Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

I have to say that the internet and news media have really raised the bar for top-notch quality entertainment today.

Without any effort on my part, I have discovered that according to Owen Paterson MP, commenting on the badger cull, that “Badgers have moved the goalposts” I’m not making this up; it’s the fault of the badgers that the cull isn’t killing as many of them as forecast. Here’s a link to the Shropshire Star, his local newspaper, but you can find it on the BBC News website, too:

http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2013/10/09/badgers-have-moved-the-goalposts-says-owen-paterson-over-cull/

Now, if that weren’t enough, the foreign news tells us that today, October 9th sees a General Election in that model country and paragon of democracy and freedom, Azerbaijan. Pity then, that the government agency in charge of elections released the result of today’s election yesterday. Apparently, the incumbent president will win by a landslide…

https://www.accessnow.org/blog/2013/10/08/with-no-votes-cast-azerbaijani-election-app-releases-final-election-results

Of course it’s true that these are only two articles, but they are of such quality that I thought it important that they be recorded somewhere, even if only here on a journal read by half a dozen people.

Sometimes, it’s just worth it.

Furtle’s cousin, John (every male in her family is called John, except for those who married in: I’m considering changing mine to John to avoid confusion) has recently got married and we thought it would be nice to send a congratulatory card, as you do.

We found out that John and his new wife (whose name I forget…) have recently got into the whole Whitby goth/steampunk scene and that gave us the idea of personalising the card accordingly.

I sat down on Sunday afternoon to make a start on the sketches that would eventually form part of the finished article and after a couple of hours I was less than impressed with what I had. The first (unfinished) sketch was superior to the second attempt, but too large: I’d got carried away and the figure’s lower legs would have disappeared off the bottom of the paper. So I started again. The second attempt fitted the paper, but wasn’t as good. I have yet to find source material that I like for a female steampunk costume. There seem to be rather more women in corsets and little else, with a cogwheel attached at some point to make it authentically steampunk, than there are dressed in Victorian period clothes with steampunk appendages.

It seems that I have a different view of what steampunk is as a ‘fashion statement’ than do many of the people posting photographs of themselves under that banner.

The costume does not need to be a full-length dress, I am more than happy – indeed I think I’d prefer something more in the colonial/Amy Johnson style (I know Amy Johnson is a bit modern for the genre, but you get the idea. What I do not want is burlesque, which is where most of the photographic source material seems to be sitting. I guess I shall have to change my search parameters to cover Victoriana and then ‘punk it up’ myself.

So much for the ‘easy’ approach.

The other revelation is just how badly my skills in sketching have declined. My own fault; I don’t practice with anything like enough frequency.

A ‘fun idea’ suddenly became a job of work. I think I shall have to simplify my concept and draft or else we will be presenting the card on their anniversary instead.

This bloody PC struggles with Monday mornings far more than I do and I should prefer to be in bed snoozing instead of here in the office. If I can make it across London to be here to tap away at the keyboard, the least that the computer attached to that keyboard could do, is not daydream while I’m doing stuff.

That is MY prerogative.

More worryingly, I hear rumours that the much anticipated but still delayed IT upgrade coming our way in September - no October – er, November – um, before Christmas at some point (honest, Guvnor), isn’t much better. It seems that some parts of the building actually have the new kit and have been impressed¹ by its performance. Given that the current equipment and software is coming up on eight years old now and that MicroSquash are about to withdraw support for most of the applications and operating system, it is hard to see how an up-to-date system could be worse, but it appears that by skilful application of procurement procedures, our IT people have managed it.

It would have been easier and cheaper to send us all down to Curry’s with a pocket full of shiny shillings, to but an office computer each.




¹I know that I am going against common usage here, but things can make bad impressions as well as good ones and really, given the track record of IT procurement in this place in the last ten years at least, I’d be wary of assigning any positive value to the phrase in this context.

After some months of dithering, I have acquired a new Smartphone. When my contract with O2 ran out in June I let it ride, beguiled with the possibilities as they seemed at the time, of a new iPhone 6, or at least mouth-watering 5S or the much-rumoured ‘budget’ 5C.

Well, big fan as I am of iPhones in particular and Apple in general, I was solidly underwhelmed by the new phones when they were finally launched. The 5C is clearly NOT a ‘low-cost’ product, it is simply a price rise in the iPhone 5 kept down by increasing the plastic content and branding it as a feature. It’s a nice phone to be sure, but it is horribly overpriced for a product that effectively makes a virtue out of stagnation.

The 5S is another beautiful piece of engineering, but the prime advances are not ones that appeal to me – at least for the next few years. I do not want a phone with a fingerprint scanner in it. I daresay the day will come when I have no option, but by then they will hopefully be more reliable and unhackable (unlike the ‘unhackable’ iPhone 5S which was hacked within 48 hours of launch by some enterprising Germans). Similarly, the 64 bit architecture may be the future, but I do not feel up to the task of being an early adopter. Let it bed in for a couple of years.

On top of all this, the price is unbelievable, both for the phones themselves and for the 4G tariffs that accompany them. Once again, 4G may be the future, but right now, coverage is limited and frankly, the so-called contract ‘deals’ are largely daylight robbery.*

The upshot is that I have, after a little over 4 years of iPhone use, during which time we have re-equipped the Gin Palace with many items Apple, I have gone Android for my new phone (as, subsequently, has Furtle). In a couple of years time, when I am again looking to upgrade, I shall look closely at what Apple are offering at that time – probably the iPhone 6S by then – but they will have to seriously up their game either in product or price (or both) to tempt me back. I accept that they see their iPhones as premium products demanding premium prices, but frankly I was struggling to reconcile that approach with the iPhone 5 and failed completely with the iPhone 5C. The iPhone 5S is undoubtedly a premium phone, but packed with features I do not, as yet, require or desire.

So. Where did I end up?

For once, I did a fair amount of research, which is rather unusual for me insofar as purchasing phones goes. I looked briefly at the Nexus 5, I hovered over the Sony Experia and the Nokia Lumia. All perfectly serviceable phones (though I have to say that the Nokia’s dependence on Windows skewed me against it, for the simple reason that their app store is so far behind the big two). Given the glowing reports from friends, I was (and am) much attracted to the Samsung Galaxy S4 and for a while it looked as though I might go for that. A friend suggested that he’d heard good things about the HTC One and as chance would have it, I had the opportunity to examine one in the flesh as it were.

A couple of Sundays ago, Furtle and I met mathcathy in East Ham for drinks and dinner and it transpires that she has an HTC One, so I blagged a quick look. I was very much impressed by the styling and the tooling; it is a very well engineered phone and made largely of aluminium, rather than backed with plastic. Cathy’s is a silver finish and I have to say that I coveted it very much. Subsequent research confirmed my thoughts and this weekend just gone, I acquired one -though in black – I may be the only person in the country to have bought it in black.

I bought the phone outright for once and took out a 12 month sim-only contract. And yes, it’s 4G, but I only got the 4G because it happened to be the day that O2 were launching it and there was a reasonable deal to be had. As long as I don’t stray out of London, Bradford or Leeds (!) I have 4G, though I understand wider coverage is expected soon.

As of last night I have managed to wrangle a number of custom ringtones onto the device and I am enjoying it hugely. The only annoyance (and what is the point of a new phone if you can’t get annoyed with it?) is that I do not seem to be able to find a setting that will put my apps in alphabetical order (though if I view them in “Airdroid”, that will display them like that) by default.

As it happens, Furtle, spurred by the increasing failure of her ancient iPhone 3 and possibly by my acquisition, has just upgraded too. She has gone for the Nokia Lumia, which is rather cheaper, but still a very nice phone. She is less addicted to fancy apps and general Smartphone use than am I, so the smaller range of available apps is not so much of an issue for her as I would have found it.

We are now both set up for the next couple of years, giving Apple time to produce something that might tempt us back to the fold…




*That said, ellefurtle and I seem to be very much in the minority holding this view

Dear Livejournal chums, I owe you a big update and you would have had it today except that I have spent most of it with no internet access other than my phone.

I haven't gone anywhere; normal (or my approximation to it) service will be resumed shortly.

Honestly.

We watched two movies over the weekend. Initially we thought we might go to the cinema and watch Red 2, but it appears to have been and gone and there was nothing else showing that ellefurtle fancied watching and I didn’t check to see if there was anything that might ring my bell.

In the event, we may have accidentally crossed a Rubicon of some sort. I have rented a couple of cheapie movies from Blinkbox in the past – the terrible 99p specials that were always destined for the bargain buckets. They can be quite fun and at less than a quid a shot, why not? Anyway, as of this weekend, I paid hard cash for two movies that exist only in cyberspace. I have arrived in another part of the future, where people own data on the ‘Cloud’. I think that most of our movie purchases will still be of the DVD variety (and mayhap one day, BluRay), but an occasional impulse buy for immediate viewing is acceptable.

Blinkbox doesn’t necessarily have the best selection of TV and movies – it’s okay and they do do the 99p specials as I’ve mentioned, but you just pay as you view; you do not have to have a regular subscription, so you don’t pay for anything other than that you watch. I am reasonably sanguine about using it as it is owned and operated by Tesco so I don’t think it is likely to go under anytime soon. Quite the opposite, in fact.

There are drawbacks, of course. Having coughed up the requisite golden splonders for these two movies, I can watch them as many times and as often as I wish, but I have to have access to broadband so that I can stream them and I am limited to a maximum of 5 devices to stream them on. So far that has not proven to be a problem, as all I have used is my iMac and my iPad, both mirrored onto the TV set so we can both watch the movie without clustering around a small screen. I shall probably link it to my Nexus7, too. It does mean, however, that I can only take these movies to friends’ houses if they have the capability to mirror from either an iOS or an Android device. Nonetheless, it adds a welcome new dimension to our viewing, particularly as we don’t watch enough movies to warrant a subscription to say, Sky Movies or similar.

So what did we watch, I hear you ask with baited breath?

Saturday, the pair of us plus Furtle’s sister clustered around the telly to drink wine, scoff snax and watch Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, a movie I’ve wanted to see since I saw the first stills. By rights, it ought to be a shoddily-made Asylum movie for SyFy, but it is remarkably well-made and acted. Most of the CGI is well done, though there is some that is rather ropy.

The basic idea is simple. It is based upon Lincoln’s real life diary, in which there are substantial gaps. So the scriptwriter just added in vampire hunting, set against the background of slavery in the South (Confederacy) and linked it in to Lincoln’s real life. It is very enjoyable, but don’t expect high art!

Last night we watched Argo.

As you will know, it is set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution and the US Embassy hostage crisis. I’m not sure why we didn’t go and see it when it was in the cinema; I’m reasonably sure that we meant to. I know that Furtle’s Mum, who is something of a historian has been rather dismissive of it as she thought it downplayed the British contribution (by which I mean ‘ignored it completely’), but to be fair to the movie, the greater crisis was simply the backdrop to the quite specific story of the six members of the embassy staff who got out and hid in the Canadian Ambassador’s residence. Apart from news reports on TVs in the background and a couple of scenes showing what was happening in the embassy, the wider diplomatic background was irrelevant to the immediate story. I should check to see that the UK wasn’t involved in ‘exfiltrating’ the six escapees. Nonetheless, it didn’t seem quite like the hijacking of history that U-571 was, where an historical event that was purely British was restaged and filmed to be an American victory.*

Regardless, it is a very good movie. Ben Affleck is NOT boring. It looks and sounds like the late 70s and early 80s. And the technology is wonderful. Computers at the CIA and in the airports, yes – old, slow and huge by today’s standards, but there, nonetheless. Everything else is wonderfully analogue. The movie portrays a world in transition in more ways than one.



*It’s not as if they are thin on the ground, there’s no need to nab ours.

I thought it might be nice to plug my earphones in and have a listen to the radio while working. I mean, I could listen to the various playlists on my iPod, but for a change I’d listen to the radio.

And it turns out that here, in the wilds of Victoria, no more than 200 yards from Buckingham Palace, the only FM signal powerful enough to penetrate the steel and glass of this building is BBC Radio London. So I’m listening, God help me, to Vanessa Feltz (or however you spell it) being grumbled at by listeners about dole scroungers.

I’m only a few feet away from the window; I can’t understand why no other stations can get through it. Still, makes a change.

Back in the office, then, after a nice five-day break.

Boo Hiss.

After work on Wednesday ellefurtle and I jumped on a train at Victoria and disappeared off to Canterbury for a couple of nights. No particular reason, you understand, but it’s nice to get away.

Our hotel was just off the Buttermarket and seems to have somehow installed itself hermit crab like between and around a number of other buildings, all of some remarkable vintage. I guess at some point, the entrance would have been a tiny alley between two other buildings, but now it’s a door that leads directly onto a staircase that goes up to reception on the first floor. Off to the side of the reception area are more corridors to the kitchen and tiny dining rooms that feel as though the gentile ghosts of Jane Austen books should flit through them. There is a small, low corridor to a small lounge, which in turn leads to the ‘roof garden’ (a fire escape style iron ledge with a table, potted plants, two chairs and a splendid view of the cathedral). The other corridor is short and terminates in a door that opens out on to the rooftops.

On to the rooftops.

Well, that was unexpected. There was a non-slip walkway across the roof (Furtle had never been on a roof before) across to another door in an entirely different building (or buildings) from which extended further corridors and stairwells leading to bedrooms in yet further buildings. I’d love to see an architect’s 3D cross section of the hotel. Our room looked out of the first storey above the street just down from the entrance. Imagine, I suppose, clean and well appointed servants’ quarters in Gormenghast.

Furtle’s record of getting us into odd hotels remains intact.

That evening we wandered out for a look around the town (remaining within the mediaeval walled area, of course). We found a nice little pub, which I would imagine is crammed with students during term time. I had a pint of (I think) Biddlestone’s cider at a mere 8% and we listened to some interesting music, a sort of progressive punk… Of course, being in Canterbury, there was no 3G for my iPhone to latch on to, so there was no possibility of using ‘Shazam’ to find out what we were listening to. I asked a 23 year old Gandalf at the bar, but he just responded, “Sorry, Dude. I wasn’t listening, I was talking.” He did agree though,. That there was some strange music on the jukebox. Pity. Someone suitably obscure has lost out on a possible sale on account of us having no idea what we had heard.

Dinner was fish’n’chips for me and pizza for Furtle in a splendid little pub/restaurant around the corner down the (I think) High Street, next to the canal. We ate in the semi enclosed garden area, with huge amounts of ivy-like creeper along the rafters under the roof. We even found and drank the restaurant’s last remaining bottle of Kentish Red Wine, which was rather nice. We know it was the last, because we had to drop back to cheap Italian plonk after the bottle had dried up, despite our wish to consume more.

It turns out that after about 11.30pm until around 10.30am, central Canterbury is deathly quiet. Life retreats into the pubs etc and the streets are almost village lane, quiet. So quiet, in fact, that someone like me, who has spent the past few years living on main roads in London, it was difficult to sleep. Or so I thought. I completely missed the drunk at about 2am, wandering down the street shouting and swearing at everything he saw.

Next morning was, of course, rainy. Very rainy. So we went to look around the cathedral, which ranks as my favourite English cathedral and probably my favourite full stop. It is about 25 years since I’d been there previously and it turns out that the stone on the inside isn’t quite a pink-hued as I’d remembered, but then 25 years ago, it was sunny and I can see from the architecture that sun might give the stone a pink glow. It is light and airy, unlike many cathedrals made of darker stone, and reflects the internal dichotomy of the Church of England in being relatively shorn of icons, statues etc, but not entirely so. There are still a few to be had and not just tombs.

The candle that stands on the wide, empty spot marking the place inhabited for close on 300 years by the shrine to St Thomas of Canterbury (or Thomas Ā Beckett, as you may know him) surely couldn’t exist in another context. After Henry VIII ordered its destruction during the Reformation, it would surely have been replaced in later years in another country. But not here. The space in front of the altar remains, marked by an eternal candle.

Down in the crypt is the ‘Martyrdom’ marking the spot, I think, where Henry II lost his turbulent priest. It is a very modern-looking piece but I didn’t get to check precisely when the sculpture was installed.

After the cathedral, in which we spent an unprecedented two and a half hours, we went for a pub lunch where we had a humongous cheese sandwich, chips and (another) pint of cider. The remainder of the day was spent wandering around shops and such, with me dithering over the possibility of getting a tattoo (I didn’t).

Dinner was, against the odds, at Café Rouge. Initially we had decided to avoid chains and try local, but frankly (!) we fancied French cuisine and for a chain, Café Rouge is pretty good it has to be said.

Friday morning, we wandered a bit before catching a train home. We had wondered about staying just the one night, but I think we were right to make it two. I doubt we would have enjoyed wandering around for a full day lugging our bags around. As it was, we caught the 12.30 train and were home in time to sit in the pub garden for another pint of cider.

And that was all before the weekend started.

Oh the irony.

Even as some of my chums seem to be winding down their writing – or more correctly, directing their writing efforts elsewhere, I find my enthusiasm returning. At the same time, I find the actual opportunities to write rather reduced, particularly if it’s anything more spectacular than an LJ entry, or a sarcastic riposte or observation over on Farcebørk.

On Friday last week, we met up with The Kindly Ones and their Kindly Spawn on one of their occasional visits to the Great Metropolis. We spent much of the evening in a restaurant near Waterloo (a curry/burger fusion place – who knew such delights existed?) and boozed and chatted. During the conversation, I discussed some old story ideas I’d had but never really developed.

This has made me dig them out and start playing with them, see if I can take them anywhere and, who knows, actually write something of over a couple of thousand words…

And suddenly my time is at a premium – at least my time in front of a keyboard for sustained creativity. In the tradition of all good hobbies, maybe I need to gear myself up by buying plug-ins and other peripherals for my iPad and such. You know, the actually interesting part of the hobby before the fascination with dust bunnies etc reasserts itself.

A little over a week ago we grabbed a bunch of courgettes off one of our plants on the upper bed and cooked them up with various other stuff – much of it home produced - for a tasty meal. We have had several meals from the two plants we have, now and that’s not including the cucumber, tomatoes (which will soon be in glut!) and mange touts. After a slow start because of the long winter, it’s been very good on the garden produce front.

This time last week we noticed that there were three or four new courgettes growing, but they were as yet only small, so we left them to put on a bit of volume. By Saturday they had come along nicely and we picked them. One had clearly enjoyed the weather and had grown, in less than a week, from something about an inch and a half long to become a reasonable sized marrow.

Quite how the brute grew so quickly is anybody’s guess. You might have almost expected to hear it expanding over the five or so days it more than quintupled in size.



We looked up recipes for baked marrow/courgette and ended up with something that looked and sounded exceptionally tasty – onions, tomatoes and the ground up insides of the marrow, seasoned with fresh basil, pepper and a sprinkling of salt, topped off with plentiful mozzarella.



This was all baked for around 40 minutes and it smelled and looked bloody fantastic.


It tasted like boiling water with cheese in it. Back to the drawing board…