July 2003

July 31st, 2003. Seasonal

It's almost time for the Festival again. Tents have started to go up all over the Meadows, and the city is filling up with tourists. A crowd of American teenagers was blocking the pavement in George Square this morning, and the buses seem full of well-tanned backpackers.

In a week or two, you won't be able to walk anywhere in the Old Town or around the University without having flyers thrust at you every couple of yards. There aren't many so far, but they're starting. "Hi!" said a cheerful, shiny-faced American woman as I was walking to work, "would you like a flyer for our new show?" I give her two days before she gives up her patter and just hands them out wordlessly to whoever will take them.

I'm tempted to keep a record here of the flyers I end up with. The more interesting ones, anyway. This was for a play: the House of YES. Their star actors include Fritzie Andrade and Melissa Zygmant, and their slogan is "love is for tiny people with tiny lives." Lovely. Personally, I want to know if Fritzie picked her own name.

18:08 Comments (2)

July 29th, 2003. Red in tooth and claw

Walking up to the office door this morning, I saw something sitting on the garden path. A cat's skull. Only a small one, so probably a kitten. Under six months, I'd say - small enough to have been caught by the foxes that live underneath the Tat Emporium garden.

(my next appointment with The Good Doctor is tomorrow - I'm not sure what I'm going to say, because frankly, little has changed in the past couple of months.)

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July 28th, 2003. Academic

An email arrived the other day from an Edinburgh University research student called Scott Nowson. He's doing a PhD on bloggers' writing styles, and as part of it he wants people who write blogs to go and answer his questionnaire, and send him a month of their archive. As many people as possible, was the impression I got. Aptly, he's also writing a blog on the progress of his project.

I don't normally pass on random email like this, but it seems like an interesting project. How can you turn down someone whose previous research projects include "Being John Motson, or, Toward a Computational Model of Football Commentary"?

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July 27th, 2003. Definitely not a come-on

The worst thing about sleeping on my own is that when I wake up in the early hours of the morning.

I never sleep very well in any case, because of the cat. I rarely get more than a couple of hours uninterrupted sleep, because of him waking me up to come inside, or go outside, or to get a cuddle, or because he just wants to miaow a bit.

I wake up in the early hours of the morning and lie in bed flooded by gloom, and sometimes I just wish there was someone there next to me that I could hug, and who would tell me it's going to be all right. Like this morning, when I woke up convinced that I'm going to get an eviction letter in the next day or two. I can't cope with having to spend hours on my own, at night, despair-filled.

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July 25th, 2003. The Picture That Wasn't There

Sometimes, you have to wonder what motivates art collectors. Especially modern art collectors, wh buy installations or pieces that need special storage; things they can't view aside from in a gallery along with everybody else. Maybe they enjoy spending money, or get a nice warm feeling from funding Culture.

Some art collectors, I know, do collect pieces just because they like the look of them. The Boss and his girlfriend have paintings on almost every wall; some abstract, some figurative and some rather beautiful. Most, I think, were painted by their friends. I'm sure that most of the customers at the Glasgow Art Fair back in April were shopping for something they'd want to look at on their wall every day.

Some people. though, collect art because they want something to collect. The same turn of mind that makes some men want to see every train in the country, or collect every known Guatemalan stamp. makes some people avid collectors of art. More than anything, they want completeness. That was what I couldn't help thinking when I saw the exhibition One Hundred Great Photographs: A Collection By Bruce Bernard at the Dean Gallery. It's the exhibition of a privately-owned collection which was commissioned in a single bound by an art collector who knew relatively little about photography. And so, here are a hundred great photographs covering the history of the field.

Any collection like this is going to be moulded by the personal tastes of the person who assembled it. Moreover, a collection like this is bound to be different to a plain list, because it's limited to photographs that could be bought. So, the collection is short on classic, iconic images. It's unclear to what extent Bernard went to get hold of specific pictures that he already knew and wanted to include; only a couple were described in that way. There is, though, a fairly eclectic selection from Fox-Talbot to the present, by a variety of known, little-known and unknown photographers. On the whole, this is one of the collection's strengths: it largely seems based around visual appeal rather than famous names. It's a good thing to see a collection of strong, striking, beautiful photographs that perhaps aren't that well known.

The picture I remember best, though, is the one that wasn't there at all. Tucked away next to the lift, the image was replaced by a printed sheet describing it, and why it wasn't there. It showed a young Japanese girl suffering from Minamata Disease, a form of mercury poisoning caused by her mother eating contaminated fish.

Photography, and photojournalism, alerted the world to Minamata, which was one of those events which forced people to realise how dangerous pollution could be. The picture's place in a photographic history is well-deserved purely because of that. Now that the girl in the photo is dead, however, the photographer's widow has decided that photos of her should not be published further. And, somehow, a page of spare text says more than a hundred pictures.

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July 24th, 2003. Growth

Earlier, I was talking on IRC to Wee Lucy. She'd just been to London for the first time, after spending most of her life in a tiny remote country village in Galloway.

"Did you like it?" I said.

"It was nice," she replied, "but I don't think I'd want to live there. It was too busy."

It set me thinking. When it comes to places to live in, do we follow some kind of smooth progression from place to place? I mean, I grew up in a fairly boring village just outside a very boring town. There was hardly anything to do; my weekends were made of trips to my grandmother's and trips to church. In the evenings I stayed at home; the hard kids would go and sit on the village green, drinking cider, until the police came along to shoo them away.

When I was 18 I went to university, because it was a good excuse to leave home. I deliberately avoided an out-of-town or rural university, and ended up living in Edinburgh. Living in the city was great - always something new to do or somewhere to explore; always a chance to go out and get some food; always some sort of activity happening.

Now I've lived here for several years, though, it seems a bit of a small place. Yes, it's easy to get anywhere without too much trouble. But there's not that much going on. I know the art galleries' permanent collections closely, and every room of the museums. It feels like I've walked down every street in the city, and know where every shop is. There's no sense of novelty any more. It feels like I've already found almost all of the hidden details.

Edinburgh might feel quite small to me now, but it's still a city. I can't keep upgrading to larger and larger places to live, because I'd run out. The only other place I'd want to move to, really, is London, and I couldn't go anywhere larger after that. And how long would it keep my interest for? Maybe after another five years I'd start thinking 'I need to move somewhere more interesting' all over again. Am I just feeling this way because I'm a bit low at the moment?

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July 23rd, 2003. Frowning

I'm in another angry, irritated, upset and worried mood today, about the landlord and the flat. I'd better not go over it, because it will only drag me down further. I'll explain soon.

To cheer myself up, I've just been out to an art gallery, looking round various exhibitions. I'm going to go home now and try to write something coherent about it.

15:57 Comments (1)

July 22nd, 2003. Summer time

There are all sorts of lengthy blog-entries I want to write, but whenever I get to a keyboard or pull out a notepad they start falling flat. In my head they're fleshy and interesting, but on paper they're too brief and lifeless.

Email is the same at the moment. I try to start writing an email. My head is full of what I want to put across, but out comes a tiny mish-mash with nothing in it. My grand plans become a single two-sentence paragraph.

Thanks to someone (it might have been Zoe, but her site seems to be down right now so I can't check), I found this BBC article about blogging. It's the democratisation of publishing, apparently. The best bit has to be the comments at the end:

The bloggers I am already aware of seem to have all the time in the world to sit and write their hubristic and self-opinionated garbage - goodness knows how they get the day job done and its a wonder their managers haven't spotted it. Life is too short to go around reading all this stuff. Ralph White, UK

Never managed to get past the first sentence of a "blog". Boring self indulgent drivel. Nick Stutley, UK

(The first rule of critical writing: if you don't like something, put it in "quotes". That way, everyone will be able to tell you don't like it!)

Something else which was an interesting read was Gert's piece on when going to the press is the Right Thing for civil servants to do. And it's topical too, of course.

18:06 Comments (2)

July 19th, 2003. Everybody's Trash To Somebody, Baby

The album I bought last weekend has been going round and round and round in my head all week. I like it, but I'm not sure I want its songs to be going round and round all the time because surely if they do I'll just get bored of it sooner.

What makes it worse is that I can barely remember any of the lyrics. So, I'm sat at work singing away in my mind, thinking something along the lines of Everybody's trash to somebody, baby, ... um ... da daa da da daaaa da da daaa da-dah daaaaa. At least I can manage to keep it in my mind; I don't really want to burst into out-of-tune singing in the middle of the office.

In other news, I was just market-researched for fifteen minutes. Walking along Princes St, I was dragged into a hotel and asked what I thought - via a computer - about various clothing adverts. I thought that all of them would make me less likely to buy the clothes in question, if anything. I really didn't fancy looking like any of the people in the pictures.

12:21 Comments (0)

July 17th, 2003. What I didn't watch on TV last night

I read this in the TV listings yesterday:

8.00 How Clean Is Your House? Kim and Aggie visit a single Scottish woman in her thirties, with three cats and a nest of beetles in her oven.

"Eep!" I thought. That's so going to be me in ten years time.

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July 16th, 2003. That's What I Want

Last weekend's entries have set me thinking. They reminded me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago, with the writers of a locally-based website which I'd better not name. We were sat on a bench in the Meadows, at about half-midnight, eating kebab-shop food, and the conversation went something like this:

Caitlin: "I wish I could think of some way to make money through my blog."

Web-writer-person: "Yes, I can't see how you could get a blog to make money."

So, ever since then I've had that thought ticking over in the back of my head, and now I'm thinking: Why don't I get someone to sponsor me? After all, there must be lots of companies who'd love me to say how wonderful their products are. I'd be completely above-board and explain when I was talking about people who were sponsoring me. They could even have a little discreet advert in the menu. If they didn't want to pay me, they could send a crate of goodies every so often.

Who should I ask to sponsor me, though? It would have to be something that would 'fit in' with the site, and something I'd be happy to advertise. I could hardly talk about how great the new vanilla flavour of Coke is, for example, because a) they're an evil, money-grabbing globalising multinational corporation. And b), vanilla coke mings.

I have no imagination of my own, of course, so I want you all to help. Please send me comments telling me what you think I should advertise on this site, and why. Even better, tell me what you'd give me in return for advertising YOU!

18:21 Comments (6)

July 15th, 2003. Spreading the Good News

Walking home last night, I saw a big, purple trailer parked at the end of the street. It looked a bit like a mobile library; presumably something to keep the kids occupied during the summer holidays and stop them mugging old ladies and smoking crack.

On the side, in big letters, it said: "BIBLE ZONE: Timescope II". I wondered what sort of thing goes on inside.

"Hello, children, welcome to Bible Zone! You're here today to learn about Jesus, and what he did, and why you should worship him! Jesus said lots of great things to people, like 'love your neighbour' and 'treat others the way you'd like them to treat you', but the Jews didn't like that so they got the Romans to brutally kill him. Luckily, though, he was God, so he came back to life again! Isn't that nice!

"Now, do you know what the Bible is? The Bible is this big, thick book which I know looks very boring to you children but it has lots of brutal killings in it just like all those video games you play nowadays. It tells us all about how God created the world, and started time itself, which happened six thousand and five years ago. It tells us all about what Jesus did whilst he was alive and all the good things he said and did, like healing the sick and bringing people back from the dead. All this happened a long, long time ago when people hadn't invented things like 'metaphor', so it's all definitely true and happened exactly as the Bible says. More importantly, though, it tells us that the world is going to end soon, and that if you don't do exactly what the Bible tells you, you'll burn in the fires of hell and suffer in intense pain for ever and ever and ever.

"Don't worry, though, the Bible tells you all the things that you should do to worship God properly, and if you do them all you'll go to heaven! There you'll have everything you want, and you'll be able to meet God, Jesus, and everyone famous and you'll be able to have everything you want. It's easy to get into heaven, as long as you do just what the Bible says. You have to make sure you're not one of those sick, disgusting men who likes to kiss other men, because God thinks they're an abomination. Also, you might not know this yet, but when girls grow up they start bleeding from their girl-parts every few weeks. It's nothing to worry about, but you must make sure that you don't touch any women who are bleeding from their girl-parts. If you do, it means you're Unclean, and God doesn't like that either. You can get Him to like you again, though, by taking a small goat (or two doves) and killing them and burning them as an offering to God; if you do that he'll like you again and you won't have to worry about not getting into heaven. Now, would anyone like a sandwich? I've got prawn cocktail, or BLT."

(no, I'm too lazy to check what the actual atonement for coming into contact with a menstruating woman is supposed to be, so I made it up off the top of my head. Feel free to tell me what I should have put.)

18:17 Comments (3)

July 14th, 2003. Hot and tired

It's too hot to think coherently in the Tat Emporium office today, so this is a Search Requests I've Seen Recently post.

holiday greece snog
ancient hebrew serendipity
tickling underwear spiders pictures
hate waltham toll bar school
list of names british minesweepers
Bengali food on plate pictures
photos cucumber girls inside spread apart
miki berenyi lush pictures
witchcraft tickling naked
plastic fetish sites
dressed in twinset and pearls
much of a muchness
vodafone website is rubbish
sporran radio question
desktop pictures of western highland dogs

I was going to provide a witty commentary to them, but I'm too lazy. I'm sure you can write your own.

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July 13th, 2003. Keep your eyes open

So, of course, within a couple of hours of writing the last entry, I see a bus go past with a huge advert for them on the side. It presumably is just me that had never heard of them before, then. Duh.

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July 12th, 2003. Snowballing

A couple of months ago now, I was in a shop getting a sandwich or something for lunch, and decided to try a different drink instead of the usual half-litre of Irn-Bru. I picked something healthy and fruit-based, and found it was very tasty (apart from the slight hint of banana). Moreover, I loved the packaging, complete with an amusing, whimsical paragraph of blurb which seemed to be different on every few bottles. Yes, I know I *shouldn't* love things just because of the packaging, but they really are great designs.

Anyway, it wasn't a company I'd ever heard of, or seen advertising for, or anything. But when I was on my way to Alton Towers a couple of weeks ago, I saw one of their lorries zooming down the motorway. And now, (courtesy of Lyle at Destruction to All Lawyers, Especially Those Bastards At Wiley Publishing, Inc or whatever he's called now), I've noticed a BBC News story about the company that makes them, Innocent Drinks.

They really are rather nice drinks, and I'm sure they're one of those word-of-mouth discoveries that you think noone else knows about. And, as I said, even if you don't buy any you should look for them just to read the labels on the bottles. Any company that has a line on its packaging inviting their customers to pop round and visit their head office if they're bored deserves to do well, if you ask me.

11:32 Comments (2)

July 10th, 2003. Meow

Occasionally, people write things like "I love being bitchy. It's such fun." I don't understand it.

I mean, I'm not saying I'm never nasty to people. I wouldn't try to claim that I'm always the perfect person who bites their tongue whenever they think of a nasty comment. I just don't understand people who are proud of the way they can turn on their nastiness at the flick of a switch. Being a bitch might feel good at the time, and it might make you smug for five minutes afterwards, but it's still not something to be proud about.

18:29 Comments (1)

July 9th, 2003. London H: How I fell in love with Sir John Soane

Hoarding is a habit that runs in my family. My grandmother would keep everything she could - all my dad's toys, even the braces he wore on his teeth - carefully wrapped up in supermarket carrier bags. My parents are almost as bad, keeping things for years just because "they might be useful". Their attic is filled with empty cardboard boxes, all their polystyrene chunks carefully preserved in case anything ever needs to go back to the shop.

That sort of thing - keeping things because they might eventually be useful - is just hoarding. If you keep things purely for their own sake, though, that's something different. Then, you're a collector. It's more refined; it's almost an art form. And the best collector ever, the one with the most panache and style, is surely Sir John Soane.

Some people have collected so much that they've had to move house; not many have had their house turned into a museum. Sir John designed his own home, then bought the buildings either side and rebuilt those too. His house, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, became Sir John Soane's Museum after his death, with much of it preserved just as it was during his life. Some rooms are much like typical Georgian buildings; but some are packed full of fragments of Classical statuary, crammed together like a nineteeth-century museum storeroom. He didn't have enough room to hang all his paintings, so he cunningly designed a room to store them in, with its walls designed to work like an enormous wooden book. Hinged panels fold out layer on layer, like a walk-in picture album.

Many of the paintings in there seemed to be of Soane-designed buildings which were never built; if more had been, then London might have looked very different. He seemed to want to rebuild the whole city in a grand neoclassical style. Westminster would look more like Washington if his designs - for a neoclassical House of Lords, for example - had come to pass.

There's a large portrait of Sir John in his museum. I don't know what he was actually like, of course, but his portrait seems to be tender and compassionate. His drawing-room is in bright yellow because at the time it was virtually the only non-toxic colour of paint, and he didn't want to poison his children. It's often tempting to think that historical figures might share the same outlook as ourselves; I'm sure it's usually misguided. With Sir John Soane, though, I really hope that in life he was as active, creative and kind as he appears.

(The Sir John Soane's Museum is at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, and is open free of charge, five days a week. Their website is at www.soane.org.)

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July 8th, 2003. Runaway Train

It wasn't a very good song, but you might remember the video. The video probably won awards, in fact, and the man who made it is now a well-known film director. The shots of the band and so on were nothing special, but it became famous for the Missing Persons. Over the chorus, the screen would fade to black and a series of grainy, blurred Missing Persons photos would appear, each captioned with their name and the date they disappeared.

"Missing Persons photos are so poignant" is such an obvious thing to say, I'm trying hard to think of a better way to put it. You all know that already. One little snapshot taken at a random, thoughtless moment, or a school portrait that looks nothing like you, becomes an iconic image on posters and newspapers in every corner of the country. I don't remember the name of the girl from Morley (I think) who disappeared on her way to the corner shop one day in the early 80s, but I remember the poster about her that was stuck up in my local library, a hundred miles away, for years afterwards.

She was even in the Runaway Train video, I think, ten years later. Its British version, anyway: it came in different editions with appropriately-localised missing. I wanted to talk about one person from the British version in particular, but I'll do that in a future entry. The missing girl with the misspelled name.

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July 7th, 2003. I can see you, you know

Only last week, I spotted that someone from my old secondary school has been reading this site. Now, I've noticed that someone else in Grimsby has been reading it, from a North-East Lincolnshire Council computer. Hello, whoever you are. Have fun.

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July 6th, 2003. London G: Putney in the height of summer

"I'm so lucky!" said C. "I've got such interesting friends!"

We'd just had lunch together, in a little café next to Putney station. It was the first chance we'd had to have a proper conversation for a few years, so I took the opportunity to tell her about the Good Doctor and all that stuff. Now, we were walking down the High Street vaguely back to her office, on a scorching June afternoon.

"I mean," she continued, "W.'s gay, and now there's all this with you, and ... well, Tidswell's a Duran Duran fan." Both C. and Tidswell had been very excited to learn that Simon le Bon lives just round the corner from C. And it's so nice to be "interesting".

She had lots of questions to ask, of course. The usual ones about timescales, treatments and medication. It's good that she showed so much of an interest, I suppose. She seemed genuinely intrigued.

As we walked along, we reached Putney Embankment. Unlike the Victoria Embankment, Putney Embankment is right down by the hide water mark, with pools of river water washing over onto the road. Along most of it a line of railings separates road and river, but at some places it stops, with the road sloping gently into the water without any boundary.

"Putney's quite posh," said C, "so a lot of people come down here with big posh cars - Mercedes, Aston Martins andn so on. They park them on the slipways at low tide and don't notice where the high tide line is; so often we look out of the office window a few hours later and see all these big expensive cars floating off downriver."

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July 4th, 2003. London F: Sounds of travelling

Sounds are one of the most evocative things about travelling. If you have a recording of a place you've visited, you can lie back, close your eyes and re-live all those soaked-up memories.

That's why I enjoyed finding the one-minute vacations on quietamerican.org, 60-second sound recordings of various places around the world. In particular, a minute on the Northern Line in London. I can listen to it at work, and sit back imagining I'm just leaving W's flat and heading off into the city for a day's exploring.

(via But She's A Girl, who in turn got it from Antipixel.)

17:43 Comments (2)

July 2nd, 2003. Grown-up tastes

We started having the Salad Argument in the car on the way back from Alton Towers. I'm sure I've mentioned the Salad Argument in the past here. My mother loves to make salad in the summer, because it's simple and quick, but I really don't think what she makes counts as salad. It's usually something like the following:

• A few rather wet pieces of iceberg lettuce
• A tomato, or a few cherry tomatoes
• A piece of cheddar cheese
• A dollop of coleslaw
• Maybe some watercress, with lots of stalky bits

all just placed next to one another on a plate. It accompanies something like some cold fish, or a slice of pork pie, or quiche, or pizza, and there would be a jar of salad cream on the table. I got rather fed up of this when I was young, and survived by coating the lettuce in enough salad cream that I didn't notice the taste.

The Salad Argument goes something like this:

"What you make isn't salad; it's some vegetables sat next to each other."

"Well, what is it if it's not salad? That's what I've always called a salad."

"A salad has to have dressing, for one thing, and I don't mean salad cream."

"I'm sure if you went into a cafe and asked for salad, that's what you'd get. It's only these posh expensive places that doll it up with dressing and what-have-you."

"Just because you can buy it in a cafe, it doesn't mean it's any good."

"What I make is a traditional English salad. It's only recently that people have started eating all this fancy foreign stuff."

When the argument gets to that point, there's really no point continuing - I mean, it's heading dangerously towards "Two pieces of lettuce and a tomato would have been good enough for the Queen Mother, and she sacrificed her life for this country, you know!" territory. I'm never very sure if my mother gets more reactionary as she gets older or if I never noticed it as much before I left home. But anyway. Instead, I tried to find out what she had in the kitchen, and worked out what I could throw together quickly.

I managed to put together a completely-fake Thai-style salad - minus the chillies, and with Worcester sauce instead of fish sauce - and was surprised how nice it was. I was rather disappointed that my mother wouldn't show any interest in what I was doing. "I know how to make salad dressing," she said. "I know how to toss a salad. I don't bother because your dad would say 'What's this you've been doing? We've never had this before.'"

(I don't want you all to think that I'm getting snobbish and thinking I'm above my parents now or something. I'm not like that at all, but I do keep trying to get my parents inspired and interested in trying new things, and they always seem extremely dismissive about it, and unwilling to get past "but we've always done things this way!")

10:01 Comments (6)

July 1st, 2003. We only get polite terrorists round here

My mother gets stranger and stranger.

Visiting at the weekend, I noticed a bit pile of empty milk-bottles stacked in the corner of the bedroom, the big three-litre plastic ones. Her explanation was:

"Well, they were saying on the news that if there was a war they would contaminate the water supply or turn it off so we should all stock up on bottled water. So I thought instead of buying that I'd wash out and keep the milk bottles instead, so that if they turned the water off..."

"You'd have a big pile of empty milk bottles?"

"Well, I assume they'd give us a bit of warning first."

09:58 Comments (1)