June 2003

June 30th, 2003. It was called 'Waltham Toll Bar' in my day

Over the past few days, I've noticed that someone at my old secondary school has been looking at this site. Whoever you are, hello! I wonder if it's still as bad as it was when I was there, with a headmaster who, it seemed, was more obsessed with improving statistics and having a good public image than with actually educating people.

And, incidentally, your website is rather broken, too.

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June 30th, 2003. London E: Maybe we were dreaming, or maybe it was REM

Someone was filming a video in Greenwich Park.

(How can you film a video? It sounds a bit contradictory. Anyway.)

We were sat around in Greenwich Park, in the sunshine, picnicing. In typical disorganised picnic style, the food was a bit of an odd combination: some crisps, a punnet of cherries, a tub of gingerbread men; not the sort of meal my mother would approve of. When Gordon goes to picnics he takes proper food like langoustines, but I think everyone else who goes to Sinister picnics just takes whatever cakes and biscuits they can grab that day.

A few hundred yards away, in the brighter sunshine, a man had set up a camera on a tripod, and a woman lay nearby encouraging him. Three other men were about, all in dark suits. One was skinny, bald and thin-faced, a bit like Moby or Michael Stipe. They got videoed in various odd poses. For a while, they walked towards the camera arm in arm. One would stand close to the camera doing nothing or playing a guitar, and the others would be in the background doing something more interesting. They would stage-fence with umbrellas; or throw a giant yellow balloon backwards and forwards. Instead of going directly where they threw it, of course, it would be tugged by the wind, hover in mid-air, and then blow away completely sending the cameraman running after it. Eventually, it burst, and they had to go back to the umbrellas.

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June 29th, 2003. The Rollercoaster Ride

I'd never been on a rollercoaster of any kind before today. So, I started off with a short one. With a face-down vertical drop in it. It was rather good fun, although my teeth felt like they were going to disappear down my throat.

I have to admit, though, the day ended up like any day out with the parents. It started off without any trouble at all, despite a horrid car journey. It ended up, though, with us getting more and more tetchy at each other due to our complete indecisiveness:

"What shall we do now?"

"I don't know: it's up to you."

"No, it's up to you two. I don't mind what we do."

"It's not up to me, it's up to you. We've been following you for the past 10 minutes."

"I wasn't going anywhere! I was following where you were going. It's not up to me."

All three of us would keep going on like this. I do more sighing and eye-rolling, but otherwise we're all pretty much the same.

I've decided that I do like rollercoasters, even though they're vaguely unsatisfying. There's an all-too-brief bit of mad energy where you think you're going to explode or something; a feeling of "Wow!" when your legs are still all wobbly; then a dull headache for the rest of the afternoon. In fact, I'm tempted to go all Fast Show - "Riding on a rollercoaster, you understand, is very much like making love to a beautiful woman."

Incidentally, the reason we went to Alton Towers for the day is that my dad works for BT, and BT hired the place for the weekend, persuaded Status Quo and Madness to do a gig there, and gave free tickets out to everyone who's worked for them for N years. It was quite a frightening thought, seeing a packed theme park and thinking: "Oh my god, all these people are somehow connected to telephone engineers". Everyone who went was given £60 of vouchers to spend in the park; by the end of our trip we still had over £20 left, so my mother, not wanting to let the company get away without giving us all the freebies we deserved, went to a sweet stall and came back with a heavy carrier bag full of chocolate and sweets and licorice.

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June 26th, 2003. What, *another* holiday?

Incidentally, at The Appraisal last week, I was told I spend too much time blogging. Or on blogging-related sites, at least. I've been told I should limit any non-work-related stuff to twenty minutes in the afternoon, and an hour after I finish work. Grrr.

The Boss is keeping an eye on me, too. Every so often he'll say "You've been spending a long time looking at that window. Is it work-related?" I'm trying to come up with work-related reasons for anything that might appear on the screen. Chat-client windows, for example, are easy: I'm asking someone for some coding advice. Blogsurfing is a bit harder to get away with.

Anyway, I'm going away on Saturday, because I have a free ticket to Alton Towers (Woo!). This, though, means spending time with The Parents (Boo!). If all I can post on Sunday or Monday is "AAAARGH!" you'll know why.

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June 23rd, 2003. Groan

The book you've all been waiting for! The next installment of your favourite fantasy series! Learn about the boy wizard's trip to the South Pacific to collect the mystical guano that will be vital to defend against He Who Shall Not Be Named! You won't be able to stop turning the pages as Harry learns how to control the magical power of birdshit.

Harry Potter and the Ordure of the Phoenix - in all good bookshops now.

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June 23rd, 2003. London D: The Family

For some reason, I definitely have an aversion to travelling by bus. Maybe it's the travel-sickness. It might be because on the Underground it's much easier to find your way about.

Whatever the reason, every day I was staying at W.'s I'd walk for 10 minutes to the nearest tube, rather than get the bus into town. Plenty of buses go past his flat every few minutes; but even so I preferred the walk to the tube station. It's through a nice yellow-brick neighbourhood, and past a lovely white-spired church. In the hot summer sun, it's a rather nice walk.

It was only after getting back to Edinburgh and talking to my mother, that I discovered a bizarre coincidence, after I persuaded my mother, over the phone, to get out the old family bible.

Like a lot of families, we have an old family bible with dates of births, deaths and weddings carefully written in copperplate inside the covers. Ours belonged to my mother's mother's mother; and I knew, from a school family-tree project, that it said their branch of the family was from South London. I'm not sure how they moved from there to Lincolnshire, but the South London part was definite. What I didn't know was that, according to the family bible, my mother's grandmother's parents were married at the church I'd been walking past every day, just round the corner from W's flat. And on top of that, it was their wedding anniversary just the other day, 118 years ago.

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June 22nd, 2003. London C: The Chthonic Railway

This isn't really a London entry at all. It's a dream entry.

I dreamed about London again last night. About riding on the Underground, and living at The Barbican. Getting on the train at Barbican station, and riding back and forth on the Hammersmith & City. I stood on a Circle platform for an age, but the train never came. Looking down the tracks into the tunnel, I could see the tunnel descending into water, flooded so much that eventually water reached the ceiling. Getting a train the other way, I ended up waiting to change again at Paddington; but again the train never came. I stood on the platform, studying maps of the station and the network.

Woken by the cat, I laid in bed half-asleep, wondering what it would be like to drive an Underground train, back and forth between the same stations day after day.

(The dream was about places I visited in London, incidentally. I walked through the Barbican, and waited for ages at Barbican station. I'll probably get around to blogging about it some time).

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June 20th, 2003. Small print

Whilst I was away last week, a heated debate blew up in the comments for one particular entry on this site. Although the debate itself raised more heat than light (one person I spoke to described some of it as "paragraphs and paragraphs of bile"), it did bring up one interesting point: sometimes people I talk about might feel that they've been mis-represented; or sometimes I might make mistakes about things and should be obliged to correct them. And this led to me thinking, whilst wandering to the tube station one morning, that when I got back home I should write some sort of general statement explaning the general rules I apply to myself when writing stuff on this site.

So, this is it. It's meant to be kind of an ethics statement for how I behave when writing, and also how anyone that leaves comments should behave. It was partly inspired by this Weblog Handbook extract, but most of it came into my head on that walk to Stockwell station.

1) Everything I write here is, as far as I know, true in spirit if not in exact detail. I might sometimes be careful with the whole truth about something - if it's about work clients, for example - but almost everything I write is based on fact, and if it's not it should be obvious.

2) If I make a mistake, I'll correct it, as long as someone lets me know.

3) However, when I correct or change things I'll leave the original text, and make it obvious that the entry has been updated.

4) Anyone can say what they like in the comments. If you write something that's abusive or irrelevant, I might delete it, but I'll only do that if I think it's absolutely necessary. If you got something factually wrong in a comment and ask me to correct it for you, I will do if I think it's important enough; but I'll make it obvious that your original comment has been edited.

5) If you think I've said something that deserves an apology, then please let me know. I can apologise anonymously if you want, too. I'm not going to write 'corrections' like: "I'd like to say that the anonymous person X from entry blah blah wibble is definitely not So-and-so from Cleethorpes," though, because that just encourages guessing games, which isn't the point of anonymising people at all.

I think that's everything. If you think there's anything else I should add to this, let me know and I'll update it.

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June 20th, 2003. Apprehensive

Appraisal this afternoon. Eep.

Incidentally, I did think about writing a full 26 entries about my trip to London. I've given up the idea because I wouldn't be able to get 26 entries out of a five-day trip without making them all about half a paragraph long. And it would end up taking a couple of months, too. So I'm just going to keep on lettering them and we'll see how far I get.

Probably to E, or so. I'm starting to get that "maybe this wasn't a great idea" feeling.

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June 19th, 2003. London B: Don't waste your time

When you're a tourist, there's an obligation to go out and do stuff. I felt I had to be out at 9.30 every morning, straight down to the tube station before spending every minute of the day catching up on all the London things I miss out on at home.

It doesn't quite work like that, of course. Last week was far too hot for tourism. By mid-afternoon every day I was weak at the knees, overheated and overtired. I'd rush into a gallery or museum before thinking "why am I here? There's nothing I want to see," and leaving again. In part, this was the fault of the guide book. Before going away this time I'd actually bought a guide book. I'd read through it, getting excited about all the places I'd be able to visit. Once you've bought your guide book, you have to make sure you're making good use of it.

You don't experience a city by rushing round it with guide book and camera in hand, though. The only way to experience a city properly is to live there properly, at the normal sort of pace. To really enjoy yourself, I think, you have to leave plenty of space for moments of coincidence and serendipity. And remember to help nice old ladies who are lost on the Tube.

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June 18th, 2003. That homely feeling

Oh dear. Back at work for three days, and already things are going badly.

We had a meeting at work yesterday, at which I pointed out - subtlely, mind - that one of the people I work with could do with learning a few more things about the internet, because she really needs to know them in order to do her job.

"I'm not learning any of that code stuff," she said. "Definitely not."

"I think it's a good idea," said The Boss, "if       remains a 'naïeve user' so she can critique our websites more effectively."

"But it's too late for that!" I replied. "She already knows too much for that." She's claimed a role for herself, and she needs to learn certain things to do it properly, because I'm fed up of having to answer stupid questions all the time and fix her mistakes.

Then, they explain to me that they think it would be a good idea for me to have an Appraisal. Oh dear. I can just see it coming...

Caitlin, we've noticed you seem to spend a lot of time on IRC...
Caitlin, we've noticed you seem to spend a lot of company time updating your website...
Caitlin, we don't think we can keep you any more...

And today, it gets even worse:

The Boss: I've noticed you seem to be spending far too long on Project X. Whenever I ask you how much longer it will be, it seems to grow extra things that need to be done.
C: No, before we started we agreed what we were going to do, and nothing else has been added to that.
The Boss: [lots of unnecessary management-speak about only doing things that are worth the time]
C: When I started on this we agreed that I was going to rewrite Project X completely from scratch, and explained what needed to be done. That's what I've been doing.
The Boss (paraphrased): But when we said 'completely from scratch' I meant 'just redesign the visual bits and leave all the backend part unchanged and half-broken'. [Lots more nonsense about how Customer Experience is the most important thing]
C: Um, surely it's more important to make sure we're actually charging people the right amount for things?

Things are a bit tense in the office at the moment. Not good if you're supposed to be being Appraised.

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June 17th, 2003. London A: when the past comes back

W. has a busy life. He's an up-and-coming young actor (as they say), a drama translator and producer; he's got a boyfriend and an active social life, and he manages to fit in plenty of temping to pay the bills. So it's not too surprising that his phone rings quite a lot.

We were sat on his bed, eating pizza. It was a week ago; I'd just arrived in London and trundled round to his flat. We were eating pizza and his phone rang. I could tell quickly that it wasn't a good call: "Oh, no," he kept saying. "Oh, no. Oh, no, no."

It turned out to be about S, one of my best friends from primary school. One of the people I've known the longest in my life, in fact. She'd just taken an overdose.

S. has been ill for a long time. I'm not entirely sure, but I think she's got ME. When we were at primary school, she was off sick for most of Third Year. "It's just 'cos she doesn't like our teacher," was the bitchy playground rumour. "There's something wrong with her hormones," said my mum. I didn't think you were supposed to have hormonal problems when you were 8, but my mother has always liked blaming hormones for things.

After a few months off she seemed fine, and she seemed fine all of the rest of the way through school. When she left college, though, it all seemed to come on again. She's been housebound for most of the past seven years. A week ago, she suddenly decided to go to her ex-boyfriend's house, a hundred miles away, and kill herself. She survived, just.

I felt ashamed of myself on Tuesday. I didn't feel distraught enough. S, as I said, was a very close friend for a couple of years. I felt I should have been deeply upset, like W, but instead the news seemed to bounce off me. I hope she's going to be OK, and I want her to get better, like she did when we were children. But I still feel detached about her. Uncaring.

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June 16th, 2003. Return

Yes, back home again. My flat is still there and in one piece, fortunately, and the cat seemed happy to see me again.

Last time I went on holiday I spent a couple of months recounting just about every moment on here. I'm not going to go that far this time, but I'll still probably talk about it for a couple of weeks or so. I'll try writing bits down and seeing if they make any sense.

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June 13th, 2003. Educational

Things I Have Learnt In London This Week:

• Michael Faraday's ghost haunts a telephone exchange in St. Bride St.
• Former Lush singer Miki Berenyi is now a sub-editor for the Radio Times
• There are some people who, with the Eurovision Song Contest, are even more geeky than W. is.
• Shoreditch station is on Grimsby Street
• I don't seem to care about getting lost in the city any more

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June 11th, 2003. We Love The City

You might not know the song We Love The City by Hefner. It starts like this:

This is London
Not Antarctica
So why can't the tube run all night?

And it really is, I think, one of the things that London and Londoners get stereotyped about the most. Their public transport, and the tube in particular. Londoners are always - in my mind, at least, and I'm always stereotyping people and jumping to conclusions - whinging about how awful their public transport is. Especially the tube. It's hot, crowded, sweaty, dirty, broken, late and cancelled.

The thing is, though, Londoners don't realise how lucky they are. Yes, the tube is often hot, crowded, sweaty, dirty, broken and late, and you are quite likely to get stuck in a tunnel for twenty minutes with your face pressed up to an American tourist's armpit. Even so, the tube is there. It works, most of the time. It works surprisingly well. It might stop running at midnight, but that's much better than most places.

Today I went from Stockwell to Holborn, from South Kensington to Embankment, and all around the place on my way back again. Yes, there were breakdowns, late trains, security alerts and so on; but the thing is there. It's not the English countryside, with one bus a day. It's not even Edinburgh. To someone from the provinces, it's great.

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June 7th, 2003. Off work!

Geeky congratulations to Mark, for leaving the five hundredth comment on this site since it's had comments on it, about a year ago. Woo!

I think I've got everything about my holiday sorted, now. I've got somewhere to stay, and I've booked my tickets. So it'd better be going ahead.

Yesterday at work felt a bit like the last day at term at school. I said to The Boss: "I should have asked if I could bring games in." He didn't seem to like the idea. His afternoon was spent thinking up names for items of jewellery. Rather than have a catalogue of items with names like "Ring #60103" and so on, he wanted them to have interesting, descriptive names like "Autumn Sunshine" and "Basket of Cornflowers" - in fact, the sort of names that you see on household paint ranges. He did this by dreaming up a list of those sort of names and applying them to each item in order, deliberately making sure he had no idea what each one looked like. I tried to get him to slip in a few names like "Button of Joy" or "Cyclopean Serpent", but he wouldn't go for that idea either.

Update: I don't want you to think that the Tat Emporium does that kind of thing of its own volition. We made sure our client knew what was going on before we went round renaming everything. Well; more or less. I still think "Cyclopean Serpent" would have been a good name for a pendant.

Oh, and I meant to update the Recipe Tree before I went on holiday, but I didn't. Sorry; it'll be done as soon as I get back to the office, I promise.

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June 5th, 2003. Holiday planning

I've decided to go to London. I've started trying to organise people to meet up with and places to go in London. The only problem is, I don't have anyone to look after the cat; so I still have no idea if or when I'll actually be able to go there. I don't have anywhere to stay yet either, but I'm working on it.

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June 4th, 2003. Back onto politics

Appearance is everything.

As I've said before, in the mornings I like to lie in bed and listen to Today, the BBC's big serious political radio show. Quite often, I fall back asleep and have really bizarre dreams involving that morning's news headlines. Sometimes, though, I stay awake and manage to listen to all the in-depth news, and the interviews with whatever government ministers they can get on.

This morning, they had a long interview with a government minister, who was trying to explain that the government would never mis-use the stuff it gets told by its spies, and any spies saying otherwise are all 'rogue agents' plotting against the government. It sounded like something right out of the 1970s, when the Prime Minister resigned because he thought the intelligence services were conspiring against him. I didn't believe a word of it, though, because the minister on the radio was the Leader of the Commons, John Reid.

Of course, I have no idea what Dr Reid is really like as a person. He's an expert in West African history, and is probably very kind to his family and small fluffy animals. But I've seen him on the telly, and he doesn't look very nice at all. In fact, jowly and stubble-headed, he looks just like your stereotypical Glasgow underworld hard-man. I've heard him on the telly and the radio, and often in interviews he doesn't sound very nice either: harsh, uncooperative and sometimes even threatening. Whenever he appears to defend the government - and he was doing it a lot, it seemed, in the run-up to the war - it feels like the government knows it's losing, so sends in its toughest fighter. Therefore, I never believe a word he says.

John Reid presumably has lots of government friends, though, so he can scoot along careerwise with no problems despite looking so gangsterish. Which is lucky, I suppose. Like all Scottish MPs he has a bit of a problem coming up soon: there are a lot of boundary changes coming up at the next election, and his current seat will disappear. He was going to have to compete with his neighbour George Galloway for the Labour nomination for the new Glasgow Central seat; but by handy coincidence George has been suspended from the party, so it looks like he won't be able to fight for it. Dr Reid will just have to face a popular, left-wing independant candidate instead, then. I bet that'll be fun for him.

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June 3rd, 2003. "Apparently it is very clever to start a book by writing THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT nineteen times"

So, I spent the whole of Monday cleaning and waiting in for someone to turn up. And, of course, nobody came. Grrr.

The only thing I'm worried about is: I didn't spend the whole of Monday waiting. The inspection was between 2 and 4, so in the morning I went out to get food for lunch, before coming back and cleaning. By 11 I was back home and tidying energetically. This means that if someone did come, not only was it completely when the appointment wasn't; it was when my flat was a complete mess. Now I'm terrified that I'll get an eviction letter in the post for not tidying.

One rule of thumb that I've always relied on is that things you imagine beforehand never actually happen. If you day-dream something in advance, it will never come true. All the people I've mentioned this to, though, say I'm being silly. But then, sat at home finishing reading I Capture The Castle whilst waiting for the landlord to appear, I read this:

One temptation I didn't manage to resist was that of letting my imagination leap ahead a bit. As Rose had said I could have Neil, I let myself just toy with the idea; I ... imagined him proposing. ... Of course, Neil will never propose to me now that I have let myself imagine it. Not that I mind.

It was good to read something like that that I've always believed in -- well, "believed in" sounds too strong a phrase, but anyway. Every day now I'll be busily trying to imagine getting home and finding a nasty letter from the landlord on the doormat, just to try and make it a bit less likely.

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June 3rd, 2003. Open letter

A dream from the other night:

It's at a party, in a big hall at the top of a long spiral staircase. As soon as I see her walk in, I run over to her, screaming:

"What the hell do you think you're doing here? How dare you! How dare you come near me after all the promises you've broken? After everything ou made me do!" And so on in this vein, as loudly as I can though I wish it were louder.

Eventually, my voice going, I storm out of the room. Everyone should be applauding me for taking such a stand, so I start applauding myself as I go. At the bottom of the stairs, though, I hang back, wishing desperately that she will come running after me to apologise for whatever she has done.

And awake.

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June 1st, 2003. But were there any Bible studies?

As I mentioned, a couple of weeks ago I went with Gordon to see the film Secretary. And, as I said, it was rather good.

Now, it's not like I make a habit of watching films with S&M scenes; but this was the first I've seen, I think, to portray it as such a potentially positive thing. More importantly, the structure of the movie was such that it highlighted the importance of the non-physical side of this type of relationship over anything else - the title characters were shown to be in a vaguely BDSM-type relationship, mentally at least, well before any of the spanking and so on started.

The characters, too, seemed very realistic and believable. James Spader's character wasn't some kind of one-sided warped sadist; most of the film revolved around him refusing to come to terms with his own feelings, before being forced to overcome his senses of shame and guilt. When he finally did, a beautiful tenderness seemed to emerge.

I was quite surprised that The Guardian gave it a five-star review, only one person wrote in to say: "How on earth can you review a film that promotes the abuse of women!?" I'm also intrigued by what the Daily Hate Mail might have thought of it. All the reviews I've read were very good ones; but given the way the Mail's film critic was campaigning to get Crash banned a few years ago, I'd be interested to know what they made of this.

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