Stolen Property?

I’ve been uploading songs to YouTube again over the last couple of weeks, and have had some surprisingly pleasant comments. In order to allow me to embed one of them on my stumble blog i had to give it a thumbs-up – something i generally avoid doing with my own work as it smacks of shameless self-promotion. However, on this occasion it seems to have worked out ok – no one seems to mind and it’s brought some people to my page who would otherwise not have seen it, and who have been saying very nice things about what is essentially a clumsily and hurriedly rendered version of one of my old songs, played on piano as an experiment. In any case, I’m happy that the outcome has been so positive and may try doing it again sometime as, not only has it fuelled interest in this particular video, but a few people have obviously clicked through to my other stuff and have left nice comments there too. The most bizarre thing about it all though is that a few of the people who’ve commented have remarked on it being “better than the original” and “a good cover” which, while extremely flattering, is also completely baffling as it’s one of my songs. The only other version on the internet that I'm aware of is my own guitar version which is also on YouTube. I look fairly similar in both vids, which added to the fact that both were uploaded using the same username it strikes me as unlikely that anyone would think this is a cover of the other one – they are both quite obviously me. So the question is, where does this notion come from that it’s a cover? are these people just poking fun? or is there a song out there that sounds the same? I certainly didn’t consciously plagiarise anything, and haven’t come across anything that sounds similar enough for me to think “oh dear, best scrap that one then”, or even anywhere close. Granted, the chord sequence isn’t uncommon, but neither is it particularly common, and given that there are only 7 chords in any given key, all songs inevitably sound a bit like something else. But, close enough for people to thinks it’s a cover? that’s another thing altogether. So, if you know what song it is people think I've ripped off, I'd love to hear from you – I'm completely intrigued and not a little concerned. Anyway, enough of my rambling, here’s the song. I hope you enjoy it (at least as much as the original). As ever, comment and feedback are welcome.

New songs on youtube

Well, new versions of old songs. Been playing a lot of keyboard recently to try and level up a bit so am tackling old songs and trying to work out better arrangements of them. They’re still rough as balls at the moment because I am a sloppy pianist at the best of times and I still stumble over the notes and it’s a bit of a lottery as to what chord comes out and whether it enhances or detracts from what I’m playing. That said, I’m fairly happy with how Sleepyhead came out. It’s still a bit clumsy, but presentable, so here it is. Comments welcome, as ever.

Fun and Games

I have had an odd couple of weeks. Because of various things going on at the moment I have for some time been feeling a bit stressed and increasingly lethargic. I have a history of depression but am generally able to recognise the symptoms early enough to take the necessary action to prevent slipping from detached and lethargic to actual depression. There have only been a few instances, usually for a period of a couple of months, where I’ve found it too much to cope with on my own and have had to get additional help. About a week and a half ago I started getting various symptoms of a bug or virus – headache, nausea, aches and pains – and initially thought it might be swine flu, as a few people at work have had it, or have relatives who have. The one thing that made me doubt it though was that I had no fever.

Having had a couple of days off at the beginning of the week because of having worked the weekend, I went back to work last Wednesday (12th) and felt completely wretched all day. That night I barely slept and woke up the next morning with a headache, and feeling dizzy and disorientated. I called in sick and got some bed rest. The next day I felt just as bad, so called in again. By the weekend I still had the same symptoms which showed no sign of abating, but still no fever, so I began to wonder if it was in fact a bug, or if it was something else. I follow NHS Direct on twitter and over the weekend they posted a link to a new part of the NHS Direct site which is a mental health symptom checker, so I figured as I had been getting on towards depression for a while I’d run through it and see if anything tied in. All the symptoms I was experiencing, it turns out, are symptoms of depression. Most of them I knew, but wasn’t aware that it can cause headache and nausea, so hadn’t initially made the connection. The advice at the end of the questionnaire was to go see my GP, which I figured was probably for the best.

The problem was that at that point I didn’t actually have a GP. I have a phobia of medical practitioners and establishments, partly due to a completely irrational fear, and partly due to bad experience with incompetent or indifferent practitioners. It is fair to point out that the vast majority of medical staff I have encountered have been superb and I have every faith in the health service and its staff, but the ones who were bad, were quite horrible. Anyway this phobia works in such a way that upon entering a medical establishment, I immediately get a sense of dread about all the things that can go wrong. My brain imagines horrific things no matter how hard I try to quash the images, and I start to feel faint, then invariably have a panic attack and pass out.

Part of the reason that the fear has become worse over the years, is that passing out is a truly horrific experience, and it is partly the apprehension about that which makes me feel worse, in essence making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lots of people talk about passing out after a heavy night out, which the majority of cases is just falling asleep, or losing consciousness. Actual passing out is very different. You start by losing coherence and focus, then start to get tunnel vision. When you are about to pass out, if you’ve done it before you know it’s happening, and that only makes it worse because you try to fight it and end up panicking. There comes a point where your brain is simply overloaded and you lose consciousness. Your entire body goes limp and you just fall where you are. If you are stood up, you just fall over and hit the ground hard.

Next comes the dream. This is usually, but not always, vaguely related to the situation which has made you pass out, and is generally like watching a short reel of film of about 3 or 4 seconds, over and over again. In one dream I was being hit by a bus, over and over for what I’m told was about 2 minutes – I think this stemmed from the fact that I had fallen heavily on one side, so had pain all the way down that side of my body, which my brain was trying to rationalise. While this is going on, it is not uncommon to seize, similar to an epileptic seizure, which although unpleasant is actually beneficial because it doesn’t have any detrimental effects (bar, occasionally, friction burn on one side for your face) but it does make people take notice. 

The next stage is regaining consciousness. This can be very unpleasant indeed as on awaking you initially have no idea where you are, how you got there or what has just happened. You invariably wake to find lots of people crouching down next to you looking concerned, but you have no idea why, or in most cases, who they are (this is also the case even if you know them). Sound and vision are both very hazy at this point and you have a ringing in your ears similar to tinnitus, usually accompanied by pins & needles and often sharp pain in whichever part of your body has taken the brunt of the fall. For this reason it is advisable to lie down when you realise you are going to pass out. Over a period of maybe 30 seconds, you gradually take stock of your surroundings, and on realising you have passed out, what usually follows is a brief period of calm, where you realise you are over the worst and that the feelings of nausea will pass. within about 5 to 10 minutes you are ready to sit up, and start talking coherently. Within about half an hour, the nausea usually passes, and you are left simply feeling drained and very fragile.

Needless to say, knowing all this, and knowing that any trip to a doctor is liable to cause this to happen, I eventually tired of it and simply stopped going to the doctor. It can be quite restricting and leads to taking as few risks as possible with anything which may entail a trip to the doctor’s. Something which is a simple and mundane part of life for everyone else, becomes something which is virtually impossible, and it takes a hell of a lot to get me to go to see one. For this reason, after I stopped going to my old doctor, I simply never bothered registering with a new one when I moved house. By Monday of this week it became apparent that my options were either to try and get through this with no medication, and having to go back to work on Thursday, so I decided to bite the bullet and get registered.

So on Thursday morning, for the first time in about 8 years, I saw a doctor. I had been eating very little for the past few days and so was already quite weakened by the time I got there, and in the waiting room was on the verge of passing out. Fortunately I wasn’t waiting long, and the doctor immediately put me at ease. He was compassionate and helpful, and did not dismiss any of my worries or symptoms, simply took it all on board, asked for my opinion on things, and then discussed with me his prognosis and suggested course of action.

I have only once been on medication for depression, which was Seroxat. I did not have a particularly good time on it – it switched off all the negative emotions, which helped me get a hold on things and look at things objectively, but in so doing it also muted all the positive emotions so I really didn’t care enough to do anything. I essentially became an emotionless drone, incapable of much more than lying in bed waiting for each day to pass. This was obviously an experience I was keen not to repeat, but I knew that anti-depressant medication is quite varied, and was open to the possibility that the right medication may be what I needed. The doctor signed me off work for two weeks and prescribed Venlafaxine, with a view to reviewing both after the two weeks to see if the time off is sufficient, and if the medication is right for me.

He advised that there may be some nausea as a side effect and suggested taking the medication immediately before bedtime so that the majority of the nausea would be while I am asleep so I wouldn’t suffer too much from it. I have been taking the medication for two days now, tonight will be my third dose, and I had held off on reading about other side effects, in case reading about them made me project and psychologically cause effects which I would otherwise not have had. Since the first morning I woke up after starting on the medication I have felt groggy and nauseous more or less constantly, and have had a headache on and off. I have had a decreased appetite for days anyway, so this is likely a contributory factor, though it has definitely got worse over the last couple of days, and feeling constantly nauseated does not make you feel very enthusiastic about food, so I have now been living off one meal a day, with the odd cereal bar thrown in, for about 5 days. It is something of a vicious circle, but one which I hope to be able to beat by basically forcing myself to have food first thing for the next couple of days.

Tonight, having experienced a few things which I thought might be side effects, I decided to look up Venlafaxine to see if anything else could be attributed to the medication. This is what I found:

Common side effects

NOTE: The percentage of occurrences for each side effect listed comes from clinical trial data provided by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Inc. The percentages indicate the percentage of people that experienced the side effect in clinical trials.^[4]

• Headache (34%)
• Nausea (21-35%)
• Insomnia (15-23%)
• Sexual dysfunction (14-34%)
• Dry mouth (12-16%)
• Dizziness (11-20%)
• Sweating (10-14%)
• Decreased Appetite (8-20%)
• Abnormal ejaculation (8-16%)
• Hypertension (4-5%)
• Vivid/Abnormal dreams (3-7%)
• Akathisia (Agitation) (3-4%)
• Decreased libido (3-9%)
• Increased yawning (3-5%)
• Apathy
• Constipation
• Ongoing Irritable Bowel Syndrome
• Fatigue
• Vertigo
• Orthostatic hypotension (postural drop in blood pressure)
• Impulsive Actions
• Electric shock-like sensations also called "Brain zaps"
• Increased anxiety at the start of treatment
• Memory Loss
• Restless Legs Syndrome

Less common to rare side-effects

Note 'Rare' adverse effects occur in fewer than 1 in 1000 patients.

• Cardiac arrhythmia
• Increased serum cholesterol
• Gas or stomach pain
• Abnormal vision
• Nervousness, agitation or increased anxiety
• Panic Attacks
• Depressed feelings
• Suicidal thoughts
• Confusion
• Neuroleptic malignant syndrome
• Loss of appetite
• Tremor
• Drowsiness
• Allergic skin reactions
• External bleeding
• Serious bone marrow damage (thrombocytopenia, agranulocytosis)
• Hepatitis
• Pancreatitis
• Seizure
• Tardive dyskinesia
• Difficulty swallowing
• Psychosis
• Hair Loss
• Hostility
• Activation of mania/hypomania.
• Weight Loss (of concern when treating patients suffering from anorexia nervosa)
• Weight gain (effect not clear, but of concern when treating people who may have Body Dysmorphic Disorder).
• Homicidal Thoughts
• Aggression
• Depersonalization
• Visual Hallucinations
• Swollen and/or bleeding gums
• Frequent urination

Quite a list isn’t it? I’m happy to say that I have never in my life been suicidal, and have never really had suicidal thoughts, so am not too worried about that, however an awful lot of the side effects seem to match up exactly to symptoms of depression, and I have already had an alarming number of the side effects. Most I had put down to ongoing increasing symptoms of depression, but as the majority have only started in the last two days, I am now not so convinced. My hope is that most or all will be temporary and that as the drugs start to take effect it will all be worthwhile. I remain open-minded and positive am not going to draw conclusions until my body has had time to adjust, but all the same, it is an alarmingly large list. I just hope the positive effects make up for the negative ones.

One of the biggest problems I face as a sufferer of depression, is that it is so widely misunderstood and dismissed as a cop out. Depression is an actual chemical imbalance in the brain, it is not just feeling down or sad. On the contrary, I don’t feel particularly down or sad at all, it is more a lack of emotions, than it is an onslaught of negative ones. It affects different people in different ways and I know some people do feel absolutely miserable as a result, but from speaking to other sufferers, it seems that the one unifying symptom seems to be lethargy. It is like actually physically being depressed, in the way that you depress a button on a keyboard – being pushed down, like your whole body feels to weigh far more than it should, and *everything* takes far more effort than normal, while bringing far fewer returns in terms of feeling satisfaction and accomplishment. One of the most important things to do to remedy depression is to keep busy, doing things you enjoy, and getting exercise, but getting exercise is a hundred times harder than normal – you have absolutely no motivation whatsoever, and are physically drained, making it that much more effort, both psychologically and physically. Doing things you enjoy is also relatively moot, as it is very hard to get joy out of anything – even things which would normally make you laugh or smile, or which would satisfy you now seem mundane and futile.

A lot of people, who have been lucky enough to never have suffered from depression, have the idea that it is simply that the person feels a bit down, and often dismiss it simply as laziness. Until you have been through the sheer mind-numbing futility of it all, it is impossible to fully grasp just how all-encompassing it is, and how hard it makes even the simplest of tasks. Trying to explain it someone who has never been depressed is like describing purple to someone who has only ever seen red and blue. It’s a mixture of both, but is also it’s own distinct colour, and without being familiar with the concept of purple, it is virtually impossible to envisage it.

Whether you are aware of it or not, several people you know have, or have had depression, and have been through exactly what I’ve described here, and it’s likely that among the primary feelings they have had have been guilt, brought about by the general opinion of society that they are just wasting everyone’s time and being lazy, and frustration at feeling so unbearably disconnected from everything and yet still expected to function as normal.

If you have, or have had depression, I’d love to hear from you, either in the comments, or by email, to discuss your experiences, and how you have coped with it.

Happy Birthday Oli

It's rare that you can pinpoint a specific day in your life which changed everything thereafter. In August 1994 a series of events took place that would catapult my life on a whole new trajectory, and my friend Oli's birthday will as a result always be a special day for me. The reason I play guitar, is because Oli doesn't. And because, of the three friends he chose to take to Center Parcs to celebrate his coming of age, I was one of them. And because shortly after that trip, my younger brother was due to start at the school both Oli and I attended and had chosen to learn to play guitar. He needed an instrument to learn on. Oli had one such instrument gathering dust, which needed a new home. With the frequent discussions taking place between Me, Oli, and our respective mums (who were all but interchangeable at the time as both had pretty much adopted her counterpart's offspring) to plan the upcoming trip, the subject came up of my brother's need for a guitar, and so an arrangement was made whereby the not-quite-full-size classical guitar would change hands for the very reasonable sum of twenty-five pounds, and that the transaction would take place upon our return from Center Parcs. We set sail to Nottingham on the 19th July and returned on the 26th. The remarkable events that took place at Center Parcs, most notably Gaz Bunt's propensity for the entire trip to re-enact the events of the film Backdraft, with alarming realism and frequency, are a whole other story.

I played the hell out of that guitar. My brother lost interest after a few months (though did pick it up again some years later) but to me it was a key to a larger world, inhabited by heroes, masters of an elusive craft I had long yearned to share. Granted, at the time my main hero was the legendary Per Gessle of Roxette rather than Jimi, or Prince, or Satch, but he set me in the right direction. I couldn't afford lessons, but wouldn't have been interested anyway - I learned the flute at school via lessons and always ended up learning whatever the teacher wanted me to learn - with the guitar I chose what to study - something I soon realised makes all the difference. Armed with a chordbook, a rudimentary understanding of music theory from doing music GCSE, and two books full of songs by the Beatles and the BeeGees, I realised that as long as you knew the songs, you didn't need to be shown how to play them, it was all there in the books. The chord shapes matched the strings and frets and it was all perfectly logical. Just hold these strings down here, then move to those ones over there, and before you know it you're playing New York Mining Disaster 1941. And the best thing was, it was free!

This was to be a key factor in my advancement - After that particular set of Summer hols Oli and I parted ways, academically at least, as he went to college while I stayed on at school, and most of my other school friends were busy discovering alcohol and night clubs. the fact that I still looked far too young to get served, coupled with the fact that I had barely any money, meant that while my school friends were out revelling in the wild world of glow-in-the-dark plastic palm trees, my options were limited to staying home and playing Oli's guitar. I didn't mind one bit. By the end of my A-Level year I had reached a point where I had the confidence to get on stage and play songs to other people, even including my first, naive attempts at writing my own songs. I was in a band called Skarph and we somehow sold out a 150-seat theatre for a one-off gig, where we did three sets of about 45 minutes each, with costume changes between each. Where the drummer fell asleep mid song and carried on playing, and none of us had guitar amps. I was the only one who could get any kind of distortion as the electro-acoustic I had finally got round to getting with my inheritance money could go loud enough to distort the signal into the mixing desk. One rehearsal Oli came down to the theatre where we rehearsed and did some promo shots, the most memorable one being where he did multiple exposures on the same shot, so that we were simultaneously on stage, in the rafters, in the audience and dramatically exiting stage left, all in the same shot. This determination to do things a little differently is what makes Oli such a brilliant photographer to this day. Good times.
At the end of the year there was a school concert, and as was the tradition with our school, at the Summer concert any student who was leaving that year was allowed to get up and do their turn. I got up with My friend Jonty (who, due to one very drunken night and some disagreements on the class structure in Britain, I am sadly no longer in touch with) and did a version of Message In A Bottle, and my own newly written song (Tell Me) How To Live. I was very into brackets back then - it seemed very high-brow and deep. Most of my contemporaries had little to show for the past two years' evenings of debauchery, save a few hangovers, but I had received this beautiful gift of freedom of expression that allowed me to play my own songs to crowded hall of my peers and mentors. I was addicted.

Since then, playing songs has been a constant source of relaxation, catharsis, excitement and discovery. It has found me playing at a festival in Germany, on a year out where I had thought I would be doomed to have little more than fresian cows for company. It has allowed me to meet and share ideas with some of the coolest and nicest people I have ever known. It has seen me play pretty much every venue in Manchester city centre, had me drunkenly bellowing out La Bamba at the top of my lungs from the top of a canal boat in Wales, appear dressed only in a sock, for a bet (I won - ten pounds if you're wondering. Times were hard). It has led to me learning the bass, ukulele and mandolin. I even once got to jam with a (completely unknown) hero of mine, Joe Roberts, in a very dingy Roadhouse in Manchester. I have countless recordings made over the years with countless other musicians and singers, some of which make me smile, some of which make me cringe. A few make me do a little happy dance, that I could have been involved in making something which makes me feel so utterly full of joy. When I look back over the past 15 years, it's great to have such a vast record of what I've done, what I've achieved, and who with. And all of this stems back to Oli's birthday.

So, thanks Oli, for not playing guitar, and for taking photographs instead (he's very very good at that by the way). Thanks for being one of my longest standing and most interesting friends, and for not getting cross when I consistently fail to keep in touch, or to find school photos that you asked for so long ago it's embarrassing. For being efficient and sending me things in the post that cheer me up immensely. For not giving me a hard time about the fact that although your birthday is such an important date in my calendar I never quite mange to get my arse in gear enough to send you a card. For making me laugh when I need a lift, and sharing in so many happy memories, and just generally being very very cool.

Happy Birthday, Oli. Here's to many more (oh, and say hello to Mum for me)

Pablo, 19th August 2009

Some videos

I haven’t been much in the mood for blogging lately, or writing or for being creative at all really. The family shit that has been going on (which has actually led to some progress, which was a pleasant surprise), coupled with the work shit that has been going on at the same time, have meant that motivating myself to do anything at all has been hard. I have a history of depression, or more accurately tendencies towards depression, and though I mostly manage to keep it in check, when everything seemingly conspires against me, I sometimes feel overwhelmed and see myself slipping back into the old mindset - the first phase of which is usually lethargy (well, after the mood swings). As long as I’m aware of it I can usually force myself to keep moving, keep busy, to stop me slipping into the rut of not being bothered or motivated to move or do anything much at all. But sometimes it gets too much and I just settle for going through the motions and basically vegitating, and once that starts it’s hard to get out of the cycle. It’s like being in a pit that just about shallow enough to climb out of, with interesting things all round the edges, but you’re sat in a really comfy chair in really heavy wet clothes and as much as you want to go do interesting things, it’s just too much effort. Once in this pit, anything is a chore, be it getting up to make food, performing some random task you’ve agreed to do to help someone out, or even just moving at all. People think of depression as feeing down, or sad, and while there’s certainly an element of that – I have felt fucking miserable lately – I always (thanks to David Baddiel’s brilliant description in whatever love means) think of the literal meaning of depression, as in to press something down – to depress a switch. That’s what it feels like, having an actual physical weight on you.

So this week I booked some days of work and went to Newmarket to do a gig with an old friend and colleague, who I used to regularly play guitar with until he moved down south. We generally meet up every year or so, either up here or down there, and whenever we do we try and squeeze in a gig somewhere. We have a short set of mostly covers, that we just like playing and which need little rehearsing, so we can usually just pick up where we left off. Having spent a couple of hours on Wednesday night going through the existing songs, Thursday was then spent expanding the set – working out new arrangements and deciding what we could and couldn’t pull off. Thursday night was the gig, and in spite of there being a small crowd and some sound issues (I have lost my pickup for my acoustic guitar so had to play into a mic – I am never doing that again), the set went down well and we had a good night. The videos from the gig didn’t come out particularly well though, because of the noise of the pub and unbalanced sound due to my immense crapness at remembering to find one of the most fundamental parts of our required equipment. So that evening, full of JD, we decided to get up the following morning and bash through the set one more time, and video it for posterity. Thus with fingertips so battered and painful from playing far harder and longer than either of us usually does, we sat down and went through the set one last time.

The quality still isn’t brilliant as it was recorded on a camera phone, and the two of us were tired, slightly hungover, lethargic and in no small amount of finger pain, but excuses aside, it’s nice to have a record of what we did. And the act of creating, of bouncing ideas off each other and of spending quality time with a good friend - doing what we both love - has definitely recharged my batteries a bit, and although I’m already dreading going back to work tomorrow, the weight that has been depressing me over the last few weeks feels a little lighter for the knowledge of having achieved something, and of having enjoyed it. So, here are a couple of videos. I’ve uploaded the whole lot to youtube, and you can watch them in order as a playlist here, but don’t expect great things, and don’t feel obliged to sit through them all. That said, if you like these two, then I certainly wouldn’t object to a few more hits on youtube, if you want to check out the rest. And before anyone points it out, I’m aware that the fact we are wearing almost identical clothes (this was unplanned), kind of makes it look like I am doing a set with my future self. I assure you this is not the case. Had I managed to achieve time travel I wouldn't be posting low-grade films on youtube and future self wouldn’t be playing guitar with me, he would be telling me the outcomes of upcoming popular sports events. Thanks for listening, and apologies for whining.

 

A new story and a new challege

A conversation with Lee and Dean today inspired me to write my first proper work of fiction. Although I love sci-fi, I had pretty much decided against trying to write any as I don’t have enough of a scientific background to do it properly, but this idea seemed basic enough for me to have a go. It’s just shy of 2000 words, which is the longest I’ve written so far, and I’m fairly happy with how it’s come out. I’ll no doubt do some editing over the next few days, but here’s the first draft anyway.

Survival

The worst thing about the job was the realisation that we'd never know whether it worked. If nothing happened it might mean we'd succeeded, or it could equally mean we were wrong, and the changes we made - the little atrocities we daily committed - were as unnecessary as they were inhumane. The thing was, if we were right, if we really were preventing catastrophe, the only way to prove it would be to stop, and then we'd...well, that line of thinking never got us anywhere. Even if it failed and the very effects we were striving to prevent were too far in motion to be stopped, we'd never see the realisation within our lifetime. Quite a conscience tester though, doing a thankless, controversial job; hated by near everyone whether religious or not and never knowing whether you were a hero or a terrorist.

Getting the equipment was easy enough, I worked with it every day. Sometimes your round would leave you closer to home than to the recharge bay, and you just went straight home and recharged the pod in your own garage. The company paid for the power anyway so it didn't matter to you, just saved you a trip. It was one of the perks of the job that all energy consumption bills were covered by the state, I guess as an incentive to take the job. With fuel prices so high people would do pretty much anything if you gave them it for free. So yeah, the equipment was no problem. Getting it in the house without her knowing, and using it in secret was going to be the tricky part. I'd told her she'd passed. She didn't have to have the procedure. She didn't have to bear the shame of being unfit for purpose. The knowledge would crush her. The damage done by the buffer serum would pale in comparison to the psychological damage of knowing she wasn't good enough, that there was something wrong with her that couldn't be fixed. They called it a buffer to make it sound like a kind of protection, and I suppose in perverse way it was. But to me, buffer had only ever really meant one thing - end of the line.

"Bad day?" she asked
"No", I smiled, realising how sullen I must have looked as I came in, "today I was a hero"
"You always are to me"

The glint of love in her eye was as a sliver of lead through my stomach as the guilt hit me. She meant it, there was no irony yet if she only knew the macabre task that lay ahead of me she'd understand why I didn't feel a hero tonight. Some days you felt the shame of a murderer, other days you realised how essential you were to every man, woman and child the world over. Today had been a good day: I'd seen it all for the best. "I am making a brighter future with each candle I snuff out" I would tell myself, "The prophylactic nature of my job is just and honourable", just like I'd been trained, and today I believed it. Right up until I got back to the office and picked up her results. They usually sent them out by post, but because the lab was in the same building as my department, I'd arranged to pick them up myself. It was still a relatively new procedure at this point, so the protocols and processes weren't yet so rigid that everything had to be done by the book. It wasn't yet so hated that everything had to be done to the letter for fear of the consequences, so it hadn't been seen as untoward, that I was picking up my wife's results rather than have her receive them at home, on her own, while I was out performing the very service she feared she would soon be the unwilling customer of.

I already had a faked success report, in preparation for the worst - whatever the outcome, she had to always believe that she passed. I'd seen and delivered enough of the damn forms to undeserving, arrogant pricks, to have had chance to scan and amend one. The facsimile was good, convincing. It wouldn't convince anyone working in the department, or a judge, but it would be enough for her. It looked completely different to the form I pulled out of the envelope though. The simple, plain form - so plain it almost mocked the cruelty of the news it delivered. she had failed the test. Mentally she was fine; aptitude tests quite a mark above average. She was no Olympian but was in sufficient physical shape to be allowed to carry. The problem was a single dormant gene. She was a carrier of some pretty much unheard-of degenerative disease. She might contract the affliction herself at any time, but had just been lucky so far. So much has happened since I read it I don't even remember what the disease was, now I wish I'd paid more attention - it plagues me every night, trying to remember what it was. Back then it didn't seem important what she had, the only important thing was that she would never be allowed children, and that not only would I be the one to have to tell her, but that I would be the one to perform the procedure.

Some years ago the governments of the world realised that simply being greener wasn't enough. cleaner, more sustainable fuel sources did not change the fact that there were simply too many people. We were not affecting the climate just by our actions or inactions anymore, we were affecting it by our very presence. Scientists had known for years that this was the case and had eventually pressured the governments into encouraging vegetarianism and self sufficiency, hoping against hope that they could reduce the number of other animals, to prevent having to reduce the numbers of the animals causing the most damage. Humans. For a time things looked positive: with fewer livestock everywhere, with food being grown locally and delivered to people's houses to save them all having individual transport, a visible change had taken place, things were improving. But it wasn't long before the governments realised the change was too slow. We had only postponed, not prevented our fate. Action needed to be taken, drastic action, but without causing a panic. A delicately balanced amount of information was systematically introduced into the public domain, pressure applied to the press and the broadcasters to encourage more careful family planning and make smaller families more desirable, more socially acceptable. It was subtly done - TV shows started having fewer people in each family. In children's programming protagonists were rarely shown to have more than one sibling, and often they would antagonise and make the idea of a brother or sister almost repulsive. Planting the seed to prepare people for the next phase. Giving them the subconscious feeling that large families are bad and wasteful. The one real benefit that reducing the animals had had was showing that reducing numbers could have a positive effect. However bitter the pill would be to swallow, it would be difficult to deny that it was probably going to work and as long as the majority of the speculation held hope for a favourable outcome, that should be enough to carry the legislation through with little public resistance.

The end result was that by the time they introduced means-tested sterilisation, a large proportion of the populace was relatively easily convinced that it was for the best and some even volunteered for the procedure before being tested. Debates had raged for months between parliaments to determine how the selection process would be decided. Some had suggested a lottery, arguing that means testing, though more beneficial for the species as a whole, was in itself a genetic lottery - someone who was intelligent, healthy and strong would be more likely to provide intelligent, healthy offspring, but how did that make them more worthy or deserving than someone who had contributed to society's greater good for years, yet carried a dormant defective gene? Others had said that each nation should have to sterilise a percentage of their population and they would each be responsible for making the decision themselves how best to choose. Inevitably different faiths argued different standpoints, according to their own specific dogma, and what was acceptable according to their teachings, but they were eventually shouted down by the scientific community who argued that enough of their rules were already being regularly broken as to render meaningless any opposition to the process on religious grounds. Eventually the squabbling had gone on long enough and the tests were decided upon. As the whole point of the exercise was the survival of the species, it seemed most logical to the majority of debaters, that the process should be a kind of orchestrated natural selection - survival of the potentially fittest. If someone was up to certain standard against a list of desirable criteria, they were allowed to reproduce, if they failed any one of the tests, they would be the end of their line. Knowing how difficult it would be to police and control such a decision, the buffer serum was developed, to painlessly render the subject infertile and unable to reproduce. At least, in terms of the physical it was painless.

As long as we had known each other there had been no question of us growing old without bringing new lives into the world. Unswerved by the negative light society now shone on large families, we still had dreams of nurseries and playrooms, and small voices filling the air with laughter. We both wanted children, lots of them, but had slowly resigned ourselves to the idea that one or two would be all we were allowed. Not being able to have any would be too heartbreaking to bear, and I knew that the guilt of having been the one to prevent it could prove be too much for either one of us to bear. Despite this, I knew that telling her would seem like an accusation, an open declaration of failure, it would be too big a thing for us to have between us, so quite simply, she could never know. I could never tell her the truth. I would tell her she had passed the test. The only flaw in my plan was that just telling her was not enough, she had to believe she was ok, and in the clear, yet never conceive a child, lest the company find out that I had failed in my duty. She still had to undergo the procedure or our offspring would end up orphaned, as both parents spent the rest of their days incarcerated for violating the mandatory sterilisation act. I knew what I had to do, and the night I gave her the results I brought the pod home to charge. We celebrated and although heavy with the weight of the lie, my heart soared to see her so happy and relieved. She was tired before me, as always happens when she drinks, so I tucked her into bed, content and at peace with the world. As I sat in the garage some minutes later, administering the buffer serum to myself, the smile on her face ran through my head and made me glad it was me making the sacrifice instead of her.

Norden Carnival

You can see all the photos from the carnival over on flickr

Heroes

I remember being mesmerised by the guy on the bike. There was a long tarmac road down the back of our terrace and all the kids used to play there. It had a slight incline so was perfect for sitting on skateboards and racing to the bottom, and also interlocked with a ginnel that lead to the main road so there was enough room to cycle too. This was before we ever did either though - I was five and I, along with all the other kids, were watching an older boy on on a motorbike. He was doing tricks up against walls and up and down the tarmac road, which to a bunch of four- to seven-year-olds was like being able to watch Evel Knieval, for free, just outside your back garden. We were all entranced, but having always had the fear of danger, I was perhaps more engrossed than the others and was paying far more attention to what the amazing stunt guy was doing, than I was to what i was doing. Anyone noticing this group of young kids watching a slick teenager showing off on a petrol-powered killing machine would doubtless have been expecting an accident at any moment - he was jumping and pulling off insane wheelies and driving up walls - he was bound to come a cropper at some point, so it was to everyone's surprise, mine most of all, when the inevitable accident befell not the daring motorcyclist, but the awestruck boy of five who, oblivious to all but the spectacle before him, had tripped and fallen face-first onto the tarmac.

I remember a sudden flash of pain, more than anything I'd ever felt before, then a bewildered numbness. Too stunned to move, I was jolted back to awareness by the crash of the bike hitting tarmac. First guilt hit - my stupidity had distracted the motorcyclist and he'd fallen off, no doubt sustaining injuries far worse than mine -then a glorious warm glow of relief as I felt myself being picked up and carried, very very carefully, but quickly, back to my house and the realisation hit that the older boy had been aware of us the whole time and at the merest sign of trouble had simply thrown his bike to the ground and was now getting me safely home. I suppose the next bit is patchy as my brain has either forgotten or blocked out all but the most pertinent details. Mum's horror at realising I was badly injured enough to have to be carried, wondering what new stupidity I'd discovered, then relief as it dawned that I was just too stunned to move, finally settling on ad hoc efficiency as she realised that amount of blood was going to mean a hospital trip.

How we got to hospital I have no idea - I don't know if I've simply forgotten, or if the surrealism of the event, made up entirely of feelings and thoughts I had never experienced was just too much and I just shut it all out - but I still remember the sudden, horrific petrifaction upon being told I was going to have to be stitched. I had learned how to sew at school, with one of those square bits of cloth with the holes pre-cut for small, clumsy hands, and the thick thread that went through them, making great big crosses. To my still very naive mind, this was what I understood as stitching and the idea of this being done to my face was quite simply too much to take. Everything after that is missing. To this day I don't know if I passed out, if they anaesthetised me, or if I've simply blocked it out, but whichever it was, I have no memory of actually being stitched. Something I can only be grateful for. What I do remember is being told afterwards that I had had three stitches and being confused when looking at my chin that I couldn't see them, just a big cut with a few lines across.

Some weeks later I went to have the stitches out and was very pleased and proud when I was told I could take the stitches home with me. The nurse very carefully cut them out (this surely must have hurt like hell, but I don't remember it, so I suppose either it didn't or it's just something else to add to the list of things I chose not to remember), and stuck them between two bits of sticky tape. Three long, wavy bits of purple thread. I took them home and proudly showed all my friends, and even more proudly showed the whole school, when I was allowed to take them in for showing assembly, where they were met with genuine awe as the teacher played up my bravery and the mere mortals beheld and revered my coolness at having been stitched up and survived. I was a battle-scarred hero and the stitches were my spoils of war.

But I wasn't the hero. The hero was the motorcyclist, who had been watching all along, waiting for one of us to do something stupid like jump in front of the bike, or fall off a wall only a few inches high. The crash of the bike and the miniscule amount of time that passed between that and me arriving home lead me to think he must have just thrown the bike down, engine still running, and picked me up in one swift move - no thought to his own possessions, my safety paramount. The scar is still there, at the front of my chin - my first real war wound - and each time I see it I am reminded of the lesson he taught me: sometimes you can help someone at your own expense and whether you know it or not, you can change someone's entire outlook on life and to  that one person you can be a hero. Unrecognised, unknown, unthanked, but a hero.

 

 

This is story number six. For more stories, click here.

New online stuff

You’ll be forgiven for TLDR’ing this entry cause it’s quite long.

Took the day off work today to chill out a bit and have been very glad of it. This morning D3-3Nasked on twitter: “what is this tumblr.com stuff???”. I’d been wondering about that myself so, seeing as I have the day free, decided to investigate. With this kind of thing I tend to find that reading about the service seldom actually helps me understand what it’s supposed to do, or more importantly what I can do with it, and it’s generally easier to just sign up and dick about with the settings till you find out what it can and can’t do. Off I went to tumblr to sign up, but was aghast to discover someone had already registered mogfather.tumblr.com. Arses.

Then it occurred to me – maybe I registered it and forgot about it. The password reset page asks for an email address, not many it can be, so within a few minutes I discover it was me that registered it, and never used it, and we are now logged in and good to go. So I have a play around with the settings and find it’s really just a blog, but with an interesting interface. One thing it does have though is facility to park a domain on it, so you can register your domain then park in on tumblr and effectively have your tumblr page as your website.

blogger offers a similar setup, but it’s rather more complicated – firstly you can’t par a domain on blogger – only a subdomain. Presumably blogger don’t want you to have your blog as your main site. It does allow you to use the www. subdomain, but this means that if someone just enters the domain without the www then the site won’t display, unless you set up some kind of domain forwarding, which is an unnecessary pain in the arse. Also the DNS for blogger is a bit fail in that you have to point the cname at ghs.google.com, whereas tumblr allows you to actually set the A-record to point to tumblr, so if you go to the site either with or without the www it will display fine.

Tumblr also allows you to upload mp3 files (though only one a day, bizarrely) and then it puts a little player on the blog entry. Interesting idea, not sure how much use it will be, but a nice idea for maybe posting your song of the day, which people can then subscribe to. There are various other media types you can upload, some of which (quote and chat) I’m not yet sure of the point of as surely text would do the same. I guess I’ll find out next time I want to quote something. The upload options look like this:

On the video section you can either use a URL for a video that’s already hosted elsewhere (a similar setting on audio allows you to bypass the one mp3 a day rule, provided it’s hosted elsewhere), or you can upload a video, though it does require signing up to a new service to do that – tumblr don’t host the video themselves, but rather they’re hosted on Vimeo so you have to log into Vimeo to post it. Not too much of a problem, but it strikes me that if you have a Vimeo account you’d have uploaded the video there anyway and so would just use the URL of that upload on Vimeo, thus rendering the upload option a bit pointless as far as I can see.

One nice feature is the RSS option. I’m a sucker for RSS because I personally think it’s the future and can’t understand why hardly anyone uses it, so anything which uses feeds in a new or interesting way instantly has my attention. I’ve been quite pleased with the twitterfeed setup which allows you to setup a bot to automatically check specified RSS feeds and update your twitter status when a new entry is published. I’ve used it for tweeting when I have a new blog entry (though not this one as I have a new toy to try for that – see further down), but there really isn’t any limit to what you could use it for as you don’t actually have to own the RSS feed in order to tweet it.

Anyway, back to the point, tumblr allows you to do a similar thing to twitter feed in that you give the details of up to 5 RSS feeds and it will update your tumblr each time the relevant feeds are updated, so I could for examle use it as an amalgamator of my various blogs – I have several different ones for different subjects, but it could be useful to have a central point where all the updates can been seen in one place. Add to this the fact that there are various tumblr plug-ins which allow you to embed a tumblr feed on a webpage, so you could even use tumblr as a conduit to collect and collate various information and then post it on your actual website, without viewers ever having to visit your tumblr page.

All this is for the most part redundant and pointless, but I love the fact that it’s possible, and for anyone wanting to promote themselves on the internet could save themselves a lot of troublesome duplication by using services like these. While retarded geeks like me sign up for pretty much any- and everything going, the vast majority of people only sign up for at most 3 or 4 inline services or social notworking sites, so how do you get your product/artist seen by everyone? Well this kind of setup could be just the thing, so you just update one blog or site, and have numerous feeds readers ready to automatically re-broadcast it to countless other services so it gets seen by all the world and his dog. One step closer to, as Dirk Gently (né Svlad Cjelli) called it “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, which would I think, make Douglas Adams very happy. I was recently pleased to see that I’m not the only person who wishes DNA had survived long enough to be the best twitterer ever – more here.

So I guess the conclusion is that tumblr looks like it might be quite cool, given more time to work out what everything does. This blog also signifies two tests – firstly I’m trying a new twtter updater in windows live writer, which should automatically update my twitter feed when I post this, and also the RSS feed on tumblr, which should also update after I post. Have a look here if you want to see whether it worked.

Comments fixed

Right, I’ve been having a play around with the wordpress settings today, and I think I’ve now fixed it so that comments can now be left without you having to sign up (apologies to those of you who have already signed up). I think I still have to moderate them so your comment won’t appear straight away, but you can leave one without having to provide four pieces of identification, proof of address and a blood sample. If you have any problems posting a comment, please email me and let me know where you got stuck, along with any error messages or specifics. Cheers.

I’ve also been uploading loads of new pictures over at flickr this week.

11 seconds

Just unearthed this piece, that I wrote on 2nd May 2007 then forgot about. It's called 11 Seconds and I wrote it while bored at work.

11 Seconds

11:41:13

it's like a dim, warm glow around the head, not tired as such but drowsy and a little achy - like the first day of recovery after the flu - not quite ill, but still not quite on the same frequency as the world around me. the less there is to do, the less motivated I feel to do anything, as though the longer I sit still, the thicker and heavier grow the layers of inaction like a covering of dust ever increasing my isolation from my environment.

11:41:14

The background noise of the room, ordinarily filtered out by concentration on a given task, swells, the mind registering snippets of mundane office oratory, none of it making sense as the conversational white noise builds, too much to take in and growing almost as if building towards a final burst that never comes, an orchestra growing more frantic and frenzied, increasing in pitch and volume towards the finale then right on the cusp, putting down their instruments as though suddenly waking from their reverie and feeling rather foolish. Willing the crescendo to come, I register its lack with frustration as the noise once again ebbs to almost comprehensible snatches then begins to swell again, the cycle once again repeats.

11:41:15

I look at my hands and am taken aback by the level of detail, the clarity, as if my whole consciousness is focused on one line, almost a psychotropic reaction - zooming in until I see the cracks in the skin, the result of 29 years of bending and retracting, expanding like the banks of a new stream as my focus becomes more acute and the magnification greater. I can almost feel the retinas contract as they strain to see beyond normal scale of vision, drawn in towards a solitary hair, closer now, so I can see the textured surface like a snake, scaled and patterned in ways incomprehensible on something so minute and ordinary, so insignificant.

11:41:16

Looking down I become aware of the blood cells just below the skin rushing back and forth like commuters in some perverse biological representation of rush hour traffic, each performing its given task without question, carrying oxygen round the veins, each cell minute, ordinary and insignificant.

11:41:17

My gaze wanders, pupils expand and dilate to focus on something just on the edge of vision, something which seems almost in harmony with the red cell so recently occupying all my conscious thought. the insect, tiny and red crawling along the top of the screen, pausing now and then, returning down its well-trod path, resting and then setting out again: a vespoideal Sisyphus ever carrying its burden back and forth; its work futile, never completed. Unquestioning, it continues oblivious to all but its task and unaware of being observed in its minute, ordinary, insignificant labour.

11:41:18

Deaths unknown, unnamed, unconnected, unregistered. Headlines flash before my drowsy eyes, none taking hold, only the overwhelming sense of death and the underwhelming sense of the synapses indifferent to these losses. I have no connection to these people. Without their deaths I would never have been aware of them, the only significant act in their minute and ordinary existence being the brutal and untimely exit from their mortal coil. But like dead skin cells, they fall away, forgotten in seconds, replaced by new ones and the world turns.

11:41:19

Dust in sunlight: motes appear and disappear as though passing briefly into existence from another reality, briefly basking in the light and heat of a burning ball of gas light years away, briefly connected and in focus, then slipping away. Their insignificant entry in the annals of time minute and ordinary, witnessed by just one sentient mind and then instantly forgotten. The dead skin cells of countless individuals, having served their mundane purpose and been cast aside, unnoticed by their host.

11:41:20

Determined clicking from the computer; the unrecognised sentience of a being able to think, but only within clearly marked boundaries and parameters. incapable of expression it clicks poignantly as power courses through its conduits like electrical pulses along excited synapses, it tries desperately to justify its existence, ever aware that it is obsolete from the day of creation, unable to adapt, to learn: a relic, counting its days, wondering as it powers down each day whether it will be for the last time, whether it will be discarded and replaced by another minute, ordinary, insignificant and ultimately disposable successor.

11:41:21

A sip of water sets atoms of oxygen, each carrying two atoms of hydrogen like unwanted luggage, colliding into each other in a frenzied ballet of excitement as the liquid is heated inside the recipient. each willing the temperature to increase enough for them to break free of their liquid incarceration and be carried on currents of air to new possibilities, new elements, towards the chance encounter with another substance, another type of baggage, the chance to be part of something more significant than simply a substance so ordinary that it covers two thirds of this minute rock.

11:41:22

Oblivious to the impact the action will have, a sentient biped nonchalantly clicks send on a document he deems to be minute, ordinary, insignificant, blissfully unaware of the chain of events he is setting in motion by that single click. unaware of the reaction it will trigger in another insignificant being halfway round the world, who will realise the potential significance of the words on the screen, and will share them with other insignificant beings, who in turn will pass on the words, each iteration gaining in power.

11:41:23

The tiniest spark of hope appears like a new life, like a real-world miracle and the realisation dawns that maybe, just maybe, insignificance is relative.

Mikro

I’ve wanted a Mikro for a while now and so when I saw one in town today I snapped it up. It’s basically a sheet of very thin metal cut out in such a way that you can fold it out and make a model, but without detaching any of the pieces, so the sheet becomes the floor. There are some really complex ones out there but they only had the little ones. As it’s the coolest and because I love space, I got no. 2 – Mars. It also seemed fitting as it was Mike Massimo’s last day on the ISS today. I decided to take pics of each stage as with the metal being so thin it’s something you can really only do once. here are the various stages:

In other news

I signed up for a .tel today. No idea if anything will come  of it, but it looks like one of those things I’ll see in 6 months’ time and wish I signed up for, after my name’s already gone.

Catfish

While turning the house upside down tonight for a wooden spoon (long story), I found this little gem. Won’t mean anything to most of you, but means a lot to me. Back in the day I was in a band called Catfish. It went through many line-ups, including 3 singers (all at the same time) , 2 guitarists (at the same time), 3 bass players (at different times), 1 drummer, 1 cellist, 2 keyboard players, a saxophonist, a violinist and a trumpet player. By the end it was a 6-piece funk outfit on the cusp of success, but then everyone left Uni and went their separate ways. We got a couple of recordings down by the end, along with some dodgy gig recordings, but what I found tonight took me right back to the very beginning. The first ever gig, in the Grovel, the bar in the Whitworth Park halls of residence in Manchester, with the original line-up of 3 people. One of them is still one of my best friends, and still my favourite person to jam with. I can’t believe it’s been more than a decade since the first gig. Since I’m blogging this, I may as well add some gig pics too.

The original setlist

The Boys

Battle of the bands Round two in the Hop & Grape (now academy 3)

Words of wisdom and comfort from Dr Boardman

And of course the sock. On the right is Guppy, desperately trying not to look at my arse.

And finally the sock itself. It’s original owner is now a well-respected San Francisco-based blogger, Married to a Biochemist who also happens to be an inspirational bass player that I had the great pleasure to be in a band with for too short a period. Catfish. Good Times.

The Value of Money

that last post got me thinking about school again so thought I’d impart another memory.

They say school is the happiest time of your life and while I didn’t think so at the time, I do remember most of my time at school fondly. One of the things that did always bother me though, was being one of the poor kids. My family wasn’t actually that poor. Both parents worked, there were three of us boys and our needs were quite simple, but the problem was I went to a public school. For any American readers, that’s the same as your private schools (I know that’s confusing, but that’s how it is). So the thing about a public school (or Grammar School as mine was) is that you have to pay fees to attend, unless you get a scholarship. If you’re under a certain income level (or rather your parents are) you can apply for an assisted place, provided your mark in the entrance exam is high enough. As my older brother had got in on an assisted place, and as my parents couldn’t afford full fees, there was quite a lot of pressure on me to get an assisted place. Suffice to say I managed it, but never did I imagine what a difference it would make.

More or less all of my peers were better off than I was. All of them had fancy calculators and watches, and new uniforms, bought for them, not handed down from an older brother (though mum was always careful to ensure it was my  name in everything, not my brother’s). If they played a musical instrument it was their own, not one borrowed from the school. So I was always conscious of being less well-off than pretty much everyone else.

Before too long I managed to get myself in Saturday morning detention (unsurprisingly, for failure to do homework) and on the day, found myself in an unheated portacabin on the edge of the school grounds, in the company of ruffians, bounders, cads and ne’er-do-wells, and sat next to a boy who was in my year but in a different form. He asked to borrow a pen. I had two, a fountain pen and a calligraphy marker. I was very particular about the fountain pen but knew I’d get into trouble if I lost the calligraphy marker as it had been expensive. Thinking I’d probably get in more trouble for handing in lines written in thick marker, I handed the calligraphy pen to my fellow detainee.

I never got it back, but over the years I came to be good friends with the boy in question and one year I was invited to his house, over Christmas. I didn’t really understand the trust that was being placed in me until I got there, and realised that here was someone who was actually less well off even than me, and realised that my friend was very slightly embarrassed by how sparse everything was, and how little they had. He was one of 5 or 6 kids, I forget exactly how many, but I remember being envious of how well they all got on (me and my brothers seldom saw eye to eye when we lived at home). My friend’s parents were divorced, but got on ok, and so at Christmas made a concession and Dad came round for the festivities. Very seldom have I been made more welcome than I was that day, and was fed to bursting point, though this weighed on my conscience, feeling that I was depriving them of a helping that would have made their own go that bit further.

If it all sounds a bit Dickensian that’s because that’s a bit how it felt. I’d known all my life we were poor, but didn’t realise how fortunate I was until then. I saw what it was like to just get by, to just make ends meet. And then the really surprising thing happened – they started giving out presents. It wasn’t actually Christmas day, just a meal in the Christmas holidays, so I hadn’t been expecting presents. I felt a bit awkward as though I was intruding on a private family moment – I hadn’t brought anything to give them, not even my friend, as I hadn’t know it was expected. And it didn’t seem logical for them to have got me something because it had been a bit of a last minute thing, so I was just kind of watching this private thing. Then my friend’s Dad said “and this one’s for Paul” and handed me an envelope. I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say. I made intrigued gratitude noises and carefully open the envelope. Inside was a puzzle. A hand-made puzzle. the instructions read:

1. This is another wall (without any half bricks)

2. It is 6 bricks high.

3. There are 48 bricks in the wall.

4. There are 16 pieces of three bricks.

5. No brick of the same colour is next to another of that colour either horizontally or vertically in the correctly built wall.

My friend’s Dad had made me a present. My friend was a bit embarrassed, but he needn’t have been. Of all the friends he could have made at school, I was one of the few who really understood what it meant to have less than everyone else. What it meant to have home-made and second hand stuff. To have to bring your P.E. kit in  a carrier bag instead of an adidas boot bag. To have a no-name blue blazer with the school badge sewn on the breast pocket because we couldn’t afford the proper blazer. I thought the present was ace. I love puzzles, but I also loved the fact that it had been hand made, and his Dad had given it to me so I’d feel included. And I did. A fool knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. That puzzle is a few bits of cardboard in a brown envelope but it’s one of my most valuable things, because it changed the way I look at the world, and at other people.

I work best under pressure

That’s what I keep telling myself at least. I haven’t felt like this since Uni. In fact, realistically since A-Levels. In a week’s time I will just have run my first full training day. The current planned attendance is 70 delegates. the day will start off with an hour long presentation, by me with some help from my Parental Unit. It will then lead to an hour long practical demonstration of the technology in the presentation. After this I get lunch and then a break as Dad talks to the delegates about library stuff I don’t understand, like funding and boroughs and other counilly words. After that the delegates which each spend an hour or so doing practical excercises which I have written specifically for this course. They will involves things like setting up a blog, following an RSS feed. sending a message to @stephenfry. Finally there will be a summary of the day, again given by me, followed by a Q&A (if anyone has any questions I haven’t been able to answer during the day).

The presentation is nearly finished, which is the basis and foundation of the course, but the rest is still very much in the planning stages. I still have 6 days to put my shit together, and I know the last bits can be done in a couple of evenings, or one full day, but between now and then I am also doing the Manchester Run, with insufficient training (just as I did last year, so pretty sure I’ll be ok) and doubt I will be in the mood for powerpoint afterwards. I remember at school I always used to leave all my homework until the last minute, doing everything imaginable to avoid doing it (thankfully there was no such thing as a blog when I did A-Levels or I wouldn’t have passed anything and would probably have four gold stars and an attitude by now) and it’s a habit I’ve never been able to break. I know that it will make things a lot easier in the long run if I get things done early, then I can relax and not worry myself half to death thinking about what I haven’t done. I know that there is less chance I’ll miss anything if it’s finished earlier so I can add to it later if need be. But despite knowing all this, I just can’t do it. I do work well under pressure, but whether I work better is doubtful, whatever the little red dude on  my shoulder keeps telling me. It’s just how I’ve always done it. I should probably address it and get myself more organised, but I know that even if I do, there will always be a little voice inside my head saying “yeah, but it works, you know?” and I’ll always inevitably say “Yeah, *sigh*, I guess I could build that snowspeeder again after all. And might as well put the trilogy on while I do. That homework’s not due for nearly a week”.

Once a slacker, always a slacker.

Sleep is a precious commodity

Opinions vary on how much sleep you need, and how much is too much or too little. Different people need different amounts and we all have very different requirements. Sleep can be a blissful regenerative experience and so its lack can be frustrating and even traumatic – both during the hours when you try, in vain, to sleep and during the following day when you have to not only deal with the challenges of the day, but have to deal with them in a foggy and slightly trippy frame of mind due to the lack of sleep the previous night.

I am very particular about my sleep and all the factors that surround it. I can’t sleep if I'm to hot or too cold. I can’t wear anything when I'm sleeping because i move about too much and on more than one occasion have woken up apparently trying to asphyxiate myself with my bedclothes. If the surface is too soft, or too hard, i can’t sleep. If there is noise outside the normal ambient white noise of a northern suburb, i can’t sleep (people rolling out of pubs drunk rarely disturb me as that’s par for the course). If my pillow is too high or too low, i can’t sleep. I take my own pillows pretty much everywhere with me because they’re at the right height and one of them is memory foam and it takes me a good 3 or 4 nights to get used to a new pillow arrangement that it generally works out easier all round just to bring my own. Getting to sleep, when all the right conditions are met, is a sublime experience. Failing to sleep due to one of the criteria falling short, can be a stressful experience, often triggering a catch-22 cycle of thoughts as i get more and more frustrated with my inability to perform the most basic and fundamental function of being human. For this reason i like to go to bed late, thoroughly exhausted, on crisp, clean sheets with my memory foam pillow, where i read until i find myself reading the same line 5 times through the drowse, or sometimes until i wake up with the book on my face.

Once I’m out though, there’s no waking me up. I would sleep until doomsday if i was left to it, so i have to have quite a complex and logical wake up system. I work shifts, which can be anything from an 8-4 to a 12-8, so week-to-week my sleeping patterns can be quite different. As you probably noticed already, I’m quite particular about things being changed, so i have conditioned myself to an easy to understand regime. I have one alarm for each shit pattern, and another for days off. Each has a different song assigned to it, so that when i wake up half dazed and befuddled, i can tell, from what song is playing, what shift i am on. Each alarm is set to snooze after 7 minutes (except days off when i have a ten minute snooze (if i have an alarm (and yes, i did just double bracket – three including this one))). I get up when it goes off for the third time, or before – if by some miracle i am awake enough.

This all probably seems terribly OCD, but if it is, it’s an OCD brought about by too many sleepless nights leading to the point where the only way to possibly *get* any sleep is to devise a system. The system has built up over many years and gradually becomes more complex and elaborate, as though sleep is an adversary, ever trying to evade capture, so i have to constantly update and refine my strategies to track him down. I suspect that by the time i reach old age, I will need three mattresses (one memory foam), a real-time temperature adjuster, a pile of cushions and pillows, a specially blended mix of exactly the right proportions of oxygen and nitrogen, and several lines of valium, just to get vaguely drowsy.

Caustic Soda

"Right, this, boys and girls (I went to an all boys' school, but Dr. Marsden tended to ironically use the patter of a  stage magician whenever he showed us something cool or funny) is caustic soda".
At this stage of our lives, none of us has a clue what "caustic" means, but we know soda is an American word for pop, and we've also come across bicarbonate of soda - if not at home then in a previous lesson with Dr. Marsden. So naturally we assume it's something along those lines.
"I want you to form a line at the front and I'm going to drop a little bit onto your thumb". Sounds easy enough, and anything which involves queuing up at the teacher's desk is clearly not going to involve any writing, or anything that could be described as "work" for a while, so we go about it with an enthusiasm rarely seen outside the chemistry labs. We dutifully queue up and Dr. Marsden proceeds to put a drop on the forefinger of the first few boys, who then amble back to their desks, rubbing thumb and forefinger together. After a few have been done, the Doc says:
"Can you describe what it feels like, boys?"
"Sir, it's a bit slimy"
"Yeah, and a bit sticky"
"feels like soap"
"OK, so you'd describe it as 'viscous'?"
"Yeah that's it", a few boys chime in sheepishly, having been taught the word only last lesson, and told to remember it.
"The interesting thing about caustic soda is that it actually has a consistency very similar to that of water"
"Sir, so why is it slimy then?"
"Viscous, boy. It's viscous because it's not actually the caustic soda that's causing the viscosity, it's the cells of skin it's dissolved from your finger tips"
The soft, barely perceptible whisper from the rubbing of 10 pairs of thumbs and forefingers comes to an audible halt and blood drains from about half the faces in the room. A couple of boys strangle a gasp, determined not to look like wimps, but at the same time shitting bricks about how much more the caustic soda was going to dissolve before he got round to telling us the antidote. The other half of the faces instead turned to a kind of macabre excitement - wanting to feel the viscosity of dissolving skin but already knowing the outcome, and more importantly they guessed - the resolution, before getting the drop of flesh-eating liquid.
"It's actually neutralised by water, you just need to wash it off"
I have never before or since, seen a group of 12 and 13 year old boys more eager to wash their hands. In seconds the four sinks in the chemistry lab were surrounded by boys trying to get to the water first, while the rest of the class clamoured round the teacher's desk to get flesh-eating liquid dripped on their skin, somehow more exciting by the fact that we knew what it was going to do, but exciting in a safe way, because you know how to make it stop.
I imagine modern health & safety laws, and the culture of law suits we have now, preclude this kind of demonstration these days, but for all it's barbarism, it was very effective - to this day I think of that lesson whenever I hear the word caustic, and I've never forgotten the properties of caustic soda.

Jollydays &c.

Well I’ve been a bit busy being on jollydays to have much time for doing stuff on here. I’ve also got lots of projects ongoing so have been busy doing stuff instead of blogging about doing stuff. This is a bit of a summary blog, mostly for my own benefit to try and keep track of everything I’m doing. In just over a month I’m running a training day with my Dad for a load of librarians who want to know about the kind of technology that is now available. Well, I say that, in fact their boss wants them to know more about it – they are a bunch of 40 and 50-something technophobes, as far as I can tell from the information we’ve been given so far. The brief is to enthuse them about new technology and specifically how it can be used to improve library services. This is a kind of ongoing project which started a few years ago with us giving a presentation at the National Library for the Blind in Stockport, about the migration from cassette tapes to digital media in the field of audiobooks. This is obviously a big subject for the NLB, but also for librarians in general as it’s a popular format and most libraries are still issuing tapes.

After the first presentation we were invited to do a couple more at various venues and library events around the country, gradually expanding the presentation into a full lecture and Q&A, encompassing more aspects of digital media and ways of disseminating information to customers. The last one was at the international “Umbrella” conference organised by CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), where we presented to some 200 librarians (standing room only by the end) who wanted to know what all the fuss was about ipods, mp3s, RSS and so on. Clearly it is something that librarians are interested in, but it isn’t something which is covered within the profession. Various authorities around the country have dabbled with various things but it’s far from being a library standard and most web services are viewed with suspicion or largely ignored, which to be is quite disappointing, but more than that, it’s quite surprising.

Librarians are the original nerds, and their prime directive is getting information to the public for free (or at least on a very small budget). Now, seeing as the internet is largely made up of geeks and nerds (well, all the bits worth seeing are) and bearing in mind that the internet is basically a massive free resource of information, the fact that the vast majority of librarians know little or nothing about the internet and the services available to them is, quite frankly, baffling.

I am by no means an authority on any of the services available, but I am geek, and regular user of a lot of the services – some of them because they’re useful, some of them because they’re fun, and some of them cause I just like being involved with things which are new and shiny and efficient. I love the fact that the web is this massive, sprawling, interactive *thing* that everyone can have as much or as little involvement in as they like. I recently discovered that I can publish a blog post by sending an email from my phone to blogger, which will in turn notify twitterfeed, which then updates my twitter status to say that I have blogged. So I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that the course is basically being presented to the kingdom of the blind, and I have one eye. Or something.

So anyway, today it occurred to me that while I am at home being ill and coughing all over everything and doped up on lemsips and some foul-tasting cough medicine that seems to do fuck all, I might as well put the time to good use, so registered a domain, set up a site, a blog and an email address to act as a kind of interactive resource for the delegates both before and after the training day. Not really got much on there yet but just getting it set up is a load off cause I can just add stuff as I think of it. Aiming to have a fairly functional site by the end of the weekend then I’ll send it over to the organisers to pass on to the delegates. Most of them will probably ignore it pre-course, but any that do look at it will be better prepared for the course, and if anyone asks for copies of anything on the day I can just post it on the site for them, making the whole thing that bit more interactive.

So, in addition to the library stuff I’ve also been busy giving my site a bit of an overhaul cause it was looking a bit, well, shit. No major changes, just updated the pic to reflect the fact that i don’t have long black hair anymore, and changed the overall look of it. The pseudo-futuristic lettering was starting to annoy me a bit and the blue made it all see a bit cold and naff. Now it’s brown and probably equally naff, but I like it a bit more. I also added a link to my youtube page, which seemed appropriate now that I’ve actually started putting things *on* my youtube page. I think it’s safe to say that the combined readership of my site and all my blogs and tweets is about 15 people, but should it ever increase and people want an easy portal to everything, then the web site will be ready and waiting.

Still struggling with getting the HD transfer from the computer to the xbox, but adding ethernet over power to replace the annoyingly unreliable wireless connection has certainly improved it to some degree, as the xbox can now connect quickly enough to click through media browser properly, though still can’t play any of the content (even the non-HD stuff") which seems to be down to an issue with transcode not doing, well, anything as far as I can tell. Ho hum, I’m sure I’ll work it out eventually, and until then I’ll just have to survive without the 720p loveliness of America’s finest TV shows. I also this week finally got caught up with the myriad RSS feeds I accumulated during the time when I had no intertubes after moving to the new house. This is great because it means that a) reading RSS feeds is once again a joy rather than a chore, and b) I can start subscribing to new stuff without fear of what it’s going to do to my inbox. And on that note, if you get this blog by RSS, apologies for the fact that it has probably taken you a week to read all of this entry, assuming anyone actually gets this far.