archives

April 2004

April 29th, 2004. Has anyone got a coin I can toss

Right. It really is decision time, as to whether I move or not. If I decide right away, I can put in my months' notice, move at the end of May, and only owe another £500 on top of my current rent arrears.

I know I keep going on about this, and have received plenty of feedback from everyone about it. I especially like the comment by James on this page, which is funny because it's true. However, thinking about it a bit more, I've tried to come up with a For And Against list.

Reasons for moving:

However. Against:

Any more advice from anyone? Anything I've missed?

* I hope none of you mind me saying this, but it's the impression I get.

** Except Hebden Bridge, of course.

*** Although I'm told that Hull has a thriving fetish club scene. Ahem. However, although Hull's a lot nearer than Sheffield it's just as hard to get to because there's a bloody huge river in the way.

**** To be fair, that's partly because of economics which wouldn't apply to me. Housing in Grimsby is very cheap, because nobody wants to live there. Therefore, if you live in Grimsby you can't move away, because a house in the area effectively doesn't count as part of the property ladder. Especially if you work for a national company who pay the same all over the country, you can't move away without accepting that you'll have to move into a much smaller house - which could be nasty if you've started a family, or are a packrat like me, and so on.

11:12 Link Comments (17)

April 28th, 2004. Meta

As I've probably mentioned before, I'm planning a redesign. A full-on, proper, all-over redesign.

Now, it's not going to be finished for at least a couple of months or so, but I've just had an idea about it, and it needs a bit of help. At the top of the column with all the links and miscellaneous information, I want to put a blurb quote, like you get on the back of books. Things along the lines of " 'Flat At The Top Of The Stairs is a cornucopia of activity, opinions, perversity, food and bad jokes' - The Author".

There'll be several of these available, and a random one will come up on each page view. The problem with this, of course, is that I need people to write them for me. Things that make me laugh are good, as are things that sound good at first but could also be read as put-downs. Also, I'd prefer it if people let me credit them with their full names, just because I think it would look better.

So. Any contributions?

11:16 Link Comments (8)

April 26th, 2004. Just so you know

Yesterday's Observer had a piece on Sir Bernard Ingham, and his campaign to rid the country of wind generators. Sir Bernard, if you don't know, was the Tory government spokesman* turned nuclear power supporter. His constant campaigns against wind farms are, naturally, completely unrelated to his fondness for nuclear fission. He's just trying to protect our Traditional British Countryside. Um, yes.

What I want to say, though, is about one small line in the piece. About how one of the local campaign groups Sir Bernard is supporting is from Thorne, South Yorkshire, who are trying to block the construction of a wind farm on the nearby Thorne Moors.

Now, reading that, you'll have thought: Yorkshire Moors. Your mind will have immediately reached for the Brontë sisters' novels, and a Best Of Kate Bush CD. You'll be thinking of wild, open spaces, hills, endless vistas of purple heather, lots of wildlife, and so on. I'm guessing that was what the Observer's writer was thinking, too. You'd be very, very wrong.

Thorne Moors really is, I have to say, one of the most boring places in the country. It's also called Thorne Wastes, is very, very flat, and only just above sea-level. It was tidal marsh until the seventeenth century, when some Dutch engineers ran out of bits of Holland that needed draining and decided to move to Yorkshire. The handful of boggy bits that weren't drained have mostly been dug up and sold in garden centres; what's left is farmed as intensively as farmers can. The area's only landmark is a water tank in Thorne itself. It's only about fifty feet high, but you can see it for miles around because it's the only thing higher than a tree. And most of the trees have been cut down in any case. Recently, the Ordnance Survey decided to find what the most boring square on any of their maps was. The one with the least actual information. It was, of course, in the Thorne area.

Excuse me for ranting, here. I just want to say that Thorne is the one place in the country which would definitely be made more picturesque by building a wind farm. No, really. Unless you're a fan of really, really straight horizons, you couldn't make it look worse than it already is.

* He was the 1980s equivalent of Alistair Campbell: the first Prime Ministerial spokesman to have an overtly political point of view himself, and in many ways one of the first British 'spin-doctors'.

11:49 Link Comments (10)

April 24th, 2004. Space-filler

Thanks to everyone for the comments on the last post. Thanks also to W for phoning me after reading it, and to John C for reading it first and telling W to. You all deserve big hugs.

Last night: a couple of little local bands; we all went along because we know the lead singer of one. Might write a bit more about it later.

In the meantime, here's the usual space-filler. Search requests! All from the past week, as usual.

* I've looked through my archives, but couldn't find it, and I'm too lazy to search properly. So it might have been ever longer ago; all I remember is writing it in the internet cafe in Waverley Station.

** Actually, that probably covers a lot of clubs that I'd never go to in a million years either. I meant the sort of club where most of the clothes are black and shiny, and chains and padlocks are standard fashion accessories. Ahem.

11:08 Link Comments (2)

April 21st, 2004. Just don't let the neighbours see

Had a long talk with my mother yesterday, which was good and bad in equal parts. Basically, I'm thinking about moving back to live with them until my life gets sorted out; it won't be fun, but it will at least be affordable.

There are certain things, though, that will be a problem. Specifically, my mother wants me to be Normal. She doesn't want me to be - in her words - 'a freak', which is what she thinks I am right now. She wants me to settle down in a nice heterosexual relationship and start a family. She says things like:

"I don't care what you talk to your internet friends about, just as long as you're Normal if you live here."

Mum, being Normal isn't an option. I'm never going to be normal in your terms. Some things don't just go away.

"Yes, well, I'm sure they will eventually. As long as you at least act Normal."

There's something horribly, tragically English about that. It doesn't matter what my personal feelings are. It doesn't matter what I want to do with my life, so long as on the outside I look nice and normal and ordinary, just like everybody else. I mustn't do anything to make the neighbours, or the family, or my mum's friends* think I'm anything other than Normal, however much it fucks my head up on the inside.

* this would be 'my parent's friends', except that I don't think my dad has any.

10:44 Link Comments (13)

April 20th, 2004. The past is another country

I've watched Time Team on and off for years. Despite doing archaeology at university for five years, though, I've never ever seen anybody I've known appear on it. Heard of, occasionally. Known, no.

That was, until last night's special episode, starring one of the lecturers who taught me. It was about Oak Bank Crannog, a now-submerged artificial island in Loch Tay, which an Edinburgh-based team has been excavating for over twenty years now. The reason it's taken them twenty years is partly because it's a very complex, very special, very well-preserved site; and partly because Edinburgh University claims to be perenially short of cash, and needs to spend what it has on vital things like Management Strategies and corporate brochures, rather than on research. Especially research when doesn't make money, like archaeology.*

It's such a shame that Edinburgh has access to some wonderful archaeological sites, but can't afford to excavate them; or at least, let its students excavate them. As Time Team showed, the only way they can now afford to excavate Oak Bank is by getting random people to pay for archaeological training; presumably at prices rather beyond what most Edinburgh archaeology students can afford. Similarly, there is a wonderful site on Lewis that the university had to stop digging about ten years ago. Similar in some ways to Oak Bank, it's a ruined broch standing in a loch.** Since it was built the loch's water level has been slowly rising, so the earliest occupation levels are now waterlogged, and wonderfully preserved. It's possibly the only site of its kind in the world, and the amazing preservation is the problem: the university simply can't afford to look after all the finds properly once they've been dug up. Keeping waterlogged finds in good condition requires an awfully large amount of money, which Edinburgh's archaeologists simply don't have.

* actually, that's not quite true. The archaeology department did, whilst I was there, have a way to make money. They had a semi-independant, profit-making division doing commercial archaeology. The university management found out, and said: "Hang on! A profitable part of the university! Quick, sell it off so we can get some fast capital!"

** For the Hebridean readers: Loch na Berie, on the Bhaltos peninsula.

*** After this post and the last one, I'm wondering whether the footnotes are going to become a regular thing. Maybe I could have a strapline: "Flat At The Top Of The Stairs: the blog with the footnotes!"

10:55 Link Comments (4)

April 19th, 2004. Hysteria

Doing my grocery shopping yesterday, I scanned the headlines in the newspaper rack. Nothing very exciting had happened. My eye was drawn, though, to the headline of the Hate Mail On Sunday, written out large in SHOCK! HORROR! capitals. John Birt - former BBC director-general, peer of the realm and friend of the government - is a dirty internet pervert! He makes money out of all those evil people that swarm over the net! He's associated with perverts, paedophiles, porn-watchers, Nigerian fraudsters, spam-spreaders, virus-writers and every other kind of Internet Evil that nice, middle-class Mail readers want to be frightened of over their Sunday breakfast. And the evidence for these allegations? He's on the board of directors of Paypal.

Now, I accept that the Mail likes to give a good kicking to a) the internet b) the government c) the BBC at every possible opportunity, but I still think they're going a bit easy on the man. I mean, there are plenty of things they didn't mention that he could have been to blame for. Clearly, if he is a director of Paypal, he's responsible for absolutely everything on the Internet. There's nothing over-the-top at all about trying to smear him with perversity by association. Just as it's not over-the-top to accuse the management of (pick your ISP of choice here) of similar levels of evil, for letting their customers access Usenet (a story which The Observer has run at least three times in the past decade). Don't you just love media stupidity?

My parents are former Daily Mail readers*, and look how I turned out. Thinking about writing this post, I realised that I'm probably an example of The Ultimate Evil as far as the Daily Mail is concerned. I mean, look at me. I'm (currently) somewhere between genders, openly bisexual, and open about the wide variety of kinks and fetishes I like.** I'm a vaguely pagan agnostic, who believes in a fully secular state. I'm on the Internet. I'm pro-European, pro-choice and pro-equality. I don't see anything wrong with working mothers, and I think that two consenting people are entitled to do whatever they like to each other. Or any number of people, come to that. Worst of all, I like pointing out to people that traditions aren't set in stone, but are constantly changing. I wonder if I can get the Mail to start a campaign against me - then I'd know I'm really doing something right.

* although, they stopped after deciding the price had gone up once too often, and switched to the Independant - which was more expensive, but as it was a broadsheet presumably my dad thought he was getting a better pennies-per-square-inch rate. Now they just read the Sunday Times, and the Grimsby Telegraph - a Daily Mail-published local paper full of mind-numbing human interest stories with a bubbling undercurrent of the usual right-wing hysteria.

** well, I am after a couple of drinks.

10:49 Link Comments (1)

April 17th, 2004. All in a good cause

It's that morning-after feeling. I'm not sure whether I genuinely have a hangover, or if I'm just woozy from lack of sleep. As I can still think, walk about and generally get out of bed and go outside, I'm guessing it's the second of those.

Last night was a good night out: the pub was having an Easter party, in aid of the Rabbit Welfare Association. One of those nights where I kept thinking "Wow, that was funny! I have to remember that and blog it!" One of those nights where I kept having really great conversations with people I hardly know. One of those nights, in short, where I really must have been rather drunk but didn't notice. I've now forgotten almost everything that happened, leaving behind a nice warm feeling that means I must have had a fun night.

10:23 Link Comments (0)

April 15th, 2004. Linky linky (again)

The list of blogs and other sites on the right-hand side is, as it says, a list of the things I read regularly. I don't just put people up there because they've linked to me; I put them up there because I read them.

However, since I've not had net access at home, there's a problem. I basically use that list as my bookmarks list; therefore it's hard for me to start reading new things.

Because of that, here's some sites that are linking to me at the moment but aren't on the Things I Read list:

There are more, but I'm out of time just now. If anyone wants to complain about their description, feel free to correct me.

11:14 Link Comments (5)

April 14th, 2004. Linky linky

Sometime recently, Somewhat, Muchly returned to life. And I've only just noticed. I've always liked the site, partly because I vaguely remember receiving a random email from Ms. Muchly before I was even Caitlin.

(and, also, I've got a reader at the British Antarctic Survey. Exotic!)

11:22 Link Comments (1)

April 13th, 2004. The Stupidity Argument

Last night's TV: a Channel 4 Easter documentary called Witness: The Resurrection. It was presented by the Bishop of Durham, who wandered round Jerusalem explaining how he has proof that the resurrection of Christ really did happen. Or, at least, that was what the listings said.

I didn't take to the programme from the off, when he started off explaining that nowadays it's people like him who are the real rebels, yeah, man! Believing in something as far out as someone coming back from the dead! Rebellious! I'm sorry, but I don't think anyone who gets to live in a castle as part of their job is allowed to call themself a rebel with a straight face. I'm also very doubtful of anybody who says "I have proof my religion is right," because then I start wondering why they need it, and how strong their faith is.

As I was expecting, his "proof" never actually appeared. He relied on something that was, in the past, very common in archaeology. And it's often been disproved. It's so common it doesn't really have a name, but I like to call it "the Stupidity argument". It goes like this: ancient people couldn't invent anything.

The bishop wandered round Jerusalem, and the occasional bit of Greece, explaining various ancient afterlife beliefs - the Asphodel Fields, the Valley of Gehenna, and so on. And, he said, nobody had ever imagined that someone might die and then be resurrected a couple of days later. Maybe at the end of the world, yes, but a couple of days later? Inconceivable! So, it must have really happened!

Um, yes. As I said, this argument has been tried many, many times before. And it's often been disproved. When I have more time, I might write more about it.

11:18 Link Comments (1)

April 12th, 2004. "We're not using the Z word"

Yesterday, another Sunday afternoon trip to the cinema, to see Shaun Of The Dead. Which was very good, much better than Dawn Of The Dead, and not just because it has more jokes. I did feel slightly smug at one point, because I once visited a pub mentioned in the film;* but most of the time I sat back and giggled.

One of the slightly niggling things about British comedy films is that you have already seen all the actors in numerous TV sitcoms. On the other hand, one of the good things is that you can spot all the little cameo parts played by TV actors you recognise; like when Reece Shearsmith and Tamsin Greig pop up in this, for example. The other good thing about British comedy films is - or, rather can be - the very Britishness of them. Your standard American comedy horror film would never give you a scene where your hero walks to the corner shop to buy a can of Coke and a Cornetto, without noticing the zombies roamming the streets or the blood smeared on the door of the shop's fridge. The zombies themselves seemed to retain a little comedy consciousness, too. And, I won't spoil the ending, but it is daytimeTVtastic.

In other news: this was one of the headlines on the radio this morning. And, ever since, I've had the song There Is A Light That Never Goes Out stuck in my head. If you don't know it, hunt down the lyrics and you'll see why.

Oh, and also, I've had a new article put up on Rum and Monkey. I wrote it ages ago, to enter their Writing Competition, but was disqualified for knowing them a bit too well.** The ending is a bit rubbish, but it was fun to write.

* The Shepherds, which used to be just by Highgate station. I'm told it used to be Simon Pegg's local, but was redeveloped into some awful theme pub. And also (I was told) Coldplay's local; I think some of them had a small cameo in the film, but I'm not 100% sure what they look like.

** Not in that way, dirty-minded people. Although I did see one of them naked once.

11:04 Link Comments (6)

April 11th, 2004. The Day We Went To Roghadal

(written after reading a brief post on Island Life.)

My university dissertation took a fair amount of work. I don't mean the text: that was 10,000 words roughly typed in a single nine-hour overnight session. What took the time was the reading, research, scanning photographs and preparing drawings, all the stuff that took so long that I was left with just nine hours to write the text. And part of the research was three weeks spent travelling round Lewis and Harris by bus, visiting graveyards, taking photographs and making barely-legible pencil sketch-plans to take home and work up.

I was staying with another group of archaeologists, who were digging up fields in south-west Lewis. Not fields with ruined buildings underneath them; just fields, with the occasional boundary wall. So, one day, on their day off, we all decided to have a day out together and have a look at a couple of sites that I wanted to see, and were a bit far to visit by bus. We all got in their minibus, and went off down to Rodel.

Because of the various factions desperately trying to keep people speaking Gaelic, the spelling of everywhere in the Western Isles has changed. According to the Ordnance Survey, the place I'm talking about is called Roghadal. Which is pronounced "Rodel", which is the English spelling, and pedants would probably point out that it's actually a Norse name. It takes a while to drive down there from Lewis, because it's right on the southern tip of Harris, near Renish Point. It's a beautiful trip, though, so nobody was really complaining. We stopped off at the disused whale-gutting factory near Tarbert; and at Northton, so I could have a quick look at the broch that stood between Northton and Toe Head. Eventually, we made it all the way down the island, to the church at Rodel.

Rodel church is the place we had come to see. It's about the same size as you're average medieval English parish church; maybe slightly larger. By Hebridean standards it's a cathedral-sized edifice, with several stories of tower; and, unusually, still standing in good condition. We swarmed over it in a school-trip kind of way, wandering up and down the nave and climbing up into the tower rooms. We studied the memorial plaques.* We enjoyed the view, although for the Hebrides it was nothing special. We lazed on the grass outside, and I tried to work out which bits were worth photographing.

There was a noise. High-pitched, beautiful, echoing. One of the archaeologists could sing, it turned out. She found a room in the tower with acoustics she liked, and started to sing out loud, choral music, filling the church with pure tone. We stood and listened to the sound echoing through the building and outside to the hills. That's what I remember about our trip to Rodel.

* a lot of them, I'm guessing, were for the Humberstone-Seaforth family, who once owned Lewis and Harris; and, bizarrely, also had a large estate near Grimsby.

10:56 Link Comments (3)

April 9th, 2004. Referral (or, all publicity is *some* sort of publicity)

One thing I really keep meaning to do some time is to go properly through my referrer log, and check out all the people who are linking to me. As I am lazy, it might be a while before I get it done. There are lots of other blogs that link to here, that I vaguely know about but have never taken the effort to thank; and I really should.

However, I do look at bits of it occasionally. Today, for example, I've come across a random message board where people have been calling me a psycho. Lovely. I'm tempted to respond, but I'm not entirely sure what to say. Maybe I should find them a real psycho so they can do a Compare And Contrast.

(I should admit, I didn't bother to read the whole thread. If anyone wants to summarise it for me, feel free.)

10:50 Link Comments (5)

April 8th, 2004. Death and pretension. Pretentiousness? One of those things.

I knew beforehand, really, what I was getting myself into. I went to see Dawn Of The Dead anyway, though, and spent a lot of the movie with my eyes shut. Not much of it was scary - apart from the very first zombie scene - but there was just too much blood and so on. The zombie birth scene, in particular, was far too gruesome for me to watch. Later on, there was more and more action, filmed in that modern way with digital cameras and fast, jerky movements. We were sat at the front of the cinema, and it was just too fast, too jerky for me to watch without getting a headache.

I want to be awfully pretentious, though, and talk about how I thought of this film when watching the news recently. Lots of the reviews of Dawn Of The Dead have gone on about how it doesn't have the pointed social satire of the Romero original, and his jibes at shopping-mall culture. So I'm going to go off in completely the opposite direction and tell you what it made me think about.

The news in the past couple of weeks has been full of pieces and articles commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. It feels almost as if there is more in the news about it now than there was back when it was actually happening. Possibly even more articles about how the Rwandan horror was ignored by the first world. If you don't know anything about it, here's a brief recap. Ten years ago, 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda, for either a) belonging to the wrong tribe, or b) belonging to the right tribe, and not wanting to kill the wrong tribe strongly enough. 800,000 people, at a rate, on average, of about 8,000 per day. At the time, there were United Nations troops in the country. Their commander asked for help to stop the killing; the UN's response was to withdraw almost all of his men. At the time, there were French troops in the country. They did nothing. At the time, there were Belgian troops in the country. Around ten of them were killed, so the rest of the Belgian troops were also withdrawn. People fled to churches for sanctuary; they were slaughtered in the churches, with the priests and nuns joining in. Both the Catholic and Episcopalian Archbishops gave tacit approval to the killing; and afterwards the Catholic church helped genocidal priests to leave the country. It was one of the worst genocide events of ths 20th century, and spread to neighbouring countries, eventually leading to the collapse of the government of Zaïre.

In the past few weeks, the UN has been on its knees with contrition, admitting that it did nothing to help, saying "we must never let this happen again." I'm a cynic, though, and I keep wondering what is going to happen the next time this happens. Will rich governments actually put in any men to stop it, or will they just shade their eyes and mutter things about 'unavoidable tribal violence'? Because, if the killing is carried out by machete-waving mobs rather than industrial death-camps, it's only 'tribal' violence.

And, so, that was what Dawn Of The Dead made me think about. A swarming crowd of zombies intent on destroying the living. Who were all just ordinary people. We have to keep control of ourselves, because we could all become zombies in the wrong circumstances.

11:20 Link Comments (0)

April 7th, 2004. Tourists. And, eternal rest.

Random people coming up to talk to me in the pub always make me rather nervous. It can be fun, though, if I can get over my general shyness. There was a nice, very skinny man who tried to help us with the pub quiz last night, for example. And afterwards, two Swiss tourists came over to talk.

They'd just arrived off the plane. They had 8 days to see Scotland, and they wanted to know the best way to do it. Is hitch-hiking easy? Where can we go to hear live punk bands? How do we get to Ben Nevis? And so on.

They both had the same hair: mops of dark curls. The same clothes: thick, woolly jumpers. One had better English; he would break off occasionally to explain things to the other in what sounded like Swiss German. My German isn't good enough to make out more than a couple of words of what he was saying.

(And then they left, and some other people came over and invited Hannah to join a band. But that's another story).

The Swiss men explained that they had no money. They couldn't believe how expensive everything - well, beer - is here, which surprised us rather. They couldn't even afford to stay in hostels, but had come up with a Plan. They had found a graveyard, and inside it a grave-house with a roof, to keep the rain off. They had a tent, so they were going to camp there.

Grave-houses are a peculiarly Scottish thing, if not a peculiarly Edinburgh thing. I'm not even sure if that's their proper name, or what their proper name is; it's just the best thing I can think of to describe them. They are small enclosures, usually about 10 feet square and 10 feet high, or so. The fronts are carved to look like classical facades or porticos. Inside, they are paved, and bare apart from a plaque on the wall explaining who is buried beneath the paving. A few have roofs, but most are open; the roofed ones normally have gates or grilles over the entrance, to stop Swiss tourists trying to camp inside them. 19th-century Edinburgh cemetaries have long terraces of these grave enclosures, like a row of tenements in a street.

Incidentally - whilst I'm on the subject - I read in the news recently that lack of graveyard space is a Big Problem at the moment. Even though few people are actually buried now, nearly every graveyard is filling up. Soon there'll be no room for all the bodies, and it'll be like Dawn Of The Dead - well, maybe. What intrigued me, though, is that noone ever seems to remember that the idea of your body sitting in its grave for all eternity is barely 200 years old. If you've ever looked round a graveyard - even a historic one - you'll notice that there are very few burials from before the 19th century. They haven't just disappeared; before then, people accepted that there wasn't room to bury everyone. When a graveyard started to fill up, the older bodies would just be exhumed. Every parish had its charnel house, where the dismembered skeletons of these exhumed bodies would be stored; all neatly filed with skulls in one place, tibias and femurs in another, and so on. Why can't we just go back to the traditional way of doing things?

11:03 Link Comments (4)

April 6th, 2004. Grey

It's a rainy day again today. Grey skies. The cat will be skittish and mardy later, wanting to go outside but not wanting to get wet.

Had a job interview yesterday, but didn't get the job. The interviewer emailed me to tell me I hadn't got it within a couple of hours of seeing me; she may have well told me there and then that I didn't have it. Had another rejection-by-email at the weekend. Still waiting to hear from another interview, but it's only part-time work, and pays barely more than dole money.

And everything is dull and everything is grey, and I'm behind on my rent and it's the sort of day I just want to curl up in bed and go to sleep and hope I wake up again in my real life and all this is just a dream. You know, like on a soap opera or something. You know, that sort of day.

10:55 Link Comments (4)

April 3rd, 2004. Money, money, money

Quick note to anyone else who banks with the Halifax or the Bank of Scotland. Have you had any problems lately with them not replacing expired bank cards on time?

I do have this problem at the moment. Hopefully they will sort it out before the cash in my purse runs out. Otherwise, things could get tricky. I thought I'd ask to find out if this has been a common thing, or if it's Just Me that it's happened to.

10:59 Link Comments (4)

April 2nd, 2004. Diary Ice-cream

For a couple of years now, I've been keeping a diary. I was inspired by a visitor I had, who would write down everything she'd been doing each day in a little notebook, in a complex mixture of languages and alphabets. After she left, I bought myself a little, A6 artists' book and started writing in it.

Only a few months later, this place appeared, and the frequency of diary entries dropped off rapidly. Now it mostly gets used to record my darker times, or ramble about how well I'm managing to be open with my friends about my life. Last night, though, I read back some of the first entries for the first time, and it turns out that it had started out as far more of a gossip-diary. It's strange how teenage it sounds even though it's only from two years ago:

"C is feeling a bit upset at the moment because M moved away suddenly. She knew it was coming, but got back from            the other day to find a note that basically said: 'I've moved to           , bye'. I asked her for suggestions as to who else me and F should invite for drinks with J, W etc and she said we should ask Creepy M and his wife. Somehow I doubt he would turn up; I still haven't found out why they didn't show at C's party."

Or, a few weeks earlier:

"M and R were at a party, and T. Hopefully I demonstrated to L that I don't automatically hate M and R like she accused me of doing the other day; I assume she was projecting herself onto me."

(these are all heavily edited, of course, and in any case as far as I know none of the people involved read this site.)

So, I've decided I should keep a more gossipy private diary in future, with all the things too private to post here. If only because, in a few years time, reading it again might give me a bit of a laugh.

Incidentally, to change the subject, the poster of Comment #1000 was IZB from Yeah, but is it art? You may award yourself a warm feeling of round-number-ness.

09:55 Link Comments (0)

April 1st, 2004. Obit

Some departments of my old school were great believers in education by video. This is probably a hugely unfair generalisation, but it's what sticks out in my memory. Chemistry lessons with Open University documentaries about the Billingham chemical works, for example. There were whole terms of R. E. in which all we did was watch old episodes of Quantum Leap, in the hope that we'd pick up some sort of morals from it. Apart from P. E. and Maths, the TV was used in all our classrooms on a fairly regular basis.

By far the biggest fan of the VHS tape was the history department. They didn't stick to documentaries, either. Henry V, Waterloo and Blackadder all appeared on the syllabus at some point. Robert Redford taught us about life on the American frontier, and we learned the US Civil War from a very tedious mini-series called The Blues And The Grays (or something like that). Most of our American history time, however, was spent watching a documentary series which was already twenty years old when we were shown it. It was Alistair Cooke's America, and it was the first time I had come across the late journalist.

If you want twelve-year-olds to pay attention and learn something, putting them in front of a 1970s documentary probably isn't the best way to do it. Noone else in the class had heard of the man, and nobody was interested in what he was saying. I found his voice entrancing, though: deep, round and dark-brown chestnut-flavoured.

All my life, Cooke was an old, old man; in his 60s when making America, and 70 in the year I was born. Seeing him, now, as the grand old patriarch of radio journalism, it's hard to imagine his as a stylistic revolutionary. His carefully calculated conversationalist tone, though, was a big new thing for the 1940s BBC. As I don't know much about the history of journalism, I want to say that he's one of the originators of the main journalistic commentary style of today: where even the most serious writer tries to draw the reader in with a conversational style, and illustrates everything by comparison with their own life. Maybe other people were doing this before Alistair Cooke, but he was the one who became famous for it.

He could do this because he could write about anything he wanted. As a journalist - he was a Guardian foreign correspondant for over 20 years - he was at least expected to write about something newsworthy. As a radio essayist, he could write about anything he wanted so long as it filled up a quarter-hour slot every week. To quote his Guardian obituary: "[U]ntil he sat down at his portable typewriter, ... he never has any idea what he was going to write about. So [Letter From America] drew heavily on personal experiences, conversations with shopkeepers and taxi-drivers or obscure items in the media."

You can probably see where I'm going here. Cooke was one of the first conversational journalists, and that in turn has inspired a field where thousands of people write chattily about whatever they've been doing, and how it relates to the wider world. Today, everybody thinks their conversations with shopkeepers are worth an audience, and they can all find one too. Some people even get on the radio. Yes, Alistair Cooke was the grandfather of blogging; and all bloggers should remember him and give thanks.

(you can listen to some old editions of Letter From America on the BBC News website)

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