TS Eliot's to do list
I have just been reading about prioritisation and to do lists, and they really sound most wonderful. I have decided to put them into action, forthwith,
AM - write The Wasteland
check spelling
post off to Ezra Pound
It is a shame about Ezra, obviously he has not heard about time management, otherwise he would be a really great poet, like I am.
Lunch - not sure about the peaches, they look a bit dodgy to me
PM - dash off some minor works
discover that my name is an anagram of toilets, and will cause endless merriement to countless generations of school children, while no one understands my great poems.
Consider various alternate options for my name,
DJ Eliot, the versifier
TS - author of the Wasteland - Eliot
Virginia Woolf
decide to stick to TS Eliot
attempt to think of toilet related anagrams for FR Leavis until,
Tea - that peach is still sitting there, it is starting to look decidedly manky. Who keeps buying all these peaches.
This is the way the day ends,
not with a bang, but with dinner
This poetry lark was fun, maybe tomorrow I should try politics.
Monday 29 December 2008
clench and relax
If you think about how a muscle works, you will tense the muscle, then you relax the muscle. It seems pretty intuitive that that is the right way for a muscle to work. If someone were to clench their fist, then try and clench it even tighter, and then keep on clenching it... You just know they would end up with a very sore hand or possibly even a damaged one.
But while it seems obvious how to treat a single muscle, it is not so obvious that perhaps just clenching tighter is not the way that we ought to behave towards ourselves. If you read up on time-management and all that sort of thing, often it just seems to be telling you, try really hard, then try a bit harder, then keep on trying, ...
I suppose that you either give up on this approach, because it is stupid, but you end up feeling like you have failed.
Alternatively, you attempt to carry on with this approach, but eventually your body starts giving up. Minor health niggles start to turn into major health niggles.
Basically, we can always push ourselves a bit harder, and squeeze in a bit more, but it does come at a cost, and you either repay that cost by giving yourself a break, or your body will start to stop working properly.
But giving yourself a break is not just having a kip on the train on the way home, or vegging out in front of the television. A break is making time for something that you enjoy and find worthwhile, and giving yourself enough of a break, with a clean enough conscience that you can actually enjoy it. Because, basically, if it is not fun, then you are not doing it properly.
Your body will have certain physical limits, often successful people have incredibly robust constitutions, so the fact that your boss never has sick leave, does not mean that you shouldn't either. You have to work within the limits of your own physical capabilities. Just like driving a car, you also have to listen to your body. If it is starting to flag, then ease up a little.
Learning to listen to your body is a vast art, that few of us ever trouble to master.
Much of it comes down to energy levels, when you are doing something enjoyable and worthwhile, you have more energy, when you are doing something dull and pointless, you have less energy.
Over the Christmas break, I have been trying to keep my daughters (two) busy, I have been doing this through allocating them tasks to do. I have found a few principles that seem to work
apply some structure - so chores in the morning, something creative in the afternoon
don't leave them doing something for more than an hour
check in regularly to see how they are getting on, and be very positive about what they are doing
support rather than criticise
mix up physical stuff with quieter activities, so if they are getting a little too boisterous, it might be time to settle down with something quieter.
if they are not happy, don't force it, but think about alternatives, perhaps they need to do something apart from each other
use opportunities to get them helping or interacting with other people, for example helping my wife in the kitchen
sit down and discuss possible things that they might do, to work out a bit of a list to last a few days
listen more than you tell
set an example of how you would like them to behave
This approach seems to be working well, sometimes I have great ideas, sometimes I have lousy ones, but by seeing what they enjoy, and always letting them shape the task to suit themselves, and giving them ownership of it, it is possible to steer them gently and keep them amused without being too prescriptive.
Like everything, if you are doing something well, it will often look effortless. So I stick a smile on my face, I am self deprecating, and really enthusiastic about what they do.
This approach is working well. I am sure that I would respond well to this sort of approach myself, either in a work environment or in a home environment.
And yet, I read these books, and they tell me that I need to be more organised, that I need to work harder, and smarter and try harder, and try smarter. These books suck the fun and meaning out of everything by reducing everything down to tasks. Like a man with a hammer, who sees every issue as a nail, task management sees everything as a task.
Are tasks so lovely, so much fun and so meaningful that we really want to see everything we do in the world as a series of tasks.
I have been writing about energy levels,
aligning the sort of work you do, to your prevailing energy level,
putting fun and recognition into what you do,
about interacting with people being what gives life meaning. In this moment, or the next one, can we make a positive difference to the people in our lives.
That is the sort of technique that we should be thinking about, something in bright colours that makes us smile and laugh. People do die, but it is not the worst that can happen, they might live a whole life without being happy first.
But while it seems obvious how to treat a single muscle, it is not so obvious that perhaps just clenching tighter is not the way that we ought to behave towards ourselves. If you read up on time-management and all that sort of thing, often it just seems to be telling you, try really hard, then try a bit harder, then keep on trying, ...
I suppose that you either give up on this approach, because it is stupid, but you end up feeling like you have failed.
Alternatively, you attempt to carry on with this approach, but eventually your body starts giving up. Minor health niggles start to turn into major health niggles.
Basically, we can always push ourselves a bit harder, and squeeze in a bit more, but it does come at a cost, and you either repay that cost by giving yourself a break, or your body will start to stop working properly.
But giving yourself a break is not just having a kip on the train on the way home, or vegging out in front of the television. A break is making time for something that you enjoy and find worthwhile, and giving yourself enough of a break, with a clean enough conscience that you can actually enjoy it. Because, basically, if it is not fun, then you are not doing it properly.
Your body will have certain physical limits, often successful people have incredibly robust constitutions, so the fact that your boss never has sick leave, does not mean that you shouldn't either. You have to work within the limits of your own physical capabilities. Just like driving a car, you also have to listen to your body. If it is starting to flag, then ease up a little.
Learning to listen to your body is a vast art, that few of us ever trouble to master.
Much of it comes down to energy levels, when you are doing something enjoyable and worthwhile, you have more energy, when you are doing something dull and pointless, you have less energy.
Over the Christmas break, I have been trying to keep my daughters (two) busy, I have been doing this through allocating them tasks to do. I have found a few principles that seem to work
apply some structure - so chores in the morning, something creative in the afternoon
don't leave them doing something for more than an hour
check in regularly to see how they are getting on, and be very positive about what they are doing
support rather than criticise
mix up physical stuff with quieter activities, so if they are getting a little too boisterous, it might be time to settle down with something quieter.
if they are not happy, don't force it, but think about alternatives, perhaps they need to do something apart from each other
use opportunities to get them helping or interacting with other people, for example helping my wife in the kitchen
sit down and discuss possible things that they might do, to work out a bit of a list to last a few days
listen more than you tell
set an example of how you would like them to behave
This approach seems to be working well, sometimes I have great ideas, sometimes I have lousy ones, but by seeing what they enjoy, and always letting them shape the task to suit themselves, and giving them ownership of it, it is possible to steer them gently and keep them amused without being too prescriptive.
Like everything, if you are doing something well, it will often look effortless. So I stick a smile on my face, I am self deprecating, and really enthusiastic about what they do.
This approach is working well. I am sure that I would respond well to this sort of approach myself, either in a work environment or in a home environment.
And yet, I read these books, and they tell me that I need to be more organised, that I need to work harder, and smarter and try harder, and try smarter. These books suck the fun and meaning out of everything by reducing everything down to tasks. Like a man with a hammer, who sees every issue as a nail, task management sees everything as a task.
Are tasks so lovely, so much fun and so meaningful that we really want to see everything we do in the world as a series of tasks.
I have been writing about energy levels,
aligning the sort of work you do, to your prevailing energy level,
putting fun and recognition into what you do,
about interacting with people being what gives life meaning. In this moment, or the next one, can we make a positive difference to the people in our lives.
That is the sort of technique that we should be thinking about, something in bright colours that makes us smile and laugh. People do die, but it is not the worst that can happen, they might live a whole life without being happy first.
Sunday 21 December 2008
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks
I bought this as one of the cheap paperbacks that you can get with the Times. The past few have all been more aimed at women, which probably reflects that fact that women buy and read books, whereas men presumably get magazines where you can look at the pictures.
Anyway, it was certainly a page turner. It kept you reading, it was never dull, and moved along in an engaging way. However, despite clearly being very clever, I really doubt whether the author was even alive at the time he was writing about, or whether he has ever met anyone from the working class. Not normally huge disadvantages, but when you are writing from the perspective of a working class person who gets a scholarship to a minor public school, it would help if you had some degree of understanding of the person and their background.
You do therefore have to choke back your critical facilties and suspend your disbelief to a huge extent. If you can manage that, you would probably enjoy the book.
One example can suffice, the protaginist comes from a very poor background, yet during the late seventies at university he has a car. During the early eighties, I only knew one university student who had a car. Without hefty parental support getting a driving license, or buying a car, were beyond the reach of pretty much everyone, without huge expenditure of time and effort.
It also fell into the pattern nowadays where in novels everything and everyone is notable. In real life everything and everyone is pretty mundane with exceptions so rare that they could be disregarded for all practical purposes. The protaginist is quite an engaging character, and it would have been more pleasurable if it had all ended happily. It reminds me of why I enjoy the Douglas Coupland books where nothing much happens, and folk are a little eccentric but nothing that outrageous.
I rather prefer books about people who are mad to be borderline insane themselves, like Patrick Hamilton or Malcolm Lowry, straining at the limits of reality. Rather than something that could easily enough be serialised without frightening anyone.
Random Quote - opening lines
"My name is Mike Engleby, and I'm in my second year at an ancient university. My college was founded in 1662, which means it's viewed here as modern. Its chapel was designed by Hawksmoor, or possibly Wren; its gardens were laid out by someone else whose name is familiar. The choir stalls were carved by the only woodcarver you've ever heard of."
I am guessing that the carver is Grinling Gibbons, but the point is that the writing does rather flatter you along the way, in a way that real life does not.
Anyway, it was certainly a page turner. It kept you reading, it was never dull, and moved along in an engaging way. However, despite clearly being very clever, I really doubt whether the author was even alive at the time he was writing about, or whether he has ever met anyone from the working class. Not normally huge disadvantages, but when you are writing from the perspective of a working class person who gets a scholarship to a minor public school, it would help if you had some degree of understanding of the person and their background.
You do therefore have to choke back your critical facilties and suspend your disbelief to a huge extent. If you can manage that, you would probably enjoy the book.
One example can suffice, the protaginist comes from a very poor background, yet during the late seventies at university he has a car. During the early eighties, I only knew one university student who had a car. Without hefty parental support getting a driving license, or buying a car, were beyond the reach of pretty much everyone, without huge expenditure of time and effort.
It also fell into the pattern nowadays where in novels everything and everyone is notable. In real life everything and everyone is pretty mundane with exceptions so rare that they could be disregarded for all practical purposes. The protaginist is quite an engaging character, and it would have been more pleasurable if it had all ended happily. It reminds me of why I enjoy the Douglas Coupland books where nothing much happens, and folk are a little eccentric but nothing that outrageous.
I rather prefer books about people who are mad to be borderline insane themselves, like Patrick Hamilton or Malcolm Lowry, straining at the limits of reality. Rather than something that could easily enough be serialised without frightening anyone.
Random Quote - opening lines
"My name is Mike Engleby, and I'm in my second year at an ancient university. My college was founded in 1662, which means it's viewed here as modern. Its chapel was designed by Hawksmoor, or possibly Wren; its gardens were laid out by someone else whose name is familiar. The choir stalls were carved by the only woodcarver you've ever heard of."
I am guessing that the carver is Grinling Gibbons, but the point is that the writing does rather flatter you along the way, in a way that real life does not.
what is the point of blogging?
Well, what is the point of blogging? I've been writing these blog entries for quite a while now, erraticaly of late, admitedly.
I suppose, at its most basic, I like writing stuff down, I find it a useful way to order my thoughts. It also helps to lodge ideas in my head, so that I can come back to them later.
It is also useful to keep myself in the habit of writing, just putting one word after another, is something of an art. Like most art, the art is in making it look easy and effortless.
I've mentioned before, for blogs, I stick strictly to the rule that they are written at one sitting, and once checked, they are uploaded and are immune from subsequent revision.
Looking back, I have worried away at some topics. I don't feel that I have really arrived anywhere useful thinking about criminology, maybe it is a topic for exploration through some short science-fiction stories. Crime and punishment seem quite straightforward, with issues in black and white, and right and wrong, but once you start to delve it becomes clear that substantial castles are built on insubstantial sand. Crime is what we want it to be, as a society, punishment is there to make society feel good about itself, more than to make criminals feel bad about themselves, or fit for re-entry into society.
Similarly I have worried away at investing in shares. In parallel I have thought about decision making. There is a strong link between the two. In order to invest in shares you need to make all sorts of decisions, on a constant basis. You need to balance competing priorities. You need to re-prioritise sometimes, or even reappraise your underlying strategy as the market changes.
If you had perfect foresight, you would invest completely in the share that would offer the best rate of return. However you do not have perfect foresight, so you need to adopt strategies that balance risk and reward. It is like going to a horse race and betting on a wide variety of horses in the same race, in order to make a return. In order to really understand what you are doing, you need to step back, and look at your decisions not as single decisions, but as components within a strategy of decision making. You are constantly trying to find fault with your underlying theories and strategics.
To elaborate my strategies,
I have an underlying belief that across economic cycles money invested in shares will continue to offer a worthwhile return.
However the economic cycle follows a sine curve, so if you buy at the top of one wave, you will not make a real return again until the top of the next wave.
It is difficult to know where you are exactly, but it is possible to get a gut feeling. For example for many businesses it was clear that the rate of acceleration was slowing a year ago. There was a frenzy and over-extension of credit, that felt unsustainable even then. We are now past the peak, and descending down. It is likely to be years before we reach the next peak, the absolute trough could even be a couple of years away.
As a small investor, you need to reduce dealing costs to a bare minimum, through not paying much commission, and not selling often. As long as commission is low, it is okay to buy often, as it gives you the benefit of pound cost averaging.
The only time you actually make money is when you sell, similarly the only time you lose money is when you sell at a loss, or the share is wiped out.
As a small investor your other disadvantage is that it is difficult to get a sufficiently diverse portfolio. You should have six or more different shares, but it is only worthwhile selling a thousand plus pounds worth of shares. The maths is easy enough, unless you have thousands you cannot invest effectively. You are just playing at it, and are excessively exposed to risk.
I tackled this by aiming for a thousand pound target in chosen shares, starting with a few. Each month I invest a hundred pounds, and this goes to whatever is short of the thousand pound target and looks to be a sound bet at the time.
I very seldom need to chose new shares to invest in, about once a year at my current rate of investment. I therefore have time to think about shares that I am interested in.
In order to be interesting, the following are essential
the business needs to be basically well run - if I don't have confidence in the business, if I feel they are making mistakes, then I don't touch them.
the business needs to be one that has a long term future, that will respond well, and take advantage of the changes to the world economy that I foresee.
the business needs to be totally unlike anything else I already have.
I do not look at the financial details in any detail. If it is getting to the stage where the business has failed and is getting broken up, I'm not likely to come away with any money anyway, whatever the accounts said.
I don't pay much attention to short term predictions. I cannot trade at that level.
I don't worry much about the PE ratio, I reinvest dividends, so whether I get capital growth, or dividend return, makes no difference anyway.
I do keep an eye on the following
large rises and falls across the market - daily
value of shares - weekly
general media coverage - ongoing
specific coverage of that particular business - when other factors suggest that I ought to.
Because all shares in the portfolio are monitored each week, from the purchase of the first hundred, by the time I have a thousand pounds worth of shares, I have been looking at the share weekly for a good year. Within that phase of the economic cycle, I therefore have a good understanding of the degree of volatility and return that the share is offering.
To date my biggest success has been British Energy, I always felt that basically it was well run, it had too big a share of an energy market, which was short on supply, and long on demand. Takeovers were always a possibility, which makes me feel that there is a quick return option available. Also it was overly volatile, rising or falling with great vigour. Clearly the market was taking an excessively short term view, so there were always opportunities to pick up cheap shares.
My biggest loss, Bradford and Bingley. Fortunately my gut feeling was that the business had no long term future, and I sold half my flotation shares for a decent amount, particularly as they had cost me nothing initially. However as they fell, I bought more, and bought into the rights issue. They are currently wiped out, and although the government might offer some return, it is far from certain.
There are clearly lessons here, I should have trusted my instincts and sold the lot. I should have either stopped buying or sold out as they fell, to retrieve something. However in fairness, the truly dire state of affairs was never really public knowledge, and the bank would never have been technically insolvent anyway, it was a cash flow issue, not a fundamental balance sheet one. Also in truth, Bradford and Bingley were less aggressive than some of the banks that have now been bailed out by the government. They were small enough to get nationalised, but too big to be allowed to fail. Also logically, the buy to let market could be more resilient than the usual mortgage market, as people lose their houses, they still need somewhere to stay, so buy to let could benefit over the next few years, for those who got in early.
However they clearly failed the basic tests, they were badly run, they had no long term future. They should not have been in my portfolio at all.
For the future, basically, I have what I already have, I am content with my current shares. My most recent addition was a European investment trust, to add diversity, but the pound -euro exchange rate is nosediving, so any purchase of European shares would currently be very expensive.
It is clearer what I would not touch. I never liked the banks, largely on the basis that I did not understand how they made money. Additionally, any business that the government has a stake in, is bound to be unpredictable, and they do have a poor record of respecting shareholder's rights. Retail is uncertain, they are all suffering, but obviously some will survive.
I suppose big infrastructure type businesses, that are immune to the downturn, so energy, water, transport, telecoms, outsourcing, ports, things that have an innate value whatever happens, and that you cannot particularly defer spending on.
Ideally now is the time to invest broadly, a third of the shares could be wiped out, a third might do nothing much, a third could do very well. So the more broad the portfolio, and the sounder the underlying businesses the better your chances. But clearly it is not a nil risk option.
Investing in shares is an interesting mix of disciplines, you need to appraise qualitative and quantitative data, and make decisions based on both. My instinct is to rely on qualitative data more than most.
We are constantly faced with making decisions based on conflicting disciplines. For example, a lot of my initial blogging was about different prioritisation techniques, for example the Get Things Done methodology.
Over time, I have come to realise that I actually like to alter my approach slightly. Some of this is just down to boredom, but some of it is down to the changing external environment.
There is a world of difference between prioritising a variety of large tasks that often don't need to be done quickly, or small tasks that need done quickly, or a mixture of both.
Additionally there is also the situation where there are more tasks than time available, and the return on doing tasks can vary dramatically, so something that was important yesterday might be irrelevant today.
Factor in that you have different energy levels, and different opportunities at different times. This is not a single list of discrete items, but a nuanced proposed strategy to maximise benefit from a finite resource, namely your limited time and energy.
There are considerable similarities between how you might approach these two problems, getting a return on investments of money, and getting a return on investments of personal work time.
Part of the point is that there is no optimum solution, there are strategies that are more likely to succeed, but that is certainly no guarantee.
This blog has really not ended up where I expected it to, that is probably the point of blogging, you don't end up where you expect to. But you can have a rant along the way, and maybe even learn something about yourself, and how you think about things.
I suppose, at its most basic, I like writing stuff down, I find it a useful way to order my thoughts. It also helps to lodge ideas in my head, so that I can come back to them later.
It is also useful to keep myself in the habit of writing, just putting one word after another, is something of an art. Like most art, the art is in making it look easy and effortless.
I've mentioned before, for blogs, I stick strictly to the rule that they are written at one sitting, and once checked, they are uploaded and are immune from subsequent revision.
Looking back, I have worried away at some topics. I don't feel that I have really arrived anywhere useful thinking about criminology, maybe it is a topic for exploration through some short science-fiction stories. Crime and punishment seem quite straightforward, with issues in black and white, and right and wrong, but once you start to delve it becomes clear that substantial castles are built on insubstantial sand. Crime is what we want it to be, as a society, punishment is there to make society feel good about itself, more than to make criminals feel bad about themselves, or fit for re-entry into society.
Similarly I have worried away at investing in shares. In parallel I have thought about decision making. There is a strong link between the two. In order to invest in shares you need to make all sorts of decisions, on a constant basis. You need to balance competing priorities. You need to re-prioritise sometimes, or even reappraise your underlying strategy as the market changes.
If you had perfect foresight, you would invest completely in the share that would offer the best rate of return. However you do not have perfect foresight, so you need to adopt strategies that balance risk and reward. It is like going to a horse race and betting on a wide variety of horses in the same race, in order to make a return. In order to really understand what you are doing, you need to step back, and look at your decisions not as single decisions, but as components within a strategy of decision making. You are constantly trying to find fault with your underlying theories and strategics.
To elaborate my strategies,
I have an underlying belief that across economic cycles money invested in shares will continue to offer a worthwhile return.
However the economic cycle follows a sine curve, so if you buy at the top of one wave, you will not make a real return again until the top of the next wave.
It is difficult to know where you are exactly, but it is possible to get a gut feeling. For example for many businesses it was clear that the rate of acceleration was slowing a year ago. There was a frenzy and over-extension of credit, that felt unsustainable even then. We are now past the peak, and descending down. It is likely to be years before we reach the next peak, the absolute trough could even be a couple of years away.
As a small investor, you need to reduce dealing costs to a bare minimum, through not paying much commission, and not selling often. As long as commission is low, it is okay to buy often, as it gives you the benefit of pound cost averaging.
The only time you actually make money is when you sell, similarly the only time you lose money is when you sell at a loss, or the share is wiped out.
As a small investor your other disadvantage is that it is difficult to get a sufficiently diverse portfolio. You should have six or more different shares, but it is only worthwhile selling a thousand plus pounds worth of shares. The maths is easy enough, unless you have thousands you cannot invest effectively. You are just playing at it, and are excessively exposed to risk.
I tackled this by aiming for a thousand pound target in chosen shares, starting with a few. Each month I invest a hundred pounds, and this goes to whatever is short of the thousand pound target and looks to be a sound bet at the time.
I very seldom need to chose new shares to invest in, about once a year at my current rate of investment. I therefore have time to think about shares that I am interested in.
In order to be interesting, the following are essential
the business needs to be basically well run - if I don't have confidence in the business, if I feel they are making mistakes, then I don't touch them.
the business needs to be one that has a long term future, that will respond well, and take advantage of the changes to the world economy that I foresee.
the business needs to be totally unlike anything else I already have.
I do not look at the financial details in any detail. If it is getting to the stage where the business has failed and is getting broken up, I'm not likely to come away with any money anyway, whatever the accounts said.
I don't pay much attention to short term predictions. I cannot trade at that level.
I don't worry much about the PE ratio, I reinvest dividends, so whether I get capital growth, or dividend return, makes no difference anyway.
I do keep an eye on the following
large rises and falls across the market - daily
value of shares - weekly
general media coverage - ongoing
specific coverage of that particular business - when other factors suggest that I ought to.
Because all shares in the portfolio are monitored each week, from the purchase of the first hundred, by the time I have a thousand pounds worth of shares, I have been looking at the share weekly for a good year. Within that phase of the economic cycle, I therefore have a good understanding of the degree of volatility and return that the share is offering.
To date my biggest success has been British Energy, I always felt that basically it was well run, it had too big a share of an energy market, which was short on supply, and long on demand. Takeovers were always a possibility, which makes me feel that there is a quick return option available. Also it was overly volatile, rising or falling with great vigour. Clearly the market was taking an excessively short term view, so there were always opportunities to pick up cheap shares.
My biggest loss, Bradford and Bingley. Fortunately my gut feeling was that the business had no long term future, and I sold half my flotation shares for a decent amount, particularly as they had cost me nothing initially. However as they fell, I bought more, and bought into the rights issue. They are currently wiped out, and although the government might offer some return, it is far from certain.
There are clearly lessons here, I should have trusted my instincts and sold the lot. I should have either stopped buying or sold out as they fell, to retrieve something. However in fairness, the truly dire state of affairs was never really public knowledge, and the bank would never have been technically insolvent anyway, it was a cash flow issue, not a fundamental balance sheet one. Also in truth, Bradford and Bingley were less aggressive than some of the banks that have now been bailed out by the government. They were small enough to get nationalised, but too big to be allowed to fail. Also logically, the buy to let market could be more resilient than the usual mortgage market, as people lose their houses, they still need somewhere to stay, so buy to let could benefit over the next few years, for those who got in early.
However they clearly failed the basic tests, they were badly run, they had no long term future. They should not have been in my portfolio at all.
For the future, basically, I have what I already have, I am content with my current shares. My most recent addition was a European investment trust, to add diversity, but the pound -euro exchange rate is nosediving, so any purchase of European shares would currently be very expensive.
It is clearer what I would not touch. I never liked the banks, largely on the basis that I did not understand how they made money. Additionally, any business that the government has a stake in, is bound to be unpredictable, and they do have a poor record of respecting shareholder's rights. Retail is uncertain, they are all suffering, but obviously some will survive.
I suppose big infrastructure type businesses, that are immune to the downturn, so energy, water, transport, telecoms, outsourcing, ports, things that have an innate value whatever happens, and that you cannot particularly defer spending on.
Ideally now is the time to invest broadly, a third of the shares could be wiped out, a third might do nothing much, a third could do very well. So the more broad the portfolio, and the sounder the underlying businesses the better your chances. But clearly it is not a nil risk option.
Investing in shares is an interesting mix of disciplines, you need to appraise qualitative and quantitative data, and make decisions based on both. My instinct is to rely on qualitative data more than most.
We are constantly faced with making decisions based on conflicting disciplines. For example, a lot of my initial blogging was about different prioritisation techniques, for example the Get Things Done methodology.
Over time, I have come to realise that I actually like to alter my approach slightly. Some of this is just down to boredom, but some of it is down to the changing external environment.
There is a world of difference between prioritising a variety of large tasks that often don't need to be done quickly, or small tasks that need done quickly, or a mixture of both.
Additionally there is also the situation where there are more tasks than time available, and the return on doing tasks can vary dramatically, so something that was important yesterday might be irrelevant today.
Factor in that you have different energy levels, and different opportunities at different times. This is not a single list of discrete items, but a nuanced proposed strategy to maximise benefit from a finite resource, namely your limited time and energy.
There are considerable similarities between how you might approach these two problems, getting a return on investments of money, and getting a return on investments of personal work time.
Part of the point is that there is no optimum solution, there are strategies that are more likely to succeed, but that is certainly no guarantee.
This blog has really not ended up where I expected it to, that is probably the point of blogging, you don't end up where you expect to. But you can have a rant along the way, and maybe even learn something about yourself, and how you think about things.
Sunday 7 December 2008
Dear rambling blog entry,
This weekend, I have been mostly, reading
Engleby, by Sebastian Faulks,
accordingly my head feels a little tight, probably because with increased age and decrepitude, my eyes are getting a little wonky. I'm certainly overdue to get my eyes tested, and I'm quietly confident that it will entail a change of prescription. Bifocal bottle bottoms - I think that is the technical term.
Anyway, it is not exactly kitchen sink drama, it does read rather like Evelyn Waugh called upon to portray the working classes, with decidedly limited success. Not entirely sure I could do much better, but I remember enough of the seventies to list huge numbers of annoying discrepancies in the book. However if you do just discount the idea that it is intended to accurately portray an era you lived through, it is an entertaining read. It is not obvious where it is going, it did rather look like it would do a John Le Carre Perfect Spy sort of thing, but that fizzled out. The protaginist is not exactly likeable, nor particularly unlikeable. I'll probably write a real review when I get the book finished. Not like the proper reviewers who can write a review without even reading the book.
While I've been busy with the obvious stuff the past few weekends, I have been remiss in failing to blog in sufficient volume.
Starting to get geared up for Christmas, work has been getting pretty busy, also doing some odds and ends of things too.
I was at a conference last week, and it got me thinking how much academics seem to fall into a particular type. They seem to see the world in terms of theories and references. A name forms a short-hand for a set of theories. Of course reality exists out there, but for the academic it is mediated through the lens of theory. It would be wrong to be too critical of the academic, because we all mediate our view of reality through our own particular lens. I realise in myself that I seek to construct a narrative explanation for things. I will then attempt to arrange the evidence to conform to that narrative. However I feel myself seeking to quietly omit the evidence that does not conform to the narrative, reality is forced into a mean little strait-jacket to conform to my optimistic, or pessimistic frame of mind.
The narrative then becomes a strait-jacket, failing to inform understanding, merely marshalling like facts together.
Perhaps there is some way to force a greater neutrality, an ambivalance, allowing the evidence to speak for itself.
We tend to create false dichotomies. Things are this, or they are not. Reality forced down into binary choices.
I am rather drawn to the wisdom of children, just playing about with things.
Engleby, by Sebastian Faulks,
accordingly my head feels a little tight, probably because with increased age and decrepitude, my eyes are getting a little wonky. I'm certainly overdue to get my eyes tested, and I'm quietly confident that it will entail a change of prescription. Bifocal bottle bottoms - I think that is the technical term.
Anyway, it is not exactly kitchen sink drama, it does read rather like Evelyn Waugh called upon to portray the working classes, with decidedly limited success. Not entirely sure I could do much better, but I remember enough of the seventies to list huge numbers of annoying discrepancies in the book. However if you do just discount the idea that it is intended to accurately portray an era you lived through, it is an entertaining read. It is not obvious where it is going, it did rather look like it would do a John Le Carre Perfect Spy sort of thing, but that fizzled out. The protaginist is not exactly likeable, nor particularly unlikeable. I'll probably write a real review when I get the book finished. Not like the proper reviewers who can write a review without even reading the book.
While I've been busy with the obvious stuff the past few weekends, I have been remiss in failing to blog in sufficient volume.
Starting to get geared up for Christmas, work has been getting pretty busy, also doing some odds and ends of things too.
I was at a conference last week, and it got me thinking how much academics seem to fall into a particular type. They seem to see the world in terms of theories and references. A name forms a short-hand for a set of theories. Of course reality exists out there, but for the academic it is mediated through the lens of theory. It would be wrong to be too critical of the academic, because we all mediate our view of reality through our own particular lens. I realise in myself that I seek to construct a narrative explanation for things. I will then attempt to arrange the evidence to conform to that narrative. However I feel myself seeking to quietly omit the evidence that does not conform to the narrative, reality is forced into a mean little strait-jacket to conform to my optimistic, or pessimistic frame of mind.
The narrative then becomes a strait-jacket, failing to inform understanding, merely marshalling like facts together.
Perhaps there is some way to force a greater neutrality, an ambivalance, allowing the evidence to speak for itself.
We tend to create false dichotomies. Things are this, or they are not. Reality forced down into binary choices.
I am rather drawn to the wisdom of children, just playing about with things.
Sunday 16 November 2008
Come Dine With Me
If this blog seems a little more distracted than usual, it is because I am typing it out while listening to Come Dine With Me, which I must confess is just about all I watch on tv these days. The commentary is delightfully catty, which saves me all the trouble of supplying a catty commentary to keep my family amused with. It does have the desperate air of a car crash some nights, when the guests really fail to gel. I had always thought that dinner parties sounded quite jolly and sophisticated, but Come Dine With Me, has helpfully disabused me of this notion, and I really don't think that I am missing out on much, sitting at home sucking on my frozen ready-meal.
All this credit crunch stuff hasn't half made the wall to wall property tosh tv seem a little bit irrelevant. Inexplicably rich people look at some houses, and then don't buy any of them. Or inexplicably rich people buy houses, and then sell them to make even more money. Or inexplicably rich people neglect their children to build a hideous piece of unliveable modernism in the middle of nowhere. Now that thousands are losing their jobs every week, all this gleeful conspicuous consumption just feels a little inappropriate.
At work, there was an interview themed week, carrying out five interviews on the Tuesday, and having an interview myself on the Wednesday. Enjoyable but gruelling. My energy levels do just go after a while. The interview that I was sitting was for a decent post, but they were interviewing over two days, so that could be as many as twelve candidates. I am not holding my breath waiting for someone to phone and offer me the post ! Though colleagues have all been rather sweet, asking about it, as if I was virtually a shoo in. I've applied for a run of promotions recently, this is the fourth, and the third interview, one post I did not get to interview. My performance at interview has improved hugely over the time, so in that respect it is not a wasted effort.
And it is Sunday evening, and tomorrow, I am back to work, for another day of interviewing staff. It is all getting very busy at work, and I am starting to regret volunteering for just so many things recently.
And, so, to bed, ....
All this credit crunch stuff hasn't half made the wall to wall property tosh tv seem a little bit irrelevant. Inexplicably rich people look at some houses, and then don't buy any of them. Or inexplicably rich people buy houses, and then sell them to make even more money. Or inexplicably rich people neglect their children to build a hideous piece of unliveable modernism in the middle of nowhere. Now that thousands are losing their jobs every week, all this gleeful conspicuous consumption just feels a little inappropriate.
At work, there was an interview themed week, carrying out five interviews on the Tuesday, and having an interview myself on the Wednesday. Enjoyable but gruelling. My energy levels do just go after a while. The interview that I was sitting was for a decent post, but they were interviewing over two days, so that could be as many as twelve candidates. I am not holding my breath waiting for someone to phone and offer me the post ! Though colleagues have all been rather sweet, asking about it, as if I was virtually a shoo in. I've applied for a run of promotions recently, this is the fourth, and the third interview, one post I did not get to interview. My performance at interview has improved hugely over the time, so in that respect it is not a wasted effort.
And it is Sunday evening, and tomorrow, I am back to work, for another day of interviewing staff. It is all getting very busy at work, and I am starting to regret volunteering for just so many things recently.
And, so, to bed, ....
Sunday 9 November 2008
Technical problem,
Technical Problem,
my website vanished yesterday!
Of course cogitating on things, and a quick check on the forums suggested a perfectly good approach to fixing things.
I had recently upgraded to RapidWeaver 4.2, and there was a slight problem with the download. So either the application file was slightly corrupted, or the document file that includes the website got corrupted when it was upgraded to the new format.
So I downloaded a new version of RapidWeaver 4.2, went into Cyberduck and deleted all the existing files on my website. Went into TimeMachine and pulled out a version of the document file from last week before I upgraded to RapidWeaver 4.2. Uploaded the whole lot again.
On testing, the whole thing seems tickety boo again.
When it comes to technical problems I really do like to work to a scenario of what the problem is, and then try and fix it, rather than the usual tech support approach of working through a short list of solutions, of gradually ascending severity.
However, had my website actually been terminally corrupted, I suppose I would just have set about creating a whole new one. To be honest I am getting a little bored with the current template. It has gained a fair bit of customisation, so it is now probably more a case of starting over again, rather than mild tweaks. I am starting to feel a little minded to create a whole new website from scratch. As ever with technical solutions, make do and mend works fine for a while, but more root and branch change is required from time to time.
my website vanished yesterday!
Of course cogitating on things, and a quick check on the forums suggested a perfectly good approach to fixing things.
I had recently upgraded to RapidWeaver 4.2, and there was a slight problem with the download. So either the application file was slightly corrupted, or the document file that includes the website got corrupted when it was upgraded to the new format.
So I downloaded a new version of RapidWeaver 4.2, went into Cyberduck and deleted all the existing files on my website. Went into TimeMachine and pulled out a version of the document file from last week before I upgraded to RapidWeaver 4.2. Uploaded the whole lot again.
On testing, the whole thing seems tickety boo again.
When it comes to technical problems I really do like to work to a scenario of what the problem is, and then try and fix it, rather than the usual tech support approach of working through a short list of solutions, of gradually ascending severity.
However, had my website actually been terminally corrupted, I suppose I would just have set about creating a whole new one. To be honest I am getting a little bored with the current template. It has gained a fair bit of customisation, so it is now probably more a case of starting over again, rather than mild tweaks. I am starting to feel a little minded to create a whole new website from scratch. As ever with technical solutions, make do and mend works fine for a while, but more root and branch change is required from time to time.
Findings by Kathleen Jamie
Another short review of a book that I have just finished.
A present from my uncle, Findings, by Kathleen Jamie is a selection of short essays. Kathleen is a poet and lecturer at St Andrews University, and the essays follow a rather particular style. They describe trips or observations, predominantly of the natural world, which then provide a prompt for more philosophical musings.
I suspect that there are probably quite a few books following this sort of template, looking for parallels I would suggest, Walden, Sweet Thames Run Softly by Robert Gibbing, or Richard Mabey.
Findings however is a consistently enjoyable and thoughtful book. My only caveat would be that as with the natural world, you do need to slow down your natural pace, and let yourself take it in, a chapter at a time, pausing for breath at times, reflecting, or quietly admiring a fine turn of phrase.
I will find space in my bookshelf, between Gibbing and Mabey, and look at things just a little differently from now on.
Random Quote- “When my mother fell ill, a doctor was called, and my mother always told me the same two things about the doctor - one, that he never sent a bill, and two, that he never entered the room. Not from snobbery or fear of contagion; it was how he made his diagnosis, how he gauged the severity of her disease.”
Page 107
A present from my uncle, Findings, by Kathleen Jamie is a selection of short essays. Kathleen is a poet and lecturer at St Andrews University, and the essays follow a rather particular style. They describe trips or observations, predominantly of the natural world, which then provide a prompt for more philosophical musings.
I suspect that there are probably quite a few books following this sort of template, looking for parallels I would suggest, Walden, Sweet Thames Run Softly by Robert Gibbing, or Richard Mabey.
Findings however is a consistently enjoyable and thoughtful book. My only caveat would be that as with the natural world, you do need to slow down your natural pace, and let yourself take it in, a chapter at a time, pausing for breath at times, reflecting, or quietly admiring a fine turn of phrase.
I will find space in my bookshelf, between Gibbing and Mabey, and look at things just a little differently from now on.
Random Quote- “When my mother fell ill, a doctor was called, and my mother always told me the same two things about the doctor - one, that he never sent a bill, and two, that he never entered the room. Not from snobbery or fear of contagion; it was how he made his diagnosis, how he gauged the severity of her disease.”
Page 107
Sunday 2 November 2008
long rambling blog entry
Normally I get up early, and write my blog when I have a nice quiet house to myself.
However, this week, I am writing my weekly blog entry before my Sunday tea, just as the weekend is on the way out.
It has been an odd few weeks and weekends lately. The past few weekends I have been helping out with planting bulbs across the local area. We did manage to get some extra volunteers the first week, but the weather has been so dismal since then that the volunteers must have all perfectly sensibly stayed in their beds. Nevertheless, the bulbs are now all safely in the ground where they should be, and with any luck a decent number will pop up in the new year, to brighten up some dull corners.
It is always a rather hopeful pursuit, the actual soil is often a mere skim of topsoil over builder's rubble, we always get the bulbs into the ground late in the year, casual vandalism, council mowing and weedkiller spraying all take their toll. So it is a bit like guerilla gardening, you rather do it, because you think that it is the right thing to do, and you rather hope that it might make a slight positive difference.
The weekends are so short, I tend to be a real meanie about agreeing to do anything. Simply for the selfish reason that I rather like having a free weekend to just potter and do whatever I like.
Anyway, after three weeks, the last of the bulbs are now in.
I have also been catching up on my large pile of newspapers, and others odds and ends of pottering. I have even caught up on some phone calls. We were using a cordless phone, which is great, but if you are on the phone for any length of time, it tends to beep politely a couple of times, and then cut you off. I really hate being curtailed like that, so I fished out an old phone from the loft, and it too is now plugged in to the spaghetti of wires, cables and dust, that lurks in the corner of the living room. I am sure that there must be a better way of organising all the cabling, but failing that, sticking a small table above it, so you cannot see it, does help.
Anyway, it is now possible to have a phone call for as long as you want, which is a vast improvement for catching up with people you like.
I have decided that it is winter, and to be honest have pretty much given up on the garden for the time being. Nothing much is doing out there, and it is a bit grim gardening with fingerless gloves on when the weather is this cold. The loft is also pretty grim in the cold too, so I'm finding stuff to do that means I can stay in the living room. Hence catching up on stuff.
Worth noting that my favourite plant in the garden at the moment is some teasel, which I have grown from seed. I did try and transplant some wild stuff, but it never took. So now I have some great towering spikey teasel, just outside my window. It will probably seed right across the whole street now! However it is a biennial, so you will have to be pretty slow with the weeding to get much bothered by it. There is a photo in my Flickr gallery.
At work things are starting to pick up, in fact things have rather moved on to a footing where I really don't know if I will be able to do what I am setting out to do, which is challenging/fun/worrying all at the same time.
Still looking for a promotion, but it is just a case of applying for things, while still trying to be spiffing at what I am getting paid to do too.
I am getting into all these free or cheap promotions with the Times, the book a week for £2.99 is pretty good, I got the last few. My wife reads far more quickly than I do, and she has raced through them most enjoyably. I have also just received the set of classic albums that they were promoting. I've only listened to the Doors so far, but I quite like trying out random stuff.
I have also just bought 12 Tales from Winter City, by the Young Republic, one of those random groups that I came across, and they have been rather growing on me for some time now. It is a US version of the Delgados, if that helps. Orchestral pop.
Otherwise, the credit crunch is really starting to bite, so really reining in the spending, and doing my best to be very canny. That said, there are plenty of people in far worse straits than me, I really don't have anything much to complain about.
I have been doing a bit of work on the downloads section of my website, I have added in a scan of a Future Shock that I wrote for 2000AD many many years ago, and just for ease a copy of the cover of that particular comic. I have also added a couple more stories to follow After the Burn which I wrote a while back. There is another short story, The Exquisite Corpse, which I finished a while back, and I'm now reasonably happy with. There are quite a few other bits and pieces that have not yet reached the stage of being sufficiently finished for web publication. With luck, over the winter, I'll work up some more material and put it onto my website. At present, my ambition is to work up enough material to self publish a book of short stories and poems. However I am not in any mad rush, keen just to write stuff that I really like, rather than worrying too much about it being like anything else.
However, this week, I am writing my weekly blog entry before my Sunday tea, just as the weekend is on the way out.
It has been an odd few weeks and weekends lately. The past few weekends I have been helping out with planting bulbs across the local area. We did manage to get some extra volunteers the first week, but the weather has been so dismal since then that the volunteers must have all perfectly sensibly stayed in their beds. Nevertheless, the bulbs are now all safely in the ground where they should be, and with any luck a decent number will pop up in the new year, to brighten up some dull corners.
It is always a rather hopeful pursuit, the actual soil is often a mere skim of topsoil over builder's rubble, we always get the bulbs into the ground late in the year, casual vandalism, council mowing and weedkiller spraying all take their toll. So it is a bit like guerilla gardening, you rather do it, because you think that it is the right thing to do, and you rather hope that it might make a slight positive difference.
The weekends are so short, I tend to be a real meanie about agreeing to do anything. Simply for the selfish reason that I rather like having a free weekend to just potter and do whatever I like.
Anyway, after three weeks, the last of the bulbs are now in.
I have also been catching up on my large pile of newspapers, and others odds and ends of pottering. I have even caught up on some phone calls. We were using a cordless phone, which is great, but if you are on the phone for any length of time, it tends to beep politely a couple of times, and then cut you off. I really hate being curtailed like that, so I fished out an old phone from the loft, and it too is now plugged in to the spaghetti of wires, cables and dust, that lurks in the corner of the living room. I am sure that there must be a better way of organising all the cabling, but failing that, sticking a small table above it, so you cannot see it, does help.
Anyway, it is now possible to have a phone call for as long as you want, which is a vast improvement for catching up with people you like.
I have decided that it is winter, and to be honest have pretty much given up on the garden for the time being. Nothing much is doing out there, and it is a bit grim gardening with fingerless gloves on when the weather is this cold. The loft is also pretty grim in the cold too, so I'm finding stuff to do that means I can stay in the living room. Hence catching up on stuff.
Worth noting that my favourite plant in the garden at the moment is some teasel, which I have grown from seed. I did try and transplant some wild stuff, but it never took. So now I have some great towering spikey teasel, just outside my window. It will probably seed right across the whole street now! However it is a biennial, so you will have to be pretty slow with the weeding to get much bothered by it. There is a photo in my Flickr gallery.
At work things are starting to pick up, in fact things have rather moved on to a footing where I really don't know if I will be able to do what I am setting out to do, which is challenging/fun/worrying all at the same time.
Still looking for a promotion, but it is just a case of applying for things, while still trying to be spiffing at what I am getting paid to do too.
I am getting into all these free or cheap promotions with the Times, the book a week for £2.99 is pretty good, I got the last few. My wife reads far more quickly than I do, and she has raced through them most enjoyably. I have also just received the set of classic albums that they were promoting. I've only listened to the Doors so far, but I quite like trying out random stuff.
I have also just bought 12 Tales from Winter City, by the Young Republic, one of those random groups that I came across, and they have been rather growing on me for some time now. It is a US version of the Delgados, if that helps. Orchestral pop.
Otherwise, the credit crunch is really starting to bite, so really reining in the spending, and doing my best to be very canny. That said, there are plenty of people in far worse straits than me, I really don't have anything much to complain about.
I have been doing a bit of work on the downloads section of my website, I have added in a scan of a Future Shock that I wrote for 2000AD many many years ago, and just for ease a copy of the cover of that particular comic. I have also added a couple more stories to follow After the Burn which I wrote a while back. There is another short story, The Exquisite Corpse, which I finished a while back, and I'm now reasonably happy with. There are quite a few other bits and pieces that have not yet reached the stage of being sufficiently finished for web publication. With luck, over the winter, I'll work up some more material and put it onto my website. At present, my ambition is to work up enough material to self publish a book of short stories and poems. However I am not in any mad rush, keen just to write stuff that I really like, rather than worrying too much about it being like anything else.
Saturday 25 October 2008
one big pyramid scheme
I have not written a blog entry about the recent financial upheavals, although I have been meaning to.
At first things had the grim logic of a horror film, of course the clues had been there, we had been cocky and arrogant, and now was the time of our come-uppance. Every morning the news seemed to be reporting something that was impossible, Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, and most shocking to me Halifax Bank of Scotland. You had dealt with these businesses all your life, you knew people that worked for them.
Then the news got a bit boring, basically the same sort of story every day, generally without any real insight or understanding.
Now the news media have turned the page, and are starting to do the human interest type stories, there is talk of JK Galbraith, 1929, and Keynesian economics. The latter on Radio Four granted.
We have started to hunker down for the long term.
I work to the assumption that markets following a gently rolling sine curve, with a general tendency to move upwards. However you can easily lose money by buying high, and selling low. The opportunities to make real money, rather than just trade on a rising market, require quite particular insight and opportunities.
With hindsight it is obvious that the rate of acceleration was diminishing, we were nearing the peak. Now we have even more obviously reached the peak, and like a cartoon character, after running fruitlessly on the spot for a second, we are now starting to plunge down.
The statistics are slow coming, but the old model, of borrow, spend, borrow to buy on a rising market, dinner parties and an end to the economic cycle, are now clearly gone.
More telling is the attitude, I can see it in myself, I have weaned myself off the desire to spend. Spending is a transitory pleasure, but in uncertain times it is safer to just leave that money unspent. We have that sort of extreme nervousness that means we don't know what to do, in uncertain times, often doing nothing is a pretty good option. Indecision reigns.
Suddenly we all feel poor.
We are all starting to re-balance our attitudes to spending, to having, to what we want. Perhaps we might begin to see more clearly that money is not an end in itself, and that we are capable of more than simply accumulating and passing on money. Strangely that score does not seem to count for so much now.
The test of any theoretical model is just how long it lasts. I have been patiently buying shares for a few years now, and sensed that we were at the top of the market, but still could not quite believe it. The recent upheavals have totally wiped out some of my shares, and left others worth vastly less. Generally you have not lost the money until you actually sell, or in the case of bank shares, till they get nationalised. Therefore there is some degree of theoretical comfort there. However my portfolio will never be quite the same again, and moving back into profit territory will need to await shares reaching rock bottom then climbing back up to current valuations. My older purchases will be in loss for a long long time, however anything that I buy now will hopefully turn a profit much sooner.
I reckon that the current recession will last around five years. Not exactly five years, but that sort of ball park figure. In the meantime the best strategy seems to be just buy big blue chip type shares. Now boring is good. Not every business will still be around in five years, but many of them will and they will be making profits. So diversity is good, boring is good, blue chip is good. Volatility is there for a reason. Volatility reflects uncertainty and ignorance. Small investors are simply not nimble enough to make money on volatile markets, they make money through pound cost averaging, buying shares when they are low, and out of favour.
We live in uncertain times, where once risk brought reward with little likelihood of failure, now risk simply means exposure to catastrophic consequences.
If we are not buying things because they are cheap, or they will make us a profit, then we need to think more carefully about what things are actually worth to us, and have the courage to continue to make those choices.
We were all caught up in a glorious pyramid scheme, we all bought in, and as long as more and more people kept on buying in, we all made money. But it was all bound to end. We had abandonned common sense. More and more people bought houses thinking that it was a one way bet, until house prices reached insane multiples of income, and traditional first time buyers were priced out of the market, replaced by highly leveraged buy to let investors. As with property, so with so many other things. We were caught up in a frenzy, thinking the old rules no longer applied. Buying into things we did not understand, thinking that investment was a one way bet, that credit was good, and capital was bad.
Looking back it seems so quaint now. Maybe it all will be different next time. Or maybe it will just take us a longer time to forget the lessons we have learnt.
At first things had the grim logic of a horror film, of course the clues had been there, we had been cocky and arrogant, and now was the time of our come-uppance. Every morning the news seemed to be reporting something that was impossible, Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, and most shocking to me Halifax Bank of Scotland. You had dealt with these businesses all your life, you knew people that worked for them.
Then the news got a bit boring, basically the same sort of story every day, generally without any real insight or understanding.
Now the news media have turned the page, and are starting to do the human interest type stories, there is talk of JK Galbraith, 1929, and Keynesian economics. The latter on Radio Four granted.
We have started to hunker down for the long term.
I work to the assumption that markets following a gently rolling sine curve, with a general tendency to move upwards. However you can easily lose money by buying high, and selling low. The opportunities to make real money, rather than just trade on a rising market, require quite particular insight and opportunities.
With hindsight it is obvious that the rate of acceleration was diminishing, we were nearing the peak. Now we have even more obviously reached the peak, and like a cartoon character, after running fruitlessly on the spot for a second, we are now starting to plunge down.
The statistics are slow coming, but the old model, of borrow, spend, borrow to buy on a rising market, dinner parties and an end to the economic cycle, are now clearly gone.
More telling is the attitude, I can see it in myself, I have weaned myself off the desire to spend. Spending is a transitory pleasure, but in uncertain times it is safer to just leave that money unspent. We have that sort of extreme nervousness that means we don't know what to do, in uncertain times, often doing nothing is a pretty good option. Indecision reigns.
Suddenly we all feel poor.
We are all starting to re-balance our attitudes to spending, to having, to what we want. Perhaps we might begin to see more clearly that money is not an end in itself, and that we are capable of more than simply accumulating and passing on money. Strangely that score does not seem to count for so much now.
The test of any theoretical model is just how long it lasts. I have been patiently buying shares for a few years now, and sensed that we were at the top of the market, but still could not quite believe it. The recent upheavals have totally wiped out some of my shares, and left others worth vastly less. Generally you have not lost the money until you actually sell, or in the case of bank shares, till they get nationalised. Therefore there is some degree of theoretical comfort there. However my portfolio will never be quite the same again, and moving back into profit territory will need to await shares reaching rock bottom then climbing back up to current valuations. My older purchases will be in loss for a long long time, however anything that I buy now will hopefully turn a profit much sooner.
I reckon that the current recession will last around five years. Not exactly five years, but that sort of ball park figure. In the meantime the best strategy seems to be just buy big blue chip type shares. Now boring is good. Not every business will still be around in five years, but many of them will and they will be making profits. So diversity is good, boring is good, blue chip is good. Volatility is there for a reason. Volatility reflects uncertainty and ignorance. Small investors are simply not nimble enough to make money on volatile markets, they make money through pound cost averaging, buying shares when they are low, and out of favour.
We live in uncertain times, where once risk brought reward with little likelihood of failure, now risk simply means exposure to catastrophic consequences.
If we are not buying things because they are cheap, or they will make us a profit, then we need to think more carefully about what things are actually worth to us, and have the courage to continue to make those choices.
We were all caught up in a glorious pyramid scheme, we all bought in, and as long as more and more people kept on buying in, we all made money. But it was all bound to end. We had abandonned common sense. More and more people bought houses thinking that it was a one way bet, until house prices reached insane multiples of income, and traditional first time buyers were priced out of the market, replaced by highly leveraged buy to let investors. As with property, so with so many other things. We were caught up in a frenzy, thinking the old rules no longer applied. Buying into things we did not understand, thinking that investment was a one way bet, that credit was good, and capital was bad.
Looking back it seems so quaint now. Maybe it all will be different next time. Or maybe it will just take us a longer time to forget the lessons we have learnt.
Sunday 19 October 2008
lessons from game design for making work more engaging
Just a thought, if you look at what makes a computer game interesting and engaging, then what does that tell you about
So I asked my daughters about what made a good computer game
includes activity or activities that you enjoy
Looking at these features, different people will have different preferences and these will inform that types of games that they like.
And so, you might have the patience for games that take a long time to complete, feeling that the rewards of new levels are compensation for the time you have invested. Alternatively you might prefer games like the Sims where you are nurturing and creating, where failure is less of an element of the gameplay. Your investment of time ends up bringing you additional responsibilities.
This is actually a pretty useful lense through which to look at different employees. Some people have very little desire for new challenges, as with Tetris, they have a straightforward task, which they find sufficiently engaging. Some people feel a need to compete, and value promotion beyond any of the other intrinsic qualities of the work, being willing to do pretty much anything if it advances them in their career ambitions. Some seek to build a role for themselves, achieving recognition and extra responsibilities.
Others seek a challenge, constantly seeking a task that is unfamiliar and difficult, not always expecting to succeed, but relishing the struggle.
The shortcoming of using this particular lense is that games are voluntary, whereas for most of us, jobs are compulsory. So although the model is pretty good on what motivates us, using it to consider what it is that demotivates us is a slightly different task.
I'll maybe have a think about why we give up on games in another posting, and consider what that tells us about what makes jobs unsatisfying.
- what kind of job you might enjoy most
- how employers should design engaging jobs
So I asked my daughters about what made a good computer game
includes activity or activities that you enjoy
- it changes or develops as you go on
- includes an element of challenge, for example to beat others, or to beat your personal best
- not too short
- not too long
- not too easy
- not too difficult
- should have a goal or point to it
- includes an element of problem solving, but not too much
- includes a competitive element
- it is easy to actually understand what the aim of the game is
- but the challenge lies in achieving that aim
- like chess, takes a short time to learn, but a lifetime to master - has depth
- provide new content that meets your curiosity and desire for novelty
Looking at these features, different people will have different preferences and these will inform that types of games that they like.
- For example your tolerance of failure, do you see a setback as a challenge, or are you sufficiently demotivated to give up
- For example, how patient are you
- For example, what is your attitude to risk, in a games context you are balancing risk with reward, are you content with how these are balance
And so, you might have the patience for games that take a long time to complete, feeling that the rewards of new levels are compensation for the time you have invested. Alternatively you might prefer games like the Sims where you are nurturing and creating, where failure is less of an element of the gameplay. Your investment of time ends up bringing you additional responsibilities.
This is actually a pretty useful lense through which to look at different employees. Some people have very little desire for new challenges, as with Tetris, they have a straightforward task, which they find sufficiently engaging. Some people feel a need to compete, and value promotion beyond any of the other intrinsic qualities of the work, being willing to do pretty much anything if it advances them in their career ambitions. Some seek to build a role for themselves, achieving recognition and extra responsibilities.
Others seek a challenge, constantly seeking a task that is unfamiliar and difficult, not always expecting to succeed, but relishing the struggle.
The shortcoming of using this particular lense is that games are voluntary, whereas for most of us, jobs are compulsory. So although the model is pretty good on what motivates us, using it to consider what it is that demotivates us is a slightly different task.
I'll maybe have a think about why we give up on games in another posting, and consider what that tells us about what makes jobs unsatisfying.
Saturday 18 October 2008
The Irresistable Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday
I will just take this opportunity to jot down a few impressions about the last book that I read,
The Irresistable Inheritance of Wilberforce,
by someone rejoicing in the rather unusual name of
Paul torday author of salmon fishing in the yemen,
which is clearly something of a mouthfull.
Normally I manage a blog entry a week, but I must be way short lately, hence this rather random blog. I don't read a lot now, but honestly this is not the first book that I have finished since starting this blog.
Also worth noting, I am surprised when I pick up a proper book now at just how many words there are, my fiction writing, as demonstrated in the downloads page, is tending towards the jewel like, seldom a thousand words on the same story, so a whole grown up book on one subject is something of a shock. Nevertheless I like what I am writing now, and intend to persist in my own style.
Anyway -Wilberforce - it is about a man who drinks himself to death, told in four chapters, which are in reverse chronological order.
Having said that, it really does not come across as a realistic account of alcoholism, I certainly enjoyed the book, but the overall sense was of someone with a certain sense of reality and their place in it, rather than the emotional helter-skelter of any serious addiction.
The main character came across as adolescent or slightly autistic, like Adrian Mole at stages, slightly baffled by the world around him,
I think that the main character actually is autistic as he does not accept the reality of other people, he merely sees them in terms of what they offer him, or as possessions. His childhood is loveless, but later he does make friends, but when offered the choice of friendship or something material he consistently fails to choose friendship.
So he betrays his business partner by selling the company from under him, then breaks away from him. He finds a father figure in Francis, but ends up buying his largely worthless wine, and leaving him to die neglected. He enters a circle of friends, and ends up marrying the fiance of a friend, and alienating them.
He never accepts responsibility for his choices, and does little to make amends or make the best of things.
In essence Wilberforce is a weak man, who mistakenly thinks that what you have is more important than who you actually are. He gains another man's wine collection and another man's wife, but fails to learn what it is that he truly responds to in them, a simple openness and offer of friendship.
Random Quote -
“I love wine. I have not always loved it, but I have made up for the woeful ignorance of the first thirty years of my life by the passion and intensity of my relationship with wine ever since. I need to be more precise: I very much like white burgundy, I am fond of some red burgundies, I have flirted with some excellent and intriguing wines from Tuscany: but I adore Bordeux.” page 26
Sunday 5 October 2008
the price of peace
I am just back from a short visit to Belfast. It is fair to say that it is a city of huge contrasts. I cannot think of anywhere else where I have been made to feel more welcome, or where I have been more apprehensive. Driving round the streets tells you one story, huge bridge shaped cranes at the docks, big enough to lift a ship, the loss of shipbuilding must have ripped the heart out of the place. Sectarian murals on the walls and gable ends, beautiful but deeply disconcerting. From the air it looked leafy and beautiful, on the ground much of it had an air of staunch working class-ness.
The taxi drivers, when asked, could tell you about when no one dared drive a taxi, when not knowing the name of a pub meant you came from the wrong side of the divide and could be fatal. There was still a wariness, but the more usual concerns of drunken students, and stag parties were starting to rear their head. The papers had a sense of heightened reality, there was an edge to disputes, government seemed to hang by a thread, but then it had hung by a thread for so long now, it was not alarming.
Speaking to people there was a lot of talk about growing maturity, recognising that a process might take decades. At first the opposing sides sit round a table, mainly trying to provoke each other, or rehearsing familiar arguments for the benefit of their electors. And in fairness that might never quite end. But as politicians are given real things to debate, and engage with, they have to start to work with each other.
Perhaps the price of peace is sitting round a table with people you have every reason to hate.
Perhaps the price of peace is the cost of regenerating areas, expensively creating hotels and attractions.
Perhaps the price of peace is the cost of early retirement for vast numbers of public servants to allow for the recruitment of staff better reflecting their community.
Extremism can only really flourish where people feel no other way of making their voice heard. When people stand by, in favour of a lesser evil. When people feel so completely disenfranchised that they feel no part of society.
I am sure that the lessons learnt in Northern Ireland could equally be applied across the world, patiently working towards a form of peace, re-establishing democracy as something with meaning, letting those who want to speak for their people do it through the ballot box and the husting. Putting opponents round the same table, and letting them start to shape their own future.
It was easy for the West to operate gun boat diplomacy, it will be harder, but ultimately more rewarding to try and create the sort of social change that puts democracy back in the hands of the people, brings people round tables, patiently rebuilding society. The strongest of men are those quietly and patiently working for peace, even when it does take generations.
The taxi drivers, when asked, could tell you about when no one dared drive a taxi, when not knowing the name of a pub meant you came from the wrong side of the divide and could be fatal. There was still a wariness, but the more usual concerns of drunken students, and stag parties were starting to rear their head. The papers had a sense of heightened reality, there was an edge to disputes, government seemed to hang by a thread, but then it had hung by a thread for so long now, it was not alarming.
Speaking to people there was a lot of talk about growing maturity, recognising that a process might take decades. At first the opposing sides sit round a table, mainly trying to provoke each other, or rehearsing familiar arguments for the benefit of their electors. And in fairness that might never quite end. But as politicians are given real things to debate, and engage with, they have to start to work with each other.
Perhaps the price of peace is sitting round a table with people you have every reason to hate.
Perhaps the price of peace is the cost of regenerating areas, expensively creating hotels and attractions.
Perhaps the price of peace is the cost of early retirement for vast numbers of public servants to allow for the recruitment of staff better reflecting their community.
Extremism can only really flourish where people feel no other way of making their voice heard. When people stand by, in favour of a lesser evil. When people feel so completely disenfranchised that they feel no part of society.
I am sure that the lessons learnt in Northern Ireland could equally be applied across the world, patiently working towards a form of peace, re-establishing democracy as something with meaning, letting those who want to speak for their people do it through the ballot box and the husting. Putting opponents round the same table, and letting them start to shape their own future.
It was easy for the West to operate gun boat diplomacy, it will be harder, but ultimately more rewarding to try and create the sort of social change that puts democracy back in the hands of the people, brings people round tables, patiently rebuilding society. The strongest of men are those quietly and patiently working for peace, even when it does take generations.
Sunday 28 September 2008
miffed
I'm miffed I did not get that job I applied for, which in my gut tells me, that I do really want to move on to a piece of work that will really challenge and engage me. To be honest it is not the money, or the status, it is just that I want to work on something that stretches and engages me.
HOWEVER - not challenging in the frequently used sense,
"this is a challenging post, which requires a good sense of humour"
which is translated as, you will have to be able to laugh about how stupid you were to take on the job in the first place, and it certainly is challenging, in the same way that repeatedly hitting your head off a brick wall is challenging.
At the moment I just feel that I am caught up in the rather dull process of stuff, rather than having the responsibility to make anything happen.
I suppose that I am getting clearer on where I want to be, and it is not too difficult to figure out how to get there, it is just a case of pressing on.
HOWEVER - not challenging in the frequently used sense,
"this is a challenging post, which requires a good sense of humour"
which is translated as, you will have to be able to laugh about how stupid you were to take on the job in the first place, and it certainly is challenging, in the same way that repeatedly hitting your head off a brick wall is challenging.
At the moment I just feel that I am caught up in the rather dull process of stuff, rather than having the responsibility to make anything happen.
I suppose that I am getting clearer on where I want to be, and it is not too difficult to figure out how to get there, it is just a case of pressing on.
Sunday 14 September 2008
Is regeneration a myth?
Is regeneration a myth?
I was at some event, and one of the people attending, someone who actually lived in one of these areas that was being regenerated, said that the best thing to do would simply be to knock down the whole place. These places are often deeply unloved, even by those that live there.
The money spent on regenerating some places, you could probably have gold plated them over the years. And yet they persist as deprived areas for generations, they were deprived when I was young, half a lifetime later, I come back and it is still the same places that are run-down despite the best efforts to regenerate and shed loads of money.
We are told that regeneration has worked, for example a run down but thriving community is regenerated with dockside houses for the middle classes, and some posh restaurants. Have you really regenerated anything, or is it just a landgrab by the middle classes, shoving aside those without money, to get new houses with nice views.
Or the gorbals gets art, big arty developments. But the south side of the Clyde still feels like a post-blitz city.
Is it handy in policy terms to lump together lots of deprived people into a deprived area, and then anything you do there, is well targeted at the most deprived. But is that good for anyone, you are not deprived because you live in a bad area, nor are you well off because you don't.
Are areas deprived, because it offends our refined middle class sensibilities.
People apparently loved the gorbals, but they knocked down the tenements to build high rises, and all sense of community was lost.
Central heating does not equal civilisation, you are not deprived living in Brideshead simply because the heating is something out of Evelyn Waugh. Similarly Cold Comfort Farm, is it deprived.
Is it just that some places are more flagrant in their deprivation, or do some communities just work better, being better designed and laid out, more livable and human. Do we all want to live round a village square, sitting on the deck chair watching the village cricket team.
Why do architects design housing that they would not live in themselves, for example council housing that is so grim that you would struggle to sell it on the open market. Tower blocks that are no more than a box to exist in.
Should our houses be boxes to thrive in, our communities big boxes to thrive in. Are we predictable little sprouting seeds that just need the barest of moist cloth to exist on, or something wilder and stranger that does not really know what it wants.
I was at some event, and one of the people attending, someone who actually lived in one of these areas that was being regenerated, said that the best thing to do would simply be to knock down the whole place. These places are often deeply unloved, even by those that live there.
The money spent on regenerating some places, you could probably have gold plated them over the years. And yet they persist as deprived areas for generations, they were deprived when I was young, half a lifetime later, I come back and it is still the same places that are run-down despite the best efforts to regenerate and shed loads of money.
We are told that regeneration has worked, for example a run down but thriving community is regenerated with dockside houses for the middle classes, and some posh restaurants. Have you really regenerated anything, or is it just a landgrab by the middle classes, shoving aside those without money, to get new houses with nice views.
Or the gorbals gets art, big arty developments. But the south side of the Clyde still feels like a post-blitz city.
Is it handy in policy terms to lump together lots of deprived people into a deprived area, and then anything you do there, is well targeted at the most deprived. But is that good for anyone, you are not deprived because you live in a bad area, nor are you well off because you don't.
Are areas deprived, because it offends our refined middle class sensibilities.
People apparently loved the gorbals, but they knocked down the tenements to build high rises, and all sense of community was lost.
Central heating does not equal civilisation, you are not deprived living in Brideshead simply because the heating is something out of Evelyn Waugh. Similarly Cold Comfort Farm, is it deprived.
Is it just that some places are more flagrant in their deprivation, or do some communities just work better, being better designed and laid out, more livable and human. Do we all want to live round a village square, sitting on the deck chair watching the village cricket team.
Why do architects design housing that they would not live in themselves, for example council housing that is so grim that you would struggle to sell it on the open market. Tower blocks that are no more than a box to exist in.
Should our houses be boxes to thrive in, our communities big boxes to thrive in. Are we predictable little sprouting seeds that just need the barest of moist cloth to exist on, or something wilder and stranger that does not really know what it wants.
Saturday 13 September 2008
thoughts on criminology #2
I have not troubled myself to re-read my blog posting on criminology, but I have that nagging feeling, that it is not quite right.
I suppose that I should change my perspective. Crime is not an issue that can usefully be understood on a personal/individual basis.
What we need to do is to create social environments in which people can prosper. Not everyone will do well, but there should be the capacity there for people to do well. It is easy enough to look at social environments that seem to work well, or point to ones that do not work well.
An underlying problem is that, in science your first instinct is to lock down all the variables, and then just work with one, and see how it impacts on your system. Within a social environment, you cannot lock down the membership. On the one hand you are working with free individuals, they are free to leave when they want to. If someone has done well for themselves, and they want to leave your area, then you cannot forbid this. On the other hand, if people are coming into the area, similarly you have little scope to vet them either.
However, although you are dealing with different individuals, you might well have a steady state, with the population staying within certain broad definitional parameters. By making positive changes, would it be possible to encourage the population towards a different equilibrium. More people staying, different people coming.
Is the key to simply create attractive places to live, that then become so popular that not just anyone can get in. Is exclusivity the answer?
While that might work for one area, does it just do so at the expense of another area. Is this just a zero sum game, where you chuck more resource at one area, attract the mobile and choosy, beggaring another neighbourhood, that has not had the money spent on it.
Maybe the key is to create an attractive neighbourhood, but one which has not arrived there on a cost free basis. You can live in the neighbourhood but the cost of doing so is ....
volunteering and participating
being neighbourly
donating money, if you cannot donate time
keeping your garden tidy, and maintaining your house
Perhaps it is possible to extrapolate a list of activities that contribute to the local community, and those that detract from the community. That is not to say that the virtuous never do anything that detracts from the community, or that merely doing certain activities makes you an asset to the community.
Activities that contribute to the local community
using the local shop
using public transport
using local amenities, such as schools, community centres, parks
walking a dog
cycling
gardening
maintaining your house
maintaining an interest in what goes on in your street
being open and accessible
speaking to neighbours, smiling at strangers
getting involved, attending, joining, helping to run local organisations
tidying up things a bit
looking out for people
keeping an attractive front garden
getting involved in local issues
knowing the prominent people in your local community
etc.
On the flip side, there are activities that detract from the community
parking a car in the street - everyone does it, but if everyone parked three cars in the street there would be no street
untidy front garden
dropping litter
not engaging in the local community
basically the negatives of all the positives.
There are time banks, which count up all the time people put into some activities, so that you can then draw upon other people's time and expertise, there is also peer pressure where people feel compelled to behave like everyone else. I think the latter might be a more productive way of encouraging behaviour.
Stepping back, how do you encourage a community to shift from one that is not working, over to one that is. How can you achieve this sort of social engineering, is it something that government can do, can anyone do it?
Alternatively, maybe the lesson is that you need to fight hard to keep neighbourhoods working, where they are working, because once they are broken, it is near impossible to fix them again. Like the broken window, once broken, it does not easily fix.
I suppose that I should change my perspective. Crime is not an issue that can usefully be understood on a personal/individual basis.
What we need to do is to create social environments in which people can prosper. Not everyone will do well, but there should be the capacity there for people to do well. It is easy enough to look at social environments that seem to work well, or point to ones that do not work well.
An underlying problem is that, in science your first instinct is to lock down all the variables, and then just work with one, and see how it impacts on your system. Within a social environment, you cannot lock down the membership. On the one hand you are working with free individuals, they are free to leave when they want to. If someone has done well for themselves, and they want to leave your area, then you cannot forbid this. On the other hand, if people are coming into the area, similarly you have little scope to vet them either.
However, although you are dealing with different individuals, you might well have a steady state, with the population staying within certain broad definitional parameters. By making positive changes, would it be possible to encourage the population towards a different equilibrium. More people staying, different people coming.
Is the key to simply create attractive places to live, that then become so popular that not just anyone can get in. Is exclusivity the answer?
While that might work for one area, does it just do so at the expense of another area. Is this just a zero sum game, where you chuck more resource at one area, attract the mobile and choosy, beggaring another neighbourhood, that has not had the money spent on it.
Maybe the key is to create an attractive neighbourhood, but one which has not arrived there on a cost free basis. You can live in the neighbourhood but the cost of doing so is ....
volunteering and participating
being neighbourly
donating money, if you cannot donate time
keeping your garden tidy, and maintaining your house
Perhaps it is possible to extrapolate a list of activities that contribute to the local community, and those that detract from the community. That is not to say that the virtuous never do anything that detracts from the community, or that merely doing certain activities makes you an asset to the community.
Activities that contribute to the local community
using the local shop
using public transport
using local amenities, such as schools, community centres, parks
walking a dog
cycling
gardening
maintaining your house
maintaining an interest in what goes on in your street
being open and accessible
speaking to neighbours, smiling at strangers
getting involved, attending, joining, helping to run local organisations
tidying up things a bit
looking out for people
keeping an attractive front garden
getting involved in local issues
knowing the prominent people in your local community
etc.
On the flip side, there are activities that detract from the community
parking a car in the street - everyone does it, but if everyone parked three cars in the street there would be no street
untidy front garden
dropping litter
not engaging in the local community
basically the negatives of all the positives.
There are time banks, which count up all the time people put into some activities, so that you can then draw upon other people's time and expertise, there is also peer pressure where people feel compelled to behave like everyone else. I think the latter might be a more productive way of encouraging behaviour.
Stepping back, how do you encourage a community to shift from one that is not working, over to one that is. How can you achieve this sort of social engineering, is it something that government can do, can anyone do it?
Alternatively, maybe the lesson is that you need to fight hard to keep neighbourhoods working, where they are working, because once they are broken, it is near impossible to fix them again. Like the broken window, once broken, it does not easily fix.
Why I have not bought Spore!
I was pretty excited about the Spore Creature maker, although truth be told I only made one creature. So I was pretty keen to get Spore when it did come out, my daughters certainly enjoy Sims so this seemed like something that they would also enjoy.
However on the day of the big release, it was not available for Mac, so that put me off for a day or two. Then the links to get a Mac version were down, and it was pretty opaque what the Mac system specifications were. There were a few good reviews on the US Apple store site, one bad one on the UK Apple Store. The reviews of Amazon were phenominally negative.
Wikipedia shed a little more light on things, and checking out some personal blogs via Technorati a bit more.
All in all an interesting story was unfolding, the professional reviews were overwhelmingly positive, a few caveats, maybe not historic, but certainly momentous. The wisdom of crowds was telling a different story
DRM DRM DRM
limited gameplay in some levels
not a lot to do throughout
certainly no classic
only three installations, and immense problems getting any tech support
bugs when playing
buggy installation
won't run unless on an admin account (apple - big deal for me, all users have separate accounts, we run three computers, and I run the only admin account myself)
still fuzzy what machines would actually run the software
The game has been in development forever, and being hyped up for longer, so it can hardly be a case of rushing it out. The more likely explanation seems to be that the game is a shell, albeit a buggy one, that will allow for further expansion packs. An undersea level that was in promos has not been released, and it looks like EA do acknowledge that expansion packs will come out.
After the slating that Apple and Microsoft have had for releasing buggy software, it looks like the media are giving EA games a free ride here, they have released software that is buggy, and difficult to install, providing dismal tech support, but the traditional media have given them glowing reviews, and fail to pick up on issues like all the negative Amazon reviews disappearing through a technical glitch. It would appear that traditional media, and established web media want the same old rules of hype it high, stack it high, sell it in shedloads, to apply. The people that actually shell out money are trying to subvert this message, there is a degree of hysteria, I am not sure that the DRM is that big a deal, or the Amazon glitch, but I am equally certain that this looks to be a shockingly buggy and problematic piece of software that has not attracted the glowing reviews over gameplay that would encourage me to take a chance with it.
I will just let this one run for a while, as they say, wait till it turns up in the bargain bins, or they manage to iron out the bugs.
Had this been Apple or Microsoft it would have been front page news, poor products are hard to forgive, but the games industry still seems to get away with releasing stuff that is bright and shiny, without getting probed on the substance. I hope that we are entering a new world, where companies need to impress lots of vocal customers, and not just a few privileged media folk. On recent performance the average Joes seem to have been much more astute here, and it is their advice that I will be following.
Saturday 30 August 2008
thoughts on housing
I have been meaning to write a blog entry on this for a while, but suspect that I'll not be able to sort my thoughts out fully.
Housing allocation is getting to be a major issue for local authorities now. In the era before right to buy, the housing stock was much easier to manage. Now the better stock tends to leave council ownership, so there are
private houses
mixed council owned, and right to buy housing
unattractive council housing that is not being bought.
For councils the main driver, metric, seems to be voids. Until there are a lot of voids, they don't seem to worry too much. However by the time that there are a lot of voids, it is probably too late, too expensive to do very much.
The problem with housing is that it is not just about providing people with a roof over their head. It is about providing them with an environment in which to live. An environment which will support or hinder them, with which they will interact positively or negatively.
Increasingly the junction between housing and police, or housing and social work is becoming key.
Councils have a reduced housing stock, so now far more of the people that they need to place are compulsory placings, and those without special needs, will find their way into private rentals, or simply stay where they are. So there is a far larger proportion of people with no choice to house, the former homeless to house, ex prisoners, etc.
There is always an element of social engineering in housing allocations. I suppose the council expects the good people to exert a positive influence. Too often it is the other way round and the negative influence becomes unbearable.
I think that the local authority needs to recognise that it is not simply in the business of renting out housing, working to the same metrics as any buy to let landlord, looking to avoid voids and ensure occupancy, with no real quality indicators.
Because their client base has changed, their business needs to change.
There needs to be vastly more emphasis on the social reintegration of people.
If the local authority believes that local residents are doing this, then it should pay them to do so. Maybe not directly, but what about a rebate on their council tax, or the provision of extra amenities for all. Put in some former homeless people, then ensure that the local police spend more time in the area, put a community pool in the local school, engage with local community groups. You need to create the sort of deal that the chinese do, a deal that works for both sides, so that it does not need to be tied up with legal paperwork, because no one would want to walk away from it.
Rather than the nimby argument, just put this somewhere else, communities should be offered such a good package that they want it.
Surprisingly Dounreay created a lot of jobs in a remote area, so by and large it was accepted positively by the local residents. With the right package, local communities will accept difficult choices. Local authorities need to treat communities as equal partners and engage with them in a meaningful way, a policy of simply imposing is wrong, imposing and listening, but not negotiating is wrong too, it needs to be a case of reaching agreement on what would be acceptable.
Because local authorities are in the business of social reintegration, they cannot just provide a roof over people's heads and hope that they get on with it. They need to create halfway houses, supported accomodation for far more people. Just as the elderly had sheltered housing, all sorts of groups would benefit from warden assisted housing. In some cases the warden would support, in some they would enforce, in most it would be a light touch that ensured neither support nor enforcement was called for. Bad things happen where no one is looking. The local authority need only have someone on the ground looking, and much will go much better.
These are modest proposals, but will require that local authorities take these issues out of their organisational silos, but until they start looking at the business they are actually in, they cannot deliver. Simply doing what you always did, simply gives you what you always got. Local authorities need to start doing different, and doing better.
Housing allocation is getting to be a major issue for local authorities now. In the era before right to buy, the housing stock was much easier to manage. Now the better stock tends to leave council ownership, so there are
private houses
mixed council owned, and right to buy housing
unattractive council housing that is not being bought.
For councils the main driver, metric, seems to be voids. Until there are a lot of voids, they don't seem to worry too much. However by the time that there are a lot of voids, it is probably too late, too expensive to do very much.
The problem with housing is that it is not just about providing people with a roof over their head. It is about providing them with an environment in which to live. An environment which will support or hinder them, with which they will interact positively or negatively.
Increasingly the junction between housing and police, or housing and social work is becoming key.
Councils have a reduced housing stock, so now far more of the people that they need to place are compulsory placings, and those without special needs, will find their way into private rentals, or simply stay where they are. So there is a far larger proportion of people with no choice to house, the former homeless to house, ex prisoners, etc.
There is always an element of social engineering in housing allocations. I suppose the council expects the good people to exert a positive influence. Too often it is the other way round and the negative influence becomes unbearable.
I think that the local authority needs to recognise that it is not simply in the business of renting out housing, working to the same metrics as any buy to let landlord, looking to avoid voids and ensure occupancy, with no real quality indicators.
Because their client base has changed, their business needs to change.
There needs to be vastly more emphasis on the social reintegration of people.
If the local authority believes that local residents are doing this, then it should pay them to do so. Maybe not directly, but what about a rebate on their council tax, or the provision of extra amenities for all. Put in some former homeless people, then ensure that the local police spend more time in the area, put a community pool in the local school, engage with local community groups. You need to create the sort of deal that the chinese do, a deal that works for both sides, so that it does not need to be tied up with legal paperwork, because no one would want to walk away from it.
Rather than the nimby argument, just put this somewhere else, communities should be offered such a good package that they want it.
Surprisingly Dounreay created a lot of jobs in a remote area, so by and large it was accepted positively by the local residents. With the right package, local communities will accept difficult choices. Local authorities need to treat communities as equal partners and engage with them in a meaningful way, a policy of simply imposing is wrong, imposing and listening, but not negotiating is wrong too, it needs to be a case of reaching agreement on what would be acceptable.
Because local authorities are in the business of social reintegration, they cannot just provide a roof over people's heads and hope that they get on with it. They need to create halfway houses, supported accomodation for far more people. Just as the elderly had sheltered housing, all sorts of groups would benefit from warden assisted housing. In some cases the warden would support, in some they would enforce, in most it would be a light touch that ensured neither support nor enforcement was called for. Bad things happen where no one is looking. The local authority need only have someone on the ground looking, and much will go much better.
These are modest proposals, but will require that local authorities take these issues out of their organisational silos, but until they start looking at the business they are actually in, they cannot deliver. Simply doing what you always did, simply gives you what you always got. Local authorities need to start doing different, and doing better.
thoughts on criminology
I have been reading a criminology Reader, I like to read up on the theory of a policy area when I get started, and a Reader is actually a pretty good way of doing it.
Basically a Reader assembles a lot of key texts into the same book, so that lecturers can simply ask students to get the Reader, and then they can ask them to compare the theories of different writers. Thereby saving the task of hunting down articles in obscure journals.
Well this is Criminological Perspectives - essential readings, by Eugene McLaughlin, John Muncie, and Gordon Hughes.
What do I make of it so far? It is incredibly dense, even for a reader, which obviously will assemble short texts from a variety of writers and times, on a variety of related subjects. In the past I have found readers on Cities/urbanism, a lot easier to read. That said it is useful, just not something that you can casually pick up and read. I rather like the way that reading all these different theories, is like humour, subtly rearranging your sense of what is real, and what you think.
It is clear that criminology is a discipline without compelling paradigms, that is, unlike say economics, there is not an overarching theoretical framework that everyone can at least agree on.
In part this is because it is the subject deals with people, and people are variable. In part it is because, like archaeology, the lens through which the subject is viewed, is a very subjective one. What is crime? Is middle class crime, the same as working class crime, the same as upper class crime. Is an act criminal because it harms others, or because it harms society. Is the undetected crime still crime, what about the unreported crime?
Often people use a discussion of crime as an arena to discuss something else, such as the class struggle.
On the basis of my reading so far, I am struck by the theory that crime is a prioritisation of short term gain over long term costs. Thus the drug addict is a criminal, and any ultimate conviction is not relevant. What is relevant is the ultimate harm to the individual and society. The criminal frame of mind is to live in the present, seeking short term pleasures. Thus drugs and drink associate themselves with the criminal frame of mind. That is not to say that everyone who drinks is a criminal, or that it is wrong to seek short term pleasures. However the theory is that by excessively seeking the short term, failing to apply restraint or postpone gratification, you tend more towards the criminal frame of mind. This intuitively applies to the scale that runs from decent hard working people at one end, to the feckless and selfish at the other, regardless of class or background.
Another problem in criminology is that you tend to assume that everyone operates in the way that you think you do, a sort of extended empathy. However people can live such different lives that we cannot use our own lives as a reference point. For example for those caught up in the gang culture, there are few points of similarity with most of our lives. Clearly this is not a society based on money or the pursuit of money, it is a society based on respect. These are often people who feel that they lack status and respect, and such activity is a way of gaining respect among their peers. The currency is respect and humiliation. Often the behaviour is intimidating just because it is supposed to be, it is supposed to intimidate and humiliate others, because the participants feel that they are humilated by society. When respect and humiliation are the currency, you take what you can when the opportunity presents itself. Are recent muggings really based on monetary gain, or simply the pleasure in humiliating the victim.
But the currency in that culture does not readily translate into currency in the wider society. There is a divide, you might choose to succeed in that culture, or in the wider society, but not in both. You end up deciding which tribe to belong to and which rules to play by.
Of course all the theory in the world is no good if it does not take you anywhere. On the individual level, or the tribal level, how can you change, should you change.
There has to be freedom of choice, we cannot constrain people and compel them to do as we do. However, it is possible to offer better choices. When should we do this? Most criminal activity is caused by people in their teens, most of these people are set on this path earlier in life. So improving the job prospects in an area will not directly affect the cohort you are trying to impact on, except to the extent that it affects their family environment. However improving the schooling in an area, supporting families in the area, will have a much more direct affect.
We need to look at what works, look at people who do well in the area, look at organisations that are decent, families that do well. As much effort needs to go into support for those that are not a problem, as trying to sort out those that are. Their good example, and good work can ripple outwards. Some people will always choose a criminal path, and there might well be little that they can teach us. We need to focus on those that simply run with the crowd, which is always the majority.
Basically a Reader assembles a lot of key texts into the same book, so that lecturers can simply ask students to get the Reader, and then they can ask them to compare the theories of different writers. Thereby saving the task of hunting down articles in obscure journals.
Well this is Criminological Perspectives - essential readings, by Eugene McLaughlin, John Muncie, and Gordon Hughes.
What do I make of it so far? It is incredibly dense, even for a reader, which obviously will assemble short texts from a variety of writers and times, on a variety of related subjects. In the past I have found readers on Cities/urbanism, a lot easier to read. That said it is useful, just not something that you can casually pick up and read. I rather like the way that reading all these different theories, is like humour, subtly rearranging your sense of what is real, and what you think.
It is clear that criminology is a discipline without compelling paradigms, that is, unlike say economics, there is not an overarching theoretical framework that everyone can at least agree on.
In part this is because it is the subject deals with people, and people are variable. In part it is because, like archaeology, the lens through which the subject is viewed, is a very subjective one. What is crime? Is middle class crime, the same as working class crime, the same as upper class crime. Is an act criminal because it harms others, or because it harms society. Is the undetected crime still crime, what about the unreported crime?
Often people use a discussion of crime as an arena to discuss something else, such as the class struggle.
On the basis of my reading so far, I am struck by the theory that crime is a prioritisation of short term gain over long term costs. Thus the drug addict is a criminal, and any ultimate conviction is not relevant. What is relevant is the ultimate harm to the individual and society. The criminal frame of mind is to live in the present, seeking short term pleasures. Thus drugs and drink associate themselves with the criminal frame of mind. That is not to say that everyone who drinks is a criminal, or that it is wrong to seek short term pleasures. However the theory is that by excessively seeking the short term, failing to apply restraint or postpone gratification, you tend more towards the criminal frame of mind. This intuitively applies to the scale that runs from decent hard working people at one end, to the feckless and selfish at the other, regardless of class or background.
Another problem in criminology is that you tend to assume that everyone operates in the way that you think you do, a sort of extended empathy. However people can live such different lives that we cannot use our own lives as a reference point. For example for those caught up in the gang culture, there are few points of similarity with most of our lives. Clearly this is not a society based on money or the pursuit of money, it is a society based on respect. These are often people who feel that they lack status and respect, and such activity is a way of gaining respect among their peers. The currency is respect and humiliation. Often the behaviour is intimidating just because it is supposed to be, it is supposed to intimidate and humiliate others, because the participants feel that they are humilated by society. When respect and humiliation are the currency, you take what you can when the opportunity presents itself. Are recent muggings really based on monetary gain, or simply the pleasure in humiliating the victim.
But the currency in that culture does not readily translate into currency in the wider society. There is a divide, you might choose to succeed in that culture, or in the wider society, but not in both. You end up deciding which tribe to belong to and which rules to play by.
Of course all the theory in the world is no good if it does not take you anywhere. On the individual level, or the tribal level, how can you change, should you change.
There has to be freedom of choice, we cannot constrain people and compel them to do as we do. However, it is possible to offer better choices. When should we do this? Most criminal activity is caused by people in their teens, most of these people are set on this path earlier in life. So improving the job prospects in an area will not directly affect the cohort you are trying to impact on, except to the extent that it affects their family environment. However improving the schooling in an area, supporting families in the area, will have a much more direct affect.
We need to look at what works, look at people who do well in the area, look at organisations that are decent, families that do well. As much effort needs to go into support for those that are not a problem, as trying to sort out those that are. Their good example, and good work can ripple outwards. Some people will always choose a criminal path, and there might well be little that they can teach us. We need to focus on those that simply run with the crowd, which is always the majority.
Diary type entry
I'll just tuck this sort of diary stuff into a separate blog entry, to try and keep things a little neater. After last weekend, the working week has felt a bit of a struggle. Not in a bad way, just that it took me a fair while catching up on my sleep and getting back into a routine after being out on the Saturday night.
Not an incredibly busy week, but pretty steady, I tend to measure these things by meetings, so there were a couple of meetings where I was simply attending/supporting, which was fine. A couple of pretty informal ones where I was just meeting people. And one where I ended up sorting out the agenda and chairing.
This last meeting was our branch meeting, there have been quite a few changes lately, and a few more coming up, so there was a feeling in the air that we needed to get together to discuss. That said, I was not convinced that an informal structure would work, so I pushed for an agenda, and was offered the chance to chair, which I took up. I tend to chair a meeting, in pretty much the same way that I facilitate a meeting. That is, I like everyone to get a chance to speak, and I see it as my role to ensure that the quieter voices get heard, and the louder voices let them. Actually it went pretty well.
I also had a meeting with my mentor, something that has been arranged through work, and had been in the planning stage for ages, but now that it has got going is really excellent. I suppose every mentoring arrangement is different, but I find this a useful sounding board, and having discussed approaches, I then feel committed to actually do what I promised to do. So in terms of personal development, it is a useful motor to get me to try and push myself. The chairing the branch meeting was one of those things, I could have simply sat back, but there was that little voice saying, this is the sort of developmental thing that it would be good to do. If you think you are promotion material, you need to be demonstrating the skills.
I'm applying for another job, which actually looks pretty good, though challenging. However I am not going to die in a ditch if I don't get it. Simply get some feedback on my performance, and try and do better the next time. To be honest I am more focussed on extra salary as something that will impact on my pension, than as take home pay at the moment. Although, like everyone else, money is starting to get pretty tight.
Yesterday, went quickly. By the time you get through the big pile of chores, and walk the dog, and relax a bit, it is time for bed.
Trying to find things that we can watch together with the girls, which currently covers upto a 12 certificate. So yesterday we saw an Outer Limits episode, Demon with the Glass Hand, and Terminator 3. A bit of an opportunity to compare and contrast classic science fiction with a more modern version. For those that have not seen the Outer Limits episode, it is an absolute classic, it won awards, and was written by Harlan Ellison. I think it is even credited in Terminator, and used the same building that much of Bladerunner is set in.
Spent the afternoon in the garden, a bit iffy for mowing the lawn, but plenty of trimming and weeding to do. This year just seems to be a year of trimming and weeding and not much time for anything else. That said, when the weather is fine, there is no better place to be than pottering in the garden. I have grown a pair of wormwood bushes from seed, and one is full of bugs. Gratifying to see that it also has a few very happy ladybirds, getting all lethargic from a constant diet of aphids. I suppose we need to offer the habitat if we want to keep the nature.
Not an incredibly busy week, but pretty steady, I tend to measure these things by meetings, so there were a couple of meetings where I was simply attending/supporting, which was fine. A couple of pretty informal ones where I was just meeting people. And one where I ended up sorting out the agenda and chairing.
This last meeting was our branch meeting, there have been quite a few changes lately, and a few more coming up, so there was a feeling in the air that we needed to get together to discuss. That said, I was not convinced that an informal structure would work, so I pushed for an agenda, and was offered the chance to chair, which I took up. I tend to chair a meeting, in pretty much the same way that I facilitate a meeting. That is, I like everyone to get a chance to speak, and I see it as my role to ensure that the quieter voices get heard, and the louder voices let them. Actually it went pretty well.
I also had a meeting with my mentor, something that has been arranged through work, and had been in the planning stage for ages, but now that it has got going is really excellent. I suppose every mentoring arrangement is different, but I find this a useful sounding board, and having discussed approaches, I then feel committed to actually do what I promised to do. So in terms of personal development, it is a useful motor to get me to try and push myself. The chairing the branch meeting was one of those things, I could have simply sat back, but there was that little voice saying, this is the sort of developmental thing that it would be good to do. If you think you are promotion material, you need to be demonstrating the skills.
I'm applying for another job, which actually looks pretty good, though challenging. However I am not going to die in a ditch if I don't get it. Simply get some feedback on my performance, and try and do better the next time. To be honest I am more focussed on extra salary as something that will impact on my pension, than as take home pay at the moment. Although, like everyone else, money is starting to get pretty tight.
Yesterday, went quickly. By the time you get through the big pile of chores, and walk the dog, and relax a bit, it is time for bed.
Trying to find things that we can watch together with the girls, which currently covers upto a 12 certificate. So yesterday we saw an Outer Limits episode, Demon with the Glass Hand, and Terminator 3. A bit of an opportunity to compare and contrast classic science fiction with a more modern version. For those that have not seen the Outer Limits episode, it is an absolute classic, it won awards, and was written by Harlan Ellison. I think it is even credited in Terminator, and used the same building that much of Bladerunner is set in.
Spent the afternoon in the garden, a bit iffy for mowing the lawn, but plenty of trimming and weeding to do. This year just seems to be a year of trimming and weeding and not much time for anything else. That said, when the weather is fine, there is no better place to be than pottering in the garden. I have grown a pair of wormwood bushes from seed, and one is full of bugs. Gratifying to see that it also has a few very happy ladybirds, getting all lethargic from a constant diet of aphids. I suppose we need to offer the habitat if we want to keep the nature.
Sunday 24 August 2008
do - learn - do better
As predicted a few blog entries ago, I did not get that post I applied for. Not much surprise, they were in a rush to fill it, so they would have phoned up and offered the post to their candidate within the day, so the fact that I had not got a call, pretty much confirmed that I had not got the post.
But I do feel ready to get my teeth into something more challenging than what I am doing now. It would be easy enough to get depressed by being knocked back, and give up trying, but ...
Maybe I just need to set myself a goal of getting a new post, tackle it like any other project. Part of the challenge is that as you move up the grades you move away from doing what you are told to do, more onto setting your own agenda and then trying to bring people along with you. I know that I would be good at something more challenging, but the problem around convincing someone else that I am the best person for their job.
Gone are the days when you sat back on your seniority and earnt a promotion through being around for long enough. Just my luck! Now that I have the seniority, they don't want it anymore!
Still, just pick myself up, dust myself down, and throw myself back into the fray, or
do - learn - do better
But I do feel ready to get my teeth into something more challenging than what I am doing now. It would be easy enough to get depressed by being knocked back, and give up trying, but ...
- being good at interviews is different from being good at the job, I will be vastly better at the job than I am at interview
- I can always get better at doing interviews
- what ever I am not doing terribly well, I can address
- you don't need to win every battle, the odd battle is fine
Maybe I just need to set myself a goal of getting a new post, tackle it like any other project. Part of the challenge is that as you move up the grades you move away from doing what you are told to do, more onto setting your own agenda and then trying to bring people along with you. I know that I would be good at something more challenging, but the problem around convincing someone else that I am the best person for their job.
Gone are the days when you sat back on your seniority and earnt a promotion through being around for long enough. Just my luck! Now that I have the seniority, they don't want it anymore!
Still, just pick myself up, dust myself down, and throw myself back into the fray, or
do - learn - do better
the weather is the best of policemen
I am probably a bit more distracted than usual, as I was out with the Strathclyde police last night, seeing how they police the Glasgow night time economy. They do quite a lot of these tours for people, letting them see at first hand how to police a major British city.
It is only fair to say that I have been apprehensive about the trip for some time, but on the night it was hugely informing and I would recommend it to anyone. The police have been working with various partners to ensure that the city is well lit, well covered by CCTV, safe zones exist with orderly taxi queues and paramedics on hand.
Of course with all the technology and police in the world, the weather can still be the best of policemen, the night was cool and wet, so folk drifted off home steadily, rather that waiting for the mass mayhem of all exiting clubs at 3am in the morning.
By the time that you had seen the initial briefing, seen people watching vast concave walls of CCTVs, control staff directing the troops on the ground, you could not help feeling that this was a well ordered process, with people knowing their roles and very effectively keeping control of what could be mayhem. It was also clear that the police themselves relished the work, they were on the front line, perhaps getting overtime, they knew what they had to do, and that if required their back up would be with them within a minute, in that sense they were the biggest and best organised gang on the street.
I got back home after 3am, and slept soundly in my bed.
It is only fair to say that I have been apprehensive about the trip for some time, but on the night it was hugely informing and I would recommend it to anyone. The police have been working with various partners to ensure that the city is well lit, well covered by CCTV, safe zones exist with orderly taxi queues and paramedics on hand.
Of course with all the technology and police in the world, the weather can still be the best of policemen, the night was cool and wet, so folk drifted off home steadily, rather that waiting for the mass mayhem of all exiting clubs at 3am in the morning.
By the time that you had seen the initial briefing, seen people watching vast concave walls of CCTVs, control staff directing the troops on the ground, you could not help feeling that this was a well ordered process, with people knowing their roles and very effectively keeping control of what could be mayhem. It was also clear that the police themselves relished the work, they were on the front line, perhaps getting overtime, they knew what they had to do, and that if required their back up would be with them within a minute, in that sense they were the biggest and best organised gang on the street.
I got back home after 3am, and slept soundly in my bed.
Monday 18 August 2008
dealing with the world the way that it is, while managing to subtly move it in the direction of where we think that it ought to be
Things have been all very busy lately, with much that is strange and new. So I have fallen out of my normal routine, spending more time on things than I normally might, and doing things that I normally might not.
I set myself a sort of target to do a blog entry a week, but seeing as I have missed a couple of Saturday's, I posted a short story that I wrote a while back by way of recompense. I'm not sure what anyone else will think about it, but reading it now, with enough time elapsed for me to have forgotten the detail of it, I still think that it reads very well. It is so difficult to get perspective on what you write, it is easy to be over-critical, and as soon as you are familiar with something, it is impossible to be objective. You really need to be able to look at something with a stranger's eyes. So with my stranger's eyes, I still like it, so content to upload it here.
Part of the point of writing a weekly blog is that it rather forces me to loosen up on what I write, my self imposed target is to write something every week, and that just forces you to write something/anything. My other stipulation is that I write it, check it, then upload it. So it is not something that is considered and redrafted and reconsidered and redrafted, just something done and up there. Quite refreshing to do something with such low expectations.
We are coming to the end of the holiday season, so the girls go back to school, a couple of colleagues are off on a final week of leave, but all will be back to normal before too long. I've not really made much of the holidays, there was the stay-cation, which was all very nice, and plenty of ad hoc days off, but all very low key. Once again, I have failed to sort out all the problems of the world. But modest progress has been made. There has been a major push clearing junk out of the loft and now the long hard slog of making best use of it. I'm buying storage boxes from IKEA, and thinking about how best to store all sorts of things. I want to find ways of storing things such that they are accessible, but reasonably compact. So there are all manner of processes in hand,
1 work through stuff to get rid of the third to half that is actually rubbish
2 source better storage options for the remainder
3 put like with like, so that it becomes obvious when enough of something tips over into too much
I am used to jobs that you can actually split into tasks and project plan, but sorting out the loft is not really like that, you can identify near future stuff to do, but as you work on, it creates opportunities, and demands new solutions, so you never quite know where you are going, but you do have a direction of travel. I guess that a lot of stuff is like that really, more a direction of travel, than a clear project.
Other stuff, I was helping out at a couple of events that someone else was running. This meant reading up on a new policy area, meeting some new folk, and working with some new stakeholders. All positive stuff. However I am part of a pool of volunteers that help out with events, and despite there being something like a hundred people in the pool, only two of us volunteered! I guess that most people don't enjoy these things the same way that I do. Anyway, a chance to work with some bright sparky people, and do something different for a couple of days. The downside is being shattered by all the travel, but hey ho.
Also trying to get my head round what I need to do this week, when various colleagues are off. After being distinctly not busy, a gradual head of work has been piling up, and I now have ample stuff to get on with, some of which is even getting worryingly old and needs pretty urgent action. I would like to see a bit more structure to things, but with luck I can start to push things along in that direction. It would be wonderful to deal with the world the way that we think that it ought to be, but the real trick is in dealing with the world the way that it is, while managing to subtly move it in the direction of where we think that it ought to be. This is self effacing stuff, less about you, than quietly and gently achieving your vision.
The garden progresses, a wet year, so beyond keeping on top of the weeding, and the mowing, there has not been much terribly dramatic this year. I could easily spend a week out there, and really get the garden more how I would like it to be. However there is probably another solid week of work in sorting out the loft, as well as a week of painting and fixing stuff round the house exterior. Giving myself credit, I have felted the shed roof, painted the bathroom, pushed on the loft vastly, and over the past year made a step change in the household IT set up. I'm never exactly idle!
I set myself a sort of target to do a blog entry a week, but seeing as I have missed a couple of Saturday's, I posted a short story that I wrote a while back by way of recompense. I'm not sure what anyone else will think about it, but reading it now, with enough time elapsed for me to have forgotten the detail of it, I still think that it reads very well. It is so difficult to get perspective on what you write, it is easy to be over-critical, and as soon as you are familiar with something, it is impossible to be objective. You really need to be able to look at something with a stranger's eyes. So with my stranger's eyes, I still like it, so content to upload it here.
Part of the point of writing a weekly blog is that it rather forces me to loosen up on what I write, my self imposed target is to write something every week, and that just forces you to write something/anything. My other stipulation is that I write it, check it, then upload it. So it is not something that is considered and redrafted and reconsidered and redrafted, just something done and up there. Quite refreshing to do something with such low expectations.
We are coming to the end of the holiday season, so the girls go back to school, a couple of colleagues are off on a final week of leave, but all will be back to normal before too long. I've not really made much of the holidays, there was the stay-cation, which was all very nice, and plenty of ad hoc days off, but all very low key. Once again, I have failed to sort out all the problems of the world. But modest progress has been made. There has been a major push clearing junk out of the loft and now the long hard slog of making best use of it. I'm buying storage boxes from IKEA, and thinking about how best to store all sorts of things. I want to find ways of storing things such that they are accessible, but reasonably compact. So there are all manner of processes in hand,
1 work through stuff to get rid of the third to half that is actually rubbish
2 source better storage options for the remainder
3 put like with like, so that it becomes obvious when enough of something tips over into too much
I am used to jobs that you can actually split into tasks and project plan, but sorting out the loft is not really like that, you can identify near future stuff to do, but as you work on, it creates opportunities, and demands new solutions, so you never quite know where you are going, but you do have a direction of travel. I guess that a lot of stuff is like that really, more a direction of travel, than a clear project.
Other stuff, I was helping out at a couple of events that someone else was running. This meant reading up on a new policy area, meeting some new folk, and working with some new stakeholders. All positive stuff. However I am part of a pool of volunteers that help out with events, and despite there being something like a hundred people in the pool, only two of us volunteered! I guess that most people don't enjoy these things the same way that I do. Anyway, a chance to work with some bright sparky people, and do something different for a couple of days. The downside is being shattered by all the travel, but hey ho.
Also trying to get my head round what I need to do this week, when various colleagues are off. After being distinctly not busy, a gradual head of work has been piling up, and I now have ample stuff to get on with, some of which is even getting worryingly old and needs pretty urgent action. I would like to see a bit more structure to things, but with luck I can start to push things along in that direction. It would be wonderful to deal with the world the way that we think that it ought to be, but the real trick is in dealing with the world the way that it is, while managing to subtly move it in the direction of where we think that it ought to be. This is self effacing stuff, less about you, than quietly and gently achieving your vision.
The garden progresses, a wet year, so beyond keeping on top of the weeding, and the mowing, there has not been much terribly dramatic this year. I could easily spend a week out there, and really get the garden more how I would like it to be. However there is probably another solid week of work in sorting out the loft, as well as a week of painting and fixing stuff round the house exterior. Giving myself credit, I have felted the shed roof, painted the bathroom, pushed on the loft vastly, and over the past year made a step change in the household IT set up. I'm never exactly idle!
Bad Star Back
I have been a bit remiss lately in posting my blog, so by way of recompense, I attach a short story that I wrote a while back. I hope that you like it,
Peter
-----------------
Bad Star Back
Our breaths mingle, maybe she is dead already. But I'm starting at the end, when I should be starting at the beginning.
I had to leave town in a hurry, there was a misunderstanding. An incident with a broken bottle. Easiest by far that I just got out of town until it all blew over.
So I went to John with my tail between my legs, he didn't like me, never liked me. He thought I was a pisshead, and he was probably right. But I never drank when we went out, and I was not enough of a pisshead for that to cause insurmountable problems. He huffed and puffed, and sighed and twitched, but we both knew that he would sign me on, so we went through the pointless charade, like monkeys establishing a hierarchy.
There were not many of us, just John, Jenny, the other John, Mike and myself.
John was in charge, he had tenure, in the sterile confines of academia tenure is god. Jenny went out with John, so that was pretty good for her too. I don't imagine that this was a particularly exclusive arrangement for him, with tenure, and god status, you could pretty much make up the rules to suit yourself, and no one would particularly object. The other John thought that if he brown-nosed and tagged along for long enough then one day he too would get tenure. He had been a moderately promising student a long time ago, now he has pissed away even more of his life than I had. Waiting for the modest crumbs that fell from the table, forever scuttling about on the bottom rung of the ladder, fated to never climb that ladder, and too long there for anything else to ever be practical. And Mike kept the Landrover running. Oily and quiet, never said much. He was the best of us.
Of course there was no real opportunity to speak of. We were a million miles away from anything that mattered. Some longitudinal geo surveys had been running since nineteen oatcake, and no one had the balls to pull the plug on them. Of course the methodology was questionable, the data almost certainly worthless, and never cited, but still it was collected routinely. I had come out here with the rest of them, and had drifted away, dispirited by the utter pointlessness of our existance. Infected with that pointlessness I had simply drifted on, drinking too much, and before long, had rendered myself too poor and talentless to manage to get away. And in the way of these things, it must have been what I had wanted.
We assembled at a rendezvous on the edge of town, I had a single shapeless canvas rucksack, and a rigid metal case for the cameras and lenses. As long as I failed to lose them, I had a slender means of support. I was early, I always am. The other John arrived next, and looked at me sullenly, as if any association with someone as disreputable as myself was a personal affront to him. I persisted in making small talk on the grounds that I knew it was annoying him, and the more sullen he became, the more polite and reasonable I became. Then Mike came along, and as Mike and engines went together like two sides of the same oily coin, the Landrover appeared next. John and Jenny were in the front seats.
Still buoyed by my chirpy good nature, I asked for a window seat, and was met with such sullen silence that I just mooched from then on. John made a point of kicking at my rucksack, expecting it to clink of bottles, although he knew that I never took alcohol on any of these trips. We sat in the back, John driving, with Mike beside him. The rest of us in the back like queezy children.
I hate travelling, we stopped after half a dozen miles, although I had been asking for a stop for most of them, and I threw up royally. Nothing to do with the drink, I just cannot travel. However the rest went back to sullenly ignoring me. I did not care. I felt like death warmed up, my stomache heaving, and my head throbbing. I did not care one iota about them, and barely cared whether I lived or died. There was a reason I had dropped out of these trips.
Pissing against a sand dune, piss uncovering something in the sand. Not a stone, not a lizard. Too still for a lizard, I stopped peeing on it, and pulled it out, getting my hand wet. It was a carving. Not just any carving, it was a lizard, but not like a carving. It was too realistic, like a lizard caught in a photo, artless and still.
I took it back to the Landrover. The others were unimpressed. Maybe they thought I had bought it in the market before we left. On my lap, I looked at it. There was something deeply wrong about it. This was not something that someone had made, not someone human. It was too strange and everyday, god had done this.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It wasn't a routine trip at all, that was why John had not been too choosy about me coming. He needed someone with the cameras I just came along with them. Back in the old country, where they read papers that are new, and can drink water out of the taps, a comet or something had been tracked. We were closest to it by a long margin, and they wanted someone to go out and have a look. Of course it was nothing to do with us. And in academic tradition, knowledge comes in two depths, infinite or zero. That was not our field, so we knew nothing, and cared less. But funders paid his wages, and you could sell a network of trained and flexible scientists to funders, so John had to borrow some equipment, head out into the desert and pretend to like it.
I did not have to pretent anything. Neither did the others, but at the end of the day, we got an overgenerous daily rate, and we never did anything but hang around, so we came along too.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We were only a day out and things started to go wrong, nothing you could put a finger on. Jenny looked out the windows like a woman possessed. Her eyes tracking back and fore following things we could not see. At first we had asked if there was anything out there, what she saw, but all she did was complain about the brightness, and look out all the more.
John pulled out a coffee sticky geiger counter, switched it on, it went off the scale. Then he switched it off and back on, and it just registered background radiation. He put it back in its box, and never took it out again.
Mike took to spending more and more time each night with his head under the bonnet. We always travelled by the grace of Mike, but the Landrover was a tank, it should have been gobbling up these miles. Instead it lurched and grinded on, the electrics seemed all shot to hell.
We each retreated into our own private worlds. I felt like I was dying, I always do when I travel. I did not care. The others, had their own private torments to contend with.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We ate our meal of baked beans, flakey and dry. The sky darkened, as the modest fire started to dwindle. I had gathered some dried scrub earlier, simply for something to do. There was no point in saying that we should give up, they all hated me, and saying it, would simply manoevre them into wanting to go on. Best to just remain quiet. Jenny was wall eyed with panic, gazing into the dark following imaginary shapes out there.
The other John spoke first, "I know that this is important and all, but it's not as if it is core project or anything."
He waited for some faint echo of support, finding none, he reluctantly pushed on. "It's not as if we are expecting to find anything, bit of a wild goose chase, and all that. If we damage the equipment or anything, we do risk scuttling the core project. You know what a comet is anyway, just a dirty snow ball, what we going to find out here, some burnt dirt if we're lucky."
John's eyes narrowed, he had not reacted when the other John started to speak, and it was not clear now whether he had heard him or was indeed replying to him now. "This place is tough, tougher than tough. The hardest, harshest environment in the world. If there is something here that needs done, we do it."
I stood up and walked off into the dark, we were going on. That much was obvious.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next day we found her. Driving along one of the flatter bits, a pile of rags, fluttering in the wind. But we stopped, and in the rags, congealed with blood, she lay. Skin wrinkled, like something old and worn smooth by time, she lay just moving, like a cat breathing.
The others were indifferent to her, you often found the dead or the dying out here, I had a bottle of water, and tried to move her into a position where she could drink. We did not have much water to spare, and she was as good as dead anyway, it was a pointless gesture. The others had decided to take this stop as an impromptu toilet break. That was cold, even for them.
Moving her head, something fell onto me, something heavy. I moved the rags, there was something amongst them, like a stone, I picked apart the scabbed rags, it was stone, peeled of the cloth, it was stone, something carved, like a hand. She was holding a carved hand. Probably found it out here, and thought it might be worth something.
I pulled at it, but she held on tight, ...
Then I realised, she was not holding the bloody thing, it was attached to her. Her hand was made out of stone. Pulling back her sleeves, tearing at them, her arm changed to stone, and her hand was stone, too bloody to tell what kind, but smooth and old, no wonder she was dying.
Her people had left her out here to die. No wonder, what could you do, what can any of us do, faced with such things.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We argued a lot then. But I thought John was an idiot, I can't be bothered with most people, John even less. He thought I was worthless. It was not much of an argument. I wanted to take her, he wanted to press on. The others said nothing. Jenny still wall eyed with panic, Mike tinkering with the Landrover electrics, the other John, something dead in his eyes, like he knew something, the ship was already holed below the waterline, but the captain was blind to it.
He hauled my rucksack out the back, it fell heavily, pulled out the cameras and threw the back gate shut again.
The deal was that they would come back to pick me up. We all knew it was a lie. There was little chance of finding me again. The Landrover was on its last legs.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I could have watched the Landrover disappear into the distance, that would have been dramatic. I didn't. I checked the water that I had been hiding in my rucksack. That was why I had so much stuff lying loose in the back of the Landrover, I had been stashing water almost from the outset. Of course I had not been planning for this. Just another pointless act of rebellion.
The loose clothing, and paperbacks, John had kicked them out onto the sand. I gathered up my stuff.
Here I was. Here I stayed.
I cradled her head. Her eyes were cloudy, her breath was like the tide lapping.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That night I burnt much of what I had. It was cold, I did not expect to last another day. A little comfort. Looking deep into the burning papers, and clothing, that cloying sooty smoke. I was so beyond tired, so beyond sore. Then looking out beyond the fire, I began to see what Jenny had seen. Shapes, without shape, coloured without colour. Like some mathematical function performed on our reality. I was seeing something out there, something I could not understand, it had no sense, beyond the sense that it was huge and unknowable.
It was not dangerous. It was just totally indifferent. The cliff edge cares not whether you throw yourself off it. It is completely indifferent to you. As was this. It was alive in the way that the sea is, or plate tectonics, alive but so completely alien, that it is whole orders of magnitude unknowable.
I could feel Jenny in my mind, she was scared of it, she saw something you could neither understand nor master. There was panic in her. Panic so unreasonable and vast that it dwarfed everything else. She lived in a world of panic. A world coloured by panic, that tasted of panic. A fearful world, forcing her in on herself, turning her inwards, and making her pebble small.
The fire died before the soot did. We were black with it, it lined out mouths and noses, I started to cough.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I started to cough, I retched and it felt like something was tearing, and then all of a sudden, a flush of mucus and blood, and in it a pebble. But not just a pebble, it was the same as her bloody hand. I was coughing up stone.
She turned slightly, and spoke,
"Bad star, bad star back.'
I fell back, this body was broken and dying, it was time for a new one.
The sand dunes swithered in my sooty eyes, the comet was turning us to stone, the comet had been here before, it had turned us to stone before, long ago, countless times, times beyond times, we had all turned to stone before. We had turned to stone, and been worn down, worn down to sand, the sand around us.
Her people had not abandonned her, they were here with her, all around her.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I began to feel peace, I could not fight the ocean tides, but I could see them for what they were, and see my place in them. Rich and strange, infinitely rich and infinitely strange. I felt a peace that was beyond language, beyond meaning. I drew breath, and cradled her head, our breaths mingled, as the strange began to seem commonplace, and the commonplace strange, letting go, I no longer felt the tide tugging, as it started to carry me.
Peter
-----------------
Bad Star Back
Our breaths mingle, maybe she is dead already. But I'm starting at the end, when I should be starting at the beginning.
I had to leave town in a hurry, there was a misunderstanding. An incident with a broken bottle. Easiest by far that I just got out of town until it all blew over.
So I went to John with my tail between my legs, he didn't like me, never liked me. He thought I was a pisshead, and he was probably right. But I never drank when we went out, and I was not enough of a pisshead for that to cause insurmountable problems. He huffed and puffed, and sighed and twitched, but we both knew that he would sign me on, so we went through the pointless charade, like monkeys establishing a hierarchy.
There were not many of us, just John, Jenny, the other John, Mike and myself.
John was in charge, he had tenure, in the sterile confines of academia tenure is god. Jenny went out with John, so that was pretty good for her too. I don't imagine that this was a particularly exclusive arrangement for him, with tenure, and god status, you could pretty much make up the rules to suit yourself, and no one would particularly object. The other John thought that if he brown-nosed and tagged along for long enough then one day he too would get tenure. He had been a moderately promising student a long time ago, now he has pissed away even more of his life than I had. Waiting for the modest crumbs that fell from the table, forever scuttling about on the bottom rung of the ladder, fated to never climb that ladder, and too long there for anything else to ever be practical. And Mike kept the Landrover running. Oily and quiet, never said much. He was the best of us.
Of course there was no real opportunity to speak of. We were a million miles away from anything that mattered. Some longitudinal geo surveys had been running since nineteen oatcake, and no one had the balls to pull the plug on them. Of course the methodology was questionable, the data almost certainly worthless, and never cited, but still it was collected routinely. I had come out here with the rest of them, and had drifted away, dispirited by the utter pointlessness of our existance. Infected with that pointlessness I had simply drifted on, drinking too much, and before long, had rendered myself too poor and talentless to manage to get away. And in the way of these things, it must have been what I had wanted.
We assembled at a rendezvous on the edge of town, I had a single shapeless canvas rucksack, and a rigid metal case for the cameras and lenses. As long as I failed to lose them, I had a slender means of support. I was early, I always am. The other John arrived next, and looked at me sullenly, as if any association with someone as disreputable as myself was a personal affront to him. I persisted in making small talk on the grounds that I knew it was annoying him, and the more sullen he became, the more polite and reasonable I became. Then Mike came along, and as Mike and engines went together like two sides of the same oily coin, the Landrover appeared next. John and Jenny were in the front seats.
Still buoyed by my chirpy good nature, I asked for a window seat, and was met with such sullen silence that I just mooched from then on. John made a point of kicking at my rucksack, expecting it to clink of bottles, although he knew that I never took alcohol on any of these trips. We sat in the back, John driving, with Mike beside him. The rest of us in the back like queezy children.
I hate travelling, we stopped after half a dozen miles, although I had been asking for a stop for most of them, and I threw up royally. Nothing to do with the drink, I just cannot travel. However the rest went back to sullenly ignoring me. I did not care. I felt like death warmed up, my stomache heaving, and my head throbbing. I did not care one iota about them, and barely cared whether I lived or died. There was a reason I had dropped out of these trips.
Pissing against a sand dune, piss uncovering something in the sand. Not a stone, not a lizard. Too still for a lizard, I stopped peeing on it, and pulled it out, getting my hand wet. It was a carving. Not just any carving, it was a lizard, but not like a carving. It was too realistic, like a lizard caught in a photo, artless and still.
I took it back to the Landrover. The others were unimpressed. Maybe they thought I had bought it in the market before we left. On my lap, I looked at it. There was something deeply wrong about it. This was not something that someone had made, not someone human. It was too strange and everyday, god had done this.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It wasn't a routine trip at all, that was why John had not been too choosy about me coming. He needed someone with the cameras I just came along with them. Back in the old country, where they read papers that are new, and can drink water out of the taps, a comet or something had been tracked. We were closest to it by a long margin, and they wanted someone to go out and have a look. Of course it was nothing to do with us. And in academic tradition, knowledge comes in two depths, infinite or zero. That was not our field, so we knew nothing, and cared less. But funders paid his wages, and you could sell a network of trained and flexible scientists to funders, so John had to borrow some equipment, head out into the desert and pretend to like it.
I did not have to pretent anything. Neither did the others, but at the end of the day, we got an overgenerous daily rate, and we never did anything but hang around, so we came along too.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We were only a day out and things started to go wrong, nothing you could put a finger on. Jenny looked out the windows like a woman possessed. Her eyes tracking back and fore following things we could not see. At first we had asked if there was anything out there, what she saw, but all she did was complain about the brightness, and look out all the more.
John pulled out a coffee sticky geiger counter, switched it on, it went off the scale. Then he switched it off and back on, and it just registered background radiation. He put it back in its box, and never took it out again.
Mike took to spending more and more time each night with his head under the bonnet. We always travelled by the grace of Mike, but the Landrover was a tank, it should have been gobbling up these miles. Instead it lurched and grinded on, the electrics seemed all shot to hell.
We each retreated into our own private worlds. I felt like I was dying, I always do when I travel. I did not care. The others, had their own private torments to contend with.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We ate our meal of baked beans, flakey and dry. The sky darkened, as the modest fire started to dwindle. I had gathered some dried scrub earlier, simply for something to do. There was no point in saying that we should give up, they all hated me, and saying it, would simply manoevre them into wanting to go on. Best to just remain quiet. Jenny was wall eyed with panic, gazing into the dark following imaginary shapes out there.
The other John spoke first, "I know that this is important and all, but it's not as if it is core project or anything."
He waited for some faint echo of support, finding none, he reluctantly pushed on. "It's not as if we are expecting to find anything, bit of a wild goose chase, and all that. If we damage the equipment or anything, we do risk scuttling the core project. You know what a comet is anyway, just a dirty snow ball, what we going to find out here, some burnt dirt if we're lucky."
John's eyes narrowed, he had not reacted when the other John started to speak, and it was not clear now whether he had heard him or was indeed replying to him now. "This place is tough, tougher than tough. The hardest, harshest environment in the world. If there is something here that needs done, we do it."
I stood up and walked off into the dark, we were going on. That much was obvious.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next day we found her. Driving along one of the flatter bits, a pile of rags, fluttering in the wind. But we stopped, and in the rags, congealed with blood, she lay. Skin wrinkled, like something old and worn smooth by time, she lay just moving, like a cat breathing.
The others were indifferent to her, you often found the dead or the dying out here, I had a bottle of water, and tried to move her into a position where she could drink. We did not have much water to spare, and she was as good as dead anyway, it was a pointless gesture. The others had decided to take this stop as an impromptu toilet break. That was cold, even for them.
Moving her head, something fell onto me, something heavy. I moved the rags, there was something amongst them, like a stone, I picked apart the scabbed rags, it was stone, peeled of the cloth, it was stone, something carved, like a hand. She was holding a carved hand. Probably found it out here, and thought it might be worth something.
I pulled at it, but she held on tight, ...
Then I realised, she was not holding the bloody thing, it was attached to her. Her hand was made out of stone. Pulling back her sleeves, tearing at them, her arm changed to stone, and her hand was stone, too bloody to tell what kind, but smooth and old, no wonder she was dying.
Her people had left her out here to die. No wonder, what could you do, what can any of us do, faced with such things.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We argued a lot then. But I thought John was an idiot, I can't be bothered with most people, John even less. He thought I was worthless. It was not much of an argument. I wanted to take her, he wanted to press on. The others said nothing. Jenny still wall eyed with panic, Mike tinkering with the Landrover electrics, the other John, something dead in his eyes, like he knew something, the ship was already holed below the waterline, but the captain was blind to it.
He hauled my rucksack out the back, it fell heavily, pulled out the cameras and threw the back gate shut again.
The deal was that they would come back to pick me up. We all knew it was a lie. There was little chance of finding me again. The Landrover was on its last legs.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I could have watched the Landrover disappear into the distance, that would have been dramatic. I didn't. I checked the water that I had been hiding in my rucksack. That was why I had so much stuff lying loose in the back of the Landrover, I had been stashing water almost from the outset. Of course I had not been planning for this. Just another pointless act of rebellion.
The loose clothing, and paperbacks, John had kicked them out onto the sand. I gathered up my stuff.
Here I was. Here I stayed.
I cradled her head. Her eyes were cloudy, her breath was like the tide lapping.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That night I burnt much of what I had. It was cold, I did not expect to last another day. A little comfort. Looking deep into the burning papers, and clothing, that cloying sooty smoke. I was so beyond tired, so beyond sore. Then looking out beyond the fire, I began to see what Jenny had seen. Shapes, without shape, coloured without colour. Like some mathematical function performed on our reality. I was seeing something out there, something I could not understand, it had no sense, beyond the sense that it was huge and unknowable.
It was not dangerous. It was just totally indifferent. The cliff edge cares not whether you throw yourself off it. It is completely indifferent to you. As was this. It was alive in the way that the sea is, or plate tectonics, alive but so completely alien, that it is whole orders of magnitude unknowable.
I could feel Jenny in my mind, she was scared of it, she saw something you could neither understand nor master. There was panic in her. Panic so unreasonable and vast that it dwarfed everything else. She lived in a world of panic. A world coloured by panic, that tasted of panic. A fearful world, forcing her in on herself, turning her inwards, and making her pebble small.
The fire died before the soot did. We were black with it, it lined out mouths and noses, I started to cough.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I started to cough, I retched and it felt like something was tearing, and then all of a sudden, a flush of mucus and blood, and in it a pebble. But not just a pebble, it was the same as her bloody hand. I was coughing up stone.
She turned slightly, and spoke,
"Bad star, bad star back.'
I fell back, this body was broken and dying, it was time for a new one.
The sand dunes swithered in my sooty eyes, the comet was turning us to stone, the comet had been here before, it had turned us to stone before, long ago, countless times, times beyond times, we had all turned to stone before. We had turned to stone, and been worn down, worn down to sand, the sand around us.
Her people had not abandonned her, they were here with her, all around her.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I began to feel peace, I could not fight the ocean tides, but I could see them for what they were, and see my place in them. Rich and strange, infinitely rich and infinitely strange. I felt a peace that was beyond language, beyond meaning. I drew breath, and cradled her head, our breaths mingled, as the strange began to seem commonplace, and the commonplace strange, letting go, I no longer felt the tide tugging, as it started to carry me.
Friday 1 August 2008
week off
This week has been my long awaited week off work, though as ever, nothing is quite what it seems, or says on the tin.
I did end up going into work on Wednesday for a job interview, which I suspect I was not successful in, although the interview went okay, there is a lot of tough competition these days.
While most people have moved over to stay-cations, where they don't leave the country, we have barely left the house. It has given us a chance to catch up on things, though the nature of the things you catch up on, is that they still never get entirely finished! There are just too many things, and big things beget small things and perspective means that ever bigger things can hide behind the visible things, so that when you deal with the visible things, other equally big things, though slightly more distant things, hove into view.
So, I have been dealing with things, but having got some of the great looming / depressing things done, it is at least possible to see the landscape of things more clearly, and get a better grasp of the lay of the land, thing-wise
We have -
- painted the bathroom
- found a skip load of what can only really be described as rubbish, in the loft. I think when you cannot be bothered to get rid of things, you just kind of think, ohh, it might come in handy, lets just stick it up the loft. Still a work in progress, but it is like finding a whole new room up there, now that the big indeterminate piles of stuff have got sorted through and in part, thrown out.
- put mdf panels on the back of a couple of cheap shelves, so that they don't wobble about all over the place, and they now hold all my wife's jams, chutneys, and associated paraphanalia.
- emptied out one of my composters, and blitzed the garden, trimming hedges, pulling out weeds, and regaining control of some of the bits that were getting totally lost beneath weeds. My fruit trees and bushes and now looking much happier, now they can get some light and air in about them.
- We have modestly cropped the garden, using redcurrents for a crumble, volunteer potatoes, as well as dill and parsley. A bumper crop of apples is not far off, I've also foraged for Billberries, as per my last blog.
- Number two daughter has been appointed soux chef, to my wife, and has been spending afternoons in the kitchen helping her to prepare some really splendid meals,
- we have been buying the odd copy of the Mail for the free DVDs, and the girls have been getting into costume dramas, Pride and Prejudice was a huge hit, they have also seen Emma, and are all now half way through Rebecca.
- I've sorted through the bulk of my clothes, getting rid of stuff that I have not worn since University, with all my stuff now sorted into neat piles, weekend tee shirts, polo shirts, smart jerseys, not so smart jerseys, trousers for the garden (the biggest pile), smart casual trousers (ie trousers that I have not yet spilt paint on) and office trousers.
- I've made major in roads into a foot tall pile of old newspapers, and recent magazines,
- the dog has had plenty of good walks
- I have also been setting the girls little projects, to try and get their imaginations working, building robots from Lego, recording music on Garageband, researching how to use crops from the garden, mini projects on a garden plant of their choice,
Finally I'll include some Chic Murray jokes that were in the Sunday Times found in that big foot high pile, because,
(a) I think that he is just hilarious, and;
(b) they make me smile
Doctor, I've got butterflies in my stomach
Oh, what have you been eating?
Butterflies.
Sergeant, get those screaming women into my tent this minute.
But they're not screaming, sir.
They're not in my tent yet.
Good evening madam, I'm from the environmental health department pest control division,
Aye well, you'd better come in, he's not home from the pub yet.
Colour television, whatever next? I won't believe it till I see it in black and white.
It was so boring six empty seats walked out.
For years, I've admired you from afar.
Mmmm, that's about the right distance.
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