My latest obsession has been with door furniture. Door furniture is one of those things that you just don't notice, 99% of the time, but once you do start to notice it, it is a surprisingly rich and diverse area.

This has in large part been the result of recently moving to working in an 1930's office building, predominantly with original brass door fittings, and my regular lunchtime walk taking me past a slightly grand Georgian street with some rather fine door fittings.

I have therefore been scouring eBay, with moderate obsessiveness, to source a variety of period door fittings for my own house. Mixed success with bidding, I clearly have an eye for the popular, as the bidding on some of my favoured items has at times accelerated into the realms in unaffordability. But after a few weeks, I have now sourced a variety of door fittings. The old sixties fittings and modern mock gothic are going, to be replaced by an eclectic selection. An aluminium cinema door style handle in one room, arts and crafts style brass in another, an art deco semi circular shaped one, and a few that could just be hefty pub door handles. The exercise has also reaquainted me with the charms of brass. A hundred years ago brass was clearly the go to metal for all sorts of things. It is slightly softer than most other commonly used metals, has mild antiseptic properties, and with a little polish gives a good yellow metal shine. It also comes in a variety of different hues. Of the brass handles that I have got, some are almost silver, some slightly rose gold, though obviously the overall impression is of yellow metal.

With a tin of brasso, it is possible to polish up the most unprepossing item to its former glories. From a collector's point of view they prefer to leave material unpolished, but for working items, I think it is appropriate that they follow the original intent, and are used in a polished state. Polishing is actually surprisingly gratifying. A little brasso, a good polish, and the formerly white cloth has a dirty black patch on it, you really feel like you are taking off the dirt. A burnish up with a clean cloth and the item really starts to glow. I suspect that the original intent was that raised areas would shine up more, further accentuating any mouldings or accents.

Anyway, I've supported this blog article with a before and after photo to demonstrate the reviving effects of brasso. More door furniture obsessiveness likely in future blog postings.

public space

There was a recent exhibition at the Glasgow Lighthouse on Cedric Price, and part of this was a handout newspaper on a number of student projects looking at public space in Glasgow. The teams each took a segment of Glasgow, starting from the centre and heading out, to consider public space available, and make interventions.

Cedric Price was a somewhat whimsical theorist, and the interventions were often whimsical.

Nevertheless the point remains, it is public space that makes our modern environment work, or frustrate. And looking at public space it is very often dismal. It is not intentionally bad, it was not designed by some Bond villain to drive us to despair, but it is uninspiring, unambitious, unnoticed, unloved, lacking in ability.

Public space is the space that falls between the bits that anyone cares about. Public space is the bits that we all own, but no one individual owns. Public space is that stuff that no one is proud of. Public space is the bits where we leave the litter to accumulate unless the council come to take it away.

But public space is, it is the space that defines our spaces. The tourists see public space, the visitors see public space, we see public space. It is the public space that creates the image of the city, the town, the village. We expect the bank to look impressive, we expect the expensive houses to look expensive, and run down ones to look run down. But it is the public space that sets the bar.

We should be more ambitious with public space, we should demand more from it. We should take more ownership of it. We should quietly clear away some of the junk and smarten it up.

We should celebrate the public space that works, and complain about the public space that does not.

You can tell when public space works. People walk, or drive slowly, they cycle, they sit. For really good public space people will walk dogs, or play, or sit outdoors eating or stop and talk. Public space can be designed, but it only works when people think it works. Too often it is designed to look good, without actually working. That peculiar branch of ergonomics where street furniture is designed to deter people from sitting too long, or even relaxing. Hence metal seats and stone benches.

It is people that make public space work, and we deserve better, and we should make it better.

trouble sleeping

Christmas is always good for catching up with all your friends.

I was hearing from an old friend, Brian. He is having a lot of nightmares and is finding it really difficult to get a good night’s sleep.

He keeps on dreaming that he is getting chased by dyslexic zombies!

economics lecture

I was out at an economics lecture last week, by Erik Britton and Dannay Gabay of Fathom Consulting. They are both former Bank of England economists and bright chaps.

http://www.fathom-consulting.com/about-us/directors/

I am interested in economics, but I've only really studied it at an introductory level, so much of the technical content was going over my head so rapidly that I didn't notice what I was missing. However I do rather take the view that economics is one area where people are arriving at explanations of the past, or predictions of the future, based solely on a handlful of prominent variables. So if they have picked the wrong variables then it does not matter how convincing they are, there is something out there to derail their theories.

I came away broadly convinced that we are looking at a fairly stagnant economy for the next few years. Japan has had a stagnant economy for decades, and there is nothing to say that Europe is exempt from such a malaise. The structural imbalances whereby China is perpetually short of domestic consumption, while the West overconsumes, all the while getting deeper in debt, were bound to end in tears.

The standard economic view is that savings are bad for the economy, while debt is actually good and creates activity. To me this seems counterintuitive. I suppose that it might work if the people taking on the debt were rational operators, if they are not, then it might work if they had a way to cope with the debt burden. In the past increasing GDP, inflation and devaluation were relatively pain free fixes.

This scenario is being unpicked now, we cannot argue that governments are rational, recent events show them to be short term, unpredictable and erratic, unwilling to make decisions, and unwilling to face the consequences of their actions. GDP is increasingly stagnant, inflation at hyper inflation levels is unlikely and unpalatable, while devaluation would be difficult within the Euro, and is only an option until your trading partners attempt it too.

The challenge going forward for government is to rebalance the economy and their role within it. For an individual it is always easier to budget when you know you will get a pay rise next year. It is when you move onto a fixed income that things really start to get difficult. It is impossible to be on a fixed income without some element of austerity creeping in.

As a country we are going to have to get used to living on a fixed income. We are going to have to make real decisions on what priorities are. The debt burden now is equivalent to the burden at the end of the second world war. Back in those days austerity meant rationing!

For the long term it seems likely that developed countries will face a low level of GDP growth. We are not going to be poor, but you cannot keep growing forever.

Perhaps what we need is dull managerialism, government that is increasingly competent, rational, capable of making decisions and learning lessons. A government that has a firm grasp on the back office costs, that is crisp and effective in making decisions. Government that manages its money like a canny pensioner, rather than some highflyer waiting his next bonus.

an irrational fondness for outdated technology

I must confess to an irrational fondness for outdated technology.

I was recently in the market for a new alarm clock. So I went to John Lewis, which sells slightly more attractive, considerably more expensive versions of things that everyone uses. The cutest alarm clock by a long margin was the Karlsson Mini Binky, so I got a little black one. It was clockwork, and had the cutest wee face you have ever seen. This thing was cuter than a day old puppy. It fitted perfectly into the hand, with the heft of a cricket ball. It ticked away reassuringly all night long. A fine tick that you could fall asleep to.

But on fully winding it, it would only run for about twelve hours. After twelve hours it would either stop altogether or stop for a wee while. On checking the Amazon reviews here, and in the USA (who knew that there was no Amazon in Australia or New Zealand?) these problems seem common. So regretfully I had to take the clock back, inordinately fond as I was, of this day old puppy that was starting to crap on my carpet.

The clock was made in China, and browsing the other clockwork clocks you can still buy, they equally seem to be made in China these days and are equally prone to similarly mixed reviews.

How is it that China can make an iPhone knock off in about twelve minutes, but when it comes to replicating technology that is centuries old, they fall down miserably. It is not as if these Chinese clockwork clocks are cheap, or as if clockwork technology is impossibly difficult.

When I grew up there were big factories in Scotland making clockwork alarm clocks, the hideous Westclocks {?}. But now, no one apart from the Chinese makes clockwork clocks.

In my lifetime it is a technology that has gone from ubiquity to a historic curio. It is a pet peeve of my to go somewhere, and see a fine old clockwork clock, that is not ticking. I love to be surrounded by the ticking of clocks. I like their slightly impressionistic approach to timekeeping. I like that you come home to an empty house after a week and all the clocks have stopped ticking, so you take five minutes to wind them all. I like that each week I take the brass key and wind up the hanging clock on my wall.

I was going to call this blog posting, "why don't Chinese people get clockwork".

But there are a lot of Chinese, you would be foolish to bet against them. For now they are producing things to our specifications. But while English uses an alphabet of 26 characters, Chinese uses an alphabet of over three hundred. A computer key board makes sense with 26 characters, in effect you have almost that many fingers, a piano keyboard has that sort of number of keys. There is an inherent ease to keyboard input for that sort of level of differentiation.

But Chinese has over 300 characters. If the Chinese had invented the computer, they certainly would not have invented the keyboard as we know it. You can certainly use a computer in Chinese, scrolling through to select the correct character. But starting from scratch that is now how you would input to a computer if you were designing a method of input for over three hundred characters.

Similarly the paradigm with a computer is that one you have entered a character, you move on from the space never to return. You cannot overlay one character upon another. You could with an old manual type writer, you probably would want to for transcribing Chinese.

And Chinese is a tonal language, unlike ours. Chinese medicine operates to different paradigms. For the moment the Chinese are building things to our specifications.

But all those factories in Scotland that made alarm clocks in my youth, are gone now, what else is going to be different forty years from now. You should never bet against the Chinese, and you should never bet against change.

frying pans

A frying pan makes the ideal gift, it does not just belong in the kitchen, it is invaluable in every room in your house. For example

a frying pan makes an ideal ashtray

a perfect candle holder

for tidying up your bathroom nick nacks

for displaying pot pouri, in an attractive yet practical manner

a mirror for people who don't want too look too closely

a stool for particularly tall people

a footstool with an easy to use carrying handle,

a pillow for people with well padded heads

a watering can for the garden

a picture frame for all your magnetic pictures

a frisbee with a built in handle to catch it with

a hammer for people with low manual dexterity skills

an easy to hang clock for people who don't care what the time is

buy a frying pan today,

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.