The Bureau

West coast diaries: Twin Peaks

2009-07-12T02:03:00.000-07:00

I finished my roadtrip with a journey into the interior of Washington State. Around 40 minutes' drive from Seattle lie the towns of Fall City, Snoqualmie and North Bend, all used during the filming of David Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series.

To say I'm a fan of Twin Peaks is something of an understatement. An ex-boyfriend introduced me to it at university and I've returned to it constantly since. I'm a Lynch fan anyway, but something about Twin Peaks stands apart for me, possibly because the atmosphere it evokes echoes very closely the place in which I grew up in the north of Scotland (lots of trees, lots of grey skies, although no handsome FBI agents, sadly).

I'm not going to start analysing TP, but I can say that I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the location holds all of the atmospheric magic that comes across on screen. There's a dividing line somewhere on Highway 202, after which I felt a change in the environment that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. First, it gets gloomier, the sky more melodramatic. The dull suburban landscape of the Seattle hinterlands is replaced by mountainous countryside, and as you divert from the highway onto the back roads around Fall City, you notice what made FBI agent Dale Cooper stop in his tracks on his first approach to Twin Peaks: Douglas Firs. Magnificent, swooping evergreen trees that add majesty and menace to the landscape.

I drove on to North Bend, site of Twede's cafe, which was used as the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks. The original building burned down a few years ago (things seem to burn down frequently in this area, adding a nice little link to the 'fire walk with me' theme of the series). The current owners milk the connection by supplying coffee in Twin Peaks mugs, and the compulsory slice of cherry pie. Both the coffee and the pie were excellent, but I was disappointed not to find Norma or Shelly serving behind the counter. Twede's is staffed by young men who listen to death metal in the kitchen. They're fearsomely polite though. My server repeatedly referred to me as 'ma'am', which I kind of liked. There were a bunch of snotty local high street kids drinking malt shakes in there. I think they cottoned on that I was a tourist, and I could hear them talking about some of the old characters in Twin Peaks. The back wall of the diner is covered in memorabilia - some beautiful photos of the actors resting between sets and messing around in the diner, as well as many interesting newspaper clippings.

Damn fine.

Buzzing neon.

Twede's cafe/Double R Diner

After my slice of pie I doubled back to Snoqualmie, which is the home of the magnificent waterfalls that feature heavily in Twin Peaks. In a moment of madness I'd booked myself into the Salish Lodge at the top of the falls, the exterior of which is used to represent the Great Northern hotel, run by TVs greatest crook, Benjamin Horne. There were no members of the Horne family in evidence at Salish Lodge, just obsequiously polite staff (American servers are incredibly polite anyways, but when you're spending a lot of money they really lay it on with a trowel). Once I'd checked in I had time to observe the falls from my window, and then to wander out to the observation deck to look at them more closely. They are over 100 feet taller than Niagara, and the noise the water makes as it hits the bottom is intense. There's an almost smoke-like quality to the spray that rises from the pool. I peered closely and saw a lone swimmer - a tiny figure barely visible in the dark waters. He tried to get close the torrent but couldn't manage it, and in the end resorted to basking on the rocks. I wonder if Agent Cooper ever took a dip?

Great Northern/Salish Lodge

View of the falls from my room.

Snoqualmie itself is satisfyingly weird. There's a railway museum with some excellent burnt out old rail cars and a log that would give the log lady something to think about. I spent longer than necessary hovering the bookstore listening to a truly extraordinary conversation between the owner and a young man. I didn't get the entire gist, but the old man was reminiscing about his time as a reporter during the Vietnam war and both praising and berating the young man for deciding to become a journalist. "You knew what you were signing up for," he muttered ominously at one point.

"My log saw something."

I snooped around the back streets, finding an intriguing crime scene behind the hairdressers and buying some unironic owl mementoes in the hardware store. The man behind the counter was completely deaf, and also slightly doolally. He rung up my purchases three times, giving his wife plenty of time to welcome me to the area and to encourage me to head out on some of the mountain trails. Snoqualmie is dominated by Mount Si to the east, and the actual Twin Peaks to the north. They hover in the skyline, sort of inviting you at the same time as making you nervous. I bought some maps even though I knew I'd have no time for trekking.

Snoqualmie crime scene: but where's the sheriff?

My evening was spent in disgusting luxury: lounging in the spa, drinking very pleasant local wine and eating local cheeses. I fell asleep to the sound of the falls and the crackling of logs from the open fireplace in my room. Everything about the lodge (even the fact that it's called a lodge) was reminiscent of Twin Peaks: from the carpets with native American design to the wood panelling in the corridors. No one pushed a note under the door during the night and I wasn't served a glass of milk by a shaky octogenarian, but perhaps that was just as well.

The next day I went hunting for other famous Twin Peaks locations. I got lost looking for the building used as the Sheriff's department, but I did manage to find the Sheriff, skulking in his car in an empty car lot at the top of a very steep hill. As soon as I arrived he started up his car and drove off in a hurry, perhaps off to an assignation with the bookhouse boys.

I did manage to find the building used as the Roadhouse, which lies at a junction in North Bend. It's still called the Roadhouse, but seems to be some kind of upscale restaurant. I had a quick nose about but by this time I was running late and had to cut short my investigations.

The Roadhouse

As I rejoined the highway I had a sudden sense of loss. Just as the atmosphere had changed when I crossed some invisible line on arriving, so the feeling left me as I moved away. While I was there I told myself to enjoy the experience as much as possible because it was unlikely I'd ever come back. Now I'm not so sure. Aside from its association with a rather bizarre old TV series, it's a place worth visiting for its own sake. I've put the maps up on my wall to ponder.

West Coast Diaries: More random thoughts

2009-07-05T21:01:00.000-07:00

In Seattle now, theoretically at the end of our journey, in mileage terms at least. We have covered the whole of the west coast, pretty much (should really have started in San Diego). 1040 miles as the crow flies, many many more the way we traveled it: some inland routes, some along the coast. We did everything we wanted to do, except go to Yosemite. We had to make do with the redwood national parks instead.

Redwood!

California
California was long, and hot and overwhelming. Further north it got more relaxed. We stayed in a small hippy town on the coast called Arcata. It was straight out of a David Lynch film. Intensely weird, intensely creepy, shrouded in mist. Three of the tallest men I have ever seen I saw there (two were brothers, I think). We ate in a darkened, cavernous restaurant with a stage and backdrop hidden by thick heavy drapes at one end. The waitress was freakishly beautiful. She was in love with one of the tall men. They embraced in an alcove at the side of the room. She stood on her tiptoes and stared up into his eyes while he stroked her arms. I couldn't take my eyes off them. Something about them made me very happy. I don't know why, except that they radiated love for one another. Maybe that's enough. On the way home that night I got pulled over by a cop for turning right from the wrong lane. I sat quietly and waited for him, knowing nothing would happen. As soon as he heard our voices his whole tone changed. He told us he used to live in Hungary; explained he had to pull over anyone driving erratically as 'this town is rife with people who smoke weed and drive badly'. Wished us a good night and went on his way. I enjoyed the whole experience, like the tourist I am.

Biscuits
I had biscuits and gravy for breakfast one morning. Biscuits seem to be part scone, part rusk, part macaroon (without the coconut). Gravy seems to be more like macaroni cheese than actual gravy. The whole concoction is vile, but I'm glad I tried it.

There's biscuits in there somewhere.

Breakfast
We eat a large breakfast at the start of each day's drive and then skip lunch. Breakfast is always immense, always accompanied by endless coffee, and is always followed by a massive insulin crash (for me) which means I have to sleep in the car for an hour even though I've been sleeping well most of the trip. Sometimes I have French toast, sometimes waffles, sometimes pancakes, eggs, bacon, links, maple syrup, strawberries, cream. It is intense, and addictive, and I am very glad I won't be able to do it anymore when I go home. More and more I am impressed by the many people in this country who have managed not to become obese.

Breakfast: it's political.

Oregon
At first, Oregon is no different than California, except there are more trees. We kind of skipped through this state. It's not so big, and the drive we chose was kind of dull. We slept through Eugene (the low point of the trip for me: tired, overly emotional, fed up of all the driving and searching for motel rooms and no privacy). The second day we made it to Portland, and things improved. We settled in one place for a couple of nights. It's a nice city - not how I imagined it. More spread out, more focused on the river, gentler vibe. We hung out in a student district, ate some very good sushi, watched the expensive people and their expensive mutts. I went to see Food Inc at an indie cinema and promptly regretted everything I'd eaten over the previous ten days. Still stunned by the fact there are only thirteen (thirteen!) slaughterhouses in the whole of the United States of America. We celebrated my birthday on the fourth by driving to the beach. This involved four hours in the car, which has come to mean a short drive in this country. Cannon Beach is beautiful, epically beautiful. Everyone there is happy and wealthy and nice. We stayed on the beach for several hours, reading, digging holes, listening to kids playing (even on a baking hot day the Pacific is too cold to swim in). Some little Asian American kids came over and stood by me shyly. I looked up from my book. They wanted to know if they could have some of my sand (I had a pile of sand beside me). I told them it was ok. They were so happy I almost cried behind my sunglasses. We headed back to Portland for the evening fireworks. Sat by the riverside with thousands and thousands of people, watched the display. It took half an hour, building to an epic finale. People clapped and roared as the intensity of the fireworks increased. By the time they erupted in a final shower of red, white and blue I was clapping too. Went out for drinks with some friends of a good old friend I have recently gotten back in touch with. They told us how untypical of America proper California, Oregon and Washington are. 'The recycling stops on the other side of the mountains,' as they put it.

Portland dawg.

Washington
Washington is colder, sparser, further north. It feels like a relief to be here. It feels a thousand miles away from LA. Our first stop was Tacoma, for a mission most tourists don't get to experience in this country. In 1913, when my then three-year-old grandfather was naturalised an American citizen his address was a residential area of Tacoma. To my surprise, when I entered it into Google maps, up popped the same address, still residential. Not sure why I was surprised, but I was. I guess everything feels a lot less than 100 years old in cities here. It didn't take us long to find it: a rustic house with a wooden tiled exterior, a beautiful tree outside and the gutter hanging off. The whole street was filled with unique, picturesque wooden houses and had a lovely atmosphere. The blinds were drawn but two cars were parked outside. I decided to be brave and knocked on the door. One of the fattest men I have ever met opened it. His name was Art. His wife's name was Sandra. Sandra was also very fat. They had lived in the house for 23 years and were slowly renovating it. They very kindly ushered me inside and answered my questions. During the renovations they had discovered the original insulation materials in the walls: newspapers from 1911, from which they had dated the house. As my grandfather was born in 1910 I guess maybe his father had built the house. Art explained that 'none of the walls are straight'. Art And Sandra didn't ask us any questions: seemed a little shy. I didn't overstay my welcome, but I would have liked to have stayed and sat under the tree for a while (Sandra told me it was a weeping birch, and that her children wanted her to cut it down as it blocked the light but she never would.) It still seems extraordinary to me that I have traveled so far in this strange and alien land, only to have found a tiny patch of my own history - a place that, on some level, I have been to before.

Grandpa's house!

Tomorrow
Tomorrow me and my bro are breaking ranks. He's going to search for Jimi Hendrix's grave in Seattle. I'm going to a place I have visited before many times in my dreams and my imagination. If you know me well, you can guess where I'm going. If you don't, you can guess anyway. Time to go and choose an appropriate shade of lipstick.

West coast diaries: random thoughts

2009-07-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

The trip has become a trip. Initial wonderment has been replaced by a strange mixture of emotions. There are long periods of driving, through sometimes extremely beautiful and sometimes quite monotonous terrain. There is so much of everything in California - millions of redwood trees, endless miles of sun-bleached grass, vineyard upon vineyard, closer to the coast just mile after mile of grey haar. The haar is almost constant at the coast, which is both a relief after the boiling interior and a nuisance when we want to see the ocean and sit on warm sand. We zigzag back and forth between the two, and it creates a strange natural mirror of my moods: open and optimistic for part of the day, sunken and muted the rest. There is so much time to think. When I'm driving there is almost nothing to worry about - an automatic car and wide empty roads make for an easy drive. When I'm the passenger car sickness means I can't read or move around too much. To be honest this is not much fun. I spend most of my time thinking anyway, and at the moment there is a lot to perturb me. I'd rather the distractions of company and events, but instead I am thrust into an uncomfortable confrontation with thoughts I'd prefer to escape from. In a way it doesn't help that I'm traveling with my brother. Unless something happens on our journey, there's not an awful lot to talk about - we already know pretty much everything about each other's lives. I feel a little guilty for being glum some of the time.

That said, the last few days have been extremely eventful, and there have been some moments where I've thought to myself: "this is one of the coolest things you will ever experience". Some examples:

Driving
I've always been dismissive of Americans and their attachment to their cars, but until you visit somewhere like California and start driving yourself, you can't really comprehend just how dependent this nation is on the automobile. Take somewhere like Mulholland Drive for example. It's IN Los Angeles, and yet it is so high up and isolated from amenities. There are houses all along it, but no gas stations, no stores, no hospitals. It's in the center of a massive conurbation, but if its residents didn't drive, they'd literally starve to death. Out in the sticks the distance between houses and amenities is just staggering. I don't think I could live here purely because I'd feel so vulnerable to the price of oil.
That said, I had the most amazing driving experience of my life the other day. I drove us from Monterey to San Francisco, a drive that takes in an incredible freeway that winds down through spectacular hillsides, and another that cruises up Silicon Valley and then hits the city. We finally got the iPod to work and I caught my first glimpse of San Fran to the sounds of Yello's 'Oh Yeah'. Fans of Ferris Bueller will appreciate the juxtaposition. Driving a big SUV along an American freeway to a classic song - that makes you feel all conquering and all powerful. No wonder these people cling on to that part of their way of life with such defiance.

Animals
On the way up I've had the chance to see elephant seals and sealions up close in their natural habitat. So close, in fact, that I can tell you elephant seals are STINKY, and sealions are total posers. No matter how low I'm feeling, animals always manage to bring me out of myself. They're just so much themselves, so idiosyncratic, and somehow so similar to us. Americans adore their pets. In fact I've even seen anti-PETA advertising exhorting Americans to stand up for their 'right to own a pet'. Our preferred motel has a welcome policy to pets, and so there are generally happy looking dogs bounding about and barking up a storm. It's nice.

Strangers
My poor brother took ill yesterday, after some dodgy Chinatown seafood in San Fran. He was forced to spend the day in bed, and so I was forced to go out and make my own company. We were staying on Geary Street, on the edge of the tenderloin district, which is one of the skankiest places I have ever witnessed anywhere (waaay worse than anything I've seen in Asia). There were people smoking crack on the street, women covered in track marks, homeless guys wandering around in the middle of the road like zombies, doing scary random shit. This gave me a somewhat unfavorable initial impression of 'America's most beautiful city' and I wandered as far from the hotel as I could get. This meant an overdose of shopping areas and tourist attractions, which tired me out. Somewhat disillusioned at the end of my day, I wandered back towards the hotel. Just a few meters up the street I chanced upon a nice looking coffee bar, with some normal looking people inside. I wandered in and began reading my book. It didn't take long before I got sucked into a conversation with the bar owner (a Turkish Cypriot) and a psychic called Elizabeth (a reformed psychic, to be precise). It soon became apparent that I'd wandered into the epicenter of neighborhood social life. Everyone who walked by popped in to say hello, ask a question, share some gossip, try and sell a stolen bicycle, find a partner to play poker with. I must have been introduced to between 15 and 20 people, each of whom had something interesting to say. At some point a local homeless guy came in and asked to play the piano. I sat there, listening to a bunch of amusing strangers discussing the nature of reality as this guy played one haunting melody after another on this utterly tuneless old piano. It was a truly beautiful moment. If it wasn't for the black poker chip nestling at the bottom of my handbag this morning, I'd think it was all a dream.

West Coast Diaries: American portions

2009-06-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

My little brother is 28 today. He is awesome - not just because he has taken me to the US for my birthday, but also because he refuses to be intimidated by even the most outrageous challenges:

That's a big salad, little man.

But it poses no threat to the man with the bottomless stomach.

By contrast, I am a mere lightweight. Regardez:

3 delicious, plate-sized pancakes with pumpkin filling: No problem, right?

I managed two thirds of just ONE pancake. At this point I had already eaten so much that I felt very very sick.

Happy Birthday, M!

West Coast Diaries: Michael Jackson

2009-06-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

We arrived in LA on Thursday, to be greeted at the airport by my friend, Ji. After giving me as big a hug as a tiny pregnant Korean lady can muster, she said: 'So, while you were in the air Michael Jackson passed away.' I looked at my brother, who by now had adopted his LA outfit of massive aviator shades and a straw hat: 'No way!' was all we could think of to say.

We both stood slightly dazed while she went to pick up the car. We'd been talking about Jacko on the flight, trying to remember where the Neverland ranch was. MJ was a hero to both of us growing up. As a five year old my biggest ambition was to become one of his backing dancers. Jacko is the reason that I love dancing. We had a cassette copy of Bad that we listened to repeatedly as kids, lunging wildly round our tiny sitting room in time with the music. There's no better music to learn to dance to. Each song has its own internal drama; the tension builds slowly, so to dance to it you have to be able to move both slowly and quickly, and to react to sudden shifts in tempo. Then there's the dramatic gestures we all picked up from watching the man on TV: the hip thrusts, the sudden head turns, the weird jerky chicken thing that really shouldn't work but does. My brother won a dancing competition when he was about six for his ability to moonwalk and pull off other classic Jackson moves. We adored the man. My brother refused to read books when he was little, but he made an exception for MJ's biography.

The whole of LA was abuzz with the news. People were talking about it on the street and on the buses, TV coverage was non-stop. On Friday morning we decided we had to go and see the crowds around his star on Hollywood Boulevard. It felt like fate to us, and we knew we'd regret it if we missed out on participating in this particular slice of history.

We arrived there at around midday. There were fewer people than I'd predicted - maybe three hundred, but with many more gathered nearby and on the other side of the street just watching the drama of all the news crews and the pilgrims. We joined a bunch of people waiting to get behind the crash barriers leading to the mini-shrine that had been placed around the star. While we were waiting news crews flocked around us, thrusting microphones at people to ask what MJ meant to them.

'What did Michael mean to you?'

The thing that most struck me was that nobody (including me and my brother) was sad. There was a sense of excitement, and of a sort of respectfulness, but everyone was having fun, even the LAPD officers around us. When one of the officer's horses had to pee, and the road was temporarily covered in a lake of horse urine, the crowd erupted in gales of laughter. This was a kind of celebrity sideshow, and certainly nothing like the mass outpouring of grief associated with Princess Diana. Gradually we were ushered behind the barrier and formed a line waiting to see the shrine.

On the way we trod over such luminaries as Jack Nicholson (it seems weird to tread on these stars, somehow - almost sacreligious). I was touched to see that Jacko's star is almost next to Mickey Mouse's. Somehow, those two belong together. The atmosphere in the line was cheerful. Some nice people offered to take a photo of the two of us; people chatted and admired the handprints in the concrete outside the Chinese theater. Of course, getting to the main attraction was a total anti-climax. We just took photos and shuffled along, conscious of the many cameras trained at us. But the shrine itself was nicely understated: some candles and flowers, a few drawings and stuffed toys, and a single silver-sequineed glove next to his name.

I think Michael Jackson the person ceased to be real to most of us many years ago. His bizarre behavior and the child abuse allegations (which, let's face it, most of us believe had at least some foundation in reality) distanced him from his fans. In fact I wonder if I am the only person to feel a sense of relief that he has gone. This was not a happy soul, and how likely was it that he would have enjoyed a peaceful and rewarding old age? What we were left with was the music, which was so extraordinary that it transcended the collective repugnance we felt at his decline. In the crowd some girls were complaining that no one was playing his music as we waited. 'We could sing,' someone suggested. But no one was keen - it was Michael Jackson we wanted to hear.

My invisible granddad

2009-06-22T11:14:00.001-07:00

Hung out with my granny in her greenhouse this afternoon (thanks comrade Nibus for reminding me she is 98, not 97). Was amazing to watch her moving about the place. At one stage she started sharpening some rusty old knife against a grinding stone. I wondered with a sort of mixture of awe and horror if I'll be able to do that at the same age - if I'll even be alive.

She started rooting through a pile of old stuff and showing me various dusty old objects. Things we found included:
-a very long, slightly bent, handmade nail
-the tiniest screwdriver in the world
-an almost empty box of bone meal
-lots and lots of poisons for killing small creatures

Then we sat down for a bit. The conversation was a bit pish as she is almost totally deaf and I can hardly speak due to a bad cold. Eventually, in order to fill the silence, I pointed at the very old wooden table next to us and said 'that's a nice table'. 'Oh yes,' she said. 'I got that for Tim when he was in hospital. It used to have castors on it so we could wheel it next to the bed.' At first I thought 'who on earth is Tim', then I froze. She was talking about my grandfather, her husband, who died several months before I was born. In the thirty-one years I have known her this is the first time she has mentioned him to me. I've never seen a photograph of them together, never been shown anything that belonged to him, never heard a story about him or a single mention of his name. If it wasn't for my dad telling me a little about him, I would never have known anything about him.

My dad was thirty when I was born, so my granddad and my granny must have been together at least thirty years before he died. Imagine being married to someone for thirty years and then just completely erasing them from your life. Subconsciously I've always felt I should never ask about him. Odd that very old people sometimes drop these pretenses and start talking about people and events from the past. Do they just not care about it anymore, or is there a sudden desire to revisit old memories in the latter stages of life?

I let the comment pass by. I have no massive curiosity to satisfy, but I let my hand linger on the warm wood of the table (it is quite a nice old table). Oddly, I think I'm happy just to have heard her say his name.

Saturn Return

2009-06-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

My life, which is typically quite eventful, has been in a state of unusual turmoil for some time now. I've been searching for reasons to explain this, and today I came across a couple of interesting ideas.

The Professor (@memestorm) kindly recommended Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness to me after a previous post on my battles with depression. It is the most scientific account of depression I have come across, and yet still manages to retain a human touch. It explains ideas that I'd encountered before but hadn't fully grasped, such as Seligman's Learned Helplessness model and Beck's extremely persuasive ideas about negative cognitions. Wolpert discusses but is rather dismissive of evolutionary explanations of depression, but I found the idea that depression could be adaptive, in the sense that it encourages the depressed person to accept a subordinate position in a social hierarchy, quite compelling. But there are many other compelling ideas in this book, and I haven't even reached the chapters that deal with treatment methods yet. The big punch in the jaw that I got from this book, however, was the thought that some of my recent life 'choices' have been driven by my biological clock, rather than something more rational and controllable.

Almost six months to the day after my twenty-ninth birthday, my biological clock switched on, just like that. For me this has been a very difficult thing to deal with. In my teens I assumed I would want a family one day, only to realise in my twenties that I really didn't. After ten years of trying to justify this to my family, and getting pissed off with people saying to me 'oh you'll change your mind soon enough' it was an awful disappointment to discover that those people were right, and that I did want a child even though none of my rational objections to the idea had changed one iota. Instead, some biological drive I have no control over just clicked into place, making me feel like an animal, like some kind of blind machine whose purpose is not after all to fill the world with love, light and magic, but just to reproduce.

It took me quite a while to adjust to this change - and to realise that a drive is just a drive, and actually we can control them. But what I hadn't realised is that drives are sneaky things, and they affect us on subconscious levels. This particular drive has been making me cling to patterns of negative behaviour I wouldn't normally have allowed. It's not quite that simple, predictably. There are always multiple reasons why we do dumb things, but I think this has been a big one for me, and it helps to acknowledge it.

The second idea that made me stop in my tracks today came from my friend Amanda. We'd been comparing notes about the awful time we and numerous acquaintances of ours have had over the past year. She mentioned the concept of Saturn Return, which I'd never heard of before. It's the idea that roughly every thirty years the planet Saturn returns to the position it occupied when we were born, bringing with it great upheavals. Now I take a passing interest in astrology, mostly because I enjoy the coincidences it throws up, but even if you think astrology is utter hokum, the concept of Saturn Return makes perfect sense for other reasons. Around the age of thirty things do shift a gear. Whether for social, biological or evolutionary reasons our priorities begin to alter; we are leaving youth behind. I certainly have started to feel that the time for experimenting has passed, and that I need to consolidate everything I have learned and start making more discernible progress in life. I built up quite a successful career for myself in my twenties, but for the last few years I have been stalled in the same position while I have watched my peers progress to enormously stressful managerial positions that I most definitely do not covet. Meanwhile I have picked up the interests in law and social justice that I abandoned after leaving university and am retraining as a lawyer and applying for volunteer positions with various advice agencies. This is a process I am ambivalent about. On the one hand I feel compelled to do it, and can see that it will reward me in ways that my current work no longer does. But the flipside is that I will have to assume 'grown up' responsibilities like working in an office, committing to long-term projects, getting up early in the mornings, dealing with the stress of personal interactions; all things I have very successfully avoided as a freelancer.

Cronus [Saturn] devouring his children, Francisco de Goya

At the same time I have been dealing with tremendous ambivalence about my personal life in almost every arena from where I live to how I relate to my family. I both crave and fear resolution to all these crises, as resolution would force me to move on with my life in new and unpredictable ways. The last few years have felt like a rather indulgent exercise in self-analysis. The concept of Saturn Return would have that this is an essential and ultimately fruitful process, but it is beginning to wear me down. I would love for the next stage of my life to be a productive one, in terms of my contributing something to the greater good, rather than simply learning painful lessons that further my personal development.

If you are interested in Saturn Return, this is a neat summary. Of everything I have read recently it encapsulates my life now, at the cusp of thirty-one, more precisely than anything else.

Fuck the recession: give more money to charity

2009-06-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

I just had a call from Plan UK, a children's charity. I'd written to them ages ago about sponsoring a child, but had completely forgotten about it until now. Judging by the surprise and pleasure in the phone canvasser's voice, I'm the first person in a while to hand over my bank details and agree to set up a direct debit. No surprise, given the shoddy state of most people's finances these days.

I've been chasing my former employer over unpaid wages for months and months now. Just as it looked likely that I'd be able to claim back the money from the government's insolvency fund, it seems some deadline I wasn't aware of has passed and I won't now see any of the money back. I suppose I could let this get me down, but really, I'm ok. I've spent the last nine months living cheaply and saving money. I can afford to spend most of this month on holiday. I can still buy ridiculous shoes. I'm not going hungry. And compared to so many people I know, I'm owed hardly anything. I'm not rich, but I'm doing better than most people. So rather than moan any more about what a c*** my former boss is and how the economy is going to shit, I'm going to give more money to charity this year than I've ever given before. I think this is perhaps the best way to cock a snook at the financial crisis, the greedy MPs, the Fred Goodwins of this world.

In case any of you feel like joining me, but lack inspiration, I can recommend two places to deposit your dwindling reserves of cash:

Plan UK are an excellent charity, enabling you to sponsor girls and boys in countries around the world. I'm giving £15 a month to sponsor a girl in Africa. I reckon this works out as about as much as I spend on shoes in any given year. I have worked for a subsidiary of Plan and spent time in their offices. They are run by a good mixture of clued up individuals from developed and developing countries. In other words, if you want to sponsor a child in Africa, you'll be giving your money to a charity run on the ground, by Africans for Africans. Same if you want to sponsor a child in Asia or the Caribbean.

Media lens. I can't praise these guys enough. If you like Chomsky and Pilger, you want to read what Media lens writers have to say. They hold mainstream journalists to account, in a way that will make you flinch. I've been sponsoring them for several years now, but very few of their readers contribute anything. As almost no mainstream news source will touch them they exist solely through sponsorship, and must make a very meager living indeed. Even if you don't agree with everything they have to say, they perform a very valuable public service for all of us.

If anyone else has any good charity recommendations, stick em in the comments box to give us all something to be cheerful about.

kxx

Angst

2009-06-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

I spent the afternoon watching Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire and drinking a very good bottle of rioja that was meant as a gift for a friend, but somehow ended up being drunk almost entirely by me.

If you haven't seen Wings of Desire you should. It is beautiful and uplifting. It also has Columbo in it, but don't let that confuse you; it all makes perfect sense.

In outline, the film is about angels who walk around Berlin, listening to the inner thoughts of its inhabitants and noting them for posterity. The tenderness with which the angels listen is very moving. They rest their heads on the thinker's shoulder, their arm encircling like a lover. They yearn to offer comfort, but the thinkers (for the most part) are unaware of their presence.

The main angel falls in love with a human woman, who reminded me strongly of someone I don't like to think of, which only served to somehow make her more beautiful. At the end of the film she delivers a monologue that makes you feel like you are holding hands with everyone else in the world at once. It is a meditation on love and loneliness, and it will comfort all those who are weary of heart.

On the way home I sat at the bus stop and wondered if angels do exist. If they follow us around town, holding us up somehow when we falter, encircling us with their arms. I imagined my mother's mother and my mother's father on either side of me, leaning on my shoulders, giving me strength. On the bus I watched the people: the tiny Jewish man full of nerves, the sleepy Chinese girl, the angry black actress, and wished I could hear their thoughts as the angels could.

My own thoughts these days are so loud and so insistent I wonder that the world can't hear them. I have stopped listening to my iPod as I travel, as to drown out my thoughts is to deny them, and that seems like a crime. I think about love, and loss, and pain, and death, the sound of trains, the shape of a stranger's face, that feeling of immense tiredness that accompanies the start of a difficult journey, how I wish I could speak fluently the language of my relatives, why trying to escape is just like being forced to look in a mirror, how to let go, when I will walk in the woods again, whether one can climb on the 'o' in 'Hollywood', what a ship sounds like at night, when I will kiss the back of my lover's neck again.

Tomorrow I am going on a strange journey. Tiredness and vague anxieties overwhelm me, but the angels carry me onwards as they always do.

Five things I hate that no one else seems to

2009-05-23T05:36:00.000-07:00

Crisps
OK, I confess to occasionally munching on those nice oily handbaked ones that cost a fortune and go quite well with an icy G&T, but Walkers crisps? Please. That isn't food; it's slivers of scab sprayed with eye-wateringly toxic chemicals. The mere sight of a packet of Walkers makes my stomach begin to churn - as for the smell - my God, it is the very definition of putrefaction. But the very worst thing is the way that opening a bag of Walkers turns a person into a slack-jawed automaton with a thousand yard stare, mindlessly dipping their filthy paw into the packet, raising to the mouth, mechanically chewing, repeat, repeat, repeat; like a cow in a field filling itself in anticipation of eventual slaughter, except no one would want to eat flesh raised on such filth. Brrrr. Stop it. Stop it now.

Cunt.

Pizza
I have eaten many pizzas in my life; I have had two that could be described as good. One was from the Deep Pan Pizza place on Trafalgar Square when I was fourteen, one was in Milan when I was twenty-four. Most of my friends will tell you I have an awful memory, so why do I remember these two pizzas? Because a good pizza is as rare as a Chinese river dolphin: either the base is heavy, doughy and damp like a sweaty towel, or it's thin, dusty and bland, like a burnt table water biscuit. The toppings can be quite nice, but they'd be infinitely better if you scraped them off, ate them on their own or combined them with nice ingredients to make a proper meal. Think you like pizza? You don't. It's a giant cultural conspiracy.

You like this do you? Really? Really? Come on now.

Mozart
Tinkle tinkle tinkle, la la la, harpsichord, harpsichord, can I go home now? Words that come to mind when I think of Mozart? Bland, bland, blah. Must have been all those stupid minuets and trios I was forced to learn during piano lessons all those years ago. Dull as ditchwater the lot of them. Do people really like Mozart that much, or is it just that he's one of only two classical composers most people can name?

Oh sod off and eat a pizza, Moz.

Family Guy
This cultural 'offering' makes me want to cry at its sheer awfulness: the vapid characters, the execrable draughtsmanship, the funny funny 'jokes', but most of all the fact that people I know and love seem to find it so damn entertaining. When I watch my family watching Family Guy I feel utterly alone, like I don't really belong to the human race and that I'll never find my way back 'home' to a planet where there are beings like me. The very existence of this show is a black mark against humanity.

Champagne
Such an apt name for such an excruciating drink. How best to celebrate a birth, a wedding, a birthday, an anniversary? Slice the back of your throat with a razor blade and douse the gash with TCP. At almost every celebratory event I attend I tell the host 'I don't much like champagne, actually' and they always say 'Oh, you just haven't had the good stuff. You'll love this.' I nod, obediently take a sip from the o-so elegant fluted glass, try unsuccessfully to hide the wince that inevitably disfigures my face and then sneak off round the back to 'water' the first poor shrub I find. But what do I know. A thousand premiership footballers can't be wrong, right?

Happy anniversary, darling.

I'm not going to tag anyone as I know most people are sick of it, but if you want to run with this meme, go right ahead.

Thank you Naomi Wolf

2009-05-10T02:33:00.000-07:00

Was amused to read a story about Naomi Wolf in an interview with feminist blogger Jessica Valenti in today's Guardian.

I'm the same age as Valenti, and, like her, I was a fan of Wolf's writings on feminism as a teenager. Wolf is about as far from the stereotype of a bitter, man-hating, sandal-wearing, hirsute feminist as its possible to be; she's attractive, witty, self-deprecating, and clearly fond of men. I could identify with her work, as it didn't make me feel like a traitor to my brother, my father and my male friends that I agreed with what she said.

When she was 17, Jessica Valenti went to retreat hosted by Wolf, and describes her mortification at being picked on by Wolf to read out a speech about the ten things she was most proud of. Valenti felt that she had nothing to say in comparison to the much older women at the retreat, and began to cry when Wolf insisted she give the speech anyway. Wolf comes out of this anecdote quite badly; Valenti seems to be implying that she picked on her deliberately, and in fact states that the incident 'put her off' feminism for a few years.

A couple of years later, when I was 19, I met Wolf at a book signing in Edinburgh (a city where she lived for a while). I'm not quite sure what prompted her interest but she started quizzing me about what I did. 'Are you an artist?' she asked. Somewhat overawed and bashful I stumbled over my response. To me, 'artist' meant 'painter', so I said something like 'er, no, not really, but I write a little'. Then I realised that to her 'artist' encompasses 'writer' and I started to blush. Ignoring my confusion, she began to encourage me to develop my writing, even suggesting that I send my work to her. I was taken aback, mumbled my thanks and shuffled off into the night.

I never did send anything to her to read, never even considered it. I knew I had a way to go before I could show anyone my writing, and in some way perhaps I sensed that her encouragement was meant to be more motivational than practical. Reading Valenti's story I can't help wondering if Wolf's determination to force her to give a speech she didn't want to give was meant well. I think Naomi Wolf is one of those rare public figures who feels compelled to use her influence to kick start other people in some way. I guess these attempts can backfire in certain cases, but I am glad she tried with me.

I don't write because Naomi Wolf told me I should, but there's no doubt I have thought about her words over the years and that encouragement from someone I admired did me good. Thank you Naomi. I hope you're still out there lighting firecrackers under lazy teenage asses.

Shanghai 2001

2009-04-27T04:27:00.000-07:00

That wag Tim Footman has managed to prick my conscience into getting me to write a second blog post in a month - my pathetic rejoinder to all the 'blogs are dead' noise on Twitter.

As my life at the moment consists almost entirely of exam revision, lesson writing and cat grooming, I have to plunder my memory for entertaining content. On Facebook this morning I came across this photograph (which I'm hoping Jason and Jennifer don't mind me reproducing again).

These are the kids of two friends I made in China, now happily settled in New Orleans. This picture reminded me of the two of them, but also of the immense amounts of fun I had during my first year in Shanghai (subsequent years were also fun, but there's nothing quite like your first time in a crazy foreign land).

I went out there in April 2001, with nothing but a TEFL certificate, the telephone number of the school I was to be working at, and a few hundred quid, kindly provided by Patroclus and my friend Doctor B. I knew only one phrase in Mandarin ("ni hao" meaning "hello", which was taught to me by a Pakistani newspaper vendor in Charing Cross Station).

On the flight on the way over I remember looking at the map on the TV screen with a line tracing our trajectory over Russia and Mongolia. I'd never been anywhere more exotic than Toronto before, and I had to lock myself in the bathroom at one point and do a silent scream in the mirror and jump up and down with suppressed excitement. When the plane touched down my nose was pressed against the glass of the cabin window. Would I see Chinese people in straw hats riding bicycles? Yes! Would I see a large billboard of British snooker player Steve Davis? Er, yes! (This was the point when I realised that China probably wasn't as otherworldy as I'd allowed myself to believe.)

Unperturbed by the prevalence of McDonald's outlets and the fact that vast parts of my new home were clearly far more developed than anywhere I'd lived in Britain, I set about exploring Shanghai. The few hundred quid in my pocket kept me alive until my first pay cheque. In fact, it wasn't a cheque, as foreigners weren't allowed bank accounts at that time. For my first year I was paid monthly in cash, and had to carefully protect my small stack of 100 renminbi notes.

For the first few months my concepts of money and distance were terribly confused. I was terrified of taking taxis as I assumed they'd be expensive as in the UK. I would walk for miles and miles to meet friends, until I realised that most taxi journeys cost less than a pound. Expat bars and restaurants were an extravagance to be enjoyed once a week perhaps. For the rest of the time I ate in what can best be described as a shack opposite the school where I taught. The shack was run by a cheerful family from the north east of China. The foreign and Chinese teachers would eat together there, in an annexe to the family bedroom (we would have to traipse past the beds on our way to the table). The food was some of the best I have eaten before or since - heavy noodles in oily sauce, shoots of unfamiliar green vegetables with strips of succulent pork, cubes of chicken hidden in a deluge of fiery chillies. I quickly realised that the Chinese food served up outside China is some kind of twisted joke. Real Chinese food is unimaginably delicious, and I can only speculate they don't export it for fear their country would be overwhelmed by salivating immigrants.

I found most of the British expat teachers at my school to be your typical stereotype: rude about Chinese people, disparaging of local culture, perpetually complaining about everything. I avoided almost all Brits for the entire four years of my stay, and instead hung out with the Chinese teachers, and later the myriad other nationalities I encountered. My best friend for the first few months was Lilia, a girl who had never left China, but who spoke flawless English with a strong valley girl accent. She'd picked it up entirely from watching American movies. We would sneak off to the local Korean restaurant for lunch. She taught me to enjoy cold noodles, how to snip them into smaller pieces with scissors, and how to manipulate metal chopsticks. The other female teachers hated her, because she was incredibly rude to them, which I of course, secretly enjoyed.

Due to some administrative cock up I lived in Puxi, which is the older part of Shanghai to the west of the Huang Pu river, and worked in Pudong, to the east. My commute to work involved a twenty-minute walk to the subway, a change of lines at People's Square, and then a bus journey to my final destination. If I was in a rush I wouldn't wait for the air-conditioned bus, but jump on the cheaper rickety bus, jostling for space besides sacks of God-knows what and a load of sweating travellers. I quickly learned the Shanghai traveller's etiquette of elbow-blocking, shoving and full-body seat diving. No one ever berates you for getting to a seat before them. You have 'won', and that is that. Eight years later I am finding these skills very handy for roller derby ;)

Oddly, considering how interesting my life was at that time, I found my students to be rather dull. For the most part they were young professionals, learning English in order to get promoted at work. They all seemed to have the same ambitions: to do an MBA at Harvard or Stanford and then become the CEO of a Chinese company. They all parroted the same lines: 'China's economy is growing very fast' (true), 'Shanghai is very beautiful' (not really true), 'Your Chinese is soooo good' (not true at all). There was the odd exception, but it wasn't until I started teaching young children that I realised what the problem was. The kids were as interesting, creative and unique as British kids, until they reached the age of about 14, whereupon their personalities seemed to be subsumed by the system. At mainstream school they sat in classes of fifty or more, hands visible on their desks at all times, rote learning facts and being encouraged to cheat at every opportunity. (The very limited number of places at good schools and universities in China means cheating is often the only real chance for many to succeed. All my students cheated in tests, and after a while I gave up berating them for it. They thought I was stupid for trying to stop them, and I started to understand their point of view.)

As I grew to know some of my adult students better, traces of the person beneath the veneer emerged. I met many students who had wanted to be musicians or designers, but who had 'chosen' accountancy or banking because their families were (legitimately) concerned for their future security. Later on I would start to meet high-level managers at foreign and Chinese firms who would bemoan this lack of personality and creativity in their Chinese employees. The most common complaint was that Chinese employees had no problem-solving skills. When I left I was starting to hear rumblings about reforms to the education system. How do you educate a billion people to be both docile and go-getting? This I think is a far more interesting question than whether China's economy will continue to flourish.

I gave up teaching after a year and moved on to publishing, which was far more interesting. A group of students took me out for a meal at the end of their course, and I remember it for two reasons. Firstly, there was an area of the restaurant devoted entirely to the carving of fruit and vegetables into ridiculous shapes (all carvers smoking furiously over their creations). Secondly, the little cretins tricked me into eating chou dofu (stinky tofu), which is possibly the one Chinese dish I can't abide. It is so foul-tasting and smelling that it almost negates the deliciousness of the rest of their cuisine. Almost...

God, I've been rambling on for ages. I could write a million anecdotes about that first year, but my abiding memory of it is the feeling of constant enthusiasm I felt. I woke up each day as high as a kite. Nothing, not the appalling heat, the terrible manners, the endless inconveniences, the pollution or noise, stopped me from feeling like life was incredible, rich, exciting and fulfilling - and so it was.

Living with depression

2009-04-23T02:48:00.001-07:00

I've been undergoing a slow process of insight into my own psychology these past few months - it's a work in progress, but I think I achieved some concrete understanding today.

I have a genetic predisposition to depression. Both my maternal grandparents suffered from it, as does my mother (and from looking at photos of my great grandparents, it looks like they were pretty dour folk, at least on the odd occasion when a photographer popped a flash bulb in their direction). As an adult I've had regular tussles with the black dog, but until recently they were isolated incidents - periods of weeks or occasionally months of awfulness punctuated by much lengthier periods of 'normality'.

This past year has been different though. A succession of bad things has happened to me (redundancy, death of a family member, illness of a family member, money worries, other things) and, although there are times when I have felt pretty desperate I have somehow managed to avoid falling into the grip of a profound clinical depression as in the past. Instead, what I have felt is a kind of background depression: a cushion of sadness and weariness that is seldom far away. It's not pleasant, but the key thing about it is that it is manageable. Unlike in the past where I've been signed off work or spent vast amounts of time staring into the abyss, I've (mostly) been able to get on with life, be of use to other people, laugh at jokes, feel 'normal'. My depression (if that's still an appropriate word for it) seems to be a part of me now, rather than something that I suppress most of the time until it rises up and overwhelms me.

It's very hard for me to unpick exactly what has brought this about - perhaps its part of ageing (very interesting article in today's Guardian about why mental maturity means the best free divers are in their thirties, rather than their twenties), perhaps its simply that I'm better at vocalising my anguish and therefore receiving better advice and support from others, or maybe its because I've taken up a sport and am getting regular exercise. Partly, I think, it's that I've stopped treating depression as though it weren't an inevitable part of my psyche. In the past I kidded myself that it was possible to be happy all or most of the time. I still think happiness is a worthwhile end in itself, but it's perhaps easier to accomplish if one is not expending massive amounts of energy in order to avoid all misery.

My mother has a stomach condition that occasionally causes her a lot of pain. The pain in turn causes emotional distress, such that she starts to feel like she will 'never be well'. My advice to her recently has been to try and accept that sometimes she won't feel well, but that most of the time she'll be fine, and not to let the bad stuff be predominant in her mind at all times. She doesn't listen. Like me she wants perfection: to be well and happy all the time. Are we, as a society, starting to feel entitled to constant good health and happiness, now that medicine makes these things theoretically possible, and is this sense of entitlement robbing us of the chance to live well despite our defects? (To be clear, I am very much pro-medication. My question is more related to how we cope with long-term conditions that can't be eradicated through treatment.)

Twitter: The Honeymoon is over

2009-03-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

I've been using Twitter less and less lately, and my enthusiasm for it has waned to almost zero. I've been reading articles about the Twitter backlash. They seem to be suggesting that existing users are turning against Twitter because it is being flooded by hordes of new users sputtering endless inane commentary. I'm not sure how this can be the case, since one needs to be following these people in order to be aware of what they are saying. I haven't followed that many new people recently and I never see the fail whale, so my burgeoning indifference is coming from somewhere else.

I think in part it is to do with the conflict between the professional and private personas that people display online. My favourite Twitter friends are those who tweet about their lives, their feelings, their boyfriend troubles, their everyday traumas and amusements. But a large proportion of the people I follow are there partly or mainly for business, and can't risk exposing themselves in that way. In fact, since I've started to meet other users at real life events, and some of those users have enquired as to what I do and requested my business card in order to put me in touch with potential clients, I've felt too constrained to really use Twitter to express myself, as I felt able to do a few months ago.

I'm not complaining. One of the things that I liked about Twitter in the beginning was that I ended up carrying many of my online conversations into meat space, partly because of my involvement in Twestival, but also because of other ad hoc arrangements, like the wonderful Edinburgh Social Media Coffee Morning, pub quizzes, tweet ups and dinners. I still think Twitter is a good way of meeting people. The enthusiasm for tweet ups hints at people's desire to form real connections in an environment where they don't feel constrained. All of the professional tweeters I've met have been a great deal more interesting in real life than they've allowed themselves to be online.

Another unpleasant new trend I've noticed recently is for users to form small cliques that endlessly ass kiss each other. One of Twitter's early strengths was as a recommendation tool, but such recommendations only carry weight if they are done genuinely and sufficiently infrequently so as not to alienate other users. Follow Friday is a good example of this. At the beginning users were recommending quite interesting people to follow. Now they seem to be recommending people they feel they ought to. There is also a rather sickening trend towards false positivity. I think people feel unable to express a negative sentiment in case it reflects badly on them. As a result there are lot of people who project an image of being constantly on the verge of orgasmic bliss. I find these twitterers as irritating as I do those who constantly whinge.

To my mind, Twitter is echoing the trajectory of Blogger back in the early noughties (ironic given Evan Williams' involvement in both). I had a Blogger blog back in 2002 and found it a good way to start conversations with people. There was a lot of random traffic, and people commented regularly on each other's blogs. Today, even established bloggers note the dearth of traffic and commentary on their blogs. People still read blogs, but they've stopped commenting on them, and something similar is happening with Twitter. People are tweeting more but responding less, as Twitter becomes a platform for displaying your business credentials or personal agenda. This has had the twin effect of making me feel like I'm 'showing off' when I tweet, and that my followers are 'spying' on me, rather than engaging with what I say or telling me something real about themselves.

I'm not quite at the point of closing my account, but I think it's safe to say my love affair with Twitter is over. I'll watch its progress with interest, while keeping my eye out for smaller, newer, more interesting social media platforms.

Out of time

2009-03-23T12:44:00.000-07:00

I just found out about the death of a former flatmate from brain cancer. He was a lovely person: full of fun, humour, energy. I didn't live with him for long, but he made a lasting impression on me. Having given up on his first choice of career as an actor he was just starting to retrain as a drama teacher. He was incredibly enthusiastic about teaching and desperate to get stuck in. As someone who'd love to teach state school but doesn't quite dare, I was inspired by his boldness and enthusiasm. Sadly, his teaching career was cut short by a malignant tumour, and the kids of Stoke Newington are worse off as a result.

Sitting just now with my 98-year old grandmother, who clings to life like a moss clings to stone, I was filled with conflicting emotions: a kind of blank numbness that has been growing over the past year as people I love have died or been felled by depression, contrasted with a raging fury at the unbearable pointlessness of human existence. I want to lash out and punch someone in the face, scratch out eyes and twist necks till they snap, but I can hardly be bothered to get up out of my chair.

More and more I come to loathe those who dole out meaningless platitudes: 'what will be will be', 'it's all part of the plan', 'it's in the hands of fate'. On its own, life is utterly meaningless - it's up to us to shape it, give it direction, make it mean something... anything.

He was a handsome man, too, and if he hadn't had a girlfriend, and I hadn't been distracted by some ridiculous musician, I'd have risked making a pass at him. Just yesterday, even, I'd suddenly remembered him and wondered what would have happened if I'd tried. I guess at the back of my mind I'd thought maybe we'd meet at a party one day and I'd have another chance. It hardly felt very urgent. I thought that time was on my side. As usual, I was wrong.

Self-publishing - the debate rumbles on

2009-03-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

Self-publishing: just a case of vanity?

I commented on this post a while back and then forgot all about it until @selfpubreview flagged it up for me on Twitter. The comments thread is an interesting snapshot of both sides of the self-publishing argument.

[In case you can't be bothered to read the whole thing, be assured that I am rabidly in favour of self-publishing, and consider those who dislike it to be backward-looking snobs (though I put it a little more politely in my initial comment).]

Addendum: @selfpubreview's site looks to be an excellent resource for self-publishing.

EdTwestival

2009-02-13T10:59:00.000-08:00

I'm too exhausted to write a proper blog post about the EdTwestival, other than to say it was a roaring success, and that we raised over £3,500 for charity: water. I wish I'd had time to actually talk to all the lovely people who turned up, rather than just thrusting my book of raffle tickets in their faces and demanding cash, but it was worth it to raise such a lot, and to hammer London for the number of tweets sent about our Twestival.

Here's my outfit, which ought to have won me the 'best-dressed female' prize, but since I was judging the damn thing, I decided it would be unwise to nominate myself.

Pay it forward

2009-02-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

Something unexpected and lovely happened to me recently.

I've been working closely with a team of novice writers for the past four months: writing briefs for them, reviewing their work, and trying to comment on their lessons in a way that encourages them to produce better material, rather than become discouraged and petulant (no mean feat, as I have discovered again and again over the years).

This job has been made harder by the fact that I am in a different continent and time zone to all three, and so my comments are generally delivered via the impersonal medium of email or text chat. With one writer in particular I had become a little worried. My lengthy emails to her, delivered in what I hoped was a bright, encouraging tone, were met with curt, perfunctory responses. Sure, she always did what I asked, and her work certainly improved over the months, but I wondered if she was becoming disillusioned by the process of writing.

Then I heard on the grapevine that she was leaving for another job. I wrote to her to say how much I thought her work had improved in the short time we'd worked together, and that I hoped she would consider working in materials development again in future.

No response.

Weeks passed, and I discovered that her new job was in a different part of the same company, working on e-learning materials. Then, out of the blue, I received a lovely email from her thanking me for being 'incredibly supportive' of her work, and for providing constructive criticism that, she thought, had helped her 'to better myself as a writer'.

I meet a lot of young teachers and writers in my industry, and if I see potential, I try and encourage them to stick with it, and to devote time and energy to developing their skills. But the mill turns fast, and it's rare that I get to see the results of my encouragement. People move on: to new schools, new companies, new projects; feedback is rare, and so to receive it, and for it to be positive - these are wonderful things.

It did get me thinking though - do I always thank those who have helped me to grow and to develop as I've travelled along my path? It's easy to give praise to those below you in the food chain, but we often forget to thank those above us - the ones whose job it is (or should be) to pass on the knowledge. It wasn't until I left a particular company, for instance, that I realised just how much my boss for the previous five years had taught me. I guess because we didn't always see eye-to-eye it never occurred to me just how much I owed him, but when I told him I was leaving, I suddenly found myself giving him a bear hug and thanking him profusely. On reflection, I wish I'd thanked him earlier - not because it would have made my life easier, but because managing people is a difficult and sometimes lonely job, and people need to hear when they are doing it well.

So the point of this rather long ramble is to suggest that you have a think about how you got where you are today, and to ask yourself if you've properly thanked those that helped you get there. Go on, make someone's day.

Twitter: Making and Spreading the News

2009-02-04T08:21:00.001-08:00

I've been trying to resist the urge to write about Twitter, but it's just too interesting not to. I've just got off the phone with a journalist from a Scottish press agency, who wanted to speak to me about my involvement with the Edinburgh Twestival.

When I got involved with planning the event, I had no idea it was going to be so popular. I naively thought we'd struggle to sell 40 tickets. In the end, it looks like we'll sell more than 200 (170 already gone) and potentially attract as many folk as we can fit in the building. This is great for charity: water (all proceeds from the 180+ Twestivals around the world go to charity), for my social life, and for my local Twitter ranking (25th in Edinburgh, last time I did a vanity search).

But what really interests me is the way local journalists have reacted to it. I contacted The List a few weeks ago to ask if they'd be interested in featuring EdTwestival. Turns out a lot of the staff are on Twitter already, so they 'got it' straight away and were very enthusiastic. What's more, inspired by us, they set up a Twitter account specifically for The List to stream news.

A couple of weeks later, and The Scotsman, The Herald, and the BBC have picked up on the buzz and are contacting us for stories. BBC Scotland are even coming to the event to live stream it. We've hardly had to do any press ourselves - Twitter has done all the work for us. By retweeting info about our sponsors, prizes and the bands we've booked, and our followers retweeting the news again, we generated interest organically, and in the process, we've convinced a number of journalists to sign up for Twitter to see what the fuss is about.

The journalist I spoke to today had just joined Twitter and said her conversation with me had 'opened her eyes' to the potential of it. At one point I started telling her about the Stephen Fry stuck-in-a-lift story, which, as a Twitter addict, I was laughing at as it happened last night. She'd caught the headlines, but hadn't absorbed the details. And then it hit me: here was I explaining the news to a journalist! The only reason that is possible is because of the tremendous meme-spreading, news-generating/promulgating possibilities of Twitter.

So, not only did we not need traditional news media in order to advertise the Edinburgh Twestival, in the process of generating our own hype, we became the news. Changing times indeed.

Keith and Billy: the same person?

2009-01-29T15:19:00.000-08:00

Seriously, has anyone ever seen Keith Urban (Mr Nicole Kidman) and Billy Ray Cyrus (don't tell my heart, my achy breaky heart, etc) in the same room?

Keith, or is it Billy?

Billy, or is it Keith?

New Battlestar Galactica

2009-01-26T15:17:00.000-08:00

I just typed 'Gaius Baltar' into a Google search and my browser crashed. This is clearly some kind of Cylon conspiracy to prevent me looking at pictures of James Callis.

Added to this frustration, I am completely flummoxed by the latest twists in the story (so much so that I can't even form coherent questions to try and alleviate my confusion) and I have the horrific image of Admiral Adama lying in bed with the egghead President. Yeuch!

This had all better be sorted out by Friday.

Twitter 1 BBC 0

2009-01-25T17:30:00.000-08:00

I don't agree with the BBC's decision not to broadcast the DEC's Gaza appeal, but I can at least understand why Mark Thompson struggled with it (incidentally, it's nice to see citizens complaining about something a little more important than Jonathan Ross for a change).

But what I don't understand is their decision not to mention the furore that this decision has created. The Guardian have reported it. CBS have reported it. As a British citizen I expect the BB-fucking-C to tell me the news, but when I go to the BBC news homepage, it tells me nothing about the 10,000 complaints it has received since refusing to broadcast the appeal, nor does it tell me about the protestors who staged a protest at the BBC's offices in Glasgow yesterday.

In fact, I heard about the protest on Twitter first, when someone I follow posted a picture taken inside the presentation. I flicked through the news sites intermittently for a while, and read nothing, so I retweeted the info. A while later I noticed someone else had retweeted my tweet again, so Twitter users were clearly clamouring for the information.

Four hours later and the Guardian have picked up on the story, but the BBC? They're telling me that 'breast ops defy financial gloom'. I've had a low opinion of the Beeb's news production for years, but this really takes the biscuit.

Bogart and Van Damme - separated at birth?

2009-01-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

I mean, just look...

P.S. I can't wait to see this.

Tagged and collared

2009-01-22T18:16:00.000-08:00

I've been tagged by the Hank Moody of magical realism, the wondrous, intellectual, sexbeast Don Felipe (is that enough ass kissing for you, my little pretty?) to write six random things about me.

1. I'm a raucous drunk.
2. I used to kill rabbits with myxomatosis on the way home from school, until I misjudged a blow and made one scream (you do not want to hear a rabbit scream).
3. My favourite character in Twin Peaks is Albert Rosenfield, because of this quote:

"You listen to me. While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a nay-sayer and hatchet man in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I'll gladly take another, because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. I love you, Sheriff Truman."

4. Princess Diana once scowled at me and then looked away. I was five. (Princess of Hearts, my arse.)
5. I know for certain that God has a sense of humour.

I am tagging Kel D.

Has anyone else noticed...

2009-01-22T13:30:00.000-08:00

...that Barack Obama (seen here using his Barackberry) is quite sexy? Or am I the last person on Earth to spot the bleeding obvious?

Image totally stolen from Mashable

History today (title stolen from Tim)

2009-01-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

For the most part I loved O-bam-bam's inaugural speech, and will probably watch it again. I especially liked the part about 'honesty, hard work and courage' being 'the quiet force of progress' through history. Not bad for a twenty-seven year old speech writer. I'll be pushing my team of writers to develop a lesson around the speech soonest.

If you liked it, or if you hated it, I recommend Learn out loud's 'Great speeches in history' podcast, downloadable free from here. It includes Nelson Mandela's address on release from prison, JFK's inaugural (which is interesting if you want to compare and work out the formula for all Presidential inaugural speeches) and Newton Minow's 'Television is a vast wasteland'. 'Ask not what broadcasting can do for you. Ask what you can do for broadcasting.'

Scot Wok - for J

2009-01-15T18:06:00.000-08:00

Herewith - some pictorial illustration of the aforementioned Chinese Banquet of Excellence. Unfortunately, most of the main dishes got eaten before I thought to photograph them, but the menu went something like this:

Cold dishes:
Cubes of silken tofu marinated in chilli oil
Mushroom, carrot and green bean salad, marinated in a tofu and tahini dressing
Soba noodles in a ginger soy sauce
Cucumber, marinated overnight in a sweet rice vinegar and spring onion dressing (which Rufus thought could make a drink all of its own)

Hot dishes:
Garlic spinach
Deep friend green beans in a chilli and soy sauce
Gong bao ji ding - cubes of chicken deep fried with peanuts and red chilli
Pork belly and deep fried aubergine in a sweet shaoxing wine sauce

Prep. Note peeled peanuts and the evil bag of glutinous rice that destroyed my saucepan.

An entire sinkload could barely satisfy the one vegemetarian present.

Cold dishes

Straining the tofu for the cold salad dressing

The girls drink red wine while they wait.

The boys go into shock at the excellence of the cuisine. Except Aeneas, who is thinking about his moustache.

Pong's hair stands on end at the deliciousness of it all.

New blog

2009-01-13T09:34:00.000-08:00

Because I'm *such* a prolific blogger, I've decided to start another blog to feed my obsessive need to procrastinate. This one is about pictures, rather than words, though.

Each day I take a look at my Facebook friends feed and have noticed how few people put privacy settings on their photos. This means I frequently find myself looking at the photos of complete strangers, some of which are really bizarre, really unusual, or, occasionally, really beautiful.

I've decided to share the best of them with you lot (until I get sued).

There's no such thing as innocuous

2009-01-10T19:38:00.000-08:00

Heard a story this evening from a friend who works with special needs kids.

When I was at secondary school in the north of Scotland, we had a special needs department as part of the main school complex. The special needs kids were partially integrated into the main school and would join the rest of us for certain classes. Being typical schoolchildren, we refused to call them anything as politically correct as 'special needs kids'; instead, we called them 'spastics' or, if we were feeling particularly generous, 'spackers' - a phrase that is still in common use among my generation of Scots (perhaps in other parts of the world as well; I'm not sure).

Apparently, at some point since I left school, The Spastics Society, as it was then called, realised that a generation of kids was being labelled 'spastics' and 'spackers' and decided to go for a rebrand, changing their name to SCOPE. This, I suspect they thought, was an innocuous name that no one could mould into a nasty pejorative term of abuse.

They should have saved their money. Today's schoolchildren now refer to their peers with cerebral palsy as, wait for it... 'scopers'!

Apologies

2009-01-06T19:59:00.000-08:00

I've been a lax blogger of late. This is because I have become obsessed with Chinese cuisine, and have been chopping up animal flesh and saucing it up in all kinds of decadent and delightful ways.

Tonight is Chinese banquet night, and I have eight dishes to unleash on my unsuspecting public. It matters not that I have rice vinegar in my hair, sherry splattered all over my slippers (yes, sherry is an essential component in all Chinese cooking) and silken tofu in my cleavage: it's all going to taste like heaven.

Me, earlier today.

But first, time for a nap.

2009... so far, so good

2009-01-01T12:36:00.001-08:00

So the sun did shine (my humblest apologies to the Swiss), and I feel a whole lot better than I did yesterday.

2008... ...so last year.

Ten things I learned in 2008

2008-12-31T07:19:00.000-08:00

I've decided to take a tip from the Chinese and deal with troubling times by retreating to contemplate life by the side of a beautiful lake. As luck would have it though, the weather in Lausanne is unremittingly grey today, and Lake Geneva is just an idea in my mind as I watch the rain sleet down from my cosy indoor nest. My companion assures me the sun will honour us with an appearance tomorrow, but you can never trust the Swiss.

So, borrowing a meme from mcco12, here is my list of things I learned this year.

1. Never trust a Swiss person.

2. Pastis is not so bad, really.

3. The best liars are those who believe their own lies.

4. I don't want to be a lawyer; and spending an absolute fortune on getting a qualification in law was well worth it purely for this realisation.

5. If someone tells you he is thinking about killing himself, it probably means he doesn't want to die.

6. If someone really wants to kill himself, he will, and he won't warn you first.

7. Making your own cream cheese is surprisingly quick and simple.

8. Being in love can be jaw achingly tedious.

9. The first thing a person tells you about herself is often the only thing you really need to know.

10. Good friends are the best defence against depression.

My best wishes to you all for a prosperous, tranquil and satisfying 2009.

Wise words

2008-12-22T11:39:00.000-08:00

As the saying goes: 'If you've nothing good to say, then say nothing'. So rather than inflict a deluge of Yuletide bad cheer on you, gentle readers, here are some jokes in regional British dialects. If you don't get them, ask Johnny for an explanation - he has more time on his hands than me.

Yorkshire joke:
A bloke from Yorkshire goes to the jewellers:
He says, "Can tha mek a gold statue o' mi dog?".

"Aye, reckon a can," sez the jeweller.
"Does tha want it eighteen carat?".

"Neigh," sez bloke, "I want it chewin' a bone."

Courtesy of Popbitch.

Scottish joke:
Wha's the quickest way tae gie a Scotsman a sex change?
Throw him aff a tall building so he lands wi a fud.

Courtesy of the fitba pundits on Radio Scotland.

As promised - PARSNIP

2008-12-11T06:51:00.000-08:00

My explanatory guide on subjects to be avoided at all costs in ELT materials.

Pornography
Student: Teacher, what is 'pornography'?
Teacher: Er, it's pictures of naked people.
Student: Do you mean like paintings?
Teacher: Er, not really.
Student (smelling blood now): So, what is the difference?
Teacher: ... Why don't you ask Michel? He was looking at some on one of the student lounge computers just this morning.

Alcohol
Qatari education minister: So, you want to supply my country with your English books?
Publisher: That's right. We have some top-quality authors and our books have won awards from the British Council.
Qatari education minister: What is this picture on page 55?
Publisher: Oh, that... That's just ... some young people, at a party, sipping ... non-alcoholic cocktails?
Qatari education minister: Next!

Racism
Teacher: Today we're going to discuss racism. Anyone have any stories they'd like to share?
Student: My sister was beaten to death by white supremacists.
Teacher: On second thoughts, let's turn to the grammar section on page 11.

Sex
Teacher: Today we're going to talk about sex. Perhaps those of you I've already slept with could get into pairs and give me a score out of five. The rest of you should line up in the corridor outside the storeroom.

Narcotics
Teacher: Class, let's talk about drugs, and the evil they do to our society.
Student: Carlos sells the best weed. Honestly, you should try some.
Carlos: Yeah, anyone not have my number?

Islam
Teacher: So what do we know about the ancient religion of Islam?
Chinese student: Muslims are all terrorists and women-haters.
Muslim student: Chinese people eat dogs and babies!
Italian student: Who wants to hear a joke about 9/11?

Pork
Qatari education minister: Ah, I see you have chosen some more appropriate pictures for your textbooks this year.
Publisher: Yes, we spent a lot of money checking and then reprinting the series to remove all possible connotations of sexual behaviour or alcohol consumption. I think you'll be delighted with the results.
Qatari education minister: What is this picture here, on page 121?
Publisher: It ... appears to be a young man ... enjoying a ... bacon sandwich... I'll get my coat.

Apocalypse now

2008-12-07T09:35:00.000-08:00

You know you've lost touch with reality when you start feeling nostalgic about electricity and running water.

I've just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy and have been watching the excellent Survivors on telly. This morning as I was filling the kettle to make coffee I genuinely thought 'it's going to be so sad when I turn on the tap and no more water comes out'.

I've also started sizing up the people I walk past on the street, wondering which of them will share their last can of baked beans with me when all the supermarkets have been looted and which will chain me to a wall in a cellar and systematically cut off my limbs and roast them for dinner.

Come to that I've had to question whether I'd be able to resist the lure of cooked human flesh if that were really all that stood between me and death from starvation.

I really really hope I never get to find out.

The school of hard knocks

2008-12-05T11:01:00.000-08:00

I just had to write a chapter on Project Management for a business studies textbook.

I used to hate teaching business English and writing business English materials, but then I went freelance and started running my own business and suddenly the subject came alive for me. Working with Americans and Chinese people also invigorated my interest in the subject: they don't tend to look askance at the business of making money in the way that many Brits do. In recent years my interest in business has verged on the geeky. I've become the kind of person who enjoys taking training courses at the Inland Revenue (sorry, HMRC) and researching the minutiae of contract law. My accountant says I am his star client, because my spreadsheets are so efficient he can do my tax return in half the time it normally takes (and yes, he does charge me half as much). I knew his business was going to go bust three months before my last boss did.

This last part made the writing of this chapter a rather bittersweet process. One of the tasks I set was to read quotes from dissatisfied clients and identify the mistake made by the project manager, another was to identify the most vulnerable points along a project's lifecycle, another how to incorporate risk management. A couple of years ago this would mostly have just been common sense, but I've seen so many projects botched through bad project management in recent times that I have a rather uncomfortably large store of real life experiences to draw from.

Thinking hard, I can't call to mind a single really good project manager, and I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible to find one. The skills required are so varied that anyone at the helm of a complex project is bound to fail on at least some grounds. If you're good at managing people, chances are you dislike detail. Perhaps you're hardcore at keeping suppliers within a budget but useless at communicating with your team. Almost invariably you'll have an overinflated sense of your abilities in one area and deep insecurities about your abilities in others.

Most of this comes down to personality and ego, in the end. I've seen an entire series of books literally ruined because the project manager was out of her depth and desperately trying to salvage her reputation by ruining those of everyone in her team. Judging by the stories I hear at publishing network events, this type of thing is depressingly common.

So it's nice that I have so much material on which to base my chapter, but I heartily wish that more of it were positive. Why don't they teach management in schools?

The best thing...

2008-12-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

...about working in the English Language Teaching (ELT) industry is that you have an excuse to research and write about almost every subject under the sun (apart from those that fall under the PARSNIP exceptions, of which perhaps another post at another time).

Things I have had to think about this week:

-Spontaneous Human Combustion: it can kill your pets by consuming all the oxygen in the room.
-Ways to describe an electric toothbrush shaped like a banana.
-Knowledge management - will companies invest in it less during times of economic crisis?
-How to explain to Chinese students why English people use the term 'skin and blister' to refer to a female sibling.
-Will students be able to label a diagram of decubitus ulcers?
-The subjunctive.

I love my job.

Tell me why...

2008-12-01T05:39:00.001-08:00

...I don't like Mondays.

Anyone know how much it costs to petition a company for liquidation?

It's made of mental

2008-11-26T07:11:00.000-08:00

One of the many jobs I did when I lived in China was working at a recording studio attached to the country's biggest audio-visual publishing house as 'token British female'.

Over the four years I lived there I must have recorded hundreds of hours of English language learning materials. These were used across China as part of the national English curriculum. Some of the materials I read were excellent - a couple won awards for innovation. Sad to report though, most were utter dross: derivative, plagiarised, inaccurate, unhelpful.

The Chinese concept of 'face' played a huge part in making most of the materials not only poor quality but grammatically, lexically and stylistically incorrect. As these texts were often written by Chinese people in managerial positions, the correctness of their English could not be challenged by the grunts in the recording studio, and certainly not by cocky western monkeys like me. After the first few months I gave up pointing out that 'no one EVER says this!' and just read it out with as much panache as I could muster. Most Chinese students who studied English in primary or secondary schools during the first half of this decade are no doubt familiar with the sound of me suppressing gales of laughter. Perhaps there are even Chinese people speaking English now with a sardonic Scottish accent - I like to think so.

When I was in Shanghai this month I went for a reunion at the recording studio and did a five-hour stint. There was less grammatical innacuracy than I remembered, but the materials were still being used primarily as a way of promulgating propaganda and outdated, factually innacurate nonsense. They were often unintentionally hysterically funny.

Some choice cuts:

A: What were Class Three students doing while Class One students were having a Chinese lesson yesterday morning?
B: They were having a lesson on the History of the Chinese Revolution.
A: What were they doing during the sports hour while many other students were playing ball games?
B: They were doing bodybuilding exercises.

A: You were preparing a new lesson around eight in the evening, weren't you?
B: No, I was reading a magazine article on shadowboxing.

Conversational tips:
Did you have any orientation programme about campus life for entering students?

Monologue:
I think playing mahjong for gambling is a bad habit. A lot of people play it very late at night, so they don't have a good rest; some people are so obsessed with playing mahjong that they don't care about their work or study; other people lose a lot of money and this lead [sic] to the break up of their family, to name just few [sic].

Fish farming promises to be a good way to produce large quantities of food. The culture of fish and shellfish is an ancient skill practised in the past mainly by Oriental peoples.

The technology to harvest the sea continues to improve. By the year 2000, experts believe that the problems of exploiting the food, minerals, and energy sources of the sea will be largely solved.

And my personal favourite:

A: What's this called in English?
B: It's called a pencil-sharpener.
A: What's it made of?
B: It's made of mental.
A: Where is it sold?
B: It's sold at the stationer's.
A: What is it used for?
B: It's used for sharpening pencils.

Minor Bun Engine

2008-11-24T06:04:00.000-08:00

Since it's Monday.

Buzz buzz, buzz buzz in the eardrum

2008-11-19T12:23:00.000-08:00

Loving this post about buzzwords in education. I've had to sit through a lot of meetings and read a lot of emails recently about whether my editorial team should be training our writers to utilise the ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) methodology, or the PPP methodology (Present, Practice, Produce). Then again there's TTT (Test, Teach, Test) or ARC (Authentic use, Restricted use, Clarification).

Now I'm not against theory. There's not much I'd rather do than read a good paper on educational methodology, or sit about debating the best way to teach a language, but when I've got three months to get three novice writers to churn out tonnes of content, and that content has to be teachable, engaging and relevant, I go for the pragmatic approach every time. So when the conversation gets overly theoretical, my translation software kicks in:

Is there enough authentic use in this lesson? = Will the students get a chance to speak?
Are the materials engaging? = Are there lots of fun pictures? Will students stay awake?
Does the lesson flow in a logical sequence? = Will the teacher take less than five minutes to work out how to teach the lesson?
Is there an overarching outcome? = Do students get to do something useful at the end?
Has the methodology been correctly applied? = Will the teacher want to kill the writer by the end of the lesson?

Week 1 of content production nearly over - so far my three writers have produced some lovely lessons. Only eleven weeks to go.

Task mistress

2008-11-18T00:46:00.000-08:00

I'm back from the training course I was helping to run in Shanghai and now I have a team of three fresh, enthusiastic writers making their first foray into materials development.

My job is to guide them through the next three months, and try to keep their spirits up as the creativity falters and the production line mentality kicks in. Two of them are lucky - they only have one lesson to write per week, as an adjunct to teaching. In my experience, this type of contrast is invigorating: teaching informs materials development and materials development becomes a relaxing diversion from the classroom. The other writer is full-time, however, and has to write three full lessons in a week, as well as revise previous ones. I'm going to have to think of some creative ways to keep the current heartwarming enthusiasm bubbling over.

Fleeting images from Shanghai

2008-11-16T00:04:00.000-08:00

Pudong skyline: fifteen years ago this was all agricultural land.

The view from my hotel. At night I'd occasionally see a light on in the tower crane driver's box to the right of the picture. Did he sleep up there?

Shanghainese shoes on the 93rd floor: spot the Chanel.

Down at street level things can be a little more earthy.

My company's head office, complete with suspended meeting room, indoor amphitheatre and raised towers: a far cry from the three-bedroomed apartment 15 of us crammed into in 2002.

Fuzhou Road: you can still spot the occasional blue Mao uniform.

The original fusion cuisine

2008-11-09T05:15:00.000-08:00

I haven't been blogging much because I've been working flat out, and when I haven't been working I've been eating, and when I haven't been eating I've been recovering from all the working and eating.

Today I worked in the recording studio of the Shanghai foreign languages university, recording some English language learning materials. Six hours of reading out passages about the history of philately and the discovery of penicillin can get a bit wearying, so the boss took me and the other 'voice' out for dinner at his favourite Sichuanese restaurant, which was decorated in the most bizarre rococco/neon style. One of the things I like about even the simplest Chinese meal is the way foods that would never be combined in the west are eaten quite happily together. So, for example, it is common practice to have a shrimp dish, a pork dish, a chicken dish, a tofu dish and a vegetable dish all at the same time. However, it is not quite so common to blend so many meats, veg and seafoods together in a single dish, so I was quite stunned by the following concoction:

The ingredients I could detect were cockles, shrimp, cow's stomach lining, squid, large lumps of blood pudding (source unidentified), bamboo and enough chilli to make a dragon's eyes water, all mixed together in a delightful spicy soup. Just try imagining what that tastes like.

At the end of the meal I had quite a collection of detritus on my plate. See if you can spot the discarded bones of frogs' legs, shrimp exoskeleton, bamboo bark, mushed up sugar cane and the side of a duck's face:

Class Dynamics

2008-11-03T06:50:00.000-08:00

I've spent a fair portion of the past week observing classes in the schools where the materials I'll be editing will be used. The schools are extremely swish looking, but the classroom materials they use (PowerPoint presentations) are clunky and don't match with the online course the students follow at home and in the language labs.

'Check in' area

The classes have some interesting dynamics, which need to be addressed in the design of the materials. For a start, classes are no bigger than four, and sometimes just have one participant, so no large group exercises (traditional textbook fodder) can be used. The classrooms themselves are also pretty small, so students can't easily break off into pairs. Instead, their focus is on the computer screen, which creates another problem, as the teachers come to rely heavily on the PowerPoint presentations and are reluctant to step away from them and do board work or organise the students to do speaking activities independent of the content on the slides.

Reception and classrooms in background.

So I've been trying to work out ways of getting round the physical limits of the classroom and providing direction in the teachers' materials to encourage teachers to break away from the tyranny of the PowerPoint presentation; an interesting change from working within the more predictable framework of the textbook.

Additionally, I've been put in charge of writing a guideline on PowerPoint style for our writers, and have been nosing around in the theory of 'thirds'; something I'd understood intuitively but never seen written about before.

Image taken from Presentation Zen

Certain of my comrades are deeply suspicious of PowerPoint, but I'm rather fond of it. There's something deeply satisfying about creating a good presentation, and it works surprisingly well with language teaching, on both a macro and micro level (and yes, I'm sure Keynote works much better, but I'm not allowed to use it, so Microsoft it must be). Whether you are animating down to the syllable level, or creating an overarching theme that runs through the entire lesson, the ability to take the idea and create the outcome almost instantaneously is a blessed relief when one is used to waiting for months for books to arrive on ships from Hong Kong.

Social life in Shanghai

2008-11-02T00:04:00.000-07:00

When I used to live here, the varied and unpredictable social life was one of the main appeals of this crazy city. Aside from the fact that everything is cheaper so it's easier to go out five or six nights a week, new places open (and close) at such a phenomenal rate that there is always something new to try, and promoters are always shoving invitations and free treats at you to try and fill space in their new bar, restaurant, theme park, health spa or whatever.

Seems not much has changed in the four years since I left and so last night I found myself accompanying some friends to the opening of the Park Hyatt hotel in Pudong, currently the tallest hotel in the world. We arrived by car and were ushered down to the underground car park. Along the route there must have been twenty or thirty bored-looking parking attendants employed just to stand there holding a placard pointing towards our final destination (utterly pointless when you consider that we were on a sloping, one-way lane that could only have lead to the car park, but a perfect example of how cheap labour is here). When we arrived there were another ten or so parking attendants milling around to tell us which bay to park in. However, they weren't much use in directing us into the parking space, which was so tiny it took us eight attempts to reverse into it, despite the car being a standard-sized BMW. Having finally parked and edged our way out of the tiny space we were ushered upstairs to the lobby, and then mysteriously beckoned outside, where we stood waiting in the chilly evening air with a bunch of Shanghai's finest, all dressed up in mink coats and tuxedos. It turned out that we weren't allowed to just walk to the reception entrance; instead, each group had to wait for a chauffeur-driven merc to pick us up and drive us round the corner of the building so we would arrive at the red carpet in perfect order. Judging by the amount of time we had to wait I reckon they ought to have funnelled some of the parking attendant budget into the chauffeur one, or maybe there was a mercedes drought in the city that night.

So, all of thirty seconds after we got into the car, the chauffeur was opening my door and I was trying to clamber as gracefully out of the car as possible and then walk down the red carpet as nonchalantly as I could, bearing in mind that the only red carpet I've ever walked on was my mum's door mat. There were photographers taking pictures, we had to sign our names in a massive guest book and then we had to shake hands with at least twenty hotel managers with rictus grins. When we finally got inside there was another long wait for the elevator. I wish I'd timed how long it took us to get from the ground to the ninety-first floor, but all I remember is that my ears popped twice on the way up.

On the first level we found ourselves a booth and then sat there for an hour and a half while waiter after waiter brought round trays of delicious free food (of the lobster and foie gras variety) and champagne. There were several hundred guests at this event, which lasted from 7 until long after midnight. During that time no one paid for any of the food or drink. There were five open bars and four open kitchens, plus a free sushi bar with five chefs working non-stop. If you've been watching the TV show The Restaurant with Raymond Blanc you might remember that he recently berated a couple of restaurant owners for giving away too many free canapes at their opening event. I have no way of quantifying how much the event I attended cost the owners (bearing in mind that this was simply the 'soft' opening, and the main opening event hasn't even occurred yet) but I reckon you could run a small UK restaurant for at least six months on the budget for food alone. As for the drink, I hesitate to imagine how much free champagne and wine was consumed. Nothing was too much trouble, and when we got bored of wine they started bringing us free cocktails.

With all the consumption it was several hours before I even thought to go and look out of the window at the view. When I did it completely took my breath away. When I last visited here, merely three years ago, the Shanghai World Financial Centre, as the building that houses the Park Hyatt is called, had nothing beyond a foundation stone. The tallest building at the time was the Jin Mao tower, no dwarf at 370 metres tall. The first thing I saw when I looked out of the window of the 93rd floor bar was the top of the Jin Mao, quite far below my line of sight. The SWFC is apparently the second tallest building in the world, and I'm prepared to believe it, based on the lurch my stomach gave when I pressed my nose against the glass. When you look out over the Shanghai skyline, you can understand why Chinese people are often perplexed by the appeal of cities like London. If you take Canary Wharf and multiply it by 100, you still aren't close to visualising the appearance of this immense city. In terms of the sheer number of skyscrapers, Shanghai is hard to beat. It's as close to Bladerunner as you are going to get.

I was in the one in the middle, just under the big gap.

Surprisingly, I didn't see anyone else looking at the view the whole night. For the urban Shanghainese, being so close to the heavens is nothing new, and I suppose it isn't particularly cool to gawk like a tourist. I retreated to a booth with my friends, sipped another cosmopolitan and reflected on just how different life is here to back home.

You put Russell in the ratatouille!?

2008-10-31T09:48:00.000-07:00

I've been following the whole Ross-Brand fiasco story in the media with some interest, as Brand is a common topic of conversation among my peer group. Only last week a friend and I were watching him on TV and agreed that he was struggling. His entire show was based around dissecting untrue news stories about his sexual exploits, a gambit he has used over and over again on his radio show. There was none of the gentle whimsy he can be so good at. I suppose he really has disappeared up his own backside as fame has consumed him; a shame, as his early shows on Radio 2 (I missed the 6Music ones) were often absolute gems. Instead of talking about himself incessantly, he spent large parts of his show giving advice to listeners on unusual problems. One that sticks in my memory was about a woman whose dog barked incessantly whenever she was driving. Over the course of the show, Brand got her to take the dog out in her car then hold her phone to the dog's ear so he could calm it down (amazingly, it seemed to work). Each week the problems were entirely different, allowing Brand to free-associate at will, leading to many laugh-out-loud moments. I stopped listening to his podcast with any regularity last year when he dropped that item in favour of talking almost exclusively about himself. In the earlier stages of his career he was merely becoming famous, and his dissections of his own celebrity resonated more, purely because they were an unusual comic device at the time; he really ought to have moved on over a year ago, or done the decent Eminem thing of recognising when you've run out of material, and bowed out gracefully to concentrate on his acting.

As for the answer phone messages that lead to his downfall - I've heard him leave similar messages many times. What about the non-stop sexism and homophobia (so patiently pointed out to him by Simon Amstell recently) - why has he never been censured for any of that before? I suppose the addition of smug Jonathan Ross and his over-inflated salary was just too much for certain people to bear. I'm a fan of both Brand and Ross to an extent, but I'm glad this has happened. Brand's material was getting very tired, and hopefully Ross will think twice before trotting out his standard Carry-on comments in future. It was an overreaction in terms of the crime itself, but long overdue when you consider how much these clowns get paid to produce ill-prepared, lazy, predictable, patronising material week after week after week. Let's hope they both go away and raise their game.

T-shirt heaven

2008-10-30T05:20:00.001-07:00

Hong Kong

2008-10-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

How do people survive in this city without air conditioning? It's almost the end of October and still it's too hot to sleep without the chugging lurching air conditioning unit on all night. In the end I turned mine off around 2am as the noise was so loud I couldn't sleep anyway, but then I just lay there in the horrible stinky heat, scratching mosquito bites and yearning for some lovely European fresh air.

View from the 23rd floor, Times Square

Now I'm in the Hong Kong office of the company I work for, staring out over the water to Kowloon. Everyone here spends so much time indoors in air conditioned buildings, working ridiculous hours and then partying really hard. Last night was Monday night and the bars were doing the kind of brisk trade that British publicans can only dream of. It's going to be an exhausting few weeks.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles

2008-10-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Hong Kong and Shanghai, via the unspeakably glamourous staging post of Gloucester, where I am attending a very modern, multicultural baby naming ceremony (none of that christening malarkey, oh no).

If the visa wallahs allow me into the PRC I'll be doing some training workshops with writers in preparation for the first stage of a big e-learning redesign project for my old company. I'll try and blog about it, but last time I was in China they kept blocking blogger, so if I go radio silent for three weeks it'll be because I've fallen down a proxy foxhole ... or because I'm too busy eating crabmeat dumplings.

The birds and the bees

2008-10-23T14:21:00.001-07:00

Anyone with an interest in seeing how sex education is taught to British teenagers can watch my friend Alice doing what she does best here.

She says the kids are normally more vocal, but they were intimidated by the bloody great TV camera and wouldn't say anything. Don't blame them. I wouldn't want to be on the news talking about chlamydia either.

Andrew Mackenzie's Unfortunate Accident

2008-10-21T18:03:00.000-07:00

I've been titillating my insomnia with a local history book kindly provided by my dad. It's called A Salmon for the Schoolhouse and charts the day to day concerns of a 19th century schoolmaster in the village where I grew up. Surprisingly, it seems that schoolmasters of yore were just as plagued by HM Inspectorate as they are today. 'Surprise' inspections were quite common, with the visiting Inspector expecting to be wined and dined after passing his judgment. However, this inconvenience was somewhat mitigated by the immense quantities of fresh fish provided for free by the parents of local scholars. (I can honestly say that no pupil of mine has ever presented me with a freshly caught trout.)

For those of you also awake at some ungodly hour I present some selected highlights.

26 November 1880 - storm continues and no children during the week. Twenty inches of snow. 3 December - still no children, measles. 24 December - no holidays were to be given but no children could come anyway.

27 June 1881 - school deficient in inkwells, a clock and suitable maps. Two small forms needed, and a new lock on the schoolroom door.

October 1887 - 30 pupils enrolled but on 21st a few were still at field labour, and on 28th a few were still at potatoes.

January 2nd 1891 - Began a scheme today of giving a cup of coffee to the children at midday.

May 14th 1894 - Inspector's comment: A new map of Scotland is required and a gate should be placed across the entrance to the school to prevent outsiders getting admission to the playground.*

November 16th 1894 - James Muirhead and Grace Innes both had feet scalded by hot water at home.

December 4th 1894 - Andrew Mackenzie's unfortunate accident is the only one of any consequence within school hours in 38 years.**

* Hmm, so a preoccupation with prowling pederasts is not unique to the 21st century.

** Don't worry. He only broke his tibia.

Letting the days go by

2008-10-20T06:27:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning standing by a recycling facility somewhere in rural France, feeding quail egg boxes into the cardboard bin and squinting in the strong sunlight. As I drove away in the car, I started singing this.

Why bookworms should date geeks

2008-10-18T03:29:00.000-07:00

Excellent post about intellectual property and why certain leviathans of the publishing industry are light years behind others in terms of the way they think about copyright.

I've been wondering just why it is that people who write software are more likely to embrace the open source mentality than people who write 'text' books. When you get a marriage of the two, things seem to work beautifully. Witness a lovely publishing model, in which books are provided via a multitude of different channels - open source, subscription-based searchable databases, print-on-demand. It reminds me of the way the music industry is fragmenting into a variety of different business models (to its benefit). David Byrne breaks it down into six potential routes to market in a fascinating analysis here.

Perhaps its simply a cultural difference. The music and software industries are younger and therefore less 'set' than traditional print publishing with its established models and centuries-long history. In other words publishers still cling to the long lunch, rather than embracing The Long Tail.

For my part, I've been pondering the failings of the publishing industry for several years now, without really achieving a clear view of the problem; never mind a solution. In order to be a successful publisher today you need to understand not only the print publishing industry but also online distribution channels, new technology such as the dreaded Kindle, whole tranches of complex IP law across a variety of jurisdictions, social networking as a marketing tool, print on demand, digital piracy and a whole host of other things I've probably never even heard of. It's an awful lot to get your head around when all you want to do is publish decent books for a reasonable profit.

I had a dream

2008-10-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

Back in 1998 I was at university studying, among other things, philosophy. The philosophy department, perhaps aptly, was a dusty, rather antiquated place. At times it seemed to me like an old folk's home for the terminally eccentric. Most of its long serving members were heading towards their dotage and were well advanced (it seemed to me) along the road to senility. One of these fellows was a charming but rather preoccupied chap named Geoffrey Madell, who was noted for his theories on the mind and personal identity, and also for his rather unfortunate tic. He would stride across the stage of the George Square Lecture Theatre expounding on some principle or other, every so often his shoulders propelled forwards by a violent involuntary thrust that made him look as though he was attempting the funky chicken. After a while my shoulders started mimicking his in sympathy and I had to keep my eyes shut during his lectures.

It was around this time that I had one of my favouritemost dreams ever. In the dream I gradually became aware that I was in the university library. Furthermore I was on a shelf in the philosophy section. Slowly it dawned on me that I was a book on shelf in the philosophy department of the library - a book that could somehow 'see' through its (his? her?) spine into the aisle. After some time it further dawned on me that I was a copy of Mind and Materialism by Geoffrey Madell.

What happened next in the dream is hard to quantify, but it seemed to take place over a number of years - possibly decades. Time became compressed, and proceeded apace, but the awful thing was that no one ever took me down from the shelf and carried me to the desk to take home and read. No one even bothered to peruse my dust jacket. Over time I began to feel a deep existential despair, but I couldn't turn to Jean Paul Sartre on the opposite shelf for some moral support. Instead I was condemned to stare out at the same view, perhaps for eternity. It was a deeply moving dream, and I woke from it with a kind of awe-ful empathy for all the unread books mouldering away on shelves all over the world.

I have still never read Mind and Materialism, although I see Geoffrey wrote a new book in 2002, so at least 'I' won't be alone anymore.

Natural

2008-10-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

I've decamped to the Dordogne for some respite care, and to get away from credit crunchiness. Since Johnny in particular is jaded by all this talk of technology, I'll give you some pure, unadulterated nature for a change.

I don't know what colour those leaves are, but I love it.

Tonight's dessert.

I could look at the view all day, if there weren't so many delicious things in the kitchen to eat.

Back to school

2008-10-10T03:34:00.000-07:00

Today I took the somewhat disorienting step of going back to my former primary school. Disorienting because it's no longer in the same building, but about quarter of a mile away from the original location in a brand spanking new, purpose-built complex that includes a community centre and post office. Also disorienting because, although I haven't been back in 18 years (yeah, work out my age, clever clogses) the first person who greeted me when I arrived was the mother of one of my then classmates, and the second person I saw was my former teacher, still there, still teaching, still wittering on about 'hairy canaries' (I wonder if Patroclus and Nibus know who I'm talking about).

But I wasn't there to reminisce, or to revisit my childhood (brrrrrr), or even to prey on small children. I was there to take a look at their interactive whiteboards (IWB), and to see how they are used in lessons.

For those of you who haven't come across these things, they're great big boards that are hooked up to a computer. At their most basic they are simply screens onto which you can project software or a page from the internet, but, as their name suggests, they are generally used in much more 'interactive' ways than that. The screen is touch sensitive, so students can drag elements of it around with their finger, or write text directly onto the screen with a special pen.

In the short class I saw, the students did four exercises, including one on symmetry using a projected grid. The teacher created a shape out of differently coloured squares in one quadrant of the grid, and the students took turns to come up to the board and tap different squares to create a symmetrical shape in the other three quadrants and make it different colours. In the end, 17 of them had worked together to create a perfectly symmetrical shape, and had learnt the words 'horizontally' and 'vertically'. Much more engaging and memorable than colouring in squares by yourself in a jotter (though of course they still do that sort of exercise as reinforcement).

The next exercise was to do with money. The teacher called up a screen with a picture of an empty wallet, and some images of various British notes and coins. She then gave individual students a target amount, and they had to come up to the board and 'drag' the notes and coins into the purse to get the exact amount. While they took turns to do this, the rest of the class watched intently, clearly doing the arithmetic in their heads. Something about the performative element of the activity held their interest and ignited their competitiveness much more than if the teacher had simply been writing the task on the board and calling on individuals to answer it.

Next they did a geography task, where they had to drag the names of countries and cities to the correct location on a map of the UK. Like true Scots, their English geography was totally crap. Good to see patriotism is still very much part of the national curriculum of Scotland. Oddly, this was the one activity they didn't seem to enjoy particularly, whereas my inner nerd was screaming: 'Aberdeen is three inches south, you stupid dolts!'

The final task was arithmetic. The teacher called up a program that had all the students' names pre-programmed, and the computer picked names at random. ('It always picks me last!' sulked an enthusiastic boy called Colin.) Whomever was picked got to choose either an addition, subtraction, multiplication or division question and a level of difficulty ranging from easy to medium to difficult to EXTREME. The harder the question, the more points for a correct answer. I was surprised to see most students picking difficult or extreme multiplication and division questions. I was horrified to discover that I couldn't answer most of these (I think I was off for the whole of mental arithmetic, or maybe I was too busy thinking about the grid references of British cities). Most of the students got the answers wrong though, so I guess their ambitions slightly outweigh their abilities in this department (probably a good attitude to have when approaching maths).

I came away with a lot of ideas to apply to my English language lessons. I can see things like interactive matching activities, gap fills, text highlighting, timer clocks and the ability to write directly onto the screen being extremely useful. Perhaps the best thing about IWBs, though, is the way they really focus the attention of the entire class, encouraging them to both work together and think through solutions individually. Regular board work (e.g. teacher writing a sentence with a missing word on the whiteboard) does this to an extent, but something about the IWB galvanises students much more. I think it's possibly because blackboards and whiteboards tend to 'belong' to the teacher, whereas IWBs belong to the students. It is the students who spend most of the time interacting with them, while the teacher simply observes and comments, stepping in to help only occasionally. Students are constantly ready and waiting to take their turn with the IWB, whereas they are seldom invited up to write on the blackboard or whiteboard - these things are pretty much out of bounds, most of the time.

Yet another great thing about IWBs is the way they bring together different learning styles. I'm thinking here about Gardner's oft-misunderstood Multiple Intelligences model, that defines different styles such as visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic and verbal/linguistic, to name but three. I've never really bought the idea that students tend to fall broadly into one or two styles of learning (and according to Gardner, that was never what he meant). Instead I think that most learners need to employ pretty much all of the learning styles at some point during a lesson. This keeps their interest and energy levels high, and reinforces the learning, usually by having the material presented in a variety of different ways. So for example, during the maths quiz, students were looking at a visual representation of the coins and notes, carrying out intrapersonal reflection and logical analysis, while listening to feedback from the teacher and responding when called. Simultaneously they were ready to get up and move to the board in sequence. While at the board they were making spatial decisions about how to move the coins and notes and how to coordinate their own movements to do this as smoothly as possible. No wonder a group of restless 10-year-olds was gripped, attentive and responsive throughout the entire lesson. I've taught this age group before and never seen such focus.

Time for some real work now, unfortunately.

Something's gotta give

2008-10-08T15:40:00.001-07:00

I've been offered two new projects today. That's on top of the report I've been commissioned to write, the teacher's guides I'm writing, the e-learning project that began on Monday and the business books project that also began on Monday.

I'm not gloating - far from it. I'm genuinely bowled over. I was freelance for three years the last time and I was never this busy. Put it this way, I never turned down any work. I've already refused two projects in the last week, and I'm probably going to have to turn down another, and scale back on yet another.

All this is making me very nervous, as I've scarcely touched the study materials for the second year of my law degree. The whole reason for doing the degree in the first place was because I couldn't see much of a future in freelance editorial work. Now I'm starting to wish I'd had a bit more faith.

As for all the things that make a life a life, as opposed to just a living - pshaw! I went to the cinema this afternoon (Brideshead Revisited, which pissed all over Atonement, if you're interested) and felt guilty for leaving my desk. As for friendships, thank God for Facebook, is all I can say. As for romance ... it's dying under the weight of airport tax levies and pending deadlines.

Still, it's nice to be popular, and to think that one day, in the not too dim and distant future, my bank manager might perhaps return my calls.

The Crunch

2008-10-06T07:57:00.000-07:00

Despite having recently lost my job (technically I resigned, but that was really a case of rat abandoning sinking ship) and been made effectively homeless by the credit crunch, I have more reasons to be cheerful than most of my colleagues in educational publishing.

This morning 15 people were made redundant in the London office of the company I do most of my freelancing for. As the day passes more and more round robin emails with short 'goodbye, stay in touch' messages keep dropping into my inbox. They don't say much but from phonecalls with various folk I gather the atmosphere is awful. Lots of managers meeting behind closed doors, lots of desks being hurriedly cleared.

For me, however, things are looking up. In fact, I'm currently working on three separate projects for three different departments of the same company. Because I don't take up desk space, because I'm happy to work on short-term contracts with no guarantee of future work, because I don't require holiday or sick pay, PAYE or benefits, but I'm perfectly plugged in to the company culture and know the products inside out, I'm the perfect choice in a situation like this. I know some of my freelance colleagues are suffering as publishers stop outsourcing but I wonder if this will start to reverse as more and more in-house staff are made redundant. Someone has to take projects forward and freelancers are the cheaper, safer option in this type of climate. (Of course, there'll be a complete freeze on hourly rates, if not a drop. SfEP minimum rates? Nice idea, but not a chance.)

Image taken from here.

However, the main benefit of having been credit crunched is that I now have a perfectly legitimate excuse to look people in the eye and say grimly: 'You know nothing of the crunch'.

Home

2008-10-05T15:01:00.000-07:00

I've come home to roost for a while, which means lots of long walks in spectacular woods. Autumn hasn't even begun to arrive in this part of the Highlands, so everything is still lush and green.

My mental map of the area is not what it was, and so today I got quite spectacularly lost. My walk, which was only supposed to take half an hour, ended up taking two hours, and just when I was starting to think I'd wandered into some kind of self-replicating leafy maze, I spotted the familiar turrets of the local castle.

However, I was on entirely the wrong side of the fortress, creating something of a dilemma. Should I exit stage left via the designated tourist route, thereby extending my walk by another three quarters of an hour and guaranteeing that my dinner would be cold by the time I got home, or nip out through the secret 'local' route and be home in fifteen minutes?

A no brainer, some might say, but taking the shorter route effectively means breaking in to the castle grounds and marching over what is essentially the local laird's front lawn, in full view of the tower and some twenty or so windows. Having been shouted at by the fearsome stepmother of the castle for far less heinous crimes over the years, I was somewhat feart of the consequences, but the thought of lamb stew spurred me on. I clicked open the side gate by the turnstiles, which is left unlocked for the staff to use throughout the day. I faltered slightly as I came out onto the open path that passes right round the castle, following the route of the dry moat. Lights were on in some of the windows and I could hear the shouts of children from behind the drawbridge. I didn't dare look up, just marched on with tremendous purpose, making for the bridge that crosses over the frothing, peaty river. I hunched my shoulders in expectation of a hail of arrows, but none came. I marched across the bridge to safety, skipped past the tree under which I used to hide my bicycle every Saturday when I came to scrub dishes in the scullery, vaulted over the blue gate and tripped home to my dinner, feeling like I'd escaped from Colditz. Nothing like cocking a snook at the aristos to put a spring in one's step.

Grammar Nazi's and Punctuation Pedant's

2008-10-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

People who know me often assume that because of what I do for a living I must be the sort of person who foams at the mouth when I spot a typo in a newspaper article, or that I spend my weekends stomping about town with marker pen and Tippex, adding missing punctuation and erasing unnecessary apostrophes from shop signs.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For a start, if the world wasn't riddled with examples of horrific grammar, spelling and punctuation, I wouldn't have a job at all. Mistakes are my bread and butter, literally.

But it's more than that. Even though I will spend hours picking over a text to make it as flawless as possible; even though I can and do discuss sentence structure until a normal person would start bleeding from the ears; even though I regularly proofread my emails three or four times before I send them, on a day to day level, I really don't give a flying fuck about typos, misspellings, misplaced apostrophes or less-than-perfect English.

Written English is practically impossible to master. The majority of native English speakers are crap at writing in English, crap at spelling in English and crap at English grammar. This is because English evolved from several different and quite distinct languages, and because it continues to evolve and change at a fairly fast pace. It is a rich, complex and infinitely malleable language, which makes it a joy to speak, difficult to write (unless you have a particular sort of memory and a love of form) and hellish to learn. (It is also difficult to teach, further compounding the problem.) As far as I am concerned, you are doing well if you can string any kind of sentence together in English. If you are using punctuation at all, that's excellent; who gives a damn if you sprinkle in a couple of extra apostrophe's here and there?

So, yes, I do see the signs in the supermarket that say 'Five items or less' and the traffic sign that says 'Expect delay's'; years of training makes it practically impossible for me to miss them, but they don't bother me. I certainly don't get out my marker pen or complain to the manager. I certainly wouldn't do this. And this is mostly just a massive waste of time. As I tell all my students, learn to love your mistakes: if you don't make em, you'll never learn.

Kindle swindle

2008-10-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

I've been avoiding the Kindle for a while. Not sure why - I really should try and get to grips with such technology, seeing as it's been about to revolutionise my industry for, oh, about six or seven years now.

I'm really not sure why I dislike e-book readers. I've happily junked all my tapes and CDs in favour of digital alternatives. I don't mind being locked in to itunes since their prices are reasonable, the selection is good, and I'm (mostly) happy with the iPod. I've just gotten rid of most of my books (except the ones I need for studying) because I loathe carrying them around every time I move house. I do most of the study for my law degree online, using a web-based platform, downloadable pdfs, PowerPoint slides and MP3s. In theory I should be desperate for something like the Kindle, since it would allow me to get rid of my numerous heavy textbooks and completely de-clutter my life.

But just look at the darn thing. To me it looks like something from Tomorrow's World circa 1982. And as for the celebrity endorsement ...

"This is the future of book reading. It will be everywhere." Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and Liar's Poker.

Hmmm. Not sure I want to be taking advice on how to spend my hard-earned cash from a self-professed money-grabbing swindler, but let's just gloss over that.

Scroll down the page for more celebrity endorsements. Toni Morrison seems to like it, but then she keeps drifting off mid-sentence in the manner of one who has been kidnapped and heavily sedated. Has anyone seen her lately?

Neil Gaiman, now. I can trust him, surely? He writes comics and stuff. He looks like someone I might try to chat up at a party. But, lo, he has the same slow speech and confused air as Toni. At points I wonder if he is purposely trying to be ridiculous:

"It really is ... ummm ... it's intuitive ... you know ... like a book."

Thanks Neil. It's like a book. Like a book that Spock would read on his way up to the Starship Enterprise. Like a book that costs $359 dollars and requires you to pay again for all the books you already paid for. No thanks. Not today.

(Some slightly less reactionary analysis here.)

If ...

2008-09-30T03:17:00.000-07:00

... I have to remove another set of unnecessary quotation marks from a perfectly acceptable word used in a perfectly ordinary context the rivers of Hampshire will run red with the blood of innocents.

Black books

2008-09-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

I did the unthinkable today.

I gave away all my books.

These are books I have been collecting for around 15 years - they include my university textbooks, my collections of Scottish literature and philosophy classics, detective novels, autobiographies of popstars and politicians, guidebooks to countries I have visited and might conceivably still visit, self-help books, how-to guides, chicklit, aga sagas, potboilers, the lot.

Some of them were great books. Some of them I will want to read again. Some I will undoubtedly regret getting rid of.

But I'm damned if I'm going to lug those boxes up another flight of stairs, put up another set of shelves and then artfully arrange the titles according to size, genre, whatever, only for them to go unread for another year, gathering yet another layer of dust.

Credit crunched

2008-09-27T01:54:00.000-07:00

As of today I have just under a week left in my job. Next weekend I'll be packing up all my stuff and doing the long drive back up Britain to the land of the haggis toastie and salt n' sauce.

I've only been living in England for five and a half months, and it's safe to say that, when I arrived in May, I was expecting to be staying a lot longer than this.

Having worked for large multinationals for most of the past seven years, it's been enlightening to see how vulnerable small businesses can be (although in the current climate, of course, large multinationals seem just as vulnerable). I guess what I had failed to realise was the extent to which most companies are built on a wing and a prayer, or a lot of hot air, to put it another way.

The experience of watching a business disintegrate has taught me quite a few things. If I ever go for another job interview, it won't be the training opportunities and the staff canteen arrangements I'll be asking about; I'll be requesting to see the balance sheets and to have a long chat with the company accountant. I'll be asking exactly how much guaranteed business is coming in in the next six months, what contingencies are in place in case a client drops out of the picture, whether there are savings to cover salary payments in the event of an emergency: all things I would never have considered it necessary to ask before.

Not that I'm likely to be looking for a job anytime soon. I seem to be much better at keeping myself gainfully employed than any boss I've ever had.

Despite my somewhat unclear living arrangements over the next few months (part of the time in the North, part of the time in Edinburgh, part of the time back in England) I am inundated with offers of work, which ought to be comforting, but is actually quite stressful, as they tend to cancel one another out. It's the old freelancer's dilemma of being scared to say 'no' to anything in case the offer is never repeated.

However, I've pretty much settled on the e-learning stuff, as I need a break from print, and I'm very keen to go back to Shanghai and see how things have progressed there in the past two years.

So October is likely to be a month of contrasts: drinking endless cups of tea, going on long country walks and breathing in bucketfuls of piercing Highland air for the first couple of weeks; then sipping expensive cocktails, sitting in taxis in gridlocked traffic and breathing in exhaust fumes and the stink of fried tofu towards the end.

The best thing about leaving England: no more bl**dy bell ringing!

Ways in which people screw up

2008-09-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

Work is throwing some exciting things at me: I've been commissioned to write a report on the global market for online TEFL materials - right up my street, and it was very flattering to be called an expert on the subject. Then there is the possibility of working full time on some business English textbooks, or on a series of PowerPoint materials for super hi-tech English schools in China, plus a few other things frying in a few other frying pans.

But when I look at the pile of textbooks and materials I have for the second year of my law degree (which started on Sunday), I'm really not sure I should be signing up for any work at all. I'm compressing an entire law degree into the space of around 18 months, and to say it's challenging is a bit of an understatement. Fortunately, I find the subject fascinating, encompassing as it does pretty much every aspect of human existence. I suppose if I were to summarise the study of law in a throwaway phrase it would be 'learning the ways in which people screw up'.

We're studying criminal law this year, and already I'm finding out things I had real misconceptions about. For example, English criminal law has been assembled with the intention of reducing the amount of harm we cause one another, rather than with the intention of encouraging us to be good citizens. In practice this means that I would not be held culpable for your death if I saw you were on fire, but sat on my arse to watch you burn rather than utilising the fire extinguisher that was sitting right next to me. In other words, the law does not compel us to act in each other's best interests. (Or maybe the law is just optimistic, and assumes the English are so noble they don't need to be coerced into doing the right thing. Being Scottish, and coming from a land where it's so damp no one ever catches on fire, I'm not really qualified to comment.)

Right now, I'm so tired that I'm not sure I could even be bothered to put myself out if I were on fire. 'Don't have nightmares,' our ghoulish lecturer said to us as he slunk off. I wonder if I can sue him if I do?

Safety nets

2008-09-17T01:50:00.000-07:00

It's not often that my heart goes out to workers in the City. Having mingled with them over the years in London, and watched some of their worst excesses, I can say that they are not a likely group of folk to be drawing my sympathy. However, my heart really does go out to all those who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers yesterday, and all those who will lose theirs in the coming months. However well paid you are, whatever sort of a person you are, having the rug of financial security pulled out from underneath you always feels horrendous, always causes the same anger, fear and panic.

I feel a particular empathy, rather than a delighted sense of schadenfreude, because I am surrounded by people in similar situations, struggling to cope with the loss of security that a regular salary and a guaranteed job brings. I was talking to a colleague about all this the other day and his comment was that, in the Great Depression, workers could be seen throwing themselves out of the office window when news of their company's demise reached the workforce.

Does the fact that no bodies (so far) have been seen splattered on the pavements of Canary Wharf and the Square Mile mean that the doomsayers are wrong, and this is not the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? No, it just means that the safety net that is credit has become so taken for granted that when we lose our jobs, we just borrow more money, either by actually taking out a loan, or by switching from the debit to the credit card (which amounts to the same thing). It doesn't mean we don't worry about money, but it does mean that by the time we get to that suicidal stage where we can't afford a loaf of bread and the children are dressed in rags, we have reached minus £50,000 or minus £100,000 rather than simply zero.

I can't work out which is worse: a land of zero credit where no job = starvation, or a land of infinite credit, where no job = more borrowing = people sleepwalking into a nightmare land of spiralling inflation and unemployment, infrastructure collapse (thanks, Radiohead) and an agonising slide back into the past. A quick death versus a slow death, in other words.

But there's no real choice, of course. It is our nature to delay disaster in any way we can. So while I wait for the lights to go out, I fancy a double latte, and my credit card says yes.

Salientia micturire

2008-09-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

My mother just informed me that she has been urinated on by a frog.

Picture by rcolonna; found on Flickr.

Apologies for the pig (frog) Latin.

In other news, I have just become aunt to a blue kitten. Congratulations Patroclus and Blue Cat! Miaow.

Plagiarism

2008-09-14T02:02:00.000-07:00

An interview with writer James Frey in this morning's Guardian has irked me somewhat; not because I think Frey deserved all the flak he received for fabricating parts of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, but because there are other 'writers' out there getting away with far worse.

As far as I can make out, Frey's worst crime was to make Oprah Winfrey feel like a bit of an idiot for defending him. She's a powerful woman, and rightly proud of her book club, and yes, Frey should have been upfront about the fabricated parts of his book: it would have sold anyway. But Frey was no more culpable than many autobiographers - he just happened to get caught. In fact, I reckon there were probably many writers out there shaking in their snakeskin boots after the debacle with A Million Little Pieces, wondering when the investigative journalists would turn the lamp of scrutiny on their so-called life story.

But the autobiographer who pads out her story with a little bit of creative writing is a mere mugger compared to the child pornographers who use ghosts to write their 'auto'biographies. I'm talking here about the Jordans of this world, who produce volume after volume of 'My Story', passing it off as though they sat in the attic for five months, beavering away over the word-processor until the words all fell into place. This is just plain deception, for though the story may well be about them, it most certainly wasn't written by them, and it should say so on the front cover, in big bold type.

I'm not against ghostwriting at all. It's something of a noble art, as far as I'm concerned, and there are people out there who can't or won't write but who deserve to have their story told. But if you are going to tell the world who you really are through the medium of a ghostwriter, you should be upfront about it, otherwise you are setting a rotten example.

The other day I had to write a passage in some Diploma materials explaining what plagiarism is and why it is wrong. The definition I came up with was 'the passing off of someone else's work as your own, without their permission'. Clearly ghosts give their permission for writers to plagiarise their work, but this doesn't make it okay. We tell students to carefully note down the source of all materials they borrow, and to faithfully cite them in the text. This is right and proper; stealing words is still stealing and pretending you are a writer when you are not is fraud.

James Frey may have passed off parts of his memoir as factual, but at least he wrote the darn book himself. In that sense, it is far more of a memoir than any ghostwritten book could ever be.

Push-button publishing

2008-09-13T16:45:00.000-07:00

This morning I didn't have a logo or a website.

Now I have both.

Thanks to the lovely J for pointing me in the direction of Squarespace. Quite honestly, after using this site, I fail to understand why anyone would pay someone else to build their website. For all small businesses and sole traders this is an absolutely awesome tool, and it's great fun to muck about with as well.

Now I just have to sit around and wait for domain mapping to catch up with me. Ho hum.

Things your mother never teaches you

2008-09-12T02:46:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I've managed to reach the age of thirty without anyone telling me what mensuration is.

Lesser-known Scottish Delights Part 1

2008-09-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

The magnificent word 'wow' is derived from the Scots 'wow'.

Who knew?

But try saying it out loud in your best Glaswegian twang and you'll soon see that it must be true.

Blog does not exist

2008-09-11T13:28:00.000-07:00

It only took 40 minutes, but I managed to insert the html for the Facebook blog networks app into the xml for this blog. Never mind that it doesn't quite display properly, or that the link takes you to a nasty sign that says 'blog does not exist'; considering I haven't done any coding since, ooh, around 2003, I'm mightily chuffed with my evening's work.

Stating the obvious

2008-09-11T02:57:00.000-07:00

This gem, from a writer commissioned by one of the big UK awarding bodies:

'Once again, websites will provide most information, but if there is access to a library that would contain books then a visit would be good.'

Most of the writers on this series have been excellent; they are practising professionals who somehow manage to combine a full-time teaching schedule with a pretty hardcore writing gig, and 90% of the work they produce is excellent: stimulating and well-written. I've had to do more proofreading than copy-editing, which is always a pleasant surprise when I've been commissioned to do the latter.

But for the 10% that is utter dross I do wonder (a) how it came to be commissioned in the first place (this is a BIG awarding body with a tonne of experienced commissioning editors), and (b) to what extent good writing is just common sense.

For example, you don't write a textbook in the first person. I know this, you know this, experienced textbook authors certainly know this. And yet I've consistently had to edit out the word 'I' from a particular writer's work on this job. On the one hand, it adds a friendly, personal touch to some rather dry subject matter, and I'm guessing this was the author's aim; perhaps a nod to their dynamic teaching style. But it sticks out a mile in comparison with the detached third person style of all the other authors in the series, and indeed 99% of academic materials pitched at this level. Put simply, it just isn't done. And now I have to go and undo it. All 300 pages of it.