Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Te Dieum redux

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 13:20:58 GMT

Well, I’m in the office and for once there are colleagues from my team here at the same time – not that we’re interacting that much, but it’s nice to have a bit of company.

Being here though, has underlined the fact that the office is a far more boring environment than working from home. It’s not even particularly necessary; there’s nothing I can do here that I can’t do from home without all the travelling time. Still, I suppose it’s a sort of normality. I’ve been working in this place and its predecessors for 37 years, 40 in the CS as a whole. I reckon that in those 40 years I have been bored for about 35. The trouble, I guess, is that I never really knew what I wanted to do for a living, and I still don’t. This isn’t it, but it’s not as if anything else appeals.

Juist stick it out. I’m not in the mood to retire. I like having an income too much.

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Temptation

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 12:57:22 GMT

Anyone who knows me knows I love a good hat - particularly a fedora (I have rather more than is strictly wise).

Well, it seems that algorithm me has been caught by teh intarwebs and teh intarwebs have taken notice. I keep getting adverts for a US Cavalry hat:

Not this precise example, but very close.

Trouble is, I know I could rock it.

But in Ilford?

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Te Dieum

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 13:26:06 GMT

For the past few months – probably a year now, come to think of it - we have been under a standing injunction to come into the office twice a week on average. This is, as far as I can see, because politicians assume that nothing gets done if we work at home. Spaffer himself reckoned it was impossible: he’d wander into the kitchen and find a piece of cheese or something and that would be it. The Rt. Hon. Member for the 18th century, during his brief sojourn haunting a Secretary of State’s office reputedly left messages on empty desks inviting the next person to sit there up to his office to explain their previous absences*.

Frankly, I get much less done in the office than I do when I’m at home. I do make trips to the kitchen to get tea and maybe a piece of cheese, but the work gets done, usually ahead of deadline. When I come into the office, I am constantly checking the clock to see if I can go to lunch, or if anyone would miss me if I went home.

In the before times, when we didn’t know any better and came in every day (and there was a luxurious allocation of seven desks for every ten of us), the crushing boredom would be lifted by chatting to colleagues while working. Nowadays, when I venture in, it’s rare that anyone else is around. Today, for instance, it’s me and my boss’s boss’s boss from our team. The rest are either on a visit to a local council, or working from home. A couple might be on leave, or off sick.
There are people around, but I don’t know anyone. At least at home I can talk to the cat, even when Furtle isn’t around.

The office is warm, quiet, and soporific. I am bored out of my gourd and I’ve achieved largely the square root of bugger all while I’ve been here. But that doesn’t matter, because I’m in the office and attendance is King.

*Betraying a basic lack of knowledge about how hot desking works, and ignoring the fact that successive cost-cutting measures mean that in many buildings there are only six desks for every ten drones.

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Christmas

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 10:13:58 GMT

I wrote this for Christmas 2005 and thought that an airing fifteen years later might be fun. I took a bit of a liberty, I’m afraid…

I’d forgotten how steep the stairs are, how quiet the house can be, and how the stairs creak. It’s been many, many years since I was here, and things have changed; my circumstances are, how shall I put this, somewhat reduced.

The last time I visited, we celebrated. A meagre celebration to be sure, but a celebration nonetheless; we were never ones for the grand gesture, but we knew our business and this time we had surpassed ourselves. We had got where we were by sheer hard work and a passion for the detail in a closely written contract.

And we did well, very well, our company was a legend in the City.

I remember that it was cold that night, as cold as it is tonight.

My, my, but these stairs are steep; were they always so? The effort of the climb is drawing my breath in gasps. The irony is not lost on me as I wind my way up, step after step to the grand bedroom.

The snow was fresh on the ground and I remember clearly the crump, crump, crump of my footsteps as I walked the silent streets, the brandy fortifying my every pace. I remember the cloud of condensation from my breath swirling into the still night, and the patterns it made as it passed the flickering gas lamps.

I paid little heed, but soon snow was falling so fast that I could not see. And as I walked I became aware of the profound silence around me, the desolate muffled stillness of the darkened city. I walked and walked: time itself seemed frozen, and the faint glow of the lamps, dimmed by the blizzard seemed ever more distant.

One more flight up: there are cobwebs and dust everywhere; the carpets threadbare and unwelcoming. Every step onward wearies to the very marrow, but I continue.

Ah, the doors: heavy and dark-stained oaken just as I remember. Unchanged.

I cannot think now, how long I walked that night, but by and by the snow stopped falling and a mist set with that foul sulphurous smell that betokens a thickening fog; one of London’s best. And still I walked, and as I did so my mood darkened – influenced no doubt by the numbing cold that weighed like chains upon my shoulders.

I cannot say how long it was before I realised that which should have been obvious.

Yes, the heavy oaken doors with their brass handle. I reach out with numb hands, my breath catching in my throat as the hinges creak and the doors swing open.

I remember now why I have returned, as the voice in the darkness, tremulous and afraid addresses me and I reply…

‘I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?’

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Obvious when you think about it.

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 09:48:15 GMT

One thing that hadn’t occurred to me concerning working from home all the time is that it gets dark so early this time of year and that I pretty much have to floodlight the conservatory in the latter part of the afternoon.

It’s daft, but it just hadn’t occurred to me. But what makes it even dafter is the fact that even before lockdown and extended home-working, I would habitually work from home on a Thursday each week and therefore I must have been doing this in the past.

Certain things just Teflon away from your memory, don’t they? No matter how often you do them.

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Virgin Media

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 10:55:19 GMT

When Virgin Media decide to have an outage, they don’t kid around.

There have been numerous times during lockdown where we’ve lost broadband for at least a day, which is annoying at the best of times, but doubly so when you’re working from home. (Happily we are sufficiently stocked with DVDs, CDs, books and other relatively low tech (!) items that we can entertain ourselves once streaming is no longer an option.

Last night though was a special one. I was playing Civ on the PC when all kinds of error messages popped up and the computer started running diagnostics on itself. I didn’t even realise at that point that the internet had gone, I assumed that something had happened to the PC. Well, it rebooted and everything seemed fine except that that was when I realised that we had no broadband. I checked on the iMac just to ensure it wasn’t the PC arsing around, but no, it was the broadband. Oddly, I was still getting WiFi, but no internet, which in itself is unusual. When one goes, they both go, as a rule.

Checking the Virgin Media website on my phone, I found that everything was down: broadband, cable TV and the landline, though they reckoned it would be fixed by morning. So I went to bed.

Anyway, this morning, I logged on and all seemed well. I came downstairs and it was only when I tried to demonstrate the Amazon Echo to colleagues during our weekly informal online chat that I realised that we had a problem.

Earlier in the year, I bought a mesh WiFi system to counter the odd dead spots in the house – it’s only a small house but the Victorian method of building (to paraphrase aitch_pea) using a combination of marshmallow and diamond, meant that there were bizarre WiFi blank areas. That’s worked pretty well, but it is hard wired into the main router, meaning we effectively have two WiFi systems working through a single connection. So the “Eero” (mesh) system pretty much slaves of the Virgin Hub and our devices just log on to whichever signal is strongest at any point. Usually it’s pretty seamless.

But this morning, the mesh WiFi was working but the principal WiFi wasn’t and all the Amazon Echo devices (except the recent addition in the kitchen) predate the mesh and link directly to the principal hub WiFi. We had internet access, but not from the Virgin Hub. Or at least it was wired internet to the Eero gateway and WiFi thereafter.

It’s all fixed now – a reboot of the Virgin Hub put that right, but interestingly, it could have been days before I noticed had I not needed to use the Amazon Echo and having logged in to the Virgin Media website it was reporting a possible data breach and recommending users reset passwords accordingly.
It would have been nice to have an email. Had I gone to bed before the outage occured, I might not have known for some time that there were any issues.

The long and the short of it is, if you subscribe to Virgin Media for broadband etc, log in and change your password. They might not bother to tell you.

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A week off.

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 11:23:19 GMT

With all this not going out anywhere or doing anything other than hide in the house – more so now as it’s raining all the time – it’s becoming harder and harder to think of anything to write on here. I mean I could go on about the pandemic, or the incompetence, nay corruption of the Government, but I decided some time back not to engage with all that as they are morale-sapping subjects.

We took last week off just so that we wouldn’t need to get up and log on to the office servers for a few days. Initially it was supposed to be a trip to Shropshire for my eldest niece’s wedding, but that’s now been put back a year. We decided to have the time off anyway.

I have had a 1/8 scale model of Adam West’s Batman for a number of years, sitting in its box, unbuilt and unremarked. I’ve been working on that. The best part of getting back into model-making is the same as with any hobby – obtaining the kit. I have a new airbrush, various pincers, scrapers, prodders, sanders, fillers and paint brushes. I’ve also had to buy a number of new paints. I could do a khaki drab Batman, but not a blue and grey one, so there you have it. Anyway, I’m at a bit of a hiatus with that right now. It will have to be a largely weekend enterprise, since painting under artificial light is a problem. It looks great until you see it under natural light and realise that *everything* is too yellow.

I’ve been taking photos as I go along, and in due course, I might bore you with a selection of progress pictures, leading up to the completed model. Of course, that will depend upon me finding and remembering a cheap (viz. ‘free’) picture hosting site. Dreamwidth has some capacity, but it’s limited and awkward.

We also took the time to box set Game of Thrones from start to finish. It’s interesting to rewatch it and realise how early some of the events occurred, and just how much foreshadowing just sailed by unregarded at the time. I still think the resolution is fine in plot terms, but there is no doubt that the final season could – should – have been longer. There was no real feeling of the passage of time and everything happened with unwarranted haste. I understand, though I might be wrong, that HBO offered to stump up the cash for two or three more episodes to round the final season off properly, but the producers decided against accepting their offer. A mistake, I think.

We are currently indulging in viewing Scandi Noir. Seasons 1-3 of The Bridge are on iPlayer and it’s all good stuff, though it does rather dispel the general understanding that Scandinavia is a nice, law abiding place with little crime beyond jaywalking.

In other news, despite all this isolation, I seem to have become an intermittent snot monster over the past couple of days. Grudd knows how that happened. We haven’t seen anyone.

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Chillsome

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 09:25:57 GMT

For the avoidance of any doubt, it is autumn, now. Definitely autumn.

Not only is it getting dark noticeably earlier of an evening, but for the first time since early May, or certainly late April, I am sitting here at my lockdown desk and wearing a hoodie. I am not yet quite at the point of needing the heater as I did in March, but it’s good to know it’s there in the corner should I need it.

The other sure-fire sign that the temperatures are beginning to slide (and for the record, I’d like to observe that about now, we are in prime temperature territory for Bryan’s personal comfort), the lockdown beard has gone and I’m back to sporting my (increasingly grey) goatee. Or is it technically a Van Dyke? My erstwhile friend glassfinger used to sport a ‘proper’ goatee and it made him look like a turnip. I think mine must, in truth be a ‘Van Dyke’ – you need the accompanying moustache unless you’re happy to look like an idiot.

The beard was just getting more and more unkempt and though I’m no oil painting, I do have certain standards and having trimmed it a couple of months ago for shape, it seemed to be sulking and refused to get any longer again. The tidying trim had convinced it to bush out rather than get more Gandalfesque.

Actually, looking at the linked graphic, mine is currently somewhere between ‘goatee and moustache’ and ‘extended goatee'.

For no reason other than the fact that I am a contrary sod, I often seem to loose a full beard just as the weather is getting colder, despite having maintained it throughout the summer. In a month or two I’ll probably get fed up with shaving again and start back on the full beard.

Of course, this is all in the name of vanity. I’ve always favoured facial fuzz of some kith, kin or kine, but in the twenty years since I gave up on my receding hair line and started shaving the top of my melon back to simple, dignified Picards, if I don’t have something on my face, I just look like a boiled egg with the point end at the top.

Happy Monday, folks.

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Disappointing

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 10:02:03 GMT

As an update to my post of a week ago today, the new Covid restrictions announced yesterday have ensured that we won’t be going to my niece’s wedding early next month.

We’ve known the time and place for over a year, and it was planned to be for forty guests with a large party afterwards. Then it went on hold during lockdown, but with the hopes that it would all be over, or at least much reduced by October. When things did ease up, the numbers nonetheless had to be reduced to thirty, and as of today, fifteen.

Even if there were not other difficulties with travel from London to Shropshire through the already locally locked down West Midlands, and the lack of restaurant facilities, H and her fiancé, the four kids from previous relationships, her Mum (my sister) and brother and sister make nine people. That doesn’t take any account of Pad’s side of the family, or H’s Dad, stepmother and brother.

I reckon they’d be better off rearranging a registry office wedding with parents only as guests and then sometime in 2021 having a solemnisation and a proper blow out.

Either way. I hope they save us a piece of cake.

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Catharsis

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 10:07:15 GMT

This is a piece that toyed with writing about a month ago but initially decided against. This subject has been tasking me more than it should do and has been doing so for nine months.

Forty-nine years ago this month, I made a new friend. He joined our school at the beginning of the second form, and within days we were firm friends. Within weeks we were thick as thieves, having similar interests, largely shared musical tastes and an almost identical sense of humour. We both toyed with playing guitar. He stuck with it, I didn’t (I had no aptitude whatsoever, and although I could tell a string was out of tune, to this day I couldn’t tell you if it was flat, or too sharp).

For the purpose of this piece, I shall refer to my erstwhile friend as Alceste. One should not necessarily identify the guilty, and it is an appropriate name.

( Long ramble for context here )

This then, is Alceste:

The over-imagining underachiever, a man of little ambition, dim understanding, ordinary intellect and irrefutable opinion; a monumental ego built on the shifting sands of his own self-loathing, a reflection of his own misanthropy. A negligent and casual racist who sees remonstration as only arrogance and condescension.

Alceste is a man who avoids responsibility and discord by closing his eyes and ears and pulling back his horizons to the inside of his own four walls and the society of a decreasing number of unchallenging acolytes. He is slowly becoming dehumanised through isolation and resentment; a Kantian combination of dislike and ill-will. A born-again Christian, whose god merely rubberstamps Alceste’s own judgements.

His one true love is in playing guitar and here he has persevered, and to my ears he has attained a competent adequacy, which in fairness I believe he recognises as he has retreated in the main to a comfortable twelve bars and three chords.

He is both dichotomy and paradox: the man who rages against the dying of the light even as he snuffs out the candles.

I mourn the friend I lost some forty-odd years ago and resent the pitiable reflection that had me fooled for so much longer.

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Venting a little.

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 11:11:18 GMT

I’ve deliberately avoided discussing the pandemic in any great detail as in years to come, I don’t want to look back at my posts and see nothing but that. It was the same with Brexit. It’s easy to forget that there is good stuff happening as well, and that’s what we need to remember.

That said, I’m going to grumble about the pandemic now briefly, largely because of the frustration and annoyance it’s causing for what should be the simplest of things.

Next month my eldest niece is getting married. We’ve known the place, time and date for close on two years, and I booked the hotel at the beginning of March just, as it turned out, before lockdown. Even then, we were naively hopeful that it would all have died down by then. October was reassuringly distant.

But it’s not over. Their forty guests have had to be pared back to thirty, and that might now be too many, depending upon how you interpret the current guidelines. Weddings are exempt from the ‘maximum of six persons’ rule, but it’s not clear whether or not that includes the reception. Even if that’s all sorted out satisfactorily, there are other problems. The hotel is in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Shrewsbury and Wem, in Shropshire.

We have recently sold the car as it would have taken more to bring up to spec than it was worth (plus we didn’t need it during lockdown). So that means several hours on a variety of trains and other public transport, whilst wearing masks and hoping to Grudd that other people behave similarly. And recent experience suggests that a significant number won’t.

I’ve spoken to the hotel and not unreasonably in the circumstances, their restaurant is not open. It will be open for the wedding reception, but not before or after. They are not getting enough custom to justify the costs. That means no evening meal when we arrive on Friday, and no evening meal (or more likely evening snack) on the Saturday. We will need something as the wedding is at noon and the reception in the early afternoon.

My sister and niece are trying to salvage something out of all this. The latest plan is that my sister will pick us up from Shrewsbury station on the Friday, ferry us to the hotel where we can check in and dump our bags, before driving us back into town where we can get dinner. Then she’ll ferry us back. I assume that Saturday will include similar levels of dependence on our part, and then there’s getting back to Shrewsbury station on the Sunday morning. Happily at least the breakfasts will still be provided.

When I first booked the hotel, I wasn’t bothered that it was relatively remote. We could take walks in the countryside, inhabit the bar, relax and read. But if everything is closed, it becomes a different proposition.

Oh, and the cherry on the icing: Redbridge, of which Ilford is a part, currently has the highest Covid-19 infection rate in London and they are contemplating a local lockdown.

So far we have come out of this all relatively unscathed. In some ways it’s been better than usual, but now it is frustrating and irritating and spoiling what should be a happy event.

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Mon, 14 Sep 2020 10:01:00 GMT

The Fripps continue to show that lockdown is having no effect on them:

https://youtu.be/H2cDrnVrPP8

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Start the week

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 09:40:34 GMT

On Friday we broke lockdown for only the second time (in my case – it was Furtle’s third) and caught the train up to Chelmsford so that we could meet up with Elle’s parents, have a pint or two and a meal in the Wheatsheaf and then come home. A limited day out, but a welcome break.

For those who don’t know, the Wheatsheaf is a tiny pub – two small rooms and room comfortably, for not many more than thirty people all told. Probably fewer. With the Coronavirus distancing rules in place, you’d be hard pressed to get twelve people in there. And there is clear plastic shielding over the bars, which in any case are closed. If you want to order beer, or food, you have to nip out into the only marginally bigger pub garden and order there. God knows how they’ll manage when winter sets in.

As when we went into London a couple or three weeks ago, most people are following the rules for masks on public transport, but not all. It was also instructive to see how the kids are dealing with it. The kids might be back at school, but the schools appear to be kicking them out before 15.00 these days (that said, it might be a Friday thing). The Chelmsford pupils to a body wore their masks all the time. It didn’t slow down the usual excited and noisy chatter, but they managed it all within the rules. Once we got past Romford on the way back to Ilford, the more local (and scruffy) kids started piling on and their mask rate was rather lower. Still, no-one was coughing and spluttering, so I remain hopeful that our foray to deepest Essex has had no consequences.

In a turn up for the books, I’ve lost weight during lockdown. Presumably because I haven’t been buying my morning latte on the way into work, or listening to the siren call of the office biscuits supplies. Also, we’ve ben eating better quality, home-made food, instead of using the office canteen, where more than once a week, the only palatable option would be chip-based. As of the beginning of the weekend just gone, I had unshipped 11lbs, but weighing myself this morning, I see that one of those pounds is paying me a return visit. Hopefully it’s just a step backwards to allow for a run up to lose a bit more. Even ten pounds down, I need to unship significant tonnage and historically, this is not and never has been one of my strong points.

Thirteen years ago I bought myself a double-breasted leather jacket, submarine commander style. In those thirteen years, I have only been able to button it up for a short period and that was over ten years ago, when one of my younger cousins got married. For most of the time, it’s been a struggle even to get the two sides to meet in the middle, much less to get the four inch overlap to line up the buttons and button holes. I don’t intend to wear it buttoned up very often, but the jacket just hangs much better if it can be buttoned up. Anyway, my initial target is to be able to wear that jacket and look like a U-Boat captain.

As I type, a fox has just wandered up on to the patio and had a wary look around. It was me here in the conservatory and slipped quietly into the gap between the fence and the roses/blackcurrants on the top bed and vanished down the garden. My comically slow attempt to snap it on my iPhone were suitably futile.

I shall take that as a sign that I ought to do some paying work.

But I’m not really feeling it today.

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Strange night

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 08:55:12 GMT

I am both annoyed and glad to be awake.

Annoyed because I didn't sleep so well and I'm still tired. Not insomnia by any means but one oddly repetitive dream followed by an anxiety dream.

And those dreams are why I'm glad to be awake, the first is fading rapidly, but involved, of all things, lots and lots of packed sandwiches wrapped in foil. I must have been snoring because I kept feeling bumps in my back, which instead of waking me, just got incorporated inexplicably into the reverie.

Later, in the next dream, I was back in a version of the office, where I was contacted by Matthew with a view to going to lunch. Somewhere in that dream, I ended up for a time in a church hall style advice centre, then had my laptop and iphone stolen. I started walking back to the office and somehow got turned around. Got on a bus, which seamlessly became a tram.

I was dropped off in a very wide valley, with a number of rivers in it, and several unfinished flyovers. I was trying to find another bus stop when I woke up.

Hand me the straight waistcoat and put my analyst on danger money, Baby.

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Crow?

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 11:33:34 GMT

Are you worried that you might be a crow?

Fret no longer. Help is at hand...

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Bank Holiday

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 22:10:28 GMT

Today was a good day - friends around for an appropriately socially-distanced get together in the garden. And we premiered the new gazebo, or BeRT (Big Red Tent) as Furtle has christened it:

Erecting the gazebo was remarkably simple, despite there being ample opportunity to catch fingers here and there. We elected to just have the one side enclosed to hide the less appealing side of the garden, whilst affording a decent view of the rest.

We knew Tanya was arriving around 5 minutes before she actually swung into view on account of the unmistakeable growl of her imported and hugely impractical Ford Mustang.

Tony and Tracy Lee brought their little spaniel, Fosco with them. She is always good fun, though understandably, Moneypenny was less enamoured by the idea and spent a great deal of time hiding in the lower part of the garden, or viewing the scene from the her vantage point atop the fence where Fosco failed to spot her. In the end, I took pity on her and lured her over with a few Dreamies, and then carried her into the house where the dog couldn't get to her. She then spent a happy few minutes driving Fosco mad, pulling faces through the glass.

It was a fine old afternoon of chat and barbecue, and once I'd managed to charge my Anker Soundcore, we even had a bit of music to listen too, as well.

After everyone had gone home, we decided to sit out under the gazebo a little longer and finish off the wine. As it got cooler, thoughts turned to the possible acquisition of an outdoor heater. I mean, we bought the gazebo right at the end of summer, so it's only logical that we should think about outdoor heating, right?

Right?

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Unexpected Bounty

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 15:50:18 GMT

A couple of months back, I pre-ordered a copy of the newly re-mastered and remixed 3 disc expanded version of one of my favourite Barclay James Harvest albums, "...and Other Short Stories" from Cherry Red Records. It arrived on Monday and I was very pleased.

Today it arrived again, but this time with an additional postcard. I'm not quite sure what to do with the second copy...

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Changing the season

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 09:38:10 GMT

As far I can tell, yesterday was all grey and rain. It certainly went and stayed very dark around 4.40pm and got nowhere close to brightening up before dusk. Other than that, it just felt like one of those miserable summer days that come along from time to time.

Something has changed. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Today is brighter, the sky is blue and the sun is shining, though it is forecast to cloud over again, later. The temperature is pleasant, but even at 10.30 in the morning, there remains an underlying crispness to the air. Not a cold crispness, but something almost textural.

The leaves are still green, the plants lush and there are flowers blooming all over the garden (note to self: deadhead the roses over the weekend), but something’s changed. The celestial clock has moved along an infinitesimally small notch.

Yesterday was a miserable late summer day. Today is a pleasant early autumn morning.

You can feel it. And it's early.

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Book Gap

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:30:48 GMT

I am in the book gap.

I have finished reading The Camus Club by Arturo Perez Reverte, which is a well-written, intricate and absorbing Shaggy Dog Story as it turns out. Recommended.

I now have to decide what to delve into next. I’m not short of choices; there are numerous historical books awaiting my attention, but I think I fancy more fiction for a while. Penguin recently published (and I acquired) beautiful new paperback editions of The Fall, The Outsider and The Plague by Albert Camus. The first two are very short, so I might reacquaint myself with those before moving on to something else. On Kindle, I have the complete Bulldog Drummond, but I have paper copies of the Hannay books to read, too.

Oh, and lots and lots of history books, as I said above. The biography of Albert Ball VC calls to me, as does Venice's Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance by Ioanna Iordanou, though I’m not sure where we’ve filed that, for the time being…

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Watching the seasons pass

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 12:07:18 GMT

As yet another season begins to wind down in 2020 and we draw ever closer to autumn, I am finding relief in the lower temperatures.

Nearly every working day since the end of the first week in March, I have been sitting at the conservatory table with my office laptop, carrying on as usual. Or as near to usual as we can manage. At the hight of summer, which is really only a few weeks ago, I had to have a fan blasting me at close range, even with all the windows and the skylight open. All it did was blast me with warm air, but it provided some relief. Now I am happy enough with just the door open, or if it’s particularly blustery, the door closed and a couple of windows open.

Temperatures have yet to get to the point where I am looking at breaking out the hoodie, but even that is now on the horizon.

We have been quite lucky during lockdown. Until last Thursday – a week ago today – the furthest from home I’d been was for a couple, or three circuits of South Park. South Park is okay as parks go, but walking around them for the sheer sake of walking is tedious. Beyond that, I’d made a couple of forays a hundred or so yards up the road to pick up my prescriptions and that’s been that. Elle wandered into town once, to find out that by and large, anything she wanted to do couldn’t be completed, or was frustratingly complex to achieve. So we’ve not bothered. Except for last week, when we decided to take advantage of the easing of lockdown and take the train into Liverpool Street, and mooch around London a while.

Even in late lockdown, London is a strange place. I wish we’d braved it during lockdown proper to see it completely empty, but as it was, off the main thoroughfares the place was largely deserted and even the busier places felt more like a quiet provincial town during half-day closing. If I can find somewhere to host a few pictures so that I can link to them, I might put something up in a later post. There are some across on Face Book, if you’re interested (and have access), but it might be nice, in time, to decorate a page here, like the old days.

I doubt that we will repeat the exercise anytime soon, however. Whilst we remain blessedly Covid-free (indeed free from any ailment!), other, underlying conditions make me vulnerable, so I do not feel the need to place myself in a position where I can catch something too frequently.

If the Great British Public actually played fair, this should not be too much of a consideration. To be fair, the majority do follow advice and follow the distancing rules, wear masks and so forth, but there is a significant minority who are happy to wear a mask around their neck and pretend to themselves and the world that they are following the rules. So, we continue to shield.

Quite how I would have coped if this had all happened while I lived in Clapham, I do not know, or indeed how we would have coped whilst living in Whetstone. The ‘Athenaeum’ as we called it would have probably been easier to survive in on account of the space, but the second flat was about the same size as The Gin Palace, but without a garden, and I think that it access to that garden that has kept us sane. We are relatively self-contained and lockdown hasn’t been the chose for us that it has been for many and being able to sit outside, do a bit of gardening, or just drink cider out there, has helped.

A summer winds down, we’ve bought a gazebo. We might get some autumnal (and spring) use out of it, so we can enjoy the outdoors a little longer, as this all spins on.

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Creaking back to life (revisited).

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 11:34:49 GMT

I see – or rather gather the feeling - from general comments and posts over on Face Book that there is the beginning of a tidal shift away from many social media platforms, and that one in particular. I don’t know how prevalent that is likely to become, but already I am getting notifications of people joining my friends list here on Dreamwidth.

This is rather ironic, though not unwelcome. Dreamwidth is the continuation for many of us, of our old LiveJournal accounts. My Dreamwidth account for instance only formally dates back to (I think) 2013, but the entries, imported from LiveJournal stretch back an entire decade earlier.

I have rather missed the art of the blog. I have never quite stopped writing here, but it has become rather more intermittent – a note here or there, every few months instead of the several each day, every day back in the 2000s.

Part of the reason, of course, is the general drift across to FaceBook. It is much quicker and easier to post up interesting, or entertaining nuggets there than it is here, and the effect is much, much quicker. Participation and response on all blogging platforms is now quite minimal and writing can feel very much like howling into the void and I don’t think that is what blogging is really about. It’s different from keeping a diary, which is for personal use only. A blog (to me, at least) is a place where you can say something that you might also add to your personal diary, but which might also interest your friends, or some of them. It’s the hope for some measured interaction and feedback, which is often, but not always, more focused than on platforms like Face Book, or Twitter. It’s generally more measured and polite, too.

I don’t recall disagreements getting out of hand on LiveJournal of Dreamwidth. There is room for discussion, explanation and debate. For reflection. You can bounce ideas and perhaps be shot down in flames, but not with the casual venom that is evident on some platforms.

I truly think that some friendships have ended because of mis-readings of comments on social media, or because of unfortunate coincidences where one or more entries, which should properly be separated by time and context, end up appearing in immediate sequence because of some detached algorithm. What were otherwise unrelated items become linked in the mind of the reader and can take on the appearance of some kind of concerted attack, where the author hadn’t even imagined a gibe.

Be that as it may, welcome to the people who have subscribed in the past couple of days. I am going to make an effort to write more. I need to brush off the cobwebs a bit.

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Initial Impressions of Abbey Road 50th anniversary remix

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 14:37:41 GMT

Now, I’m not saying that I have a pre-digital temperament, but well, I clearly do have a pre-digital temperament.

I took delivery of the Super deluxe (3CD+1 Blue Ray) edition of the 50th anniversary remix of Abbey Road a couple of days ago, and I’ve been grumbling that I wouldn’t be able to give it a listen until Friday at the earliest – or more likely Saturday.

Well, my ageing brane has just reminded me, somewhat belatedly, that I have Spotify on my iPhone, headphones and a good Wi-Fi connection. So now, finally, I am having my first listen to the remixed album.

My initial thoughts are that the sound is clearer, punchier and more three-dimensional. Giles Martin has given more thought to the sound separation; it is no longer half the sound on one ear and half the sound on the other. The new mix puts the main vocals more generally in the middle, along with the drums. The bass goes to the right with the backing vocals and the rhythm guitar off to the left. The overall effect is to make each part of the track easier to hear. There is less lost in the mix, to the point that I now hear things that I’ve not noticed in the previous fifty years (or more precisely, closer to forty-five years – I can’t pretend I owned a copy of the album before I was about fifteen).

I think that one of the revelations of both this and earlier remixes (Sergeant Pepper and the White Album), is that on many tracks I can finally pick out the vocal harmonies on more tracks than I ever realised had them in the past. The Beatles’ harmonies were a very big part of their game in the early to middle years of their career, and I had thought that they had largely dispensed with them after perhaps, Revolver, but no. The harmonies are there, but they weren’t as obvious (at least to my cloth ears) in the original mono and electronically separated mixes. In the recent reworkings, those harmonies are there and clearly to be heard.

It now feels as though you can shut your eyes and place each of the band members in front of you.

What I need to do now, of course, is sit down and listen to the album track by track, in its original, 2009 remaster and 2019 re-mix formats, just to hear how the evolving technology has allowed more to come out as time moves on. In fact I should do that with Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road. It’s a huge task, but I think I’m up to it. Especially now that I have remembered that it’s 2019 and not 1999.

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Well. That's what can possibly go wrong...

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 09:52:38 GMT

Well, after a fair amount of faffing, I have managed to couple up my iPad with a monitor – in this case the office monitor.

It works well enough, everything that appears on the iPad appears on the monitor, but…

I have a keyboard and mouse attached to the monitor (we do a lot of hot desking, so carry our *Microsoft* tablets/laptops around and plug in as required), so I can work as if at a desktop. These are great with the office-supplied kit; I mean who really likes typing on a laptop keyboard, or using those shitty little trackpads unless they really have to? Unfortunately, these are just paperweights when combined with an Apple product. I’d have to get a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo to work with the iPad, and frankly, that’s too much effort and expense.
Effectively, then, I can stream TV and movies – though not necessarily via proprietary apps – on to a large monitor. But I can do that with the PC anyway. So my quest was fruitless.

Tech can be really annoying.

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What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 10:29:17 GMT

I should be working, but I am distracted.

I have been poking around on my office monitor and I see that both the keyboard and the mouse connect to it directly, rather than via the Microsoft Cloud tablet/keyboard/pencil combo that I carry around and work on. The tablet connects separately via a USBc connector, and it all communicates nicely so that I can use double screens and a full-size keyboard and mouse when I’m in the office.

I own a series of cables that would, in theory at least, connect my iPad Mini to the monitor, via a USB adaptor for the Thunderbolt cable that fits in the iPad, allowing me to then connect the USB to a USB-C to USB adaptor. That’s four different plugs, and they have to be snug enough to transfer the data between devices. Ironically for a person so embedded in the Apple ecosystem, I am hoping to make apples (hah!) talk to oranges. This would be a lot simpler with an Android device, but I don’t much care for Android; there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but I prefer Apple and iOS. My days of mucking about in the innards of computers were dealt their death blow sometime around the introduction of Windows 98 and despite my efforts back then to get more involved in IT at work, opportunities kind of dried up and what little knowledge I had quickly became obsolete. These days I just like the IT to get on with it for me, so poking around under the bonnet (or hood, for my North American audience – if any) is not for me.

That is not to say that I don’t try wiring devices together in the hope that there is some degree of compatibility. I mean it’s got to be easier than making the English see eye to eye with the French, right? I mean even if the different tech doesn’t communicate, at least one device won’t get snarky with the other? Right?

Plus, given that everything works over the Cloud, and that I can download Office 365 onto the iPad (I already have Outlook on it, so I can get my office emails when I want to), it should mean that I can work off the iPad instead – provided that I have Wi-Fi access. The Cloud version of Office 365 isn’t as flexible as the actual apps downloaded and installed on the machine, but it will do in a pinch (provided I’m not trying to do something *too* clever on an Excel workbook). I mean, what could go wrong?

Well, I’ll be trying it a bit later today, once I have the iPad more fully charged.

Like I said, what could possibly go wrong?

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Taut

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 10:39:25 GMT

I am no longer sure whether having pets is a good idea. I expect that I’ll get over it, but right now, I’m unsure.

I realised this morning as I was commuting to work, that my nerves were stretched taut. I know that we’ve been stressed since we lost Peppers last Saturday, but in some ways the initial grief is fading at least insofar as I can think about him without welling up almost immediately. It still gets me when I wander down the garden to check that the foxes haven’t got to his grave (they haven’t).

The stress and worry now, is for Moneypenny.

It’s hard to know what a cat is feeling, but it’s clear that she’s a little spooked and still baffled by the fact that her brother isn’t around. She goes outside a lot more than she used to (she hard started to go out more before he died, but it’s ramped up a lot since). We kept her in for a couple of days, but we can’t really do that forever, it wouldn’t be fair. She has also got more vocal (though they had both belatedly realised that we are more likely to react to sound than we are to distant, silent staring).

We’ve tried to keep her routine as close to the way it was before, but we have installed a cat bed in our bedroom and she is no longer confined to the kitchen at night. She can come upstairs with us if she wants company. But we get stressed when she is out of sight for any prolonged period. In recent weeks, she had taken to hiding somewhere in the house and staying there for hours. I thought I’d found that nest, but she clearly has a choice of them and I haven’t found the rest.

This morning she was clearly availing herself of one of these hidey-holes, so I didn’t see her at all between getting up and going to work. A week ago this wouldn’t have made me fret, but now it does. I don’t want (and probably couldn’t anyway) to stop her having her quiet spaces, but it does make me worry unreasonably when I don’t know where she is for an extended period of time.

The nerves have returned to normal now. I got a text telling me that she had suddenly appeared from *somewhere* upstairs about half an hour after I’d gone.

I’m sure that things will normalise over time, but for now I find myself wondering if pets are worth the stress.

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