daily straying

Movin' on

2008-01-21T21:05:00.000Z

http://www.chasing-sheep.blogspot.com

Random blogage

2008-01-10T15:09:00.002Z

Newsflash: Marshmallows don't flush.

Burniture is furniture for the bedroom.

There is a particularly useful kind of delicatessen, where you can buy nuts and bolts and fuse wire.

We have a milkman. (Is that a gender specific term?). He is about 85. Our semi-skimmed comes in glass bottles. He drives a little red van and he can't reverse. I fear Ms M will snaffle him in one of these days and adopt him.

The postman brings the papers. He says you can tell a lot about people from their post. Ms M says that all postmen (and women) have a secret identity. He is probably a ~~spy~~ ~~novelist~~ world record breaking unicyclist.

It is still possible in our village of 51 people to have a paper delivered on a Sunday. It is arranged through the post office 3 villages away, who used to run a Sunday paper service. A man from the next village past ours goes down sometime on Sunday morning and collects them from that post office. Then he leaves them under the carport of our postoffice. The far-away post office produces a bill monthly. This is paid at our post office, along with an extra 50p for each delivery. They give nice-man-in-next-village-up the 50ps and then pay our bill for us. Of course.

I don't have time for blogging. I am trying to write a book whilst simultaneously finishing a piece of software. 2 pieces. I am doing something very clever in a language I don't feel really comfortable in. It is like trying to argue philosophy in Italian, when really I only speak Spanish and did a bit of Latin at school.

I leave you with this ...

Ms M: I just don't think I have the energy to do a jigsaw ...

Apparently, I am a high-pressure jigsaw dooer. Some sort of "Hurry Up Driver" or something.

I'm sure there are worse things to be.

2007-12-21T11:49:00.000Z

'twas the night before Christmas and all through the house,

not a creature was stirring not even a mouse,

because Badger's cat Frank had enjoyed them for his tea,

which is what Ms M and her boy are teaching Badger and Stray to call dinner ...

---

Contrary to reports, it's not even slightly grim up north.

The move went ... well, actually the whole boxes bit was fine. BT of course pissed us about for week after week before finally admitting that they can't actually provide broadband in our village because we share 5 phone lines between 20 houses.

We were offline for a little while, and I held in mind the wonderful words of Douglas Adams:

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

We are now on broadband thanks to a huge satellite dish in our back garden (please phone to make a booking if you would like to borrow it for your alien landing).

The village is gorgeous. The weather ranges from swirling mist to inch-thick ice crunching under boot beneath bright blue skies. We have a river and waterfalls which are fed almost entirely by rain running off the hills. After 3 wet days the ford disappears, and after 3 dry days you can cross at almost any point. We haven't had a full thaw for a fortnight, and as the water level dropped away huge sheets of ice split and tipped, now pointing skywards. Proper ice sculptures.

The drive to the supermarket is 12 miles on a 'road' that only got promoted from the status of farm-track fairly recently. Older maps still show a dead end at the next village. I have forgotten what traffic is but now allow extra time for stubborn livestock in the middle of the road or a flock of sheep being moved from field to field. It takes 40 minutes round-trip to get a pint of milk, but I've yet to feel anything except really really really bloody lucky - people drive for miles to see this view of Pen-y-ghent:

I can't wait for people to visit me. I think Badger, Ms M and I may have lucked upon the most beautiful place in the world. Our neighbours have been really welcoming and I really do feel as though this is where I am meant to be, in all 4 dimensions.

To all who I owe emails, cards, phone calls, blog comments etc - please forgive me, I have been in a whirlwind of unpacking and DIY and catching up on work for neglected clients. My Orange phone has no reception at all in this valley so I'm currently moving to Vodafone. BT managed to cut off my main email address for a while because they'd moved it to the broadband service that they couldn't provide ... so if you've sent mail and not received a reply please do send again!

Hoping you're all as happy as I am this christmas ...

A meandering ...

2007-10-29T10:50:00.000Z

I recently posted about this short exchange that I had with BT.

I am well beyond the end of my tether with them, after the 'Engineering Team' refused to install a new phone line into my new house 'because there is already one there'. I happened to already know that the 'phone line' already there is infact just an extension from a house next door. In essence my house has borrowed a couple of the unused wires out of their phone cable. This means that neither house has a line suitable for broadband ADSL.

I had (increasingly im-)patiently explained this to several 'customer ~~misinformation~~ service' representatives over the past few weeks. I explained that I didn't have time for them to activate and test the current line and then begin a new order from scratch.

In the end, they activated the line but they cancelled the broadband order because there was no line active at the precise moment earlier in the day when the line test was run. I rang them up, I was baffled yet again by the difficulties they seem to have in getting their systems to talk to each other (being a communications company and all that) and I started the broadband order again.

Sorry madam, I can't place that order - this line is a DAX line - it's not suitable for broadband.

I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, scream, swear or simply go to their offices with a weapon.

It was then explained to me that 'The Engineering Team' would need to do a 'Site survey' to establish the cost of installing a new line, which would then probably be passed on to me.

In theory BT have a flat rate of £107 for installing a new line. I did point out that I have ordered several new lines previously whilst living in London, and that the point of the flat rate is that the profit they made on doing those ten minute installations is supposed to ensure that rural communities aren't left without services, but I may as well have been explaining the exact meaning of the term 'attenuation'.

For the non-geeks, attenuation is the opposite of amplification. As the signal is transmitted through the system it becomes less strong and less clear. Whilst there is no doubt that BT's entire sales / orders / installations / service system is essentially one huge attenuator, it strikes me that this is a problem much more widely experienced in the UK.

I am working on a book at the moment about ... well, it's kind of hard to sum up here, but essentially it's a journey which takes in human biology, consciousness, anthropology, sociology, politics and the science of global warming. It seeks (rather ambitiously) to answer the question "Who are we, why have we screwed up the planet and what can we do about it?"

The book is the baby of an amazing Australian thinker who I am very very fortunate to be working with. In writing it, and making an interactive documentary, I am having to really examine my own beliefs to ensure they don't get in the way of the truth / facts / science.

In particular I am having to look again at my core reaction to the concept of Nuclear Power. It brings my hackles right up.

I have several negative responses to NP. Some of those are valid, if perhaps exaggerated or out-dated, concerns about safety. However, I have an additional and even stronger barrier which is proving to be really difficult to overcome.

I am scared that if I change my beliefs about Nuclear Power then I will not be acceptable to my peers, my friends, my family.

On a biological level, human beings are pretty useless on their own. We need others, need their love and approval as well as their tangible help and support. Our limbic system drives us to belong, to find people with whom we resonate, and shared "felt truths", such as "Nuclear Power is completely unacceptable" are the scaffolding we use to hold ourselves in place within the group.

And yet increasingly I am coming to wonder whether there is any alternative. It seems likely that in order to avoid either the catastrophic kind of climate change that will cause massive death and misery, or the escalation of tension over oil into the levels of war that will cause massive death and misery, we might have to consider how best to use Nuclear Power to generate energy that can meet the needs of every human being on the planet.

I am nervous writing this, and yet I know that were I writing in French I would be much less concerned. As a population France have accepted, and even embraced, Nuclear Power. As I began to look at the reasons why, I was drawn back to a paper I wrote when I was 19 about the challenges facing the UK as a result of a lack of scientific and engineering literacy within the population. (If you really wanted to you could order it here but it basically boils down to dumping the current education system which creates an arbitrary arts / science divide at 16 and adopting the international baccalaureate or similar).

To make informed decisions about issues such as Nuclear Power, we need a population who can comprehend and grapple with risk. To understand risk you need a sound relationship with numbers as expressed through statistics. We need an electorate who understand why it is ridiculous to sit in the crazy chair on Deal or No Deal and say 'Well, the quarter million hasn't been in box 17 for the last 54 shows, so I figure the chances it's in there have gotta be quite high'.

My dad and I regularly joke that it's quite safe for me to travel by any mode of transport because he has been in a serious train crash and an emergency landing of a plane.

So, how is NP acceptable in France when it is so feared and demonised in the UK? Obviously the French have a strong motivator, having no significant fossil fuel reserves of their own, but in addition general level of trust in and respect for scientists and engineers is much higher in France than it is in the UK. This is primarily because they have a higher rate of scientific literacy. In an age where we have lost the blind faith in authority that once underpinned our trust, they are able to maintain trust because they can ask questions and resonate with the answers in a way that we aren't able to in the UK. The vicious circle in this experience is obvious. (The circulation of the Daily Mail is a terrifying confirmation.)

The UK's level of respect for science and engineering has fallen to a level where we allow people to refer to themselves as 'Washing Machine Engineers'. A good mechanic / plumber / technician has incredibly valuable skills, and I'm not questioning the value of the work, so I lay in the bath last night wondering why it irks me so much that BT keep referring to 'The Engineering Team' when I am confident that the 'Engineer' who does my installation will probably not be an Engineer in the BEng sense at all.

It occurred to me that it is because I do have faith in Engineers. I did my (manufacturing) degree in the fairly massive 'Mech Eng' department of Birmingham University, and I would honestly say that 99% of my fellow students are people I would trust to make decisions that impact on my safety. The bread and butter of an Engineer is the process of assessing factors, discarding unimportant ones, distilling the problem to the lowest practical level, identifying risks, imagining consequences and choosing a first line solution. The area of engineering is less important than the natural alignment with the process. True Engineers don't think "Oh, yes, I should start my process ... " they are doing it constantly - they can't do anything else. (This makes us quite irritating when you really just want a cup of tea and a cuddle and not a fully spec'd pareto-analysed solution matrix).

Air travel is the current whipping boy of the global warming debate. For those of you dreaming of heading off to sunshine rather than slitting your wrists in the drizzle of a British winter let me give you a number to ease your conscience.

1

Specifically 1 percent. This is the carbon contribution of the air travel industry to the global carbon footprint. (Actually I have figures that say about 1.2 %, and these things are estimated, but suffice it to say that whilst power generation for homes and business make up 60%, not taking your winter break is not going to save an icecap).

In the UK at the moment we're talking a lot about recycling. Pay as you throw. Green taxes on air travel. Taxing carrier bags. I suspect that these conversations are mostly the noise in the system. We need to be having a bigger conversation about our education system, so that we introduce into the electorate a generation of citizens who are scientifically and statistically literate enough to hold our leaders to account. They need to be emotionally and socially literate too - able to rise above marketing messages, to know which buttons are being pushed, to question themselves as well as authority.

What are the chances?

Fairly satisfying conversational moment

2007-10-17T15:35:00.000+01:00

BT customer service rep: The thing is madam, I'm not an engineer ...

Me: I am.

BT customer service rep: Oh.

Politically incorrect observation

2007-10-17T14:00:00.000+01:00

Alan Johnson has made the ~~ridiculous~~ statement that within 25 years obesity will be a problem on a similar scale to climate change.

Am I the only person who sees a potentially symbiotic solution in syphoning the fat off of humans and using it to produce bio-fuels?

Argh!

2007-10-17T13:21:00.001+01:00

I am going to explode. Unless Ms Melancholy can give me some anger therapy pronto.

Today I rang BT again.

They have not actioned my order.

For the exact same reason as before.

They were very sorry. I shall tell this to my customers when they can't get hold of me, and my bank manager when I can't invoice people because I haven't finished the work because I can't get online. It's ok ... BT are very sorry.

Apparently there is a seven hour delay between the computers in their different departments. A request logged by BT person number 1 will not arrive with BT department 2 for seven hours.

As hundreds of millions of people all over the globe are currently passing information in almost real time by phone and internet, I can only conclude that BT themselves have no phones and no broadband.

Perhaps they've not been able to get it installed because they can't find their own address?

The irony is that this morning they sent me, as a new business customer, a link to a range of services they would like to sell me to help me use communications to serve my customers more efficiently and more effectively.

Maybe I should forward it on to them?

*sigh*

Boring Whinge Alert

2007-10-15T11:45:00.000+01:00

I have learned through experience to avoid having any dealings with British Telecom if at all possible.

Their touch feely adverts don't fool me - they have consistently given me the worst customer service I've ever experienced, and so it was with massive reluctance that I contacted them to arrange for a new phone line and broadband to be installed at our new home.

I was so confident about their capacity to ~~royally fuck it up~~ fail to deliver that I rang them a few weeks ago to confirm the procedure and the lead times.

I have no choice but to go with BT - they haven't yet fully unbundled the local loop at my new exchange, so essentially they are the only provider. I added a few days to the theoretical lead times they gave me, and placed my order last week.

I was charged £107 to book the installation of the new line. And another £300 'deposit' because, for the reasons above, I haven't been a BT customer for years.

I was sent a strange email with details of my broadband installation, giving a phone number to be activated. Strange as I don't yet have a line at the property. I rang them and was told "Don't worry - it's just a holding number, they can't process the order without the number, when your line is installed it will be a different number ... nothing to worry about - everything is fine!".

I was promised a phone call within 48 hours to confirm my appointment. It never came. My 48 hours expired late on friday, by which time their offices were closed until this morning.

This morning they told me that my order hasn't been placed for a new line. They have charged me but they haven't actually booked an install. They were going to just 'switch on' broadband on a line that doesn't exist. They were wrong to reassure me about the weird phone number - they should have realised that there was a problem when I flagged it last week. They lost my credit check and can't find most of my details. The account is compromised so they need to start a completely clean order. This means we are starting again. I can expect a phone call in 48 hours to tell me when they might see fit to install the line. It will not be on friday, when I have arranged to be in Yorkshire for the purpose. I will not be in the house again until we move on the 5th November. The satellite can't be installed until after the phone line. By the time BT give me a call to book an installation the window for booking a satellite install in the first week will be gone.

The girl who broke all the good news to me was cheerful and helpful. She took it rather well when I said "You are the worst company I ever have to deal with, and I know it's not your fault, but believe me, if I had any other option I would never give you my business in a million years." She simply said "Yes, I know. Sorry!".

The reason for the screw up, apparently, was that even though I kept telling them my address was not the one they were finding, but had "Cottage" on the end, to distinguish it from other half of the barn, they put the order through for my next door neighbour's address. Finding that address already had a BT line but not broadband, 'they' decided to revise the order accordingly, and down-graded it to a broadband-only order.

GRRRRRRR.

The only thing that is calming me down is looking at Badger's stunning photo of cows in the mist she took on the way home last night ...

The Wisdom of Freecycle

2007-10-11T11:38:00.000+01:00

A message posted on my local freecycle board today:

I am desperately in need of a large pine chest of drawers if anyone wants to get rid of an item like this it will be going to an appreciative home.

Is it just me, or is it impossible to need something desperately and also need it in pine?

However, it made me realise that if I think I need something very specific, then I actually don't need it at all.

It is completely reasonable to urgently need a new mobile phone, for example. But to urgently need a new iPhone is something else.

Needs, I have decided, don't have brands. They can have dimensions, and specifications like gas / electric, they can require a type of fitting or connection, but they don't have colours, and needs definitely don't come in pine.

Can't give it away

2007-10-04T18:35:00.000+01:00

Apparently the charity shops in Guildford are unable to accept donations at present.

This is clearly proof that I am not the only person who has at least one of everything.

Badger and I shall be moving on the 5th November up to Yorkshire, with exactly the contents of 2 luton vans, 1 dog bus (peugeot partner in the trade) and one mini. So, we are giving away, selling and donating a lot of Things. Today I filled the dog bus boot with 2 bin liners and six carrier bags full of stuff. And I drove it to oxfam, where they informed Dr But Why? that they don't need any Things right now thank you please.

Fortunately the recycling team at the local tip were quite happy to sort it into the back of their van. They told me that they sell books by the palate load (ok, they weren't that specific) to second hand book shops, the clothes will be donated, and the DVDs and videos and gorilla slippers will be resold and the money goes back into the running of the recycling center.

But. I found it really rather unsettling. There is something out of alignment in my world when I am no longer able to give Things to charity. I can't decide whether this means that the economy has slowed to such a rate that people aren't even buying second hand, or is so buoyant that we're all buying so much that we need to keep clearing out closets to make room for the shiny purchases.

I am amazed by the sheer quantity of Things I have. I am letting go of as much as possible ... books, sideboard, bread machine, ... and it feels good. I wrote last july about needing to lose about 2.5 metric tons ... and the cat needing to lose about half a kilo. I think she's just about got there ... fingers crossed this crash diet badger and I are on works in time!

New nest ...

2007-10-02T11:05:00.000+01:00

*sigh*

A perfect place to live, write, work, cook, eat, play guitar, walk, learn, read, sleep and love.

A different kind of falling ...

2007-10-01T12:54:00.000+01:00

the things I thought were falling apart
they were just falling into place

This weekend I became a parent. Of sorts. I met the boy who is going to become my sort-of-stepson, and tumbled into love I haven't really experienced before.

I was anxious about our meeting. On thursday night I had bizarre dreams about giving birth in which nobody would make me a cup of tea and someone insisted I go bell ringing. In the dream I told my continuously morphing partner that we must give the child a name that would be good for a dog. I suppose this is the only experience I've had of any kind of parenting really - trying to bring up Ruby to be secure and well mannered. I have half succeeded.

The anxiety, I realise now, was not that he would not like me. I think that would be manageable, understandable - I half expected it, warned by all and sundry of the potential for resentment, confusion and anger that he might experience on being told that his mother was not only asking him to accept a new partner in her life, but that the partner was a woman. As it was, he was completely unperturbed, being a remarkably wise and sanguine example of a 12 year old boy, but regardless, I realised that the deep anxiety was that I might not like him.

But I did. I loved him, liked him, found him interesting and funny and easy to talk to. I am not just feeling ok about moving in with him as well as his mum, I am absolutely exploding with excitement about it.

All being well, in about 5 weeks time I will be moving, with Badger, up to a lovely little barn conversion in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales. And then his mum, the most amazing person I have ever ever ever met, and gorgeous boy, will join us when they feel ready. And with 4 cats and 1 dog and a few chickens, we will be a perfect, if slightly unconventional family.

I can't believe how amazing my life is today, and how excited I am about my future. The relationship I have with my new love just blows me away. I feel lucky every time I think about it. And not because I am not worthy blah blah blah ... I do feel worthy - I feel like I am a lovely person too, loved equally by her, and just incredibly lucky to have found my soulmate midst the six billion people on the planet.

A year ago, quite frankly, everything sucked. I was about as low as you can go, and life seemed to have no purpose or plan. My partner and best friend of several years had left me. I hated myself and had few friends and felt incredibly deeply alone almost all the time. Today I have an amazing partner, a wonderful friendship with Badger as well as strong relationships with quite a few others, and am beginning the adventure of being part of a child's life as they become an adult. I know myself, understand myself, have a philosophy on life that feels coherent and I love my work. I have somehow* discarded the sense of being 'not enough'. As a result I feel able to try things without being paralysed by a need to do them brilliantly - including becoming a sort-of-ish parent. (eek!)

I feel absolutely sure that I could not have all of this richness in my life simply by tacking extensions on to the person I was a couple of years ago. The difference in foundations would have destabilised the structure, and cracks would have spread and turned to fissures. I needed to be bulldozed, dug out and flattened, so that I could start again from scratch.

I suspect this is an experience shared by the people who held me together, who smiled at the mess and the chaos and the destruction, and firmly reassured me that all sorts of things were possible. Some of those people were therapists, some were nurses or doctors, and quite a few were bloggers.

So. I shall be starting a new business shortly, peddling t-shirts and badges bearing the simple statement "Blogging changed my life". Any takers?

--

*somehow = with lots of therapy and deep conversations with very wise people, face to face and online.

You know you're moving to the country when ...

2007-09-26T14:51:00.000+01:00

... the houses you're looking at have Mains Drainage listed as a feature.

Fortunately Badger and I have survived a winter in the treehouse with only the minimum statutory level of whinging about the cold. (We have no central heating and just one wood stove. A bit like almost the entire population did up until really quite recently.)

And goodness me, I've just had a realisation that I'm really quite judgmental and prejudiced about how other people might be judgmental and prejudiced. I shall try to be open minded about whether other people are open minded. *sigh*.

One of the best things about Badger is that she's good at talking to new people. Breaking all aspergers stereotypes, Badger is actually much less shy than I am in a typical social situation. I suspect that it is almost impossible not to like Badger. Where as I know that there are aspects of me that are deeply unlikable ... though usually I manage to keep most of them well hidden on a first meeting.

So, the prospect of moving with Badger is rather less daunting than moving on my own would be. I shall wave Badger off as she goes out to make new Friends down the pub or the WI or whatever the local social hub may be ... and then hope that she'll introduce me or bring people back for tea.

I'm actually a tiny bit serious about joining the WI. The older I get, the more I appreciate people older than me. I have excellent rudimentary jam making skills, and Badger makes a wonderfully crumbly cheese scone ... though I've heard they're more inclined towards topless modeling these days :)

94% pure nerd

2007-09-19T12:48:00.000+01:00

Ok, so bobo was right!

I think I would have scored higher, but I fell down on my personal hygiene (for not having any dead rodents or insects in the room in which I am working).

I don't speak vulcan by the way. And I've never played dungeons and dragons. But I do have 4.5GB of ram in my Mac!

Colour tells us what to do, by Stray, age 7

2007-09-18T18:13:00.000+01:00

If there is a new house or building near you it will probably have some electrical cables showing out. In those cables there will be two smaller cables one will be red and one will be black. The black one is neutral and the red one is live. Yo should never touch a live of red piece of wire because if someone switched on the electricity you would probably die. The wires lead to a socet a normal plug looks like this. (diag) In a socket you put a plug but in a plug is a little different it has an extra wire which is yellow and green and a fuse a fuse is a safty divice it stops all the electricity going through to the t.v.

My parents sent me this earlier today. I have a feeling the other 7 year old girls in my class might have been somewhat less interested in electrical wiring. Apparently the diagram is completely correct, down to the glass fuse with it's internal wire.

Today I am doing some Very Clever Things with recursion and making a beautiful website out of numbers.

I am still a geek, but these days I am much better paid.

I thoroughly recommend living with a person with Tourette Syndrome ...

2007-09-17T09:07:00.000+01:00

... or should I say a Badger with Tourette Syndrome.

I was putting away my washing this morning (oh, the excitement!) whilst Badger was getting ready for ~~school~~ work. It's comforting to hear Badger's little chirps and clucks and squeaks as she makes a cup of tea, though Dr But Why? did recently point out that I have started mistaking Badger's cat Frank for her, such is the quality of his impression of her echoalia ...

Anyway. I am always rather impressed by Badger's noises. She is a fantastic mimic, where I am really rather crap at whistling and squeaking in general, and far too self-conscious to even contemplate attempting to impersonate a peacock.

But something strange is happening. I have started to respond to Badger's noises in kind. It's not deliberate, and it only happens if I am engaged in something else at the time ... but I have found myself squeaking, squawking and clicking back. And this morning I chirruped! And it was really rather a good chirrup at that, and surprisingly enjoyable to do.

I feel liberated. It was like some sort of therapeutic experience that you would normally have to pay for and might involve lots of sitting in a circle earnestly listening to other people ~~whinge~~ share about their insecuritites, before being strong armed into pretending to be a tree / flower ... no, let's not go there.

So, thank you Badger!

A meme to change the world ...

2007-09-11T08:04:00.000+01:00

First off ... Happy birthday Dad! 59 today ... wow.

My parents brought us up to have opinions about Stuff. It was a Very Good Thing.

I was recently chatting to Ms Melancholy about the way our hearts sink around people who just don't take an interest in the world. Working in the meedya, you come across an alarming number of people who don't really have any politics - not to say that they are central, moderate or balanced - but that they haven't ever really engaged with the discussions. Of course, you can find people who think that the way the world operates isn't really their problem in every walk of life (probably even politics!) but the combination of apathy and influence really bothers me.

I understand the value of a rigorous opposition ... I would rather someone held a view in opposition to mine than simply shrugged and turned to the sports / fashion pages. (In my world you need to reverse those gender stereotypes by the way - so that would be a female / male response ... ).

So. What to do?

Well, Ms M and I also had an interesting discussion about the mixed feelings that emerge when your underground passion becomes part of the mainstream world, as happened last summer to blogging.

Combining the two ideas in a reckless fashion I have decided that the electoral vote should be promoted to the status of a privilege rather than a right. In order to protect the system from political corruption, people will be selected and excluded on the basis of behaviours (not simply ideas) entirely without political basis. And I believe that bloggers are just the right people to make up the rules because if there is one thing we have in abundance, it's opinions!

So - here is my 'Rules for a new democratic process' meme. Please copy the existing text between the lines, and simply add your own, non-political criteria for the exclusion of people from the electoral roll. If you could include a link back to here, or post in the comments, then I will be able to track the progress of our strategic development and forward it to Gordon Brown / The United Nations forthwith.

Thank you.

----------------------------------------------------

Dear Gordon Brown,

We propose that the current apathetic attitude towards electoral responsibility could be resolved by the removal of a number of citizens from the electoral roll. We believe that this will create a sense of pride in being eligible to vote, just like back in the days when women had to throw themselves under horses in order to prove that they truly wanted to engage in the process. Whilst this practice was clearly effective, we believe the recent cuts in NHS A&E provision have created a climate in which it would be unviable to encourage people to go to such lengths to win their vote.

Instead, we propose that the following non-political behaviours be used as rules for the exclusion of people from the electoral roll. These rules have been gathered via a democratic consultation process that didn't cost any money, involve the hiring of large numbers of consultants, or require painting a special design on a double decker bus.

Many thanks for your time and attention,

Assorted Bloggers (as below)

For the purposes of the trimming of the electoral roll, the following behaviours should be grounds for exclusion:

1. Purchasing a 'Britney Spears on Pan Pipes' CD (or equivalent). - http://dailystraying.blogspot.com

Add your rule and your blog signature here ...

----------------------------------------------------

Wouldn't it be nice if ...

2007-09-03T19:04:00.000+01:00

... someone invented an apple-F (ctrl-F to you PC users) for the real world?

That'll teach me ...

2007-09-02T15:22:00.000+01:00

Blogging has been good to me.

Through my blog I have met a significant handful of incredibly lovely people who I am privileged to know. I have drawn out parts of myself which were dormant and timid. I've had a thousand moments of being aware of something 'bloggable' for every hundred posts I've actually got around to blogging.

I've laughed.

I've cried.

And if I hadn't been neglecting my blog I might well now be rich beyond my wildest imaginings (which aren't actually very wild).

You see, last Monday night I had A Great Idea. It was something so definitely necessary and produceable and marketable that Dr But Why? and I were stunned to realise it hadn't been done before. And I remember saying "I shall blog that - or at least I shall blog the fact that I've had such a good idea ... ".

And now, six days later, neither of us can remember the faintest detail of The Great Idea.

I do remember that I was standing by the chopping board in the kitchen when I had it. Dr But Why? remembers that she was making a hot chocolate at the time, about to get herself an early night. We stood and stared around the kitchen earlier for a good half hour. Dr But Why? went back to first principles to try to recall, where as I attempted to redraw the exact moment I had it, hoping to reconnect the missing information to my consciousness.

We do remember that it had something to do with the kitchen.

Anyone got any suggestions?

*sigh*

Unimportant things that are wrong with the world (1)

2007-08-30T11:00:00.000+01:00

The prize for the Observer cryptic crossword is a dictionary. The prize for the Sunday Times cryptic crossword is a pen.

I have been unable to come up with a scenario in which someone who can complete a prize cryptic crossword does not already own a dictionary and a pen.

Ms Melancholy is rather good at cryptic crosswords. She popped down to the treehouse a couple of weeks ago to visit Badger and I, and we did so many crosswords that when I read a sports headline this week saying "Kelly wins our first (and last) medal?" I immediately started unscrambling it.

I am no longer able to interpret meaning literally, but instead am looking for obscure alternative contexts. The cyberneticist Gregory Bateson wrote a wonderful paper on Schizophrenia which is included in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", which talks about the Schizophrenic experience as being one of taking the information but shifting the context. I have no direct personal experience of the condition, which is of course really just a blanket term for a set of experiences, as we have no 'piss-on-a-stick' test for it as far as I know, but I have met quite a few people with differences in perception or communication which would be loosely lassoed into the 'Schizophrenia' pen, and it does feel like cryptic crosswords are quite a good fit.

On the other hand, Badger's interpretation of the world can often involve the sort of literal meaning-taking that produces similarly bizarre interpretations. Ms Melancholy and I had been out and about, and were coming back to eat some lovely Thai Green Prawn curry that super-chef Badger was whizzing up for us all. Ms Melancholy made a quick phone call to Badger once we knew we were about 15 minutes away ...

Ms M: Hi Badger! Yes, we're not far away - just on the M25 about to hit the A3, do you want us to pick anything up for you?

Badger: Off the M25? Pick me something up off the M25? I don't think so ... no ...

Bless. I suppose Badger was just answering the exact question Ms M had asked!

Funnily enough we didn't come home with a traffic cone, road kill or a single shoe. Speaking of which - why do people throw shoes into the central reservation? Is it because they left the other one on the top of a bus shelter?

:Insert dramatic photo here:

2007-08-29T08:55:00.000+01:00

Woof.

Woof woof.

Woof woof woof.

Ruby isn't a yappy kind of dog. One of the good traits of Boxer dogs is that they only bark when there is something to bark at - they bark almost exclusively to alert. Ok, sometimes they are alerting you to a dangerous carrier bag blowing in the wind, but better safe than sorry hey :)

So, when I heard Ruby's very definite "Mum! Mum! Something is wrong!" bark down in the bottom of the quarry, I pricked up my ears. It continued for a little while, so I went to the door and shouted to her.

Woof.

Woof woof.

Woof woof woof.

(I didn't shout the woofs, I shouted words, she barked back. Just incase you were confused).

I had a friend over at the time, and as I pulled on my shoes I said "Sorry, it's just that it definitely sounds like there's something wrong - I'd better go and check ... " I felt like a bit of an idiot saying it to be honest. Ruby isn't known for her Lassie-esque heroic exploits.

Woof.

Woof woof.

Woof woof woof.

I was calling reassurance to Ruby as I walked down to the area of long grass, and each time I called, she barked back, the same urgent bark.

And then I saw it.

Ruby was circling the biggest snake I have seen outside of a zoo.

It was coiled, head raised a good six or eight inches above the ground, hissing and spitting at her as she barked at it. Instant adrenaline. Ruby has a heart condition and I knew that if it was an adder then her chances of surviving a bite were pretty much none. I couldn't get near enough to her to grab her collar without risking both of us being bitten, and the snake was looking even more pissed off about the arrival of a human ... eek!

For the first time since I moved here I was grateful that the place is half paradise / half junkyard. There is a derelict cottage not far from where we were standing and the rubble and rubbish from the building collapse and subsequent fly tipping has created a sprawl of junk that spreads in the wind and had conspired to leave a piece of some sort of rubbery roofing stuff about a foot and a half square just a couple of meters from where I was standing.

As I went to grab it I found my right hand patting my pocket where my phone/camera lives, and I actually contemplated taking a photo so that I could blog it. Taking a photo so that I could identify it might have been a good idea - especially as the current environmental survey here is counting snakes and the lovely ecologists who visit would have been absolutely thrilled ... but no, my only thought was that it was very very bloggable! More adrenaline fuelled a quick decision to abandon the photo idea.

I chucked the black square over the top of the snake from behind, and instantly Ruby was calm and controllable and we walked back up to the house, where I promptly got the shakes, cried a bit and drank quite a lot of tea.

It wasn't the snake itself - if it had just been me I would definitely have taken photos and enjoyed the adventure. It was the fact that my baby nearly got bitten by a snake!. It reminded me of a moment the previous day when had seen a man burst into tears on the tube after his little boy pressed the "Open doors" button as we were hurtling down the tunnel. I had watched the boy doing it, knowing full well that the doors would not open, but clearly his father had not had this confidence. The boy couldn't understand why his dad was holding him so tightly afterwards, and I'm sure Ruby was similarly bemused at my squeezes.

At over 2 ft long, the snake was almost certainly a grass snake, we'd have been very unlucky to be bitten at all and the consequences probably wouldn't have been that serious. It had a distinct cucumber shaped bulge half way along it's body(which luckily, was not one of Badger's cucumbers, she'd have been very cross!) so it obviously did present a danger to some of the local inhabitants, just not us.

Phew.

DIY-not?

2007-08-13T23:31:00.000+01:00

Here in the treehouse, we like to do things for ourselves.

When I first met Badger her idea of cooking was to put a Birds Eye frozen chicken pie in the oven for approximately the right length of time. To this day, if I make something really good, Badger exclaims cheerfully: "Wow - it tastes just like it came out of a packet!"

So, it was a major occasion this week when we picked and ate the first couple of Badger's home grown runner beans.

As well as Badger's homegrown beans (soon to be joined by tomatoes, cucumber and peppers) we have our fresh eggs from the girls, who have been pretty much bound to the shed recently after two of them were butchered by a vicious mink. We had a loose pen for them, which did a good job of keeping them from wandering off into the woods, but did nothing to keep out anything that might fancy chicken for lunch.

Fuelled by the recent tropical rains, the area by the chicken shed had magically transformed into a jungle ...

The problem of "how do we keep out intruders" has been debated by Dr But Why? and me for some time. We baulked at the idea of a concrete trench and instead began surveying the tumbled down outbuildings and piles of strange rubble that lurk in the woods. We eventually identified a dozen or so large concrete blocks, perfect for constructing a perimeter wall that would be stable enough to prevent entry into the bottom of the coop and yet unstable enough to fall on the head of any nasty stoat trying to dig a tunnel in. Perfect except for their location, deep in the woods half way down the quarry, somewhere behind the rhubarb field and the apple trees. Which is where they would still be if Dr But Why? wasn't significantly larger than me and fitted with the kind of personality defect that makes this kind of task a challenge.

I did manage to move some of the blocks some of the way. Which I think is no mean feat given that we estimate that they weigh only a few kilos less than I do. But I can't claim any credit for the moving of approximately 400 kg of concrete into position.

We had the sort of plan that an engineer-turned-software-programmer and a scientist-turned-consultant might come up with. A vague outline of our deliverables and a definite investment in the "Extreme Programming" methodology of basically striking out risks until the job was done. We reused a random wooden frame we found under the treehouse, a couple of long thick lengths of wood I had in the garage left over from building my sister a bespoke cabin bed, and the 'fence posts' from the old chicken run, which were actually old slats from Badger's single bed.

Staple gun, self-tapping screws, power drill ... and bob's yer builder, we have a chicken coop!

Badger was most pleased. The chickens were thrilled (in their own chickeny way) and proceeded to scratch, peck and rub themselves in the dirt in a very enthusiastic fashion. The discovery of a major ants nest just outside the coop was, I imagine, the poultry equivalent of realising you've moved in next door to a chinese takeaway.

Not content to stop at growing our own veg, keeping chickens and bashing things with hammers, we're a little bit partial to cutting our own hair. About every six weeks I undertake the interesting and somewhat physically dangerous task of attempting to tune in to Badger's tics for long enough to give her a quick crop without taking out my own eye or chopping the top off of her ear. Badger is quite a demanding client - she has very specific ideas about how her hair should be, and a tendency to only offer input about three quarters of the way through the process.

Many hairdressers will be familiar with clients arriving with a fantasy in mind - a dream of having hair just like Jennifer Aniston or Lady Diana (RIP) ... and Badger is no exception.

I would like my hair to look just like Wylie Kat ...

I rack my brains. Cat Deely? Cat Stevens? Nope ... I'm drawing a blank.

Wylie Kat out of Thundercats.

Oh. Of course!

And it does.

...

A variation on Murphy's law

2007-08-12T22:45:00.000+01:00

My house is approximately 1 part carpet (and grass matting) to 19 parts wipe-clean floor surfaces (marble, lino, stone).

And yet, when faced with a major failure of their digestive system, the animals never fail to vomit (or worse) on to a non-wipe-clean area.

There is even an exception to prove the rule. On Friday I went to a one hour lunch meeting in London which lasted almost five hours. As a result Ruby was at home, un-emptied, for far longer than I would normally leave her. Dr But Why? was first through the door, to discover that Ruby had rather cleverly gone to the toilet inside a partially filled bin-liner which contained various bits of plastic rejected by our recycling collection. Bless her.

I promise to post something less disgusting tomorrow.

Slow worms (not glow worms)

2007-08-07T23:23:00.000+01:00

There continues to be something wonderfully circular about this blog. Or do I mean cyclical? Both probably. Something reassuringly the-same-but-different about the content of the posts, which really I suppose is about the content of my life.

So, just over a year ago I posted this description of an evening spent on the downs behind our house, searching for glow worms. This week we have been counting slow worms here in our garden. The environmental assessment of this place, determining whether it is too important ecologically to be built on, continues. Some soft spoken men arrived last week and tolerated Ruby's enthusiastic jumping up very good naturedly as they explained that they would need to put several carpet tiles (they may actually be more than just carpet tiles but that's what they look like) in spots around the garden, and then return each day to count any lizards, snakes and slow worms underneath them.

A week later, they are averaging six to eight slow worms under each tile! Plus the occasional grass snake, and they are fairly sure that if they looked frequently enough they would find an adder or two. They also found one small lizard that ran off before they identified it. The badger set has been confirmed as active, and as well as a small group of friendly Roe deer we have both stoats and mink - it was an evil mink that butchered our chickens several months ago.

They've noted down several interesting variations of wild orchid, and some blue butterflies which may be of the rarer varieties.

They haven't done a bird assessment yet, but we have both of the major types of bat native to the UK ... so all in all it's a pretty comprehensive checklist of protected species.

The environmental assessment guy told me today that he loves visiting our house, because he feels like he is back in Canada - his favourite place he has ever lived. He told me that the patch of overgrowth we were rummaging in, the clearing where the grass is tall and thick with flowers, where clouds of crickets and butterflies are kicked up with every step and lizards slither away unseen, where you can make out the shapes of the deer who slept there the night before, is intended to be a carpark for the development. Of course.

Slow worms are quite amazing creatures really. They live for up to 30 years in the wild, almost twice as long in captivity. I'd guess that some of our slow worms have been in this garden longer than the architects on the project have known how to hold a pencil. And suddenly I can understand why perfectly normal people end up chaining themselves to bulldozers!

The big smoothie dilemma

2007-08-02T08:30:00.001+01:00

At the weekend I made a smoothie out of the numerous pieces of fruit in the fruit bowl and fridge that were perched precariously on the edge of going furry. It contained mango, plum, nectarine, blueberries, banana, raspberries, melon, papaya, strawberries and grapes. (No courgettes, despite them being sneaky members of the fruit family). And I stood back and thought to myself "What a lot of vitamins / air miles". Now, there is no doubt that the vitamin to air mile ratio of this smoothie is better than a lot of the rubbish we / I import and eat. And Dr Gillian McKeith would probably squeak in glee and pronounce me immortal after drinking this cocktail (particularly once I'd added the live yogurt) ... but still - is that benefit to me (and Badger, and Dr But Why?) worth the damage to the planet?

This stuff is particularly at the forefront of my mind because one of my current projects involves editing and making an interactive documentary about a very interesting book which doesn't yet have a title but goes under a working subtitle of "Why Global Warming is the best thing that has ever happened to the human race." It's a complicated argument, and before you can begin to think about "best" you of course need to settle on a definition of "good" and "bad".

The author's working method of determining between good and bad is quite simple. Things which are expansive and inclusive are broadly good, things which are contractive and exclusive are broadly bad. Thus, legislation which prevents negative discrimination against, to take my own minority, gay people, is good even if from time to time it infringes on the basic freedoms of individuals who are homophobic - this calculation is based on the fact that (in the UK at least) there are more gay people than people who are genuinely damaged by the fact that they can't openly discriminate against us. More people experience inclusion as a result of this change than exclusion. We're not into measuring degrees of benefit or damage - simply whether people feel more inside or outside of the circle.*

I quite like this method of calculation. It seems both human and scientific at the same time. (No, I don't want to further define those terms - I simply feel that in my gut, and as both a human and a scientist that is good enough for me!)

So. On the question of my nine-fruit smoothie, and the fact that there are no papayas growing in Surrey ... I expect that the international trade in exotic fruit is actually more expansive and inclusive than it is contractive and exclusive. Food is a doorway into other cultures etc etc.

Now to more pressing issues. NMJ raised the issue of resisting joining Facebook. It's something I've been wrestling with recently - on Monday I received an email inviting me to become Ruby's friend on Facebook. (For new readers - Ruby is my dog.) I have a limited amount of time for non-work internet stuff, and I have a gut feeling that, for me, Blogging is better than Facebook.

I realised that this is essentially a social smoothie question. Facebook and Blogging do quite different things. Facebook maintains existing networks and facilitates groups of common interest / association. Blogging is so much broader. You already know that, because you're reading this.

So, next time someone pesters me about not being a member of Facebook I shall simply tell them that I like really really exotic smoothies, and very occasionally I like to throw in a courgette. ;)

--

*Of course we all feel inside / outside of the circle to varying degrees, or even multiple degrees at the same time and this is a constantly changing experience depending on the momentary relationships we have with the various aspects of our selves, but in very simplistic terms I can generally say whether, when something changes, I feel more or less included than I did before. Inclusion is not the same as membership. Accepting an invitation may carry terms and conditions, the value of investments may go down as well as up, etc etc etc.

Soothsayer in Surrey? Yell.com!

2007-07-30T12:59:00.000+01:00

Frank has left us a sacred offering. I have spared you a photograph, although I was tempted.

The severed head of a small rodent and its expertly extracted intestines lie by the back door, awaiting interpretation by a handy haruspex.

Apparently, entrail reading is approximately as accurate as the polygraph test employed in the US legal system.

I put "soothsayer" into Yell.com. Surprisingly it gave me two results.

The first was for a vintage comic store in Glasgow. The second was for a CBT practitioner in Surrey!

Ms Melancholy? Any comments?

Name that fruit or vegetable

2007-07-20T14:22:00.000+01:00

So. I'm at the checkout in Tesco. I'm placing the contents of my trolley on to the conveyor belt, in a strict order, because that is what I am like. Fruit, then veg, then other fridge things, then stuff that belongs in the larder, then bathroom and cleaning products. We've only just started and already the checkout girl is looking a little flummoxed. Luckily the boy on the next til is willing to help.

It's a starfruit ...

Oh right ... and what's this? Are these the same?

No no, those are mangoes, and that is a papaya ... in exotic fruit, but it should have a barcode.

Oh, ok ... I'll get the hang of it soon ...

The girl is at least 25, but I figure mango and papaya aren't staple to the average Surreyite. I chip in with a bit of friendly banter about when I used to work in a supermarket, in the days before barcodes and picture tils, and we had to learn long lists of prices and product codes. She is sympathetic, and I assure her that she'll soon get the hang of it.

And then she picks up my one of my peculiar exotic vegetables* and asks what it is.

It's a courgette. I say. Astonished.

Ah! Sorry ... I've only worked here a week ... she offers, as if this is some kind of explanation.

I managed to hold back from advising her that if she ate a few more vegetables then perhaps she wouldn't look so pasty, but it was close.

--

*Obviously a courgette is technically a fruit and not a vegetable, but I think that would have blown her mind.

Cleaning is the new black

2007-07-19T12:36:00.000+01:00

I was 3 years old in 1979 when the lovely Jenny Logan first 'shake-and-vac'ed into my consciousness. The advert was shown for another 10 years, and that persistent delivery of a jingle which is 2 parts ear-worm to 1 part message has finally paid off for Glade. Last week I parted with a whole 68 pence to make my first ever purchase of Glade Shake n Vac Citrus Fresh.

What amazes me is the conviction of my purchase. Having washed our carpets a few weeks ago, I found my bedroom carpet emitting a few strange aromas as it dried very slowly ... nothing requiring gas masks or immediate relocation, just the odd whiff of something ... odd. And before I could even say "cash cow" I was at the supermarket checkouts, confident that in just a matter of hours my carpet, and my room, would smell fresh again. I didn't look on the internet, didn't even google "remove carpet aroma after washing". I didn't wander up and down the household products aisle wondering what to buy, or ask assistance from a friendly shelf-stacking person. I just remembered what to do.

Not only that, but I didn't read the instructions. No no, I recalled the distinctive wrist action, found it to be really quite a satisfying movement (though the hips were beyond me), and I shook, and then vacced. And it worked.

Thank you Jenny Logan.

In other exciting news this week, I have sorted out my tupperware. It was quite out of control, and the trouble with cleaning your house is that as each task is tackled it only serves to hilight the chaos remaining around it. So, the tupperware mountain that threatened to bury myself or Badger in a polyethylene avalanche any time we went for milk from the fridge became a Priority. Yes, I am quite aware that I just used the words tupperware and priority in the same sentence. Oh dear. Well. Anyway ... luckily Badger was on hand to oversee the process, in her own very special blunt way she looked me in the eye and said "You DON'T need THAT", as I nervously dusted my lettuce spinner. "But ... but ... but ... " I blustered, thinking fondly of the two occasions on which I had put it to use in the previous four years. I conceded. I took it to oxfam, which may or may not be a charitable act ... I can't quite decide.

PS - Hello Steve's mum :)

Nesting

2007-07-02T14:40:00.001+01:00

Did you miss me?

I have been finding myself spending time usually reserved for blogging and reading the interweb doing things. Worse, cleaning things. I have lived here in our shack in the woods for just over a year now. 10th June 2006 we moved in. Suddenly, last week, I was overcome with an urge to clean and mend - really deep clean and mend - to line the nest with new feathers and no, no, I am definitely not pregnant!

This weekend I cajoled Badger and Dr But Why? into major action, and trotted along to HSS hire shops to procure a carpet cleaner. My bedroom carpet was installed in the sixties, and the office one in the late 70s. I doubt that they have seen much more than a cursory vacuum since then.

So. Every single Thing in my bedroom was brought out into the lounge. Actually, there weren't too many Things - a bed, a chest of drawers, 3 washing baskets (I have washing sorting OCD apparently), a bedside wheely thing and Ruby's crate. I filled up the dyson with the dust from under the bed while the cat made herself comfortable in the drawers full of clothes that I had left on the sofa.

I shampooed the carpet. I emptied bucket after bucket of brown sludgy water down the toilet. I rinsed the carpet. I emptied more buckets of brown sludgy water down the toilet. It is incredibly satisfying, pouring dirt away like that ... dirt you didn't even realise was there.

Badger helped me replace my furniture, and I fell into peaceful deep sleep in a spotless room with clean sheets on the bed.

Sunday ... sunday ... we tackled The Octagon. I love that we call our office / spare room 'the octagon'. I feel like a superhero every time I say it. 3 desks, one filing cabinet, a bookshelf, 2 sofas, one window seat, assorted musical instruments, speakers, tv, tv cabinet, 3 office chairs and lots of smaller heavy electrical items were duly shuffled and shoved, dusted and polished and wiped and tidied, and the carpet was hoovered shampooed and rinsed, and brown sludgy water disposed of, while Badger cleaned all the windows and mopped the floors and the cat made herself comfortable on the sofa.

And it feels good. It feels amazing. I realised yet again that I love this house. I truly love it - in the way that one can only love a living, breathing thing. Because it is a living, breathing thing. Our house nestles in the trees, soaks in the sunshine and showers in the rain. It is gripped and woven by vines and ivy. In the autumn it hangs heavy with grapes and in the summer the plums are only a quick stretch out of the window. And in the octagon there is the window seat, and this is why I am nesting - because I have remembered, once again, how lucky I am to live in a tree.

Lost and found

2007-06-22T22:50:00.001+01:00

Oh! Cas's book launch was soooo lovely. She read beautifully and I don't know where she got that calm and steady voice from but it was gorgeous and I was so proud. Will blog more about that over the weekend, I can't believe it's been a week already!

It wasn't a good weekend to be ooop north. Ruby and I needed an ark ... we worried that even if we found one we might not be let in, not being 2 by 2 and all that. I was driving over to Harrogate when the rivers started bursting their banks. The top road was already blocked by a landslide, and now the bottom road was flooding too. Roads were closing faster than I could keep track ... I had Badger on the phone doing web-searches to try to find me a clear route, but the traffic sites were behind the flow of water, the diversions were changing every few minutes as police struggled to clear broken down vehicles and accidents.

I found my way, somehow, through crawling traffic, to Knaresborough, where my friend lives. She was struggling to get back from Leeds and I was panicking that I might be stranded in Knaresborough for days, unable to get back. Waiting for my friend to arrive home I went to look for petrol and found a retail park to loiter in. I pulled up in a space and started flicking through my radio, wishing I had a clue what the local stations might be.

And then I found it. The station that would come to my rescue, running a constant update of eyewitness reports about which roads were closed and open, where the traffic was worst and which alternative routes were giving most success. Am I odd for thinking this is kind of eerie?

shhhhh ...

2007-06-14T01:55:00.000+01:00

... everyone is asleep.

Except for those of us who are too excited to sleep.

Only one sleep to go til In Search of Adam launches in Manchester.

One sleep to go, if I can sleep, of course.

I have to sleep because I will be driving the dog bus up to Yorkshire, where I will collect Ms M and Bobo and ferry them to the launch party at Waterstones (91 Deansgate) Manchester ... where we will meet up with Badger and Matthew and JJ and Jude and the dancing girls from The Friday Project and and and ... who am I missing ...?

... who am I missing ...?

Oh yes. Ms Caroline Smailes (Author).

Oh oh oh! I am full of secret surprises and that is tooooooooo exciting to sleep. Even though it is the last before sleep. The only before sleep left.

D-W will be having her own special launch party over at her new blog Asynchronous Process too. She is creating a book chain and community of 100 people. Amazing.

But. We have to be excited quietly.

Because everyone else is sleeping.

Shhhh!

How can I help you?

2007-06-10T18:13:00.000+01:00

Having spent this morning being squirted in and out of an MRI tube, I'm feeling in a lazy-blogging kinda mood.

So. Here's what you're looking for - I hope I can help.

Search: what part of the brussel sprouts do you eat?

Stray says: anything except the stick.

Search: what is the difference between heelys and wheelies?

Stray says: Approximately 2 front teeth.

Search: signs of straying husbands

Stray says: I'm not sure, but if in doubt, have your husband microchipped to ensure his safe return when he does stray.

Search: rules of cornish daily life

Stray says: Minimum 1 pasty per person per day. Surfing 3 times a week. All single-track roads must be travelled at a minimum of 70 mph, unless you are in an extra wide farm vehicle, in which case a maximum of 1 mph should be observed.

Search: nun milk

Stray says: 7 points.

Search: My dog is very depressed because of the loss of her doggie friend, what should I do?

Stray says: Bring her over to play with mine? I could do with a cuddle myself ... your search term made me sob.

Search: murders in bellshill

Stray says: I haven't been there in ages. It wasn't me. Have you asked The Soup Dragons?

Search: mini cooper convertible wobble

Stray says: Consider an additional income through hiring your vehicle out to people who can't afford a vibrating belt massager™ as seen on tv.

Search: care and content label rules for socks

Stray says: Always keep in pairs. The end.

Search: boxer dog injured nose

Stray says: Oh! Kiss it better of course!

Search: Blessings on the occasion of opening of new Catholic Primary School message of congrats

Stray says: Why did you come here? Weren't you just asking about the nun milk?

Synchronicity

2007-06-06T14:18:00.000+01:00

Following on from my amazing coincidental arrangement to have lunch with Ms M and Cas on my blog birthday, today my Dad requested a copy of some lyrics I wrote when I was much younger.

I have a scary memory stuffed full of the words of thousands of songs ... mostly other people's but also everything I've ever written it seems ... so I found myself typing out the words to a song that I wrote when I was 17? 18? 19? (I'm 31 now - those years are a bit of a blur despite the clarity on the words themselves). I don't remember writing it - it seems like it was always there just waiting to be written down. I know that I recorded it in the band I was briefly in when I was 20 ... with the most talented singer I've had the joy of working with. Who, of course, I came to be writing music with because she was the glass collector in a pub where I was serving drinks and I overheard her singing in the loo.

Fitting.

I don't think it's an amazing feat of lyrical achievement - but I do still believe strongly in the subject matter - so much so at the moment when I have so many lovely people in my life through blogging. And so, typing it out to email to my Dad (I have no idea why he wants it) it struck me that at the time that I wrote this song I had no concept of a 'blog'. Which made me think of the wonderful contractual clause for rights in TV these days "All rights in all media now known or hereafter invented... ".

I am sure when I wrote this I would have applied the same clause. I just wouldn't have known it. Because I didn't know much ... a lot of fancy stuff with numbers and the whole back catalogue of the Smiths were about the limits of my wisdom at that age.

Anyway ... er ... please add your own smoke and beer ... here's a little number I wrote when I was just a kid, and with a small nod to the late great Carl Jung I'd like to dedicate it to his fan Ms M. I call it Synchronicity ...

these interlocking interlinking hands are weaving patterns of coherence
mapping out the paths the steps the dance this rhythm, making sense
of sights and sounds and words and pictures, sketching, drawing it together
twisting tying knots the threads of life unbroken spun forever

don't try to tell me that there's nothing going on
it's all around you, believe and you will see
don't try to tell me that there's nothing going on
it's all around you, it's synchronicity

scratch the surface feel the pulse this living breathing breeding force
undercurrents shifting tides that surge the river down its course
the fluid fragile webs of plans we're spinning growing day by day by day
the ever present wind of change blows complex til they fade away

don't try to tell me that there's nothing going on
it's all around you, believe and you will see
don't try to tell me that there's nothing going on
it's all around you, it's synchronicity

Completing a cycle

2007-06-03T18:31:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow this blog will be 1 year old.

Completely coincidentally, tomorrow I also have a long arranged date with lovely Ms Melancholy and Cas, on a day chosen before I realised it was my blog's birthday.

Fitting though.

In the last year I have, through this blog, stumbled upon a few handfuls of valuable new relationships. With parts of myself, with my camera, with writing, with ruby, with my home, with the day to day minutae that is so different when your first thought in reaction to any quirky event, positive or negative, is "I could totally blog this ... ".

I have published about 150 posts. I have written many more - as mental drafts, sketched out on scraps of paper at the back of my mind. They have often made unbearable moments bearable.

Equally precious though are the relationships I have with real live Other People. Friends who now know me better than I used to know myself. People I have drunk coffee with, cried with, laughed with, chatted online with, shared meals with, even been on holiday with. I went into my recent surgery calming myself with the knowledge that a wonderful group of people from the meditation blog I joined were, in their different time zones all over the world, meditating simultaneously and holding me in their thoughts. How beautiful is that?

I have read wisdom, poetry, funny stories, terrible pain and miraculous insight. I have ached with others in their struggles, been made braver by their honesty and feel quite encouraged about the much larger numbers of lovely people than I had imagined existed!

It's been a pants year in so many respects - but this blog and the friends I have made through it have been so positive that I don't think I would change it if I could.

Big huge kisses and cuddles and thank yous to all of you. (Ms M and Cas you can have yours in person, the rest of you will have to take them virtually for now :) )

xx

What do you eat?

2007-05-30T11:48:00.001+01:00

A good friend of mine (hey K!) and I were chatting the other day about stuff I do. I was talking about writing, about having done well in Maht's fiction comp and not being sure what to do because I like writing and I like maths and I like making films ... and she interjected:

Yeah, well you're totally an omnivore.

(you need to add a kinda laid-back-east-west-coast-mixed-up US accent there to get the full effect).

I love that description of me. It feels so accurate - I like the taste of numbers, I like the taste of words, I like the taste of music and pictures and philosopy and sociology and psychology and poetry and the combustion engine. I like the texture of journalism, I like the way true stories crunch between my teeth. I like chewy meaty things and silky soupy things. I like dry and wet. I like sweet and savory - sometimes even together. I like chinese and indian and street food and home made jam.

To make the point to myself, I just spent my lovely amazon gift voucher from Maht for winning the short story comp on a book called "Use Cases: Patterns and Blueprints" which is a high level theoretical study on best practice in software design for use.

In short: I am an omnivore - I eat everything.

What do you eat?

Blogging game 2: Mystery Limericks

2007-05-27T15:28:00.001+01:00

EDIT : I have added the answers after each limerick, but behind a link, so you can still play if you like!

A blogger called ******** from France
Was so talented given a chance
with a curly pink thing
she could make a pig sing
though she never did teach it to dance

... This is a mystery limerick. Click here for the answer

It is about someone in my blog roll. (About a post that they have written).

Their name has the same number of letters as the ******** (8).

I challenge you to find the person ... and then to make up a limerick clue about someone in your blogroll, and post it in the comments so we can all play along!

When you find each answer, don't post it in the comments ... no, because other people are still playing! Instead, email it to me, and later today, or early tomorrow (not that early, it's a bank holiday) I will make a leader board and put it up on the blog.

You will get one point for correctly identifying the blog / blogger (it can be a blog name or a blogger name). You will get an extra point if you identify a specific post that is referred to in the limerick. Don't forget that you can search a blog, and blogger for key words - you don't have the read the whole damn thing ...

Ready?

Steady?

Go!

------------------------------------------
under here I am listing the clues people have made up since we started
------------------------------------------

2 - by Ms Melancholy

A blogger called **** tried to please,
With a comp in his house of cream cheese,
Stray won it, the bugger
But he didn't hug her
Cos she only comes up to his knees

(leads to a post) - Click here for the answer

3 - by me

A blogger called **** did confess
of his liking for wearing a dress
he looks gorgeous and fine
when he's dressed the the nines
in a black number from M&S

(leads to a post) - Click here for the answer

4 - by Ms Melancholy

A blogger called ***** has a tongue
For words that are beautifully strung
She’s not easy to diss
For she sees what we miss
I think she is channelling Jung

(leads to a post) - Click here for the answer

5 - by me

A blogger called ****** did speak
of her need to squeal, squawk, pop and squeak
her top explanation
caused such fascination
She was bloody well post of the week!

(leads to a post) - Click here for the answer

6 - by Caroline

There is a blogger, I call him *************
Over him we do often swoon.
His talents are rather vast,
He crooned lyrics in the past.
But alas we will not meet him soon.

(leads to a blog, not a post) - Click here for the answer

7 - by trousers

In this post, **** never fails
To mimic one who writes tales
OMG!OMG!
With warped typography
He's scared that she'll go off the rails

(leads to a post) - Click here for the answer

8 - by me

a blogger called ****** did paint
us a picture peculiar and quaint
she might cause you to giggle
if she touched your middle
but koumpounophobic she ain't

(leads to a post) - Click here for the answer

9 - by Ms Melancholy

******** has opened his press
Forced into it out of excess
One blogger has banned him
For chatting at random
Those rules, he can’t help but transgress

(leads to a blog, not a post) - Click here for the answer

10 - by Ms Melancholy

*** ****** has a blog that’s artistic
And an outlook on life that’s holistic
She’s starting to write
But it’s hard to delight
Cos she lives with a man who’s autistic

(leads to a post) - Click here for the answer

11 - by Clare

A blogger who knows about death
Has talent for stopping your breath.
But you know the one
She's **** * ***
And no, she's not called Beth.

(leads to a blog) - Click here for the answer

12 - by Clare

I like that ** **********
Surprisingly light and jolly,
She'll lift up your mood
Might even serve food
And def'nitely isn't a wally.

(leads to a blog) - Click here for the answer

13 - by Caroline

******* shows drawings of his past,
That through time and tribulations did last.
He always cleaned his teeth,
And was frightened of the belief,
That a bomb would blow up his house in one blast.

(leads to a post) - Click here for the answer

I've found Adam

2007-05-26T11:01:00.000+01:00

This post presents me with a problem. The problem is how to communicate the fact that although Caroline is my friend, my very very dear friend who I have come to love and respect over the few months that we have known each other online, everything I am about to say is irrespective of that friendship.

So. Please take me at my word and I will begin.

Yesterday at 14.35 pm I had my copy of Caroline's new novel In Search of Adam placed into my hands by Clare Weber in The Friday Project offices. I was going in to town to get a train back out to South East London, for an appointment. By 14.50 I was walking into the underground at St James's Park tube. I took a picture of the book in my hand. I didn't know it was a 'before' moment. The beginning of a 'before and after'.

The train arrived. I sat down. I opened the book and began to read. By page 3 I was crying. On the tube. In front of people.

I need to qualify something here - I don't do crying at books, or films, or TV or music. The only book which has ever previously moved me to sob was JG Ballard's The Kindness of Women. Media which touches me with that depth is rare. The film Gallipoli, the death of Mark Green in ER - it has happened so rarely that I remember each occasion. It's not that I lack empathy, but I find it hard to entirely suspend my understanding that this is a film / book / tv show.

So. At page 3 I began crying. I didn't stop crying (or reading) until several hours later when I had reached the end. I am a fast reader, I am prone to reading books in one sitting, can eat up 2 novels on a transatlantic flight. But. But this was about Jude. Caroline has created a character who was so real to me, so utterly completely alive for me, that I didn't want to leave her alone. In the moments when I was not reading, when I was crossing the street, in the appointment, stepping on to and off of various trains, I ached to be back with her. I wanted to reach into the book and put my arms around her. I wanted to whisper I am here. I am listening. You are not alone. At times I felt that Jude knew I was there. I don't think I have ever experienced that with a book before. Have you?

ISoA is a sad book. A moving, desperately tragic story. But. But it's not a miserable book. It is without self-consciousness. Without drama. Without sentimentality. Which is remarkable considering the fact that it is a book about child abuse, written from the child's perspective.

There are lots of ways in which ISoA is a clever book too. The use of different fonts and sizes and symbols and the graphic layout of words on the page is not a gimmick. Caroline was once slated for having 'got her book deal with a few fancy fonts'. That is not the case. ISoA is bordering on visual art. The use of the fonts, the use of repetition, the layout of words on the page, they are a powerful multiplier of Jude's voice - they tell you things which Jude does not have the understanding or confidence to articulate. They add a layer of meta communication. They are crucial to the story, core to the writing. They are not formatting - weren't added as an afterthought ... I feel that this is how the words came out.

If I had millions of pounds I would have hundreds of thousands of copies of ISoA printed and issue them to every parent, teacher, nurse, doctor, social worker, psychologist, therapist, youth worker and politician in the country. I would simply ask them to read 3 pages, and know that they would read the rest.

But I don't. So, I will have to rely on the fact that I don't believe you can read a book like ISoA and not tell people about it. That people who have met Jude will carry her story to others. And they will, because, in short, In Search of Adam is a before and after book.

What I need ...

2007-05-25T09:02:00.000+01:00

... is a bloody good meme!

I have been wanting to post this week, partly just to shuffle the last stuff down the page, but I have worked (no kidding) 62 hours in the last 4 days. 40 in 48 in the first couple of days. Luckily I love my work, and I still get such a thrill out of loading the software I've built onto my Nokia N73 and playing with it on my phone.

But yeah, creative juices? I've been thoroughly squeezed.

Still, there are people in life who you can rely on to get you outta this kind of jam - I simply shone a giant "M" into the sky and there he was: Maht of The Moon Topples.

He told me he'd been following on from lovely goodthomas, who was feeling kinda needy in a non-specific vague way ... and without a therapist to hand, decided to turn to the font-of-all-knowledge (Google) to assist in his quest.

So, he ran a google search on "Goodthomas needs", and came up with some quite stunning observations. Maht found it to be similarly soul searching, and so it was a little trepidation that I carefully typed ("Stray needs" -home) into my google search bar.

The intensity I felt was not misplaced. Unhinged perhaps, but entirely justified. My results are below, followed by links to Maht and GoodThomas's quest results, and I tag Caroline, Ms Melancholy, Badger, Dr But Why? and Ms Pants to dare run their own search. Believe me, it's better therapy than six weeks of CBT. I shall be further dissecting my own needs later today. One of them made me cry (though that could be the lack of sleep).

Good luck. Don't be afraid, Google knows your darkest secrets and loves you just the same.

Stray needs:

Stray needs loving home

Stray needs help by 7/29

Stray needs money to continue

Stray needs to pick up some steam

Stray needs straw but I have hay not straw

Stray needs rescuing and money is no object

Stray needs to see a vet ASAP

Stray needs someone to take care of him.

Stray needs to possess a soulful spark

Stray needs all the TLC she can get

Stray needs to compile small real-mode programs

Stray needs roof over head, well-stocked bar.

Stray needs to see this. she has a thing for hampsters.

Stray needs to be screened for leukemia and FIV

Stray needs to get her butt in gear

Stray needs lots of love, patience and time

Stray needs the light to hit it just right to be visible

Stray needs to post!

Stray needs languages

Stray needs a fan club

...

Goodthomas needs ...
The Moon Topples needs ...

Anyone for EBT ... ?

2007-05-20T10:19:00.000+01:00

I agreed to write this joint post with lovely Ms Melancholy, of Confessions of a Psychotherapist, after reading a post by PatientGuard: Borderline Personality Disorders Treated With Elastic Band NHS Therapy In The UK.

I am fortunate not to have Borderline Personality Disorder, but I have lost count of the number of mental health professionals who have, in their best I really do care voice, asked me whether I have ever tried pinging an elastic band against my wrist.

Or drawing on myself in red pen.

Yes, really – people who claim to have all sorts of levels of expertise in mental distress, will sincerely encourage me to try drawing on myself with a red pen instead of cutting myself.

They actually become quite irritated when I don’t put these two helpful suggestions into practice.

People cut for all sorts of reasons, none of them trivial. After decades of doing it, it’s no longer possible for me to quantify or qualify why I cut. It would be like trying to write a comprehensive list of reasons why you love your best friend.

Don’t get me wrong - cutting is not my friend. I’m not extolling its virtues, I don’t think it’s big or clever. But, for us choppers, it is reliable as a coping mechanism. And, as Ms M points out in her thoughtful post about self-harm and therapy from the therapist's perspective, most people who self-harm find that on some level it is what soothes them. Soothes them in moments of otherwise unbearable emotional discomfort. Restores them to calm and control in times of extreme turmoil. (Apparently some even get an orgasm-like kick - that’s not me).

If you present to your GP and manage to confess that you self-harm – something which takes a great deal of courage because generally the response to people who self-harm is still that we are attention seeking nuisances – you will be most likely offered a short course of CBT.

That CBT will endeavour, within six to ten weeks, to teach you to challenge negative thinking with positive thoughts, to use distraction techniques to ride out difficult emotions, and to substitute elastic band pinging for actual self-injury.

I can just about imagine the elastic band thing working for me if I was pinging it directly into my eyeball. A red pen could be useful if I snapped it in half and shoved it through my hand.

Anyway … I believe that CBT primarily provides an additional set of sticks with which a self-harmer can then beat themselves up mentally for not being able to put the ‘solutions’ into practice. We are already quite good at this; we don’t need additional training!

So, if the CBT ‘solutions’ don’t work – what does?

My own experience of working with four therapists in relation to self-harm has been that it is absolutely key that the therapist doesn’t try to offer these ‘solutions’ to substitute for self-harming. I had an initial false start with a therapist who wasn’t prepared to accept my coping mechanism, was an advocate of elastic band therapy (EBT) and wanted to enforce a contract that prevented me from cutting. I was lucky to find a creative and very open therapist who was willing to put aside her own natural discomfort and believed that cutting was too complex and too central to my identity and way of being in the world to simply cast aside.

The single most important thing she gave me was a space in which I could express my thoughts and feelings in relation to cutting and not be alone. Most self-harmers spend a huge amount of energy either hiding their behaviour or reassuring others about it. We are told, repeatedly, how distressing it is for those who care about us. We know this. I personally feel huge guilt about the concern that I cause to people who are close to me, and frustration that this doesn’t automatically prevent me from doing it. So, even in therapy, I feel a duty to protect my therapist from worrying about my physical safety – an instinct to not discuss it, in case I cause her upset.

Given that alcohol is a factor in at least 1 in 4 admissions to A&E, and that 1 in 4 adults in the UK regularly binge drink, I sometimes wonder whether there is something very artificial and socially constructed about this need I feel to protect my therapist from worrying about me. I know that many of my friends who have been in therapy would see a good session in the pub as a perfectly justifiable response to a difficult therapy session, and yet I doubt that they feel a responsibility to reassure their therapist that they are not being unsafe, or that their therapist would suggest drinking pints of Ribena, instead of beer, as an ‘alternative’.

I have had the most positive experiences in therapy in the moments when my therapist is able to be real about the dilemma they face – between on the one hand wanting me to be physically safe, and on the other hand believing that a coping mechanism does what it says on the tin. That’s ok - I want to be cared about.

If both therapist and client are able to accept that the dilemma exists equally on both sides, that there is a lot of examination that can be useful, but there will never be a ‘why’, that there is no ‘solution’ – simply a (very) slow growth in tolerance of emotional discomfort, until the need to use cutting to soothe and reintegrate is diminished – then you’ve got a hope of doing the work that will eventually make cutting less influential.

There are things your therapist says to you that stay with you forever, perhaps initially stinging and burning before later returning as a calm clear voice that points the way in times of confusion. I did not know at the time which of my therapist’s words would be so important to me. I am almost certain that my therapist couldn’t predict which of her sentences I would carry with me, and which would be left in the room. Most of those that echo were said in moments of intense honesty – in which one or both of us was frustrated, or teasing, or a mix of the two.

I don’t believe CBT allows much space for the relationship - for frustrations or for teasing. But apparently that’s ok, because they’ve got red pens and elastic bands.

Lost for words

2007-05-16T17:07:00.000+01:00

On Friday the 4th of May, I wrote a post about how I was so nervous of writing an entry for Maht of The Moon Topple's Great Big Awesome (short) Fiction Contest.

To be specific, I said:

I am a coward. I want to write something but ... but ... but. Yes. Paralysed by that internal chatter that informs me that it will be shit / boring / rubbish / cliched / nonsensical. Or, more likely shit, boring, rubbish, cliched nonsense.

So. Guess what?

I came first.

yuhuh! I really did! Really!

I can't quite believe it and I'm completely confused by how it happened. But most of all I am totally over-excited and hugely grateful to Maht for organising the festival, to all of you who put energy into encouraging me to take part, and to the other authors who wrote great stories and some of whom voted for me! Woo hoo!

There were some fab stories there. I particularly loved Ms Sign's horticultural chiller, Forget-me-not. I sort of feel like I must have fluked it, because I don't do that fiction-writing stuff. Perhaps that's the key - I've had 20 years to prepare for writing that one short story! I should surely quit now, before that difficult second album experience kicks in?

I actually ummed and ahed about whether to post here, or simply place my badge and be low key, and I thought sod it, I'm really chuffed, and my parents read my blog and they'll be dead chuffed as well, and deserve most of the credit for having put huge effort into encouraging us to read and write voraciously as children. And I'd like to thank my primary school teacher Mr Long, who taught me when I was 9, for being in favour of creativity and self-expression over spelling and neat handwriting.

So, er, I feel a bit shy, but you can read my story here. If you like. No pressure :)

Lovely bubbly!

2007-05-15T19:30:00.000+01:00

Goodness me I have some very talented blog and whole-life friends!

Lovely Badger's fab post about living with tourette's has been picked up by the BBC's disability blog Ouch. OMG! I'm living with a famous Badger!

And gorgeous Caroline has her very real very actual very tasty looking book in her hands today! It looks amazing, you can preorder the hardback from amazon, or go into a real life book shop and pick it up on the 15th June.

Talented Brumcunian wrote a left-handed ode of congratulations to Badger, which I have paraphrased here :)

Bad ass Badger bags great award!

Anyone else winning awards? Having books published? Being extra special?

Phew! What a lot to celebrate :)

And the winner is ...

2007-05-14T10:04:00.000+01:00

... omg Badger's post about tourette's has won post of the week!

Well done Badger! Seriously - there was some amazing competition - so you should be ultra impressed with yourself and also send a copy to any teachers from your schooldays who ever made disparaging remarks about you or your writing :)

I hope you'll do more writing now Badger - that you feel excited about it. You really should, if you want to of course.

In the not-quite-as-important-but-still-very-special One-handed Blogging Challenge, we have 4 winners!

Brumcunian gets a special award for having slammed every category, created a 128 character left-hand sentence, and submitted a ridiculously high and varied number of entries - I am concerned that he may find re-entry to the two-handed blogging world quite difficult.

Lavenderblue scored the highest single right-hand-only sentence, with 70 characters. Sadly lovely lavenderblue doesn't have a blog! Shock! But you can find her over at TheYellowDuckPond sometimes, or Anticant's burrow.

Drak put together a quite war-and-peace like tome of a story, a phenomenal 588 characters, plus 100 points for a meta-narrative, scoring about 10 times what I thought the maximum anyone might reach in this challenge would be.

And finally, the very dapper mr trousers, similarly a pond-dweller, and frequenter of Cas's comments, has been in fine form recently, with a stupendously long poem, which scored bonus points for actually being meaningful, rounding off a winning weekend in which he was also one of the fastest people to find the treasure on the In Search of Adam Map Treasure Hunt.

His poem, below, was one of the few entries which wouldn't make my mother blush. I am looking forward to checking out my google searches over the next few weeks.

A left-handed poem, by trousers:

A redraft was faxed
3 vast tracts
Ever crazed text

Geese were wet
Ferrets feared debt
Bears were taxed

Warsaw was afeared
Essex was scared
Crewe was stressed

A cast was wedded
Greta was bedded
Tessa was bearded

As we waved
We were arrested
Ever detested

Genius, surely?

It was all rather good (if not clean) fun, and I am thinking that blogging games are a good way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. I might make it a kind of a regularish kind of a thing maybe. Apologies to those who don't like wordy spelling things. Non wordy things soon I promise!

I leave you with my Left-handed Haiku:

carefree dearest few
dare grab webs as vaster sets ~
we create great art

xxx

The One-handed Blogging Challenge

2007-05-13T00:30:00.000+01:00

Lovely Ms M and I were chatting on google talk the other night, and both attempting to have the conversation with only one hand. She was drinking something lovely, whilst I was doing the classic post-op-must-hold-my-insides-in pose.

We started to play a game of trying to construct the most complex viable reply using only the keys available when touch typing with either your right or left hand.

And so ... I present to you: The One-handed Blogging Challenge.

The objective is to write something meaningful with only the right hand or left hand keys of your keyboard.

On the left side we have: QWERTASDFGZXCVB
On the right side we have: YUIOPHJKLNM

Punctuation will vary according to whether you are using a mac or PC keyboard. I will trust you not to cheat.

Only genuine spellings are acceptable - so "hi m8" is not a valid entry.

Proper nouns are subject to sensible discretion - so names of countries and major cities are kosher, but obscure villages in timbuktu are not.

Poems are definitely allowed :)

You get 1 point per character used. Repetition won't get you more points if it's just silly. Left-hand and right-hand will have separate high scores. If people start playing properly then I shall make a badge to give out as a prize and have a leader-board in my side bar :)

If you think this would work as a meme, tag someone!**

So - I challenge you to: Get started*

----

*Left hand viable

**If you don't, please just look away politely and I'll try not to blush. I'm still a bit painkiller addled and maybe this is only fun if you've not got off your sofa for 3 days.

---

p.s. I am sorry to my very lovely dyslexic bloggy friends for yet another game that is not very easy if your letters get jumbled up. I promise I will come up with a different game soon that has nothing to do with spelling at all. Please email me and tell me what you would like instead if you have any ideas :)

Buzzed about blogging

2007-05-12T11:24:00.000+01:00

Badger's post on what it feels like to have tourette's disorder has been shortlisted for Post of the Week!

Well done Badger!

Just 8 posts made it to the shortlist this week - so to be amongst those is a huge achievement.

A friend of ours recently said to Badger "Blogging is boring", and I'm still blown away by that comment. It reminded me of when I talked to the team at the BBC's Imagine programme about blogging. There was a wonderful moment in which they suddenly realised that it was not about websites or technology or news or reporting or personal diaries - it was about relationships. I introduced them to the wonderful Natalie of Blaugustine, and watched their confusion and hostility towards bloggers melt into warmth and humour and understanding.

My blog brings me into relationship with many lovely people, but also facilitates communication between different parts of myself. I can no longer work with the concept of 'real life' being outside of my online relationships - surely these are real lives being lived and expressed regardless of the medium? Instead I have settled on a notion of 'whole-life' friends. Those who are part of my blogging community, with whom I also meet up in the flesh.

In just 34 days time, Caroline's book, In Search of Adam, will be published in hardback (yes - hardback! - that's for serious grown-up writers only!) and a whole bunch of us bloggy friends will be gathering together at the book launch event (details to emerge soon says Cas) to support her and celebrate her achievements. We won't be there out of obligation. We won't be there to network. We will be there because we love Cas and believe in her. How gorgeous is that?

Currently, we are running a little treasure hunt over on the In Search of Adam Map - which now has almost 200 pins in position! The treasure hunt clues lead you to the blogs of people on the map, and whilst it's really just for fun, we also hope that people will discover new blogs, new friends and new relationships whilst they are hunting. One of my most valuable bloggy finds recently has been lovely Maht at The Moon Topples, who has been running a very community spirited Short Fiction competition.

I haven't written a fiction story since I was at primary school. The idea of doing it terrified me. But I did do it, and I enjoyed it. As Maht says: if you like your entry, you are a winner. Wise words. I do like my entry (resisting inner voice that says I sound like a conceited wanker saying that). I liked the process and I'm content with the result - I don't think it's brilliant, but it answered my own questions. Simultaneously, I've discovered that someone on the other side of the world has read my whole NaNoWriMo story. I wrote something like 15,000 words of the beginning of a book last November, before illness interrupted me. Prompted by Natalie, I chucked it up online fairly recently in a secret location under a pseudonym, and I have a stat counter on there too. I guess I was interested to know what the response of any unconnected stranger who stumbled upon it might be ... and then somebody did.

I don't know who this person is. I know that they are in thailand, and I know that they found my blog simply by clicking on the 'next random blog' type link. Then, over 4 days, they made 3 visits of about an hour each, and read the whole thing.

Isn't that kind of exciting?

Not in an 'omg I could be an author!' kind of way. More in a 'wow, somebody has digested my thoughts' kind of way.

Of course, it's always possible that they were simply trying to learn English, and sitting with a dictionary in hand trying to work out what my peculiar turn of phrase meant ;)

But still. I'm buzzed. Buzzed by it all - Badger's post of the week shortlisting, Cas's book launch, the Map that keeps joining us to more wonderful people, Maht's short fiction comp, the stranger in Bangkok who has read my book, the fact that a whole bunch of my lovely blogging friends did a group meditation all around the world at 2pm on Wednesday as I was going into surgery, plus, above, the most beautiful flowers I've ever had - sent by the gorgeous Ms Melancholy.

*sigh*

I am a happy little blogger.

untitled and untagged

2007-05-11T22:21:00.000+01:00

Bzzzz.

3am.

I can feel insects crawling on my skin. The sound of a musical christmas card playing a thin electronic rendition of jingle bells floats in to my ears. I can focus on the tune, pull the notes closer, closer, closer.

Slip-sliding through colour-blinding sparks. Eyes closed or open? Not sure.

I make sense of things a few minutes at a time.

A single task, a solitary process.

My housemate says that taken in 2 or even 10 minute chunks I appear normal. Have appeared normal since a few hours after the operation. I am coherent and clear headed. Talking sense. The chaos only emerges over 30 minutes or an hour. Each individual thing I say is perfectly formed, reasonable, but taken as a whole there is no pattern. My brain is jumping from lily pad to lily pad. Left long enough there is repetition. I cannot follow my own tracks.

I am random numbers, rounded.

I am random numbers, rounded.

Bzzzz.

You can't make an omlette without ...

2007-05-10T11:45:00.000+01:00

... breaking eggs. Or in this case, ovaries.

I always hoped I would find a reason to blog this picture - the bizarre result of trying to poach an egg so fresh that it's still warm when you crack it.

For some reason, any time I think about my own egg-production department, I imagine a couple of hard boiled eggs.

My egg-makers have been on the blink for a good while now. The kind of blink that's exquisitely painful at times, and rather dull and boringly uncomfortable in between.

2 years ago I had a fairly interesting lump on one egg-factory. At the time they thought it was a teratoma - a rather exciting kind of tumour that's all hair and teeth and nails - which my friends referred to as my "supermodel" for the few weeks between diagnosis and removal. Anyway, it turned out to be a far more boring complex hemorrhagic cyst. A big scab with veins basically. Ewwwwwwww.

Since then I've grown a fair few more of these little babies, though none as spectacular as the first one. One of the more interesting (ha ha) aspects of these cysts is that they form in the 'corpus luteum' - the shell of the egg once it has been released. They're supposed to dissolve unless you get up the spout - corpus luteums make progesterone - running this part of an early pregnancy until the placenta is big enough to take over. So, sometimes my body thinks I am pregnant.

That might be kind of fun if it lead to interesting symptoms like only being able to eat pickled onion monster munch, and having enormous breasts, but sadly it just gives me random nausea, and, much to my doc's fascination, a linea nigra - a line of pigment from the navel vertically down. They are quite impressed with that aspect!

Anyway, yesterday I had the lovely lovely doctors, nurses and surgeons at Royal Surrey Hospital sort me out, hopefully once and for all. They detached my hardboiled eggs from my bowel which they were stuck to, and from the abdominal muscle on one side too. They've drained one cyst, lasered my ovaries to remove scar tissue and treat polycystic cysts (technically you can't have both little cysts from PCO and big cysts like I get, but I've never been one for following the rules) and they've done something called segmentation which basically gives you more surface area to expand over so the remaining scar tissue gets stretched less. You wanted to know all that, didn't you!

There was no magic computer this time! Pants! But I managed to hook up a java app on my phone to chat, though drug-addled and one thumbed on a text pad it was kind of frustrating, but it was absolutely invaluable to have a virtual visit from lovely Ms M last night.

So, I'm not long home. Feeling pretty rubbish, and a bit spaced out from morphine (they were reluctant to let me out with it, but I couldn't stick another day of no blogging ;) ) and sporting a lovely badge courtesy of lovely Badger!

What's in a name?

2007-05-07T16:45:00.000+01:00

... that which we call a nose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

I talk a lot of nonsense to my dog. Soppy stuff. Were you this cute last night? I'm not sure you were - did you just wake up cuter this morning?

Don't worry, I cringe too.

It's true though. In spite of regularly updating her 'The naughtiest things I have ever done' list, Ruby draws more affection from me with every passing day. And yet that seems impossible, because I'm sure that right now I already love her as much as it is possible to love a dog.

I have been wondering. Is it that, like pain, we cannot hold love in mind completely? Do we experience it with freshness even when it is a repetition of a previous experience? Is this, like our fast fading memories of agony, because if we did not forget then we would stop still; completed by love just as we would be consumed by pain?

Or, is it more like my gmail account? Today I am using a proportion of my 2457 MB, and tomorrow, by magic, I will have available 2582 MB. Is my heart expanding - forever slowly growing like my hair and nails?

What's the (short) story?

2007-05-04T10:03:00.000+01:00

Mr Maht of The Moon Topples, artist, writer and keeper of cats (my favourite ever blogger description) is running the fabulous GBA(s)FC: Great Big Awesome (short) Fiction Competition.

Word limit: 500.

Subject: Growth.

You can read the full details here, and there are already two great entries up there!

I am a coward. I want to write something but ... but ... but. Yes. Paralysed by that internal chatter that informs me that it will be shit / boring / rubbish / cliched / nonsensical. Or, more likely shit, boring, rubbish, cliched nonsense.

I am trying to battle the voice. Reasoning with it. It won't be good enough it says. Good enough for what? I wonder. Although there are prizes (amazon vouchers! yay!) I'm not really the competitive type. And given that the stories are submitted semi-anonymously, if it's really crap I don't even have to own it!

Ho hum.

Courage, do not desert me now.

Life laundry

2007-05-02T22:15:00.000+01:00

It's funny what the little things you do reveal about you. I always imagined my obsession with hanging my washing out in such an orderly fashion - by type, socks hanging in pairs - was just a bit of control freak-ism, a touch of OCD, a desperate attempt to give the illusion of control midst the chaos and unpredictability of life. Not that my life is especially chaotic - just life in general.

Badger hangs her washing out to different rules. Firstly, each item must have it's own personal space: no touching, no sharing clothes pegs. Ever. Secondly, items are hung the right way up, even if they have a hood and would dry much better upside down. Apparently they might get dizzy the wrong way up. Whilst I don't understand either of these rules, they don't actually upset me; what does cause me genuine distress is Badger's socks.

For starters, they aren't hung in pairs. But worse, frequently the other half of the pair is not there! I'm sure the second socks exist, just Badger doesn't see fit to wash and wear them in matching pairs.

I brought this up with Badger a few days ago. I was bringing her washing in and was feeling rather stressed by the number of unique socks, which I took to be a sign of carelessness and slipshod attitudes to the Rules of Socks (as I define them).

Badger smiled, as she does, and said "You think it is important for them to be with the things they belong with don't you?". I nodded and she carried on. "You see, I think it's important for things to be just fine on their own. They shouldn't be dependent on the other sock. They are ok just as single socks."

So, I draw the conclusion that my laundry is not afflicted with OCD, but codependency. I don't fear my clothes being out of order, I fear them being alone.

Ouch.

Cages of our own making

2007-04-29T11:30:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, I am scared to take on a daunting task, not because I might fail, but because I might succeed.

Like many people, I have achieved a few things in my life time which seem, looking back, precocious. The trouble with being good at something, unexpectedly good at it, is that expectations grow and grow, and at the same time there is a nagging suspicion that this must be a lucky streak. A fluke. Two flukes, three flukes. A dozen. And with each fluke, each double six, each head that isn't a tail, the pressure builds.

I have fluked too many things. And now I find myself scared to roll the dice, because other people seem to believe that I can guarantee a double six. They appear to be convinced that my dice are loaded. That it's all in the wrist action.

Sometimes I look at my blog stats and am grateful that I am not an a, b, c or even d-list blogger. I can't imagine the pressure of feeling like people are expecting a brilliant blog post every time. Of feeling like I will be judged on the rubbish I write. Or tied to an 'identity'. I like that as Stray I can be lots of people. Silly, serious, poetic, blunt, frivolous, funny and boring if I like.

Sometimes I feel like I am in a cage built out of my achievements. I am aware that this sounds pretty wanky. But I want to say it, because I suspect that I am not alone - that most of us walk around inside these invisible cages. What if I fuck up my second child? What if I only have one book inside of me? What if I can only take beautiful photos of beautiful things? What if they only love me because they don't know me yet?

A perpetual anxiety about being Found Out. Nudity dreams. Hesitation before raising our hand to give the answer.

What if, until now, I have just been lucky every single time?

What if I roll snake eyes?

Baaaaaaaaaaaadges!

2007-04-28T17:53:00.000+01:00

*oooooh*

I gasped ...

as Badger handed me the package.

She was grinning. And driving. Mostly grinning.

There was a tiny sticker on the back. It said "Caroline Smailes".

I s q u e e e e e z e d the envelope gently.

I turned it over and tore open the back.

Badger said "No! Wait til we get home!"

So. I waited. (I am not good at waiting).

And then. A ♥ pink heart ♥ slipped out ...

And two tiny tiny perfectly wrapped presents!

The badges.

The beautiful badges.

We are wearing them! And smiling.

Badger says she will wear it always. I suspect that tonight she will wear hers on her pajamas. (she will).

And I cannot wait, for the first person to ask - "Adam? Adam who?"

Thankyouverymuch Caroline.

--

(And so far 76 people have put their pins on the map! Amazing!)

Hospital view

2007-04-28T16:45:00.000+01:00

Teddy sent via the florist by my Mum and Dad, Lucozade courtesy of lovely Badger.

I am home now :) And sooooo glad that I didn't do that 'brave', stoical thing of simply reappearing here in a few weeks time and making some casual off-the-cuff references to having been 'a bit unwell'.

I have been surrounded by virtual flowers, covered in cyber hugs and kisses and had some very lovely chats with digital visitors to my bedside. It was the least miserable hospital visit I've ever had, and that was almost entirely down to the fact that I felt so cared about by all my lovely blog friends :) Also, the nurses were amazing. Really, really ultra lovely. Having been in London hospitals, I thoroughly recommend moving to the suburbs before you get seriously ill!

I feel quite ok about returning on the 9th of May to be delved around in, knowing that between visiting hours I shall still have plenty of company :)

I feel all warm and fuzzy about the whole thing, and I'm pretty sure that's not going to wear off with the pain killers!

Thank you :)

Sx

miracles of modern technology

2007-04-26T22:29:00.000+01:00

i am blogging from a touchscreen tv thing next to my bed in hospital, just because i can!

i am poorly sick as lovely caroline says.

we have talked on google chat!

don't worry, no key parts of me have been damaged and this is just a medical ward. girls-insides-itis is the diagnosis so far. ouch.

i am getting in touch with my inner wimp ... trying to ignore my Be Strong driver.

meantime beautiful badger is on map duty.

they don't allow flowers, so please send hugs and kisses instead xx

Searching for Adam ...

2007-04-26T00:51:00.000+01:00

I made this map and widget for the most lovely lovely Caroline, who has a fabulously important book coming out on the 15th of June.

It was particularly satisfying because we only hatched our cunning plan on Friday and it launched on Tuesday!

Yay!

I have to say, it's one of the most fun tasks I've done ages. And I am just soooo thrilled that people are using it, and I'm getting a huge kick out of the fact that they are using it in so many place in the world.

Sometimes, here in Surrey, it's easy to forget how huge the planet is. I mean, I kind of know it, I have clients in Australia and Sweden and America and even Staines* ... but it's so easy to hang your washing out under a blue sky and not give a moment's thought to the fact that in other places it is dark. Dark! Amazing.

I feel like the map has plotted a journey of my own. Intellectually it gave me a chance to rub up against my new server and really find it's edges - having a new server is kind of like having a new girlfriend / boyfriend. It isn't til you have a major falling out and they won't do what you wanted that you really have a clue about how good the relationship is. Emotionally it was an opportunity to bury myself in something utterly self-absorbed for a few days which happened to coincide with some difficult anniversaries.

Working with Caroline, hatching ideas and bouncing them off each other has been a beautiful experience, one that has made me certain that I want to do more collaborative and less solitary journeying this year, in all areas. But most of all, spiritually, I am reminded that the world is a huge place and life is complex, but amazingly, little things I do really can create a ripple in the pond, that spreads and spreads and laps up on a shore on the other side of the planet.

And, there were a lot of numbers, and I am a bit of a dirty techie and I like a good bit of geometry every once in a while.

So, I have derived that:

(Numbers + new Server(php5) ) x ((InspirationalBlogFriends.caroline + purpose) / (tightDeadline + cupsOfTea(93))) * (blogFriends - geographicalConstraints) = http://insearchofadammap.blogspot.com + Stray.happy++;

And, if you haven't yet put your pin in the map - get over there! And please zoooooom right in before you position it because Canterbury is definitely NOT in tyneside!

-----

*for my international audience, Staines is about as exciting and glamourous as it sounds. Is there a word that means onomatopoeic but for meaning? There should be. And my housemate has pointed out that RonSeal doesn't actually seal Rons. Which is really quite worrying.

You wait a whole week for a badger, and then 3 come along at once!

2007-04-24T12:33:00.000+01:00

First, of all, a Badger that was found by lovely Maht MoonTopples.

I love the sentiment: Demand Badger Food Service!

(are you listening Badger?? Mr Moon says I can use this picture to get you to bring me breakfast in bed!)

And then! The wonderful Matt of Turboart whisked me up this little beauty: A Badger Playing Guitar Hero!

(if you ask him very nicely he will make one for you too!).

And then, most importantly, the real Badger is back from her travels in the south of France. She has new badgery twitches and vocal tics with a french accent! Bien!

Do Not Disturb

2007-04-19T23:55:00.000+01:00

Shhhhhhh!

Shades of Blue and Green

2007-04-17T20:09:00.000+01:00

The title to this post is taken from the title track of a wonderful album recorded by Lorraine Craig with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO).

This song, with it's hot-chocolate smooth sweet vocal, is a regular contributor to the continuous-play soundtrack in my head. My little internal DJ, my psychic iPod, always set to shuffle.

It has a sense of humour. It likes to surprise me, and occasionally it tries to force its way forward into my speech - dares me to respond to a question, or complete a sentence, with one of my favourite lyrics.

I am still in awe of my Dad, who, once, in a Very Important Meeting, heard a colleague say "And the question is ... " and found himself responding out loud with the only appropriate answer ...

Can this white man sing the blues?

Are you normal?

2007-04-16T14:31:00.000+01:00

Wonderful cartoon by Edward Monkton

The Mental Health Bill is being debated by MPs and I have my fingers crossed, for personal as well as political reasons, that it doesn't get through.

The bill is ~~a reactionary load of tosh intended to make us all feel better about how society lets so many people down~~ an attempt to make it easier to detain and 'treat' people who are at risk of causing harm to themselves or others.

Now, first of all, let's just make it clear that if you're a commonal garden person who just causes harm to others because you feel like it, that's ok. This bill only applies if you have 'symptoms' of a 'mental illness' or a 'personality disorder'. So, if you're perfectly normal except that you like to beat your wife, you're entitled to the normal niceties of the justice system including bail and trial by a jury of your peers. If your wife, however, engages in self-harm as a coping mechanism, possibly even says she feels too desperate to carry on, and ticks a few boxes for Borderline Personality Disorder, she can be held on the say so of just two people. Without bail. Without a trial.

So, back to the purpose of the bill - to detain and 'treat' people who are at risk of causing harm to themselves or others.

That would be me then. No no, don't panic! I wouldn't hurt a fly. I pose no risk to your safety, or that of your child / lover / bunny rabbit ... but from time to time I can be a bit of a challenge to my own. My own as in me, not my own bunny rabbit. That's why it's called self-harm. No! Shh! Don't feel bad ... it's ok - really it is, I'm perfectly fine. Well, sometimes I'm not, but that's not for you to worry about. Oh dear. It's tricky talking about self-harm, people do get themselves in a such tiz about it.

I'm not mental. Honest. I just have a kind of dissociative disorder. From time to time I get myself all wound up about something, I stop sleeping, I can't eat, and shortly after that it all goes tits up [technical term]. My particular coping mechanism just happens to be a bit on the risky side, but the good news is that these days I'm pretty good at managing and assessing those risks. And I'm a very coherent and polite individual even when I'm completely mental. I always say please and thank you to the doctors.

So, this brings me to my real concern about the Mental Health Bill. I'm exactly the kind of person who could be scuppered by it. Just before christmas last year I had a bit of a wobble. It was quite a big wobble even by my standards, and after being patched up by the super doctors and nurses in my local A&E, we all agreed that as I hadn't yet slept or eaten and was clearly still wobbling, it would be best for me to be admitted voluntarily to the local psych unit for a day or two.

Of course they couldn't find a bed.

So, 12 hours later I was driven in a strange ambulance / mini-bus to a psych ward almost an hour away. It was a mixed, locked ward, with no segregation between the dozen or so male patients (all with serious psychosis) and the female patients - who totalled 2, that being me and a deaf-dumb and learning disabled woman who was already sedated when I arrived. For obvious reasons I didn't really fancy staying there. I observed that the nurse's station was a good 20 meters down the corridor, realised that the television was drowning out any possibility of communication between me and those nurses, noted the lack of alternative exits, checked out the fact that there was no emergency alarm system, and made the decision to get out.

So, I went to tell the nurses my decision. After all - I was a voluntary patient. The nurses were not pleased to see me. They were busy watching TV for starters, and after ignoring me with an admirable persistance for a few minutes, they instructed me repeatedly to go back to bed. I told them that I wished to leave, and why, and they told me in no uncertain terms that if I tried to leave I would be sectioned.

I calculated. I thought hard about the possibilities, the ramifications. I calculated some more. I decided they were (probably) bluffing. The nurses told me that any one of them could hold me on a section 5 for up to six hours. I knew that they had to at least attempt to contact the on-call psychiatrist in order to do this. So I rolled the dice, knowing that if they didn't get through they would force me to stay, and probably sedate me. They dialled the number. The psychiatrist answered. Phew! She told them to stop being daft and let me go - so they immediately opened the doors and shoved me out into the car park. It was the middle of the night. In December. A friend was coming to collect me, but they wouldn't let me wait inside for the hour it took for her to get there. Meanies!

The next day I was prescribed risperidone. It made me feel like I was underwater. After a few days I couldn't tie my shoelaces. I was reversing like a straight girl. I walked like a thunderbird, much to Badger's amusement. I stopped taking it, against my psychiatrists wishes. Since then he has read a report saying that the drugs I was prescribed (risperidone and diazepam) are now contra-indicated for people who self-harm, because they increase dissociation and reduce inhibitions. Duh. I could have told them that!

This is where I really worry. The new MH Bill introduces Community Treatment Orders (CTOs) - a kind of psychiatric ASBO. It's a legally binding agreement about your self-care. I will take this medicine. I will not drink alcohol. I will not go to this place or spend time with that person. I will attend this therapy every week ... and if you breach it you've got bugger all defense against being banged up, or given a depot (a slow delivery system for the drug they've chosen for you, injected under your skin and almost impossible to remove once inserted).

Here's the glaringly obvious irony as I see it:

• Genuinely bonkers people probably can't think in terms of longer term consequences of their actions. Go ahead, lock me up, I don't care, the aliens are coming tonight!

• Genuinely suicidal people care even less. So what if I don't take my medication - what are you gonna do? Section my corpse?

• Thus, the only people for whom a CTO is going to be effective are those who have insight into their condition, can weigh up the consequences of not adhering to treatment, and have the will to get well (as they say - the lightbulb has to really want to change). And those people shouldn't be straightjacketed by medication or compulsory therapy against their will.

We currently section around 1 in 1000 people in the general population - but that disguises the many more people who are in treatment 'voluntarily' unless they ask to leave.

I'm fortunate that I now have a very good relationship with my local MH services, who have allowed me to design a package that meets my needs and fits their provision. In the absence of a straight forward solution to the "What do we do with someone like Stray?" problem, they've had to come up with some creative solutions. If the new Mental Health Bill had already been in place then I have a suspicion that a CTO would have been their first line of action.

Of course all of this rests upon the fact that the UK's current understanding of mental health / mental illness is a bizarre and overly pathological construct in which being "well" really means being "normal".

So - in thinking about the potential impact of this bill on your own life and liberty, you only really need to answer one question: Are you normal?

----

Read Mind's excellent guide to the MH Bill, including their objections, here.

Good morning

2007-04-16T10:30:00.000+01:00

I don't care if it's unhygenic ... it's good for my soul.

Badger in the mist

2007-04-12T22:30:00.000+01:00

September '06.

What were they looking for?

To absent friends ...

2007-04-11T09:32:00.000+01:00

Jess, on the left, is Ruby's best friend. Which is only fitting, as Jess's dad is my best friend, and his mother is my mother's best friend ...

And so we are continuing the years of holidaying together as a unit, but this generation abandoning spanish villas and hotels in Lanzarote for dog-friendly caravans in bits of the UK with Big Hills. Fab.

When we first got home on Monday night, Ruby was excited to be back. Now she is depressed. She is searching and searching for her friend, going into my housemates' rooms at six this morning and crying pathetically ... and she is sad not to find her.

I wish I could explain. I wish she could understand the concepts of 'again' and 'soon'.

I went to the lakes to attend the wedding of some very dear friends. Lovely lovely people, and I would have married either of them - they are gorgeous inside and out. The sun shone and their little boys looked like a tiny mafia in their supercool suits. And it was perfect in so many ways, but glaringly imperfect in another. Another friend who should have been there, laughing in the sunshine, holding his wife's hand and smiling, because he never stopped smiling, is gone. He died suddenly just over 2 years ago, without warning, of a heart defect. He was skiing one moment, dying the next. She was there with him when he died, and as awful, as horrific and traumatic as that was, she says she knows she would never have believed it if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes.

So, there were happy tears, for those we love who are still with us, and sad tears for those who aren't. Not physically anyway. Very present in many other ways, spoken about (thankfully) and laughed about and remembered, and very much still loved.

I am doing my italian widow look she said with a smile, replacing her shades.

I know he would have enjoyed the joke.

Stowing away ...

2007-04-05T22:28:00.000+01:00

Badger and Ruby and I are off to the Lake District for the long weekend.

I think Ophelia would like to come too ... !

Back Monday - be good!

The importance of being Badger

2007-04-02T20:05:00.000+01:00

I snapped this shot of Badger at the wheel of her convertible mini cooper whilst she was whizzing us home from Portsmouth yesterday afternoon.

As I took the photo, the lyrics from the first track on the latest Take That album - Reach Out - permeated my consciousness.

'Cause I don't know you
And you don't know me

click here to watch it on youTube

And it got me to thinking about how lucky I am to have, and live with, a friend like Badger.

As well as having tourette's, Badger is on the Autistic spectrum. Sometimes it's easy for me to forget how different Badger and I are, because on the surface we're pretty similar.

We share values - simple things .. like be nice to people and animals, but don't be so nice that you compromise yourself and others. Don't worry about what's in it for you. Things that cost nothing can be more precious than ferraris. If the chickens need cleaning just get on with it, no whinging. If you don't know how to do something, ask and learn. Don't be scared to make mistakes or busk stuff.

Badger and I also share most of our interests - football, walking, tree climbing, playing the guitar ... we have the same taste in music, TV and computer games. In fact, I can't think of any of Badger's interests that make me think "No thanks, I've got some shiny new pins I can stick in my eyes instead".

We shop the same. That's what I want. That's my size. No I'm not trying it on. I'll take 3 please. No messing.

Both being runts of the litter, we had similar school experiences of always being friends with the fat kids, the ginger kids - the assorted rejects. Neither of us is interested in looking cool - which is fortunate, as Badger had a little outburst of tourette's break-dancing in the queue for the wholefoods shop yesterday.

So ... sometimes it's good to remind myself that under the surface we're very different. We gather data about the world and process that data in totally different ways.

Faced with something new and unfamiliar, I disappear into my head to extrapolate from the next-closest known-model ... Badger sniffs and touches and looks close up. Given a message - spoken or written - I am working with the unsaid, the invisible writing, the implied and the conspicuous by omission - in Badger's world everything Does What It Says On The Tin.

Being around Badger reminds me to be in the moment, that I don't have the full picture unless I stop to sniff the world around me, and that sometimes it's ok to believe that someone means exactly what they've said.

Traffic update for Surrey, 1st April 2007, 2.45pm

2007-04-01T18:26:00.000+01:00

Some tailbacks developing on the A281, following a build up of waterfowl in the road.

Inexplicably linked

2007-03-31T21:55:00.000+01:00

It's funny how historical events get wrapped up with things they have no business being involved with.

Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the true beginning of The Falklands War. Well, it's actually the 2nd of April ... but the ceremony is tomorrow.

And it makes me think of ... The Nit Nurse.

When I was six, I don't think there was a lot of definition between Bad Things. Having not yet developed a spectrum of fears and disappointments, The Nit Nurse and the fact that we were at war probably raised similar levels of anxiety in my monochromatic brain.

John Craven broke the news of the invasion with the same sincerity and heavy tone of voice that my primary teacher used to announce the inspection.

Two boys in the class were crying. One had nits, the other's dad was a soldier. I can't remember that I felt more sorry for one than the other.

I can't blog because I have nothing to say ...

2007-03-31T14:04:00.000+01:00

I have nothing to say ...

... except the huge tree in the garden fell down in the night. And we didn't even hear it.

I have nothing to say ...

... except that I have learned to Heely with my other foot infront too. And I can swap round. And earlier Ruby pulled me along the patio whilst I hung on to her collar.

I have nothing to say ...

... except my mum has just got on a plane to Japan. She is going to paint the cherry blossom in a country where she can't even read a sign for the loo.

I have nothing to say ...

... except I am finally over my partner leaving me. I know this because I can listen to James Taylor without crying.

So, as you can see, it's clear. I can't blog, because I have nothing to say.

A post with no name

2007-03-28T21:23:00.000+01:00

On Sunday I made a collage of my vagina.

Not for fun. No. No no. No no no.

This was the final task set on the Art Therapy workshop I attended for 'Women who love women'. Or probably 'Wimmin who love womyn', as we seem to have been transported back to 1973.

Over Friday evening and Saturday daytime I had faced a fair few 'I would rather eat my own head, thanks' moments. I am shy. I am not remotely disinhibited on the vomit-free side of half a litre of tequila. You may be wondering why this didn't occur to me before I enrolled, but hey, it came highly recommended by someone I respect ... though she says the whole 'vagina collage' thing wasn't a feature of the course when she attended. Really, she missed out.

So, having spent my birthday weekend engaged in what I can only describe as a rare and exquisite form of torture, for the sake of brevity, let's call it 'Hackney Glitter Torture', we were set our last and most ridiculous challenge. Some of the other members were, understandably, confused. The therapist reassured us that anatomical accuracy was not the goal, and groped for analogies, settling on "If you were a box, what kind of box would you be?". I don't think she meant it quite so literally. (Sorry mum).

I sat, despairing, midst feathers, cardboard, tissue paper and copydex, living my very own Worst Nightmare, and the one and only positive thing I could think was "I am so gonna blog about this!".

Aw ...

2007-03-27T14:55:00.000+01:00

Diamond car insurance sent me a birthday card by email.

I am strangely touched.

It said:

Happy birthday Stray*.
Hope you have a lovely day,
and eat lots of cake!

Bless them.

*Diamond car insurance do not call me Stray. Obviously.

Badgers can climb trees

2007-03-27T11:11:00.000+01:00

Badger and I have a combined age of 58.

These pictures, and our lovely walk in the woods yesterday evening, made me realise how much I appreciate the fact that my body still feels much as it did when I was seven. I can still climb trees. I still stand up on my bicycle, I ride with no hands, I do wheelies - and now can do more on my Heelys!

There are bits of me that are showing some wear and tear. I've had a bit of poking around done, and need a bit more doing. Some patching up will happen later this year, and I definitely feel a little less elastic than at previous times in my life, but on the whole my body mostly feels like the well worn pair of jeans that have been my favourites forever. A little bashed and battered, mended in pockets and on knees, but it just fits.

I haven't ever looked in the mirror to see whether I have lines appearing. I genuinely don't care. I did have a brief wobble when my ex found a few grey hairs on my head, but I'm actually utterly ambivalent about that as well now I've recovered from the shock.

But, the day I see a perfect Climbing Tree, and don't start plotting my route up it ... or come to a grassy slope and don't contemplate rolling down it ... I will apply for my bus pass and subscribe to reader's digest.

What a difference a year makes ...

2007-03-24T22:50:00.000Z

A year ago today, I was in my loft apartment in central london, which I shared with my long-term partner, who I knew I would be with forever. I was waiting to turn 30, my first sober birthday.

Tonight I am in my crazy shack in the woods in Surrey, single (she upgraded me 4 weeks later for a younger, fitter model with bigger breasts and fewer hang-ups). I am waiting to turn 31, my second sober birthday.

In the 365 days in between, I have popped an astounding number of cherries.

I have a garden for the first time. I have chickens. I have killed one of my chickens with a spade after a stoat did a half-job on the poor bird. I have picked fruit from my garden and made jam and chutney. I have been camping on my own. I have climbed a mountain. I have told my father that one of his dearest friends has died, and cried my eyes out at her funeral. I have attended the wedding of my last boyfriend, and heard that he is to be a daddy soon. I have learned that I can take photographs.

And of course, I have started this blog.

---

Badger took this photo of Ruby over looking the Black Water Reservoir around 3/4 of the way through a 14 mile hike we did from Kinlochleven to the reservoir head, and on to the West Highland Way. Along the way we had to climb off the track up a very steep bank, for a long way, to find a route across a river that had become impassable. Badger wanted to turn back, which might well have been a prudent decision, but I simply felt that I had to keep going. Most of this year has been just like that day - a case of putting one foot in front of the other, not knowing what might be ahead, but knowing that I couldn't turn back. There hasn't always been a photo opportunity, but there have been a lot more high points than I would have imagined.

ESP Shopping

2007-03-22T22:15:00.000Z

Caroline has had a spooky encounter with a clairvoyant. I think I have surpassed it though.

Examine the photograph above. My sister and I decided not to collaborate for Mother's day this year. The card on the left is the one which I purchased. The card on the right is the one which she purchased. Without conferring.

I have often questioned whether my sister and I have anything more in common than a surname, but clearly we are more closely connected than I had thought.

My first pair of heels ...

2007-03-21T20:45:00.000Z

On Sunday I will be an unbelievable 31 years old. How shocking!

So, as a birthday gift to myself I have purchased a pair of heels. Well, Heelys to be precise.

I have been levitating around the kitchen in them, with Ruby barking at my feet, objecting to the fact that the laws of shoes are not being obeyed.

I love them! I love them!

And, today I have had confirmation of what I have always known: I am a fashion guru, just so far ahead of the pack that my genius is not appreciated.

Gap have an ad campaign for their new range of "Boy Fit" women's clothes. Well, call me Jeff Banks, my entire wardrobe is age 10-12 boys attire! I am sooooo cool.

So, if you see what looks like a small 14 year old boy whizzing past you in the street, dressed head to toe in the latest supercool 'H&M kids' attire, possibly pulled along by a very good looking boxer dog, don't forget to allow for the possibility that it's actually a 31 year old woman with a blog.

Time machine ...

2007-03-20T20:25:00.000Z

Exhibit A: A working time machine, hard wired to transport the user to February 1985.

Thin King Bloggers II

2007-03-20T09:07:00.000Z

Ok, so this whole Thinking Blogger meme thingy is just another chain letter ... and it generates traffic for the originator and John Baker is a bit miffed about it (thanks to Aunty Caroline for the link).

But ... the thing is - I've paid a lot more in hard cash to feel as warm and fuzzy as I did writing my post and choosing my nominations last night. And I genuinely do feel that my attitude to the world today is all the better for it (thanks Ms. M, you truly are a great psychotherapist for prescribing it) and I have been reminded of just how much I appreciate the people who share themselves in blogland in such generous ways. Plus I had the added and truly therapeutic realisation that Blogging about the detail has made me more present in my life without having to attend a yoga class, chant or read any self-improvement books (which are surely just a distraction from being present in your life).

So, don't go spoiling my buzz please John. Ta.

Thin King Bloggers

2007-03-20T00:13:00.000Z

Ms Melancholy not only tagged me with the 'Thinking Blogger' meme, she nicked all the best puns as well.

Apparently it's the brain child of Ilker Yolgas and we don't just get to pat ourselves on the back (or head, in my case - hazard of being under five feet tall) we get a sticker for our blogs and everything. The full list of rules and regs are here.

So, Ms Melancholy says my blog made her think. Think what? is a question she politely declined to answer. Possibly something about how she should really be getting on with the redecorating, and that it's amazing what mindless devotion a good-looking dog will show to a midget with a packet of bacon.

The thing about this blogging thing (I'm being serious now, please take your seats) is that you all make me think. Both the blogs I read, and the potential unknown reader, interact with my psychic space in ways I would never have imagined. I blog in my head. I comment in my head. I suspect that Ms. M may offer me some sort of treatment for this, but I probably can't afford it. I notice things around me because of what I am reading, and because I want to have things to write about. Tiny weeny interactions in the supermarket become potentially moving / poignant / funny / revealing anecdotes. That I never get round to writing them is at least half the fun.

Some of you make me think "Oh my god I am soooo crap at this writing stuff that I don't know why I bother ... ". Some make me think "If I am ever blessed with the insight of this individual I shall be truly happy / rich / suicidal ... ". There's a fair bit of envy and a hell of a lot of relief that it wasn't my cervix / testicle / cat / mother / child / car / bar mitzvah in the story. Thanks.

So - here are my nominations ...

... Best Screenplay: this too ... a fearless account in words and pictures, with honesty that stirs me every time I read.

... Best Sound-effects: Badger That ... a joyful reminder that being normal is nothing to aspire to.

... Best Script: Blaugustine ... a seriously philosophical artist, who informs me about politics, religion, the human condition and the joy of being just who you are.

... Best Actress Mad Harper ... an extraordinary performance in the face of adversity. (Mad's keyboard no longer has a letter J, and yet she writes 'ust brilliantly).

... Best Supporting Actress Hoarded Ordinaries ... the support bit being that Lorianne's ridiculously wise words pop me back on the kerb at very regular intervals. Wisdom, kindness and a good looking dog - she's got the whole package.

So - they can consider themselves tagged, and I spose I should tell them myself as well. I'm off now to look for my sticker ...

Sx

---

The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

Stuff I've been meaning to blog about #1: Tourettes

2007-03-19T00:01:00.000Z

Badger has Tourette's. Or, Tourette's disorder as it is more properly known.

I know this because I live with her. And it's great.

Contrary to popular media stereotyping, she doesn't swear and spit and rant. Well, when she does it's her Aspergers rather than the Tourettes to blame.

No, her tics are not nasty offensive swearing, shouting, blaspheming yukness.

Badger tics like a chicken. Or a cat. Or a peacock. Or sometimes Sweep, from Sooty and Sweep. She picks up noises from her environment, and echoes them back with astounding accuracy. Her impressions are incredibly convincing - she was once treated to the full courting display by a male peacock who believed her to be The One for him.

In between, she clicks and whistles. And sometimes makes cool little space noises.

The best thing about Badger's tics is that they are sometimes even a surprise to her! She can perfectly mimic things without knowing she was even capable. It combines beautifully with her Aspergers, because she blurts out her own reaction without the normal social constraints that would hold the rest of us back. And she does have a wonderful turn of phrase.

Badger has physical tics as well. She says it is like someone walking over her grave - a shiver comes up her spine and she just has to cock her head / move her arms / do a little dance. One time she simply had to straighten her leg whilst we were stuck in traffic. Being constricted by the dimensions of her Mini Cooper, she creatively wound down the window and stuck her foot right out to get the leg room required.

I can tell if Badger is asleep or awake because from my bedroom I can just make out the squeaking / clicking / clucking in her room. It's actually quite handy in the mornings if I am not sure who is up yet.

Badger stops ticking in only two circumstances that I have experienced. One is climbing mountains, the other is playing Guitar Hero. She is about to apply for DLA, and I think that walking boots and PS2 games should be listed as medical expenses.

Badger should learn to beatbox. She would be superb. For her first single I think we should record the Old MacDonald rap.

5 things meme ...

2007-03-18T15:38:00.000Z

So, way back on the 23rd of Jan 2007, Natalie of Blaugustine tagged me with a "Five Things You May Not Know About Me" meme ... and her wonderful responses are here.

So, um, yeah, after 8 weeks of procrastinating ...

1. On my 23rd birthday I climbed the Golden Gate Bridge, right to the top, accompanied by a structural engineer called Chip. Of course.

2. I have a condition known as heterochromia. This basically means I am a piebald. I have one dark brown eyebrow and one blonde one, eyelashes to match. I tan and freckle much more on one side of my face and body. I have some variation in the colour of my irises, but that's hard to spot because the eyebrows throw you off. People either notice and remark on this the very first time they meet me, or never tune in to it at all.

3. When I was a child I wanted to be a goal keeper. I also have a growth hormone disorder. The two are not compatible. Fortunately, when I was old enough to accept this kind of disappointment, my dad explained the harsh realities to me and we swapped places in front of the garage door and started working on my shooting instead. Ta dad.

4. A punk band, who I have never met, wrote and released a record about me.

5. I was a highly literate and numerate child, and very focussed on order and understanding things in their correct context, and making sure the grown ups around me did too. I once solemnly told my mother that I had the whole 'multiple births' thing sussed. One baby is a baby. Two are twins. Three are triplets. Four are quadruplets. And 5 are piglets. ... well, I wasn't that far wrong - was I?

Now I have to tag some peeps, so ... I tag ... Badger, Mad Harper and my new bestest blogging mate ... (ok, she's emailed me, twice, probably mostly out of politeness ... but she's now an international superstar of Shaggy Blog Stories fame ... so, that'll do me ... ) Ms Melancholy.

Snack attack ...

2007-03-17T16:37:00.000Z

Clickety click. I am busy tapping away at my keyboard, hammering out flash code with my back to the rest of the room.

Crunch crunch crunch. The sound of Ruby's teeth working on something brittle slowly percolates into my consciousness.

Clickety click. I try to identify, from the sound, what exactly Ruby is eating ...

Crunch crunch crunch. It doesn't sound like anything she should be chomping on.

Clickety click. Maybe it's a biro? Ug, don't want ink all over the sofa ...

So, I spin around, jump out of my chair, and lean over the sofa to investigate more closely ... and then wish I hadn't.

Of all the things I had imagined it might be, it never occurred to me that it was a fully formed skull.

I'm trying to persuade myself that it was that of a fox, or a badger ... and definitely not anything to do with the fact that the previous occupant kept Jack Russells.

Returning

2007-03-16T19:09:00.000Z

Ruby and I returned to the woods this week. Throughout last summer and autumn we walked there most mornings, and some evenings as well. The Chantries lie on very steep hills, bordering the chalk downlands of Pewley Downs, and crossed by both the North Downs Way - England's oldest path - and Pilgrims Way.

These pictures were taken one morning earlier in the week, when we did a quick circuit of the well trodden sandy paths. This afternoon however, we did something I haven't done since I was a child - got lost on purpose. For over 2 hours we wandered from one side to the other, off the path, away from the familiar tracks, until we were properly lost, and then discovered a recognisable tree just as the sun was beginning to lose it's strength.

The purpose of the walk was to get away from the digital distractions of my desk, to give myself time to think about the book I have the absolute privilege of editing (all about why Global Warming is the best thing ever to have happened to the human race - watch this space for more on that) and am trying to create a 5 minute promo film for. Whilst Ruby chased at least 87 different squirrels, I ran around after 53 different thoughts, attempting not to grab at any of them in particular. I stopped on a bench for a little while and scribbled film notes on to index cards, whilst Ruby galloped in huge circles with 2 bouncy labradors she'd hooked up with.

I'm not sure I came away with any precise answers, but I did feel that I'd been on exactly the sort of educational journey of discovery that the original Chantries aimed to deliver to their communities.

If you do nothing else today ...

2007-03-16T12:21:00.000Z

... buy the book that Mike at troubled diva has compiled of "Shaggy Blog Stories: a collection of amusing tales from the UK blogosphere." It's in aid of Comic Relief. For charidee.

I am thrilled to see that wonderful, marvelous and fabulously funny Natalie of Blaugustine fame is number 65 of the 100 entries (which are not in order of merit or I'm sure she would be number 1). Which just goes to show that the blooker prize people don't know a thing about genius.

Sink plant ...

2007-03-09T21:19:00.000Z

Spring is officially sprung.

This little green chappie appeared over night in our bathroom sink. The skylight above drew it directly upwards, and I had grand plans to carefully remove it and transplant it to the garden, as my housemates weren't too keen on me cultivating it in situ. Sadly it didn't survive the extraction process. I thought you'd want to know.

Truce

2007-01-29T16:22:00.000Z

Comfort

2007-01-13T09:42:00.000Z

Ophelia nestles on not one, but two sleeping bags, piled up on the sofa after their use by an overnight guest. It never ceased to amaze me how she, and Ruby, are magnetically drawn to soft, squishy, snuggly places to rest, patches of warmth and roast chicken.

This picture, taken by my housemate, reminded me of the story of The Princess and The Pea.

And I am thinking, as I sit here, typing in a peculiar and uncomfortable position because of the clutter on my desk, which would take just a few minutes to tidy away, or even a few seconds to dump into a pile on another surface which I am not using, how willing I am to tolerate discomfort.

Sympathy please

2007-01-12T11:43:00.000Z

We have a very sore paw.

Luckily I have a full first aid kit and a strong stomach. And a great vet. I was thinking of leaving the NHS and joining pet doctors instead. And insurance. Phew.

It was all a little stressful as Ruby has that classic boxer genetic weakness - Aortic Stenosis ... a type of heart murmur which makes any general anaesthetic procedure a lot more risky. However, I decided that if she was still capable of bounding up mountains then she'd probably be ok ... and she pulled through just fine. The vets said she was the nicest, best behaved boxed they'd ever had in ... apparently she was sitting on the receptionist's lap, which is something she does whilst I work at my desk. At 28kg though it's not something I encourage for long periods!

So, we are 3 days into 10 days of being confined to the house except for very brief on-lead excursions into the garden to do the required business. She has perfected the art of hopping, and insists on showing her bandaged paw to anybody who passes her.

So, it's been a while. I'm not certain why ... busy with work, christmas, assorted annoying health problems ... and then of course there is the point at which something has been on my 'to do' list for so long that it becomes almost impossible to actually do it. What is that about? Thanks to all who have noticed my absence - it's nice to be missed!

I think actually it's also about pictures. I've not been taking them ... hence I have nothing to say. Or at least no external conversations to be had. More pictures is the plan!

Meta-communication

2006-11-16T10:17:00.000Z

Natalie (who is about to find fame and fortune via featuring of her amazing illustrated blaug on the good old BBC) has drawn attention to my recent absence.

I've had enough psychotherapy to know that when one can't actually communicate, it can be useful to communicate about the blockage to communication - the meta level.

So ... here are some thoughts ...

I've had the sort of cold that is not dramatic enough to blog about but makes you envy the energy levels of a sloth.

My cat is very horribly ill. Heart problems and fluid in her chest. Hopefully survivable as apparently the nine-lives-thing does kind of translate into organ redundancy in felines.

I've been getting on with some of those real-world-things-to-do. Change the butane bottle. Scrub out the chicken shed. Make firelighters. Wash clothes. Type of stuff.

To steal a royalist phrase: My powerbook is dead. Long live my powerbook. Fortunately the insurance is coughing up for what would have been a hugely expensive repair, so instead I have used that to fund 2/3 of the cost of refurb powerbook from the lovely people at Cancom. It's gorgeous but there was a gap of around a week and a bit between the old one really being unusable and the new baby being set up.

I'm doing NaNoWriMo ... well, I'm at about 12,000 words instead of 25,000 with half the days gone, but it's proving interesting anyway. I have been alternately encouraged by the struggles of even the ultra inspirationally focussed Lorianne of Hoarded Ordinaries, and discouraged by the unbelievably fast growing word count of Watermark. I think as well as the time this occupies, when I might otherwise be blogging, I am lost in the voices of the characters of my novel, and the voice of Stray has been difficult to hear at times. That sounds a bit wanky doesn't it? Oh well. Darlings, I'm writing a novel!

And now ... I'm off to spend some chillin' time, no internet access, probably no mobile phone signal. Phew! Back Monday, and boy do I have some baby goats for you ...

Collective nouns for piglets

2006-11-05T20:56:00.000Z

A squiggle, a wriggle or a wiggle?

***

Fire(works) night

2006-11-04T19:16:00.000Z

It's nice right now in here. Dark outside the curtainless windows, the fire is blazing and we're tucked up on our huge leather couch with blankets and hot water bottles.

Ruby, sleeping at my feet, perks up occasionally at the fireworks, but she's more irritated than afraid, barking a warning back.

The cat is pinning down my right arm, washing her front legs again, though I can't think I've seen her do a single thing today that might get her dirty. As the temperature drops the animals slowly manipulate themselves under the blankets with me, these days tolerating the proximity to each other in exchange for body heat.

Im in! (here!)

2006-11-04T12:51:00.000Z

I have decided to give NaNoWriMo a shot. Hey, it's no big deal, if I don't do another word it's still about 4000 more than I would have written otherwise. Anyway, this is where I am at, writing. Our shack in the woods.

The whole south side is glass, so the building warms up a treat during the day, though you can see your breath when you first wake up in the morning. Our main source of heat is a wood burner, lit just as darkness falls, we are slowly making our way through the stack of logs piled up by the back wall.

The trees in the quarry provide shade through the summer, but have dropped their leaves to let the warmth of the sun rush in unobstructed through the winter. The longer I live here the more I understand that the architect who's home this was - John Brownrigg, who designed the innovative Yvonne Arnaud Theatre here in Guildford - really did use the location and living things around it as part of the building design. It's such a modern design, I find it hard to reconcile with the fact that John Brownrigg was born in 1911. He lived here up until his death just 4 years ago in 2002.

When asked to describe my home, the expression I most often use is "Think Frank Lloyd Wright meets a scout hut". There's no doubt that the building was done on a budget. The neighbours recollect Brownrigg living on site in a caravan, doing much of the work himself around 1962 - 63. It is a peculiar building, and the genius of the design really only reveals itself when you actually live, daily, with it. Many of the quirks that originally seemed irksome are now emerging as features, details I will miss when I move on, to live somewhere "normal".

The plum sapling he planted over forty years ago was the provider of our superb crop and jam this summer. I wonder whether he imagined future generations, people like us, living in this space, loving it. I am in love with this house, in a way I have never felt about a building before. It's agony to think that it's going to be bulldozed and the quarry banks cleared of the woods, flattened and filled with flats. Not this year, but maybe the year after. This building should be listed. If it were, there is no way we'd afford to live here, but it's not about that any more. I hope to start documenting some of the detail of the house over the next few months. Capturing it, just incase.

***

Cloning

2006-11-01T12:14:00.000Z

A confession, inspired by Mary's post about her favourite jeans: I only wear Gap Carpenter jeans. Light blue. Age 10-12. I own four identical pairs.

And somehow, I still manage to have a favourite pair. Huh?

***

Dilemma

2006-10-31T10:21:00.000Z

Ok, so, it's like er about 14 hours (here in the UK) to go til the official start of NaNoWriMo.

For the uninitiated, it's a collective challenge to write a novel (over 50,000 words) in 30 days. In November.

Pros: Focus. Adventure. Challenge. My school teacher when I was ten told my parents that one day I would be a writer. It's a cheap way to spend time. There are NaNoWriMo meet-ups where I might make some new friends.

Cons: I have no story to tell.

This presents a major problem. As a film maker I'm a firm believer in Alfred Hitchcock's advice: To make a good movie, you need three things : a good story, a good story and… a good story.

But, this is not a movie. And when I begin to make a film, the most important part of the process is to find out what the story is. The story emerges, through the journey and the gentle handling of the camera operator, sound recordist, contributors, editor ... and in this process I try to let go as often as possible. To just believe in my instinct that there is a story to be told and let it unfold in it's own time.

Er. But then novel writing is a solitary activity. Unless I can find some way to conduct some sort of experiment that uses the interactions around me to create the same or a similar dynamic to the film-making process that I feel confident with.

I think I've had an idea. Oh dear.

More cons: I should be doing things that make money. I have a million jobs to do around here before winter really sets in.

Counter argument: You have always said that your best ideas come to you when you're doing other stuff, like making curtains, putting up coat hooks, stirring grape and chestnut christmas preserve (it's been upgraded).

13 hours and 23 minutes to decide.

***

Grape chutney 2.0

2006-10-31T09:19:00.000Z

Seasonal health and safety disclaimer: Allow at least 24 hours between collecting chestnuts (above), and chopping the chillies for this recipe.

Ruby's Red Hot Grape Chutney

A big saucepan of Red grapes, ripped in half and seeds removed (best to do this in front of a couple of soccer matches on the tv)
Juice of 3 lemons
Juice of 2 limes
Half a cup each of cider and red wine vinegar
Chilies, deseeded, roughly chopped* and whizzed in a blender with the lemon / lime juice
A cup of sugar
A big slug of maple syrup (I have a giant vat of the stuff to use up)
2 handfuls of raisins
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
3 large onions, chopped and lightly fried before adding
3 shallots
2 red sweet pointed peppers, chopped

Cook til sludgy, pour into warmed washed jam jars.

*see health and safety disclaimer above, ouch!

Amazingly I still don't think we've used even half of our grapes. But I have an idea for grape chutney with mulled wine spices and roasted chestnuts ...

It all feels very much like an episode of The Good Life round here. The chickens have stopped laying. We have tried adding more light, more bedding, more water ... inspected for obvious signs of distress or disease but they appear, at least to the untrained eye, to be well-adjusted and healthy. Hmm. So we rang our chicken donors - some friends who have a farm and have loaned us their over-pecked birds ... and their chickens aren't laying either. Phew. At least I can stop holding myself responsible! Perhaps they are just reacting to the bizarre weather we're having? A poultry protest about global warming?

***

Red

2006-10-30T21:57:00.000Z

How good is your colour vision?

2006-10-23T19:16:00.000+01:00

The game above requires Flash, version 7. If you don't have it, you can click here to download it. Or not :)

I originally made this game, which I called 'Planet Pop' just ... well, I'm not really sure why to be honest. I was teaching a friend a bit about how to make flash animations and games. We started with a little circle. We made it change size, move around, change colour. We made it do stuff if you clicked on it, and suddenly we were building a game.

The interesting thing about this game is that it tests your colour vision acuity. And, I've found that I can track the objects better if I don't look at them, but look slightly away from the screen - just past the edge of the game, which I know is a technique that wildlife camera operators use for following fast moving birds and animals. Anyway ... I dug it out to show someone today and I'd forgotten how much fun it is. So I thought I'd share it!

High scores can be added to the comments :) Just click 'new game' to begin!

(and before anyone complains about bandwidth and file sizes, .... it's only 27k - ain't maths great?)

---

Green, greener, greenest

2006-10-23T11:48:00.000+01:00

Mary at A Breath of Air has blogged rather provocatively about her quandry over attending the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition now on at the Natural History Museum in London.

The exhibition looks amazing, and as Mary says, supporting the idea, the artists, the campaigners is definitely a reason to get down there and fork out the exhibition entry fee ... but, there is the not-small matter of the fact that the competition is sponsored by Shell. She reports that there have been protests over their selection as exhibition sponsor, due to their environmental record. For Mary this presents a quandry. Does her visit tacitly endorse selection, imply approval, say on some level "hey, you guys ain't so bad"? I have to be honest, it might not have occurred to me to question it if she hadn't pointed it out. Which probably says more about my ability to just gloss over such issues than it does my lack of concern for the planet.

I think it's so hard ... on the one hand, they're clearly shafting the planet. On the other hand, in order for people, groups, companies, nations to change we have to believe they have the capacity to change. Even my dog requires this space to learn new behaviours - requires my recognition that my expectations are part of the pattern too.

Are Shell genuinely concerned about their impact on the planet or are they just concerned to appear concerned? Does the end result outweigh the motivation? Do I, as an individual, do enough of the easy, tiny things each day that would make a difference? If I find it so easy to buy a drink in a plastic bottle, to take my car to the supermarket, to buy avocados that have clearly arrived by air ... how do I judge others?

I do pretty well - we only throw out half a black-bag of non-recyclables to the refuse collection each week. We compost, we recycle, we feed the chickens on scraps and make their bedding out of (hand) shredded paper. But I have a bigger car in order to accommodate my dog. I try to drive it at sixty rather than eighty to save fuel, but I still drive it. I switch the lights off, don't leave the TV on standby, but I still fill my life with electricity gobbling gadgets. I still buy clothes that were made in far off lands. I shop in stores that sell things cheaply and push away the nagging questions about how much the people who made these goods were paid. I freecycle but I still have more than I need.

Looks like a great exhibition anyway ... not sure I can resist :)

---

My magic sweatshirt

2006-10-21T08:51:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I invested in the snuggliest jumper in the world ever. It is like wearing a cuddle. It possesses the same magical qualities as an axe-proof duvet ... you know, you get up at 3am in the dark, get the fear, perhaps there is a non-specific very scary thing about to attack you ... even a mad axe-man, but as soon as you're back under the covers nothing can hurt you.

So - nothing bad could ever possibly happen to me whilst wearing this jumper.

It appears to be made from 100 percent pure muppets. I don't think it sings or dances though, which might be a disappointment to others, but for a shy soul like me, is a major relief.

I think it might be overworked. I am pretty sure I will wear it constantly til march, so I might go back today and buy a back up. A friend for it ... muppets get lonely on their own.

---

The (f)laws of physics

2006-10-19T10:50:00.000+01:00

During an enlightening conversation over lunch yesterday, myself and a few others managed to establish some of the rules that govern how the universe really works.

The missing sock from a pair is the larval form of the wire-coathanger. They apparently crawl off into the wardrobe and up to the clothes rail, where they eventually hatch into an unsolicited garment hanger.

When ball-point pens die, they enter a dark tunnel, at the end of which is the light inside my car glove-box, where their bodies rest for quite some time.

---

UK Mass Blog

2006-10-15T12:48:00.000+01:00

"People throughout the country are being asked to contribute to a mass web log recording a day in the life of Britain.

Tuesday 17 October has been picked as an "ordinary day much like any other of no particular national significance".

The blogs will then be stored by the British Library and at other locations as a permanent record of everyday life."

from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6048392.stm

As well as the British Library, the BBC and the National Trust and other official sounding people are involved. Apparently, the duller the better. They want real minutae. What you ate for dinner kind of stuff. Kind of exciting though :)

Of course, my housemate pointed out that we'll have consumed ourselves into extinction long before this stuff becomes historically exciting, but it's nice to feel part of something anyway.

Take part here: History Matters

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podcasting ...

2006-10-13T15:57:00.000+01:00

This is what I was writing ...

I shall be casting my iPod into the bin I fear.

It's been a fantastic three years (or more? ) together, but last night the hard drive began stuttering ominously. Today I have restored, rebooted and reformatted many times. There has been false hope ... a momentary recovery ... swiftly followed by disappointment.

What I need is some tech support. Unfortunately, I am the tech support. And I have diagnosed that it is definitely a hard drive failure. It makes a nasty whirring noise and I can feel it shuddering in my hand.

And then ... I thought, as I ended that sentence ... 'maybe I will just give it a bloody good whack'. So I did. Smacked it really hard with the palm of my hand, so hard that it stung - which shouldn't have surprised me as it is made of metal ... and I plugged it in. Amused at my ridiculous last ditch efforts.

And now ... it is happily responding to my every whim.

And to think ... I nearly put it on freecycle for spares.

Like in all such situations, I am happier than I would ever have been had it never stopped working in the first place. Delirious :)

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Tea for who?

2006-10-13T09:30:00.000+01:00

This is my new teapot. I've had it for a few weeks and every time I look at it it brings a smile to my face.

There are three reasons for this.

Firstly, it's a nice teapot. A Denby. Just the right tubbiness, nicely weighted in my hand, holds 1 and a 1/4 pints - enough for 3 mugs, or two mugs and two top-ups.

Secondly, it was given to me by my dear friend Rebecca, with whom I spent and mis-spent a lot of my youth, and so every time I brew a pot of tea I also stir up some very fond memories.

Thirdly, it is a pre-loved teapot. Rebecca bought it second hand. Another hand, or hands, have held it, filled it, poured from it. And I wonder about them ... did they warm the pot? Were they Milk In First or Milk In Second? Did they take sugar? Did it provide comfort at funeral wakes, in periods of insomnia, after a near miss in the car? Was it a gift then as well? A wedding present or christmas surprise?

And what I love most of all, is that somewhere, out there, somebody remembers this teapot. It has stories, and I may never get to hear them, but it's still pretty cool that it's had a Life of it's own.

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Warm as toast

2006-10-12T23:50:00.000+01:00

Today I bought 3 hot water bottles. They were on a special offer at Boots ... buy two, get one free. It was lovely to sit on the sofa in the dark with my housemate, watching Cracker (recorded) and have a couple of hot-bottles each under some fluffy blankets a friend bought us. I am almost relishing the prospect of a winter with no central heating. We have a huge woodburner, and some dodgy sixties underfloor system which is effective but cost the previous occupier a whole kidney in electricity. So - blankets and the woodburner are the bigger part of the plan. The office has a small night-storage heater which can keep our fingers from freezing to the keyboards.

I say all this, feel enthused about it, now, in the warmest October since records began. Londoners are today still in short sleeves and sandals. Most peculiar. I believe people have an uncomfortable relationship with this much good weather - it's like they don't believe they deserve it. Especially in the city - where there is no investment, no personal risk. "We should be near a beach" said one guy I encountered in a waiting room this afternoon ... it seemed it was not so much that he wanted to be by the seaside, but that if he had chosen to invest in being near a beach today then his courage would have been rewarded. He would have earned his blue sky by putting himself in a place where it made a difference.

Perhaps I do feel that I've made that investment. Certainly, dry, warm and windy now means washing on the line, where once it meant sitting in the pub garden rather than the main bar. I listen for clues about when to walk the dog, when to bring the chickens in and out, when to chop wood.

Apparently tomorrow morning will begin with a light fog, lifting after lunch. That sounds like every morning to me!

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