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!

Le weekend

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

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?

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

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

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 ...

... 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

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

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

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.