, so should finally be able to keep both of the blighters up-to-date. Am therefore checking out the functionailty with this little post.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Non angli sed angeli

2006-12-21T12:00:00.000Z
Am listening to festive CDs in an attempt to "get Christmassy". Currently on the turntable (?) is Comfort and joy: a Christmas Celtic sojourn, and it is this subtitle which gives me cause to saddle up the old hobby horse and take it for a bit of a canter.

Don't get me wrong - this is a great CD, and without doubt Very Christmassy. My problem is that it is billed specifically as "Celtic" and yet contains a number of (very splendid) English pieces. Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, these are all Celtic countries. England however is most definitely not Celtic - England is Anglo-Saxon. This is not to say that the one is better than the other, or that there are no Celtic influences in English folk music. It's just that the mindless lumping together of our islands' folk traditions under the Celtic banner means that the subtleties and ambiguities of the different traditions are lost and, more importantly, the distinctive voices of the English rural working classes are made invisible.

(The same kind of thing happened with the film of The Lord of the Rings. More than once in the supporting documentary footage(1) Peter Jackson or one of his apparatchiks talks about wanting to capture the "Celtic feeling" of the books. Wrong! LOTR is not Celtic - Tolkien was very clear that in writing this, he was attempting to create an English mythology.)

So, if'n y'd like to hear a quintessentially English folk carol, have a listen to the snippet of Shepherds arise(2) on Amazon - a tiny taster of England's Glory. And if you live in the States, you can hear it in full here. English folk music doesn't get much better than this little beauty.

Non celtici sed angli.

Gut Yule!

(1) extended DVDs - yeah, I know, very sad!
(2) this is a very good version by Waterson-Carthy, on whom I don't normally go a bundle . There's an even better version by The Copper Family, veteran folk singers from Sussex, which I recommend you seek out and purchase this instant.

Miserable sinner

2006-10-18T14:59:00.000Z
I was very angry today (justifiably so, I must add) and took my anger out on some poor unsuspecting call-centre worker who didn't derserve it. Call centres are such a ubiquitous part of 21st century commerce that it's easy to forget that the people who work in them are not the company they work for. They're usually just lowly aparatchiks struggling on poor wages and lousy conditions.

So now I am filled with remorse.

I have phoned back and apologised - not for being angry (which, as I've said, was entirely justified) but for making this poor soul the target of my anger.

Don't feel much better though. In fact I feel like a complete miserable idiot and, what's worse, a Bad Person!

Having said that, the call-centre person at the Royal Mail the other day did a much better job of handling Angry Caller than did today's. Royal Mail Woman was not in the least defensive, was friendly and charming, offered me a hearftfelt apology for my trouble and sidetracked me into a bit of banter about the name 'Jennie' (her daughter's name too apparently). She also dealt with my complaint efficiently and to my utter satisfaction. Very different from today's experience in every way.

Which however neither justifies nor excuses my behaviour.

Sorry!

Mists and mellow fruitfulness my arse!

2006-10-11T11:28:00.000Z
I have to say, I'm not the greatest fan of autumn. It is a time of the year when lots of Bad Things seem to have happened in my world. Or perhaps, it is not that more Bad Things have happened in autumn than at any other time of the year, but simply that the wet, grey descent into winter amplifies the misery. Any road, whatever the reason, today is a day for moaning, so here goes.

On Monday I betook myself to the oncologist for my annual checkup and, as predicted, was taken off Tamoxifen and put onto this aromatase inhibitor thingy called Letrozole. No bad thing, per se, since Tam is useless for old ducks like me, whereas Let is apparently Just The Ticket.

So that's the good news. However, like a bad 70s comedy sketch, hard on the heel of the good news comes the bad: I'll probably have to take the new tabletki for another five, count 'em, five years. Now, I know I should be grateful and all, that the creaking, cash-starved NHS is willing to stump up the readies for another 5 years of prophylaxis, and I know this is so much better than getting another cancer, but I'd painted this picture in my head of what it would be like when I got to the end of the Tamoxifen years next October. I'd be able to lose a bit of weight, my hair would regain some of its former glory, my fingernails would toughen right back up so I could wear nail varnish again, I'd stop having inexplicable aches and pains all over my bod, I might even stop the migraines, etc, etc. In short, I could go back to being Me, instead of Cancer Patient. I feel like a prisoner who's not just lost the chance of parole but whose sentence has actually been extended. I now have a whole new set of potential side effects to keep an eye open for and to worry about. I tell you, hypervigilance is a tiring game - I've played it for the last 4 years and I've had enough.

Bah, humbug!

On the bright side however, it appears to have stopped raining, so I shall get dressed and take a stroll into town to pick up a CD from the record shop and a pair of trousers from the Surly But Efficient Alterations Ladies.

Oh, and I think I have a cold a-coming.

Git on board!

2006-10-06T16:34:00.000Z
Just back from Southport, having taken the car in for its 38,000-mile service. Apparently (and I say this because, having no automobilular knowledge of my own to fall back on, I am at the mercy of every lyin', cheatin', adjustable-spanner-wieldin' grease monkey in the world and have to take what they tell me on trust) it needed a Really Big Service this time round and so I return home nearly 600 quid the poorer. I comfort myself with the fact that work done today will not have to be done in Feb when it's due for its first MOT, but it's cold comfort indeed.

My ever-so-slight dischuffment was not ameliorated by the fact that today our Trusty Posty decided to leave a parcel not in the relative safety of the porch as is this normal custom but on the drive in full view of the pavement, where any passing Scally* could nick off with it without a "by your leave" or a "with your leave". I complained to the Royal Mail of course, and now have an apology, an Official Complaint Number and a sneaking feeling that Trusty Posty will somehow Wreak Awful Revenge upon us for dobbing him in to The Queen.

On the bright side though, we're off to Glasgow tomorrow to see the deeply splendid Common Rotation gigging at some low dive on Sauchiehall Street. Oh how we do love their subversive pop-folk-rock stylings!

*though if said Scally had indeed performed said act of thievery, he would have been mighty disappointed with the contents - somehow can't see a rather nice dress shirt going with the obligatory shell suit.

And, as a sartorial aside, there are apparently places in Liverpool where people habitually go to the supermarket in their nightwear and slippers. It's a mad world, my masters!

One monkey don't stop the show

2006-10-05T15:48:00.000Z
So here we are, back from two weeks' holidays and fighting a wee touch of the post-holiday blues, as usual.

What we did on our holidays

The peregrinations started off in Dorset at the community, where a somewhat less-than-entertaining exec committee meeting occupied most of the weekend and gave me three migraines in two days. It was a bit of a relief, therefore, to relocate to Brighthelmstone for a few days with the in-laws.

Highlights of this visit were a trip to the Weald and Downland Museum (arguably the best open air museum I've ever visited) and the obligatory shopping expedition to North Laine, this time in search of boots*. Kapla! Not one but two pairs of rather fetching knee-high boots were purchased, one red and one black. The red ones, styled 'Women's Action Boots" on the box, apparently make me look like a superhero - Theology Girl, leaping tall steeples in a single bound perhaps. Not only that, but they are Vegetarian (i.e. plastic). And the black ones are very lovely also (not vegetarian, these, but actual dead cow). Sales Assistant remarked that they had "featured in this month's Vogue" and that's good enough for me.

Creaking under the weight of newly-acquired footwear, we quit Brighton for the less heady pleasures of Essex,where we checked out the fleshpots of Colchester, a pleasant but rather damp experience - the Essex drought was a bit less droughty than usual that day. Was also furnished with an opportunity to compare Spotty Dog impersonations with m' dear friend Anonymous Lesley (though not in her son's place of work as had previously been promised - curses!)

From thence we pressed northwards to the Lincolnshire Wold where we stayed in an utterly delightful cottage for the week. As a county Lincolnshire proved to be a pleasant diversion, but hasn't set it's seal in our hearts like Dumfries and Galloway did in June. It has, however, got some bloody great farm shops selling some of the best local cheeses you could wish for. Unfortunately for Best Beloved, over-consumption of cheese caused his sinuses swell to the size of golf balls, so I was left to polish off the goodies. Plus a whole box of sloe gin truffles. And some rather delicious blackcurrants in white chocolate. Well, I was on holiday, dammit!

Then we came home.

Ho hum.

* I'm not exactly sure what has caused my Imelda Marcos gene to kick in at this stage in my life (possibly hormonal?) but kick in it well and truly has.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - get it out with Optrex

2006-09-13T15:26:00.000Z
''ve just been reading comments to a post in another journal and it's made me come over a bit thoughtful. I'm posting my response here because it's going to get rather preachy I'm afraid and I don't think one should inflict that sort of thing on an unsuspecting fellow blogger.

So, the burden of the comments (not the original post) concerned the sincerity or otherwise of commenting on someone's else's dark-night of-the-soul type post with a mere *hugs*. Some commenters were of the opinion that such is the act of an unmitigated cad and a bounder, who cares nought for your pain and thinks only to boost their flagging ego with a spot of thoughtless self-publicity. Well, hang on there chaps, surely in this case insincerity is in the eye of the beholder. Unless you are acquainted with the person in Solid World and know them to be hugger or not, then you cannot be at all certain of their hugging motivation. A *hug* is a likely to be a genuine expression of heartfelt sympathy as it is a meaningless and self-serving gesture. Wouldn't you be happier in the long run if you assumed the former in all circumstances - an anti-*hug* stance hurts not the *hug*ger but the *hug*gee.

As a somewhat reticent Britisher, my equivalent of *hug* is more a sort of *tentative pat on the shoulder* and a muttered "there, there, old chap - now pull yourself together and we'll all have a nice cup of tea. Worse things happen at sea, what!" and who wants that kind of nonsense landing in their comments box as they weep bitter, weary tears of despair into their fine linen handkerchieves?

So, take the *hug* in the spirit you'd like it to have been given. Chances are, it was.

And now, open your hymn books and turn to page ...

2006-09-13T10:37:00.000Z
And while we're on the subject of things technical, does anybody out there know how to make Thunderbird add a standard sig to emails? I'm usually pretty good at this kind of stuff, but have totally failed in this instance to work it out for myself.

Help me!

2006-09-13T10:22:00.000Z
Ah, online technical support - you've got to love it.

A couple of weeks ago I contact the HP online help thingy* about an intermittent problem I have with my printer, explaining in some detail the steps I was having to take to correct this and asking if perchance there was an easier way. They responded with instructions that were not only deeply patronising in tone but also told me less than I already knew about sorting the prob out.

And now they are badgering me with emails like a lovesick suitor, begging me to tell them how they did - "Was I good? Did the earth move for you too, darling?". Frankly my dear, you were rubbish! So don't expect a second date.

* Ironically, it's called HP Total Care - my arse!

Seasonally Affected Disorders

2006-09-11T11:29:00.000Z
All that mist-and-mellow-fruitfulness that was kicking around over the weekend triggered off a bad case of the earth-mothers*. This manifested as an urge to turn Saturday's marrow into Sunday's chutney. So off we went to Mr Booth's lovely supermarket for ingredients. Ingredients denied! At least, no cider vinegar and no stem ginger in syrup. And so I live to chut another day.

And while we're on the subject of supermarkets
This time last year-ish, in reply to a post bemoaning the lamentable quality of supermarket plums, a friend responded that: Plums are wonderous, when eaten after being picked from the ground beneath the tree on a sweltering day. Having done exactly that on Saturday in the orchard at Norton Priory, I have to say he's only right, godde love 'im.

* An overwhelming desire to e.g. bake bread, macrame some aubergines and knit one's own yoghurt

i thank You God for this most amazing

2006-09-09T16:43:00.000Z
Have just returned from a visit to Norton Priory, one of the (very few) hidden gems of Cheshire. It lurks in all its green and garden-y splendour in the middle of a trading estate on the outskirts of Runcorn, a town normal noted for its utter lack of charm. But as far as tourist attractions go, Norton P has got a goodly handful of plus points - mediaeval priory ruins, rambling gardens, sculpture trail, tearoom and one of the most glorious walled gardens we've seen in a while. Oh, and a huge*, intact mediaeval statue of St Christopher. Fabulous!

Of course, today's glorious weather helped. It's been one of those clear, bright, end-of-summer days, with a "blue true dream of sky" and just a scattering of wispy clouds, when the sun is warm but not so hot that you have to take your cardie off and fan yourself with your hand in a Peter Kaye stylee, going 'oh, it's too hot. I mean, I like it hot but this is too hot'. A day when it sort of feels like it's still summer, even though everything's started to look decidedly back-endish, with leaves on the turn and berries so very much redder than they were a couple of weeks ago.

And I also bought a marrow.

* 3.37 metres apparently, which in imperial measurement translates as 'mossive'

2006-09-09T09:35:00.000Z
You'll doubtless all be ecstatic at the news that the pneumonia vaccine did me no lasting damage. I had a bit of a poorly arm for a couple of days, a symptom with which I extracted maximum sympathy form Best Beloved on his return from Nottingham, but that's about all.

Meanwhile, back in Side-Effects Land, I turned to the BNF (that's the British National Formulary, not some ultra right-wing nationalist party) yesterday for some info on aromatase inhibitors, since the onc is probably going to transfer me onto one of these little blighters now that I am now officially old*. Was hoping against hope that these new johnnies might have fewer side-effects that Tamoxifen (which has never made me really ill, I must admit, but rather permanently uncomfortable). Well, no such luck - promised side-effects are much the same really, with the added bonus of alopecia and osteoporosis. Oh joy, oh bliss! Watch as I turn into a wizened, balding crone before your very eyes!

Still, it's better than having cancer.

And, leaving on a positive note, at the end of this month I'll be four years on from my original diagnosis and still cancer-free. Huzzah!

* i.e. menopausal

Spots before the eyes

2006-09-08T11:29:00.000Z
Y'd think, based on the evidence of the past couple of days, that I was a big Hector's House fan, wouldn't you? Well, I'm not. Not really. I always found it a bit too twee and soppy for my more robust tastes (plus it was aimed at 4 year olds and I must have been well into my teens when it hit the screens). I was, however, moved to tearful nostalgia by a page on the same website about The Woodentops.

I loved The Woodentops, partly because one of the characters had the same name as me* (it's is a pretty big deal when you're three to have a TV star as a namesake, even if it is a wooden puppet) and partly because of the utter surreal fabulousness of Spotty Dog (the Biggest Spotty Dog You Ever Did See). I can still, old bones permitting (mine, not the Dog's), do a very passable impersonation of both Spotty Dog and Baby. Buy me a pint sometime and I'll show you.

*That's right - please refer to me as 'Mrs Scrubbit' from now on.

I blame the pneumonia vaccine

2006-09-08T10:52:00.000Z
I'll tell you what, though. That half tub of yummy raspberry-and-vanilla-flavoured Alpro soya yoghurt I just chucked over my keyboard, desk and carpet is probably not going to do them a world of good.

Oh, what a clumsy old Hector I am!

And while we're on the subject

2006-09-08T08:22:00.000Z
A million hearty thank yous to our dear friends Jen and Pete for lending us Blackpool, a series so good that when you get to the end you wish you hadn't seen it so you can see it for the first time all over again.

Tennant: Of Wild Fell Hormones

2006-09-07T15:57:00.000Z
Have extracted a promise from Best Beloved that, were David Tennant ever to offer to snog the gob off me, I would be allowed to accept and still return the marital fireside with my honour unblemished.

What a very reasonable man he is (B. Beloved, that is, not D. Tennant, though he doubtless has his moments).

It's the Style, Miss

2006-09-07T14:34:00.000Z
Whilst in town this a.m. I ventured into my local independent record store* to order a Little Something for our forthcoming holiday listening pleasure. Order was duly placed. Impulse buying of Style Council 'best of' CD also occurred. When I got outside, I remembered that I (a) already have a Style Council 'best of' LP and (b) will soon have a USB Turntable on which to convert said LP to digital splendour. Oh, what a silly old Hector I am!

*in line with a recent policy decision to stop sucking at the milky teat of corporate capitalism (Amazon and its ilk) in favour of supporting the many fabulous Independent High Street Shops of Great Britain (still just as capitalist, but a lot less milky).

2006-09-07T12:41:00.000Z
Have just returned from The Quack's, having finally got round to having my anti-pneumonia shot (a privilege vouchsafed me by my right wheezy lungs*). On returning home I made the classic mistake of reading the list of possible side-effects and a now poised to keel over from any one of the following: swollen joints, low blood pressure, anaphylaxis, headaches, nausea, vomiting ...

* a couple of years ago, while laid low with a bout of bronchitis, I discovered the art of polyphonic wheezing - very melodic, m' dearios.

[Note to self: please find alternative to 'vouchsafed' - twice in two days is going the game a bit]

2006-09-06T16:35:00.001Z
Best Beloved is away in Nottingham at some conference, so I'm living the single life until Friday. Spoke to him on the blower this a.m. - he vouchsafed that he had 'a bit of a beer head'. Oh dear! and him about to lead a workshop. Will he never learn?

I, of course, would never be so foolish as to drink far too much vodka at a conference and then have to spend the next day sleeping it off in the car in a back-street in Sheffield (because I had to check out of my room at 10am) - no siree, bob. For I am a creature of moderation and without flaw...

Oh, yes!

2006-09-06T16:35:00.000Z
testing, testing, one,two, one two ... is this mike on?