Category: temporal node

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Moooooo!

Due to a forthcoming engagement which just might be an opportunity to tout for work I made some cards via moo on flickr. Choose a picture or selection of pictures to appear on one side of the card, define one set text for the other. Simple.

I should have known, having seen other people’s moo cards. I should have known, having helpfully been informed of the dimensions of the cards several times during the process. But still it came as a surprise. It’s like looking at pictures through a letterbox. A particularly narrow letterbox.

Although initially disconcerting, this turns out not to be a bad thing. Before you finalise the order each picture chosen is displayed on a page with a thin rectangular template over it which you can wiggle around, rotate or make smaller (ie zoom in on a detail of the picture).

It’s really interesting to see what ends up in a narrow slit in the middle of each picture. Sometimes it’s just never going to work but most times there’s a very pleasing, and rather surprising, new image to be seen. I’m not going to want to give them away.

And in non-bovine, listed, news I was sent a haiku by text message yesterday. Such a surprising and delighting thing, I’m still polishing it in my brain and smiling when I think of it. A new mode of transmission perfectly suited to this venerable form. And what an amazing thing to think of doing.

Secondborn announced this morning “my breath smells like a colobus monkey”. I asked how he knew this and he said he had many tiny noses on his tongue. When I explained that it wasn’t the method of detection so much as the colobus I was enquiring about he replied airily that he’d sniffed them at the zoo. And they smell? horrible.

Returning to the vexed subject of dog treats (Pedigree dentastix for small dogs are more expensive, per kilo, than parmesan cheese), I was further incensed to notice on a recent trip to the supermarket that Pedigree dentastix for unfeasibly hugely mutantly massive slobbery dogs are about half the price, per kilo, of those for small-but-perfectly-formed gorgeous dogs. So my clever compromise, although it pains me to be handing cash over to this wicked company which discriminates against the companions of sensibly dimensioned canines, is to by a box of the huge ones and cut them in half. Thus reducing the dog treat bill from £13 to £4 per month. Ca-CHING!

And finally, as they say on all the best lists of news, Curious George is excellent and exceedingly cute fun for all the family. And, not being a colobus, he doesn’t even smell.

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Finances

My word, but it’s so exciting. Not only am I now a meditation zealot I’m also a spreadsheet convert. Single-handedly, fuelled only by beer, Mr Hg has performed a miracle. I merely watched in awe (also fuelled by beer which explains why there are two bottles of each brew).

This is the “before” picture. They are carefully arranged, by Mr Hg, in order of strength. Apparently this allows one better to appreciate each flavour since the less alcohol there is the more delicate the savour.

finances - before

For the first time in my entire life I have an overall grasp of my finances. This is of course a shameful state of affairs, never having had even the most palsied plucking at the matter previously, but as with so many things it is better late than never. Spreadsheets are really really useful things, I’ve discovered, with their clever “add up all the numbers” functions.

They also demonstrate all the essential bits of gorgeousness that make life worth living readily dispensable expenditures where savings can be made. (“Do I really have to cancel the Tate membership?” “Yes” says Mr Hg sternly. I didn’t tell him about, and he didn’t discover, my shameful coffee secret which, I have just this moment worked out, actually cost the same as ten Tate memberships over one year. Does that have to go too? It does? Sigh.) What also became clear was that therapy, at a staggering equivalent of six Tate memberships each month is my biggest single outgoing. Get well before going bankrupt seems to be the moral of this spreadsheet.

Some things are easier than others to let go. Why, for instance, did I feel weepy when cancelling the two papers and one comic a week we’ve been having delivered for the last several years? I can only speculate as to how I shall feel when the last capsule of coffee is in the machine. Maybe it will be fine and I shall embrace the neglected stove-top pot without a backward glance.

It is extraordinary, and I find it shocking, that even at the cheapest outlet Maizy’s favourite dog treats cost £13.00 per kg compared to, say, parmesan cheese which weighs in at a mere £10 per kg. However rather than giving her cheese I could always try the snacks-for-humans produced by the same company which are a mere £3.50 per kg.

And the beer? Mr Hg, who is very tall and has hollow legs, got through all five of the different brews. I, who am neither tall nor hollow, managed three out of five which was pretty good going.

finances - after

The Abbot ale was rather disappointing after the Bateman’s XXXB which was delicious. The Brakspear Triple was truly nectariferous as well as being loony juice at 7.2% ABV. I drank mine the next day and had to go for an extended rest afterwards.

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An unordered week’s worth of list

  • Purple and red. Both very bright. Both very together. Why have I never seen this before?
  • Snowing downdrift of chestnut-coloured plane-fluff on titian curls.
  • The view of Canary Wharf from C’s window last thing at night and first thing in the morning.
  • There are many paths but only one mountain.
  • Using whiskey then, when that doesn’t work, a glowing match to remove a tick results only in the strong reek of flambéed fur. And has no effect on the tick. In fact it might make the tick cough crap into the dog. Tweezers are recommended. And don’t crush the arachnid using any unprotected part of your anatomy – the crap might get into you too. But how come, I wonder, my brother and I were de-ticked every evening in the bath when we were in the Isle of Man using neat whiskey?
  • “I am feeling more stable and happier than I have done for years.” Me, out of nowhere, to my father.
  • Penny Serenade has to be one of the most excruciatingly bad films ever. His Girl Friday is much better, one of my all-time favourites, but I fell asleep.
  • Dead Man, on the other hand, is one of the most brilliant films ever. And, serendipitously, is on offer in the Virgin megastore.
  • The smell of incense and the sound of sirens while meditating in a central London church.
  • “Why is it that we regard positive sentiments and phrases describing happiness as trite while misery and suffering is seen as more ‘real’?” Thought-provoking question indeed. Maybe another manifestation of Milton’s Paradise Lost v Regained syndrome.
  • Champagne. First Moët then Nicolas Feuillatte (I still have the corks). Later in the week a palette of champagne cocktails chosen and given by a friend: the pale pink of champagne, cointreau and cranberry juice with a delicate spirogyra of orange peel in a poinsettia; glowing orange-yellow of a Bellini (champagne and peach juice, the cocktail of Venice); the golden russet of a vanilla champagne cocktail.
  • Leap and the net will appear: Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, lent by a friend.
  • Second-born: “I thought I was going to have a nightmare last night, but I thought of something lovely, a happy time, and it went away”. Astonished mother, knocked sideways by this step-change in the aforementioned spawn’s unremitting negativity: “How fantastic! And what was the happy time that you thought of?” “Our camping holiday in Cornwall.”
  • Cooking for friends from Delia’s vegetarian book.
  • Hospice at Home charities and the fund-raising party a friend had to honour her mother who died, at home, a year ago.
  • Comforting a friend’s child after he fell over when she wasn’t there. Loving the trust and depth of our relationship that allowed me to hold him and calm him and wipe away his tears.
  • The crashing to the floor onto a metal object of my camera and splintering of glass… the fall destroyed the filter and left the lens unmarked.
  • Pale dry sherry and cheese-and-chive pretzels. Powering this post.
  • Loop. Again. With a loyalty card. A fabulous pattern for looooong fingerless gloves (buttercup armwarmers) in pure silk Alchemy Pagoda yarn which I’m making in Pablo’s Solace (aka purple) which was 50% off in the sale. But I’m going to modify the pattern a bit and make a thumb and thread a red ribbon (see list item number one) round the wrist.
  • I *am* a dirty old mystic. A term of abuse coined by the ex. Ok, I’m not dirty, but I’m an old mystic. And I love it. I absolutely love it.
  • Great minds. Great Minds.
Posted on

An unordered week's worth of list

  • Purple and red. Both very bright. Both very together. Why have I never seen this before?
  • Snowing downdrift of chestnut-coloured plane-fluff on titian curls.
  • The view of Canary Wharf from C’s window last thing at night and first thing in the morning.
  • There are many paths but only one mountain.
  • Using whiskey then, when that doesn’t work, a glowing match to remove a tick results only in the strong reek of flambéed fur. And has no effect on the tick. In fact it might make the tick cough crap into the dog. Tweezers are recommended. And don’t crush the arachnid using any unprotected part of your anatomy – the crap might get into you too. But how come, I wonder, my brother and I were de-ticked every evening in the bath when we were in the Isle of Man using neat whiskey?
  • “I am feeling more stable and happier than I have done for years.” Me, out of nowhere, to my father.
  • Penny Serenade has to be one of the most excruciatingly bad films ever. His Girl Friday is much better, one of my all-time favourites, but I fell asleep.
  • Dead Man, on the other hand, is one of the most brilliant films ever. And, serendipitously, is on offer in the Virgin megastore.
  • The smell of incense and the sound of sirens while meditating in a central London church.
  • “Why is it that we regard positive sentiments and phrases describing happiness as trite while misery and suffering is seen as more ‘real’?” Thought-provoking question indeed. Maybe another manifestation of Milton’s Paradise Lost v Regained syndrome.
  • Champagne. First Moët then Nicolas Feuillatte (I still have the corks). Later in the week a palette of champagne cocktails chosen and given by a friend: the pale pink of champagne, cointreau and cranberry juice with a delicate spirogyra of orange peel in a poinsettia; glowing orange-yellow of a Bellini (champagne and peach juice, the cocktail of Venice); the golden russet of a vanilla champagne cocktail.
  • Leap and the net will appear: Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, lent by a friend.
  • Second-born: “I thought I was going to have a nightmare last night, but I thought of something lovely, a happy time, and it went away”. Astonished mother, knocked sideways by this step-change in the aforementioned spawn’s unremitting negativity: “How fantastic! And what was the happy time that you thought of?” “Our camping holiday in Cornwall.”
  • Cooking for friends from Delia’s vegetarian book.
  • Hospice at Home charities and the fund-raising party a friend had to honour her mother who died, at home, a year ago.
  • Comforting a friend’s child after he fell over when she wasn’t there. Loving the trust and depth of our relationship that allowed me to hold him and calm him and wipe away his tears.
  • The crashing to the floor onto a metal object of my camera and splintering of glass… the fall destroyed the filter and left the lens unmarked.
  • Pale dry sherry and cheese-and-chive pretzels. Powering this post.
  • Loop. Again. With a loyalty card. A fabulous pattern for looooong fingerless gloves (buttercup armwarmers) in pure silk Alchemy Pagoda yarn which I’m making in Pablo’s Solace (aka purple) which was 50% off in the sale. But I’m going to modify the pattern a bit and make a thumb and thread a red ribbon (see list item number one) round the wrist.
  • I *am* a dirty old mystic. A term of abuse coined by the ex. Ok, I’m not dirty, but I’m an old mystic. And I love it. I absolutely love it.
  • Great minds. Great Minds.
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You must be at a bit of a loose end

I knocked at the door with the hand not wrapped around the neck of the wine bottle and stood back, slightly puzzled at the dark and quiet. It was J’s birthday party and I was, of course, late.

I’m actually getting much better with my timekeeping but a declaration from boy 2, as I went towards the front door, that he didn’t want to go to Arran on holiday, had to be dealt with immediately. It transpired he was worried that Arran was very close to Loch Ness and was terrified of the monster that stretch of water is alleged to contain. Much reassurance was required and an in-depth examination of the UK road map which eventually convinced him that Arran was probably a safe and monster-free destination after all.

I was also late because, lovely though the van is, it’s not exactly easy to park in the narrow and crowded streets of London. I had driven round in ever increasing rectangles looking for a space large enough to contend with both the van itself and a certain lack of sense of its dimensions on the part of the driver.

So there I was, as I said, on the doorstep, late and slightly disorientated by the walk from the van. Was I at the right house? The door opened quietly and hesitantly to reveal the countenance of A, J’s French au pair.

“Hello!” I beamed.

“Ah, ‘ello” she replied in her charmingly accented English, in a polite but clearly puzzled way from behind the safety of the front door, only her head showing around the wooden bulwark.

“I’ve come for J’s party” I said, valiantly, but the awful truth was beginning to percolate through even the dull senses of my spavined brain.

“J… she ees not ‘ere”, she said, delicately, as though concerned that this information too abruptly conveyed might cause this clearly deranged woman to perform some unpredictable act.

The arm brandishing the bottle of wine drooped and hung listless at my side. I fear my jaw dropped, lax, and my eyes probably resembled those of a week-dead halibut.

Something, I began to realise, had gone wrong.

I knew I was going out. I *had* to be going out. I was holding a bottle of wine, wasn’t I? I was dressed in carefully-chosen mid-week-party clothes. Mascara had been applied, a sure sign that something of great significance was underway. I had, most convincingly of all, entirely pushed the boat out and hired the (expensive) services of a baby-sitter, something my new financial regime (of which more soon I hope) expressly forbids.

A series of dire thoughts chased through my mind, albeit at the speed a horse with severe hoof-rot might summon up after unenthusiastic persuasion. Thoughts like: it’s the wrong night and I’m paying for a baby-sitter and, oh, the expense; it was yesterday night and I missed it and that’s so rude and thoughtless and I’m paying for a baby-sitter and, oh, the *expense*; it’s tomorrow night and I’ll have to hire a baby-sitter again and, oh my god, the expense. (I take my new financial spreadsheets very seriously in case you hadn’t noticed.)

Something of the inner horror may well have manifested itself on the outer countenance. Or maybe I was swaying and drooling in the moonlight and muttering ferociously, anything’s possible. For whatever reason A had been staring at me fixedly in some alarm and eventually asked, extremely timidly, if I was feeling OK.

“Yes,” I announced, firmly. “I know I’m going out tonight but I’ve just come to the wrong place. So sorry to have disturbed you,” and with that I marched down the path to the street.

“You must be at a bit of a loose end,” my father had said when I met him earlier in the week. In fact I’ve probably been doing more in the last month than in the previous year put together, meeting people, doing stuff. The social problem of the moment is plethora not paucity. Thus it was that, with a calendar bulging with excitement, I’d got confused.

I climbed back into the van (it was cold) and thought deeply about what to do next. Bingo! phone one of the gang… F and J and T were all bound to be going to whatever it was I was supposed to be going to. I phoned. I waited. I counted the ring tones. I noticed, with a detached sort of interest, that they all subscribe to the same network. I knew this because the same woman announced its name whilst informing me that the person I had called was unable to answer the phone but I could leave a message after the sound of the tone.

I rested my head on the steering wheel. Perhaps allowing blood easier access to the brain might help. It was intensely frustrating. It was dark. It was cold. I was all dressed up with a bottle of wine, no corkscrew and missing a party so good that three dedicated mothers were ignoring their mobiles, oblivious to the fact that my call might have been that of, oh, I don’t know, a baby-sitter wanting to know how to deal with a blue child choking on a carrot. And, of course, there was the blasted expense of my own baby-sitter.

Eventually even the glacial slowness of my neurones managed to fire up another potential solution. T lived close by and although she was obviously whooping it up at some as yet unknown venue her husband, A, would be at home with the kids. I didn’t have the home phone number but I could trot up the road and find out from A where I was supposed to be.

A word of advice. It is probably not a good idea, when dressed in clothes suitable for a mid-week party, wearing mascara and wielding a bottle of wine, to answer the strange voice enquiring what you want from the other side of the closed front door by saying that you’ve come to see your friend’s husband. This might be misinterpreted by the no doubt entirely sensible person who has been employed to baby-sit the children because both parents are out.

Luckily the person on the other side of the door opened it and I rapidly, I hope, clarified any potential misunderstanding. And she was so sensible that not only did she know where T was, she also knew the address and gave full and accurate directions how to get there. So it was K’s party tonight, not J’s at all.

When I finally arrived at the right place the door was answered by someone I didn’t know. “Who’s that?” K shouted from inside. “It’s the Emily Watson look-alike” the portress shouted back. Apparently I had been discussed earlier in the evening and the resemblance had been suggested, and was now generally assumed to be accurate since someone who’d never met me knew who I was from the description.

I didn’t know who Emily Watson was, but kept quite about it. Obviously I had to check when I got home to see if she was someone I wanted to be mistaken for. I read that she came to fame in Lars von Trier‘s film Breaking the Waves.

I interviewed Lars von Trier once on the beach of some highly expensive hotel north of Cannes. As I sat down opposite him he leaned forward and said “let’s get naked together and run into the sea”. At the time I dismissed this as a calculated attempt to cultivate his already eccentric public image, to make more amusing the otherwise no doubt entirely tedious business of back-to-back interviews to promote his film, and maybe to try to discomfort the questioner. But perhaps I was too cynical. Perhaps there, on the shore, with the crash of the waves and the salty breeze, he mistook me for Emily Watson.

Then again, maybe he didn’t. But it was worth the cost of the babysitter to have that thought.

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Mahabharottontomato

“This” said my friend as the lights went up for the interval, “is torture“.

It was such a shame. It promised to be a great theatrical event – five years in the making with contributions from an award-winning composer, lyricist and choreographer and including puppetry and video projection. Unfortunately it was a complete mess.

The lyrics were perhaps the worst part of this anti-gestalt entity. Banal nigh unto nausea with the plodding rhymes of greeting card doggerel. These lyrics had been set to (or had composed for them) almost equally tedious music. They were then sung by vocalists of such mediocre-to-non-existent talent that ones ears curled in an effort to block out the noise. Particularly disappointing since I’m a great fan of Nitin Sawhney.

The dancing, apparently a whole “new vocabulary”, failed to communicate anything very much. The battle scene in particular, allegedly the war to end all wars, the ushering in of a new dark age, resembled a small-scale difference between drunken morris dancers holding garden canes.

Both the video projections and the puppetry were badly-executed tokenistic add-ons which merely served to highlight rather than cover the gaping cracks.

The god Krishna was on stage for most of the performance. Sadly for one supposed to be the powerful all-attractive deity, prince, warrior and philosopher, he was a decidedly uncommanding presence being small and dumpy, and sported something which looked disturbingly like a vestigial chest-wig but might have been some form of necklace. We, in our top-price seats, were too far away to tell.

Also hugely disappointing was the compacting of the Bhagavad Gita into a couple of minutes of stilted and bizarre dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna which appeared, in summary, to be “it’s ok to kill people because they have another life anyway”. However the quotation made famous in the west by Robert Oppenheimer, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” was put in the mouth of Draupadi, the heroine from whose point of view the story had been reworked.

It wasn’t entirely dreadful. When anyone sang in a language other than English both the delivery and scoring was noticeably superior. The “pas de deux” between Draupadi and Arjuna was well done, set to a track from one of Nitin Sawhney’s albums. The set, a Frank Gehry-esque metallic-looking sweeping curve of a rampart, was wonderful but ill-used.

However the evening would best be summed up by the lyrics droned repeatedly by Draupadi in a sub-Lloyd-Webber fashion: “when will it end?“.

Answer: not soon enough.

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Robert the Giant Easter Bunny and the screen breaks

fishnets

I’ve been away from the keyboard and cavorting in the meatspace, basking in the joy of friends. And of course the boys are on holiday and require entertainment of one sort or another. I am delightfully happy.

One problem with actually doing stuff is that there’s so much to savour and so little time to write about it, but the continuing discipline of a picture a day gives a framework for memory.

The picture above, for instance, is the table of the abode in which I found myself on the morning of the visit of Robert the Giant Easter Bunny who brought mini eggs and some rather sophisticated dark chocolate balls. Robert, it seems, is the name of one of the oversized lagomorphs to which I have already had cause to refer. I’m told his breeder is disenchanted with the proposed North Korean farming programme having discovered that only the apparatchiks were getting to eat them.

I have learnt to hula-hoop; been down the biggest slide in the Tate Modern; bought wool to knit for the newly-arrived miracle baby of a dear friend (in the new-look John Lewis); been to the theatre not once but twice, one trip with my father which may be the start of a regular treat; cooked and been cooked for and drunk many a fine vintage; floated home through a world of infinite complexity and walked under the soft spring sunshine in many places with many friends.

Tomorrow the boys, Maizy and I set out in the van to this campsite until the end of the week. We’re hoping the weather will be good but, in a clear demonstration of the maxim that more information is not necessarily better information we are bewildered by the range of meteorological prognostications available for the same town over the same period:

bbc.jpg

yahoo.jpg

accuweather.jpg

met-office.jpg

Further digesting shall take place of the extraordinary week on Holy Island, about which Alistair has already written and pictured. I’m not sure I’ve got the words.

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Good things

I had a carefully linked list of recent good things which lead one to the next in a pleasing series of elegant segue-ways and I appear to have deleted it by mistake. Never mind.

The first good thing, which occurred after the demise of the list, has to be the result – a draw, but an honourable one. I speak, of course, of the firstborn’s endeavours on the AstroTurf this morning. He scored the equaliser.

w00000t

Almost as good was the long lens which came with the E-400… not bad for a first sporting shot I thought. Shame his mother hadn’t washed his socks though.

Staying with the family, my gorgeous cousin Jules got married. She’s beautiful. She’s funny. Talent oozing out of her fingertips – acting, singing, directing. And so clever they didn’t have a grade high enough for her degree. I love her.

Here she is giving a specially customised rendition of “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” at her wedding reception.

Jules is a singer

Obviously I want to be her, but it’s rather too late now so I take delight in watching her being her.

And on Monday I had the most wonderful time at Mr Beelicious’ birthday party.

jonathan in another brilliant hat

We met on Holy Island last August where already his excellent taste in headgear was well in evidence. He came from New York to celebrate at Les Trois Garcons. The food was fabulous, the decor outrageous-flamboyant-baroque and his friends so delightful and interesting and funny and sympa.

After eating we were taken upstairs to the living quarters of two at least of the trois garcons which had enough quirk and fluff and spangles to keep me happy for several lifetimes. And an African grey parrot with which I (and others) immediately fell in love. It was a night I hope never to forget, thank you so much Mr B!

To the realm of work. The major excitement for us at Global Voices was the launch of the new Reuters Africa site. It has a feed of the relevant Global Voices content on every country page across the entire continent.

The announcement made quite a splash since it’s the first time that blogger content has been incorporated quite so extensively in a mainstream media site. My friends and colleagues Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman both wrote great analyses of its significance and from openDemocracy came an excellent article by Becky Hogge.

The comments on the announcement article also let me discover the blog of my friend and former BBC colleague the journalist Lara Pawson who is currently in Luanda, Angola, and also writes for openDemocracy.

Hold that openDemocracy thought, we’ll be coming back to oD a bit later. Because this is where the filaments multiply beyond my ability to keep a single thread. We’ll continue with GV and another great thing which is the appointment of Sami Ben Gharbia as our new Advocacy Coordinator. Yes, for those of you with good memories, the same Sami Ben Gharbia of the Tunisian Prison Map about which I waxed lyrical last year.

We stay with the people of GV and move to the lovely Neha Viswanathan, our South Asia Editor (and reader of 3000 blogs). Quite how she finds the time to do anything beyond her work I don’t know but she does. She came over the other day and, despite being a confirmed dog person, fell for the cat big time. She also writes. Beautifully.

Click through to the previous link and you will see a picture of the aforementioned cat. The writing may be a response to or triggered by the picture – in other words ekphrasis. And, delightfully, the theme for this month’s edition of qarrtsiluni is that very thing. You can submit an image for inclusion in the gallery which acts as a seedbed of potential textual inspiration and you can submit “poetry or poetic prose” inspired by any of the gallery images or any other image you choose.

This is where Ariadne’s thread proves inadequate for navigating the maze of contemporary existence. I cannot, for the life of me, knit or even navigate a path from ekphrasis to Bamako, although no doubt it is possible. So I have to invoke the oD reference I asked you to keep in mind, and on your needle, earlier.

Some weeks ago I mentioned going to see the film, Bamako. The next day I interviewed the director, Abderrhamane Sissako, and the executive producer, Maji-da Abdi for openDemocracy. They also happen to be married, Maji-da speaks English and translates for Abderrhamane of whose European languages French is better. The interview is here.

This was one of those interviews where everything “clicked”. I have been privileged to talk to many interesting and inspiring people over the years. Abderrhamane and Maji-da are up there with the best. The more I think about the more convinced I am that everyone should see this film. It’s even had good reviews in the London press – do yourself a favour, go and see it!

This is the downside of infrequent blogging – the complexity of the catchup. However there was another good thing fueling this marathon. Purchased from the recently opened Nigerian wine merchant’s down the road is a delicious Saumur blanc from Saint Vincent in the Loire Valley. Spicy, as promised. Pale amber in colour. Complex. Citrus. A honey nose. And I’ve finished the bottle.

Also, while accentuating the positive, my pictures got some fan mail today. They were pleased, I was delighted. Which reminds me there hasn’t been a picture of ages. Here’s one the boys and I all like called “pollen”.

pollen

Good night!