one last rambling holiday blog post

This is bound to be my last rambling holiday blog posting.

Tomorrow we jump in the car to head back home, albeit, breaking the journey half way. Back at work on Monday, which is quite a thought.

Not particularly on the holiday theme, I have increasingly been getting into the Dark Horse Comics, now that they have an App for the iPad, I have been downloading comics for reading on my daily commute. To date mainly Hellboy, and the spin offs, but also a few other things, like Frank Miller's Sin City etc.

Although the website (accessed via browser) seems to be relatively stable, albeit slow at times, the access via the iPad or iPhone app is problematic. At launch their servers fell over pretty comprehensively and took days to recover. The Apps will crash if they cannot access the servers, and you are attempting to access them. Recently they offered a load of Mass Effect comics free for 24 hours, and that too seems to have pretty comprehensively crashed their servers.

I suppose that there are probably some lessons to be learnt about coding Apps and having adequate server capacity here, but there are more interesting thoughts to be thought. I don't really have any data, beyond my personal experience, and what I have just outlined, but I would guess that introducing an App for the iPad has increased the online demand for Dark Horse comics by a tremendous amount, not just doubled or tripled, but maybe even a ten fold increase.

No longer do people have to go into a comic book store, there are only a handful in the country, buy a twenty something page comic, to see whether you like it or not, if you do, then buy another single issue or two next time you come back. Now anyone, anywhere, can access free editions of a wide variety of comics, what you like, you can now catch up on in bulk, for people like me there are five years plus of back-issues to catch up on. If I do get to the stage of being upto date on all the comics that I want to follow, then it will be easy to dip into any new titles, or keep up with existing runs that I am following. Obviously demand might in theory drop off as I go through the back issues, but in practice there is a finite limit to how many comics I will read each week, so it is not likely to be a sudden drop off any time soon. This is not the sort of transition that the record industry went through when everyone rushed to buy the same titles in a different format. Most of these digital purchases will be by people who have never bought the comics in any other format before.

There is just such an inherent rightness, and ease of use, about reading comics on an iPad, it is like seeing a formerly hidden art form, suddenly appear, fully formed, vital and alive.

Of course Japan which has an extensive commuter culture has been into Manga for years, in the format of cheap bulky comic books. In the UK the format is single issue comics running a variety of titles, such as 2000AD, which is pretty much the 'mainstream' British comics industry these days. The American format is smaller comics, with a single title. Not actually that appealling a format to the casual reader, but a format that does lend itself perfectly to the digital format, it is pretty much the size and shape of an iPad screen.

Who would ever have guessed that the advent of the iPad would lead to a real commercial resurgence in the comic book industry. Perhaps the lesson is to just keep producing the best content that you can, and with luck, things will come right eventually.

Probably about time that some journalist wrote about this somewhere that someone actually reads about it. Interesting anyway, whether anyone else has noticed or not.

One thing about going on holiday, is that you sort of notice all these things that you like or prefer and rather wish that your everyday home life was more like that. This is our third trip down to Wales, and our second to this particularly cottage, so the trip is not a completely new experience, but there is a lot here that comes into that category. In no particular order;

it is nice, not having to get up for the daily commute into work,

it is nice, not having to go to work everyday,

it is nice that there are so many trees about

it is nice that there are so many fruit trees about, anywhere that is well stocked with fruit trees is somewhere I can feel happy

it is nice that the land goes up and down, hilly is the most attractive landscape

it is nice that there are some rather bleak bits here and there,

it is nice that there are not too many people, even the towns feel rather quiet

it is nice that there are proper shops, and not just chain stores the same as you get everywhere else,

it is nice that cars are made to struggle through, rather than being allowed to take over everywhere driving out the pedestrians,

it is nice that there are so many people doing crafts, arts, making stuff, making food, growing food,

it is nice that by and large everyone is friendly, even if some are rather eccentric

it is nice that there is so much interest in things green/eco/permaculture

it is nice that the gardens are all so well kept, as are the verges, village greens, pretty much everywhere

it is nice that the houses are well kept, the sort of well kept that suggests that people love their houses, not just that people have spent a lot of money on them

it is nice that so much of what you see looks traditional, waney edged wooden huts, ivy covered barns with a broken back, stone and old brick, rusted corrugated metal roofs.

it is nice that everything does not seem to have come out of the local builders merchants

it is nice that there is not litter everywhere

it is nice that everywhere seems comfortable, neither too cheap nor too expensive

it is nice to be away from the hustle of modern life,

it is nice that there are so many really old buildings that are still being used and enjoyed, not all wrapped up for some sterile preservation

it is nice that the council, or whoever, seems to actually care about the place

it is nice that everything, schools, hospitals etc, seems to be on a human scale, as if you or I actually mattered, and were not just widgets to get processed.

I suppose that if my holidays teach me anything, it is that I am at heart a country soul. The big city is nice to visit, but the country is where I want to stay, or at least as far into the country as the needs of making my daily crust will allow me. It is nice to discuss making jam and harvesting fruit with people, it is nice to live with wildlife all around you.

I have been reading a fair bit about urbanism and cities, where the story is not really about people but about places. This is one of those perception shifts that is quite difficult to make and can make you feel slightly unwell. But perhaps we would all be happier if we were to think more in terms of what we can do for our local places, and our impact on them, over the years, rather than focussing so entirely on our selves and our own private wants and needs. After a certain stage, you do end up having pretty much everything that you legitimately needs, most of what you legitimately want, and even some of what you would aspire to. Rather than spending more and more time and effort in advancing slightly up this slope, to make yourself an infinitessimally amount happier, is it not better to flip over how you perceive things, and seek to do what is right by your local community, by the place where you live, by the places you visit or are fond of.

Over the past year, I have focussed a lot of my gardening time and effort on my front garden. There is a length of border, that slopes up. Too steep to hoe, and full of bluebells, it has long been one of the least attractive parts of the garden, albeit one of the most visible. The sheer labour involved in weeding it, including taking out the bluebells, which although attractive for a short while, are invasive and choking the rest of the years, has deterred me from making more than sporadic attempts. This year however, it has been my focus, and I have been diligently turning over the soil, pulling out the bluebell bulbs, planting things that I think will be suitable, weeding anything that appears before my intended ground cover takes. This has involved countless hours toiling away, probably to very little obvious effect to the neighbours, but by and by the front garden is starting to look more like something. It may just be a coincidence, but a few other front gardens, formerly fairly unloved and abandonned, are now starting to get some attention. Hopefully by our actions we can nudge the world just slightly in the direction in which we think it ought to go.

Maybe with Broadband rolling out across the country, and Amazon delivering to all and sundry, we won't all be forced into working in cities like some unhappy battery hens. We might all spread out again across the countryside, planting fruit trees where we go, making jam and looking after our gardens. I don't suppose that everyone wants to live in the country, but it seems a more sustainable way of living to have your own front door, and enough garden to grow a few things.

Probably the sort of thing to annoy the urbanists, who predict that every man-jack of us will live in a city before long. If they do want us to live in cities, then they have to give us cities that we want to live in, or we will all just escape to the country as soon as we have the option to do so. To date, a city we would want to live in has just been an urbanised country, in the form of the suburbs. Perhaps urbanism is a contradiction of human nature. Unless you are very well off then living in the city can be a fairly grim affair.

For me, it would be nice, to have the means to live in the country all the time. Perhaps that is the point of a holiday, a chance to remember some of the other people that you might be, and the other places that you might be them.