lazenby:

LBJ kissing his father goodbye. 

This makes me think of…

We all kiss on the mouth in my family. We’re stupid and common and we don’t got no class whatsoever. Somewhere in the history of everyone else came a time when men stopped kissing men because of fuck knows. And then from somewhere else came kissing on the cheeks. Sophisticated. European. Modern. In France they got two kisses because of the unions. In the UK we only got one because of rationing. 

Meanwhile, stuck out away from civilisation on the Wirral, no one thought to tell my family who still to this day grab each other and kiss on the mouth.

I don’t tell people anymore. To warn them, I mean. I just take them out there and let them come to Jesus on their own. My wife, first time she met them, was bombarded; hardly knew what the fuck was going on.

They’re a strange bunch anyway - particularly for a girl from the South. We spent two or three days over there with them. She got kissed on the mouth a lot by a lot of strange people.  Drunk, mostly. She makes it worse by being the kind of person you want to just grab and kiss anyway.

When we were driving home she suddenly turned to me and said “They kiss, your family, you know? They kiss you on the mouth.” as though she’d only just realised it herself. 

“You’re goddamned fucking right they do, baby.” I didn’t say because, Christ. But I thought it.

And this picture of LBJ saying goodbye makes me think of that, and Uncle Ian and a family of thousands all saying hello and kissing you because that’s how we do it.

On March 17th last year, at the age of 1 year and a couple of weeks, my son Herbert had a stroke for no good reason on God’s green earth.

I was at work in York when it happened. Gem tells me he was shovelling beans into his face like he does almost every day when he went all floppy on the right side of his body. Gem screamed him to hospital in Wythenshawe and the attending doctor that night put him on an emergency course of worst-case-scenario antibiotics. She figured it couldn’t be a stoke because babies don’t have strokes. 

A few hours later when I arrived back in Manchester he was cuddled up in her arms with a huge bag of Some Drugs dripping slowly through a canula into his good arm. He still had a hugely high temperature.

While we were changing him in the little bathroom there, his eyeballs rolled back in his head and he went away. That experience tends to stick with you.

We were in the hospital for 2 weeks and we have to go back a fair bit with checkups and physio and whatnot. I’ve struggled with sadness a fair bit since then. I became aware that I was filled with it and I couldn’t get away from it. I began to feel like a cave full of cold, dark seawater. 

I got help from lots of awesome people. I briefly took drugs for it - they were excellent really. I tell people that my heart broke. Those are pretty much the only words I have for how I feel. Still, actually. My heart broke and that’s where the seawater leaked in and I think it’s irreparable - though I hasten to add that I’m fine and I’m happy and I have an awful lot of closure on the whole business so, please, don’t call in.  

Anyway, I was talking about grief the other day with my Mum. My younger cousin lost a baby at the age of 6 months - Poppy her name was. She died because sometimes babies have strokes and sometimes they die. I was talking about that with my Mum. We were talking about how my cousin hasn’t had another baby since Poppy died and how that probably wasn’t surprising.

I love my cousin. He’s like 6 years younger than me and we grew up pretty close. When I think about his losing Poppy it makes me think of my son in the hospital, rolling his eyes and going away and it makes me wish I could help my cousin more. Or that I had helped him more.

Poppy died years before my son was even invented and I couldn’t even begin to imagine at that age how much it must have hurt my cousin. I was appalled, of course. I was sad and I cried. But it’s like the Grand Canyon; it’s one thing to hear about how big and impressive it is and quite another to stand on the edge and stare down into it. 

I said exactly that to my Mum and realised I’d accidentally been profound. My choice of words took me right back to hospital and I was staring at Herb and he was going away and I could feel the ragged edges of the wound on my heart, still tender, filled with cold, black seawater and now somehow vertigo-inducing and terrifying in its enormity. 

(A horrible collision of metaphor. Not unusual, if you know me. I pretty much just tend to toss my words together like a salad and chuck them out there. You’re lucky, frankly, if you can understand one word in ten.)

But that wasn’t my sadness - it wasn’t even my cousin’s. Just something I’d projected on to him that he may or may not feel and, either way, wouldn’t be pleased to hear that I was feeling on his behalf. Depression is like a dropped lolly-ice in that respect; it’s sticky and picks up other things all too easily and pretty soon you can’t tell cause from effect. It’s all just a big ball of woe. (I am a student at the Katamari Damacy School of Amateur Psychiatry.)

So: scar tissue is what I guess this is about. The Bad Thing that happened is going to stay happened - and every day that goes by (365 and counting!) puts another few layers of skin between me and the wound. 

And, to add yet another layer of ridiculousness to this already fucked-up metaphor, the wound is clean, cauterised and doused, for good measure, in Scotch. 

Related story: the above all happened a week or so after the anniversary of Herb’s stroke. The actual anniversary was spent with my sister and her kids at the beach in East Kent. It was lovely. In actual fact though, I had no idea that it was the anniversary. Somehow I’d got the wrong date in my head. When I finally realised my error, I had a little cry and lost my temper a little bit, chiding myself that I’m a bad father, until it occurred to me that what we’d done was exactly what I would have chosen to do to mark the anniversary - with the added bonus of not having to dwell on painful memories.

So anyway. I just wanted to write these things down to mark the occasion, and to note that it is an occasion, however painful and inconvenient that might be, and to bring people up to date. Which I have now done. Please return to your gyrations. 

Anonymous asked: Tell us a story, Joe.

My Dad likes to decry the current state of teaching in this country. Actually my Dad likes to decry lots of things. Decrying things is what gentlemen do when they’ve wrestled all the bears and slayed all the dragons. Ou sont les bears and dragons d’antan, innit?

Anyway. Amongst the things my Dad decries is the current state of teaching in this country. I rarely listen too much. (I agree, as it happens, but I am busy planning my upcoming bear-wrestling bouts.) This Christmas he told me a story about the man who taught him poetry when he was a kid. I pass it on to you, anonymous asker.

The majority of teachers at my Dad’s school in the fifties were (he tells me), ex-servicemen. Some had limps, some had scars. I’ve assumed that most of them saw service in the second world war. I could be wrong, but it seems likely. Dad’s headmaster certainly did. He had a limp to boot. His name was KFW Walker.

One day Mr Walker is teaching my Dad’s class about poetry. He reads Keats’ Sonnet To A Cat to them. It is, he tells them, one of his minor works.

Cat! who hast pass’d thy grand cliacteric, 
How many mice and rats hast in thy days 
Destroy’d? - How many tit bits stolen? Gaze 
With those bright languid segments green, and prick 
Those velvet ears - but pr’ythee do not stick 
Thy latent talons in me - and upraise 
Thy gentle mew - and tell me all thy frays 
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick. 
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists - 
For all the wheezy asthma, - and for all 
Thy tail’s tip is nick’d off - and though the fists 
Of many a maid have given thee many a mail, 
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists 
In youth thou enter’dst on glass bottled wall. 

And after he reads out the poem he tells the kids a story. And the story he tells is set in a forest in Belgium some time in late 1944. Captain Walker and his company are caught unawares in an artillery attack; they have no time to dig in and have to scramble for cover where they can. The bombardment is extremely heavy and the shells are bursting in the air.

Walker tells the kids that all he had time to do was throw himself down onto the forest floor and try to make himself as tiny and thin as he possibly could while the trees literally exploded around him. He tells them that it is the single most terrifying sound that he’s ever heard. And he tells them that the only other thing that he can hear as the trees crack and fall and the shrapnel rips through everything is a line from Sonnet To A Cat repeating in his head over and over and over:

…pr’ythee do not stick / Thy latent talons in me
…pr’ythee do not stick / Thy latent talons in me
…pr’ythee do not stick / Thy latent talons in me

And that, Walker tells my Dad, who tells me, is why I can never forget that poem. And that, my Dad tells me, is why I decry the current state of teaching in this country.

(I’ll write this properly at some point. Or at least I’ll try to write it *less*. I will also tell the other story involving my Dad, KFW Walker and a ping-pong ball which will make you all cry. In the meantime, please all feel free to use the Ask Me Anything button. Press Button. Get Story is my new rule)

Edit: Some updates from suggestions from Mitchell

David said that they had an IRC channel; just for work. He said a lot of other things too, but the main reason he said that he loved his new job was that there was an IRC channel; just for work.

David’s a bloke I used to see maybe once or twice every six months or so. And whenever I used to see him it was, as it always has been, excellent. And he’d always go on about this IRC channel they had; just for work.

Now David’s a smart bloke who knows a surprising amount about stuff like making internets and mediaeval architecture - and we’ve chewed a good deal of fat over the years about various important topics - but I was genuinely puzzled as to why he’d had his mind blown by something like that.

Fast forward a couple of years and reader, I joined the company. And they’ve got an IRC channel; just for work. And its a fucking productivity tool. And it’s mind-blowing.

Its mind blowing because a) Its the old rule of ‘the simplest of tools have the most profound effect*’ writ large and b) its made me realise that a number of modern, sexy, whizzy applications that some companies spend actual money on are just gilded lilies; resource heavy, time expensive re-imaginings of something that was pretty much perfectly realised in 1988.

The only improvements from what you might call ‘IRC Basic’ that Isotoma have in place - and someone will presumably correct me if I’m wrong - is that there’s a bot who reports SVN commits as kills - complete with Unreal Tournament sound effects for double, triple, ultra and mega kills.)**

And that’s basically it. The whole company - in house and remote - on one channel, everyone with ops. And it works. And it’s wonderful. I’ve hastily thrown together some of the reasons I think this.

• Everyone knows what’s going on. There’s no eternal internal email hell. There’s one internal place for everything from “What’s for lunch…?” to “Has anyone seen the…” to “Fire alarm drill at…”. Everyone is on and, because of the non-linear nature of IRC, when they’re not available its easy to leave a message.
• There’s a feeling of social cohesion that comes right out of the box. The overall rules of the channel are easy to grasp for new starters - and quite satisfyingly complex should you wish to analyse it that far. (And you don’t. You really don’t).

(Note: There’s a much longer blog post in this, but its always been my contention that a) IRC is in general the most civil of web based communication mediums and that b) Pretty much all ‘web based’ social conventions are born or find their antecedents in the conventions of IRC channels. But that’s another story for another time….)

• It acknowledges that there’s always going to be dicking around, and the social norms - of our channel, at least - kind of encourage that too. But the dicking around is metered, on-record and public - so on one hand you’ve got encouragement of a friendly workplace; while on the other you’ve got quite a powerful tool that tells you when someone needs to be busier.
• The bot that reports SVN commits is useful as it allows senior developers to say “Aha! Person X has changed that file, let me go and check it.” and the Unreal Tournament sound effects are a (tiny, miniscule) pat on the back when you’re really cracking through it. (Let’s not get into an argument about quantity over quality of commits. Suffice to say, if you’re confident enough to repo something then you’re at least *trying*)
• Finally, and most importantly for me, its a great tool for short, technical questions that really easily fall down the cracks between Trac, staging, live and documentation sources like wikis and specs. So for example today I could see that Ticket X said that “N work” had been done, but I couldn’t see where that work had been deployed (Because I’m new, not because of some process failure.) I could either traipse around the office asking various people what was going on - or I could just dump the question into the channel and be sure that pretty soon I’d have an answer.

So at Isotoma we’re using IRC as an internal email client, an IM tool, a meeting space, a status feed, a Facebook wall, a Basecamp substitute, a noticeboard and a means of executing a particularly vicious form of mob justice. There are even most of the aspects of Wave that hipsters are wetting their pants about. Not bad for something that in Internet years is about as old as its possible to be.

In fact I’m beginning to think that if someone were to put together a simple installer with a little GUI and some relatively intelligent auto-config goodness, you could actually kick start a mini IRC renaissance in the kinds of agencies who are alwayslooking for new ways of improving internal comms and organisation. In other words: All of them.

I’m kind of expecting a few replies to this post along the lines of “Of course we use IRC in our office. Who doesn’t?” So to be clear, I’m talking mainly about web agencies at the mar-comms end of the spectrum who are, let’s face it, the least well organised, the most desperate for organisation and the most likely to spring for a few thousand dollars worth of enterprise level appallingness in order to try to attain it.

I’d say to all of them: Give it a whirl.

Finally, and most importantly, #bunnies FTW!

* Even more profoundly, the simplest application of the simplest of tools.

** Actually, its also integrated to a certain extent with the company Squeezebox with a bot that reports what’s currently playing and allows a basic “skip this song” voting mechanism. There’s also pubbot who essentially spouts Markov chains to general amusement.

One of the things we said we were going to do a few months back was actually use the office as an office - i.e. Actually work in the fucker. With my new job I’ve taken some steps to actually making this happen - but to do it properly will require some plumbing jobs from an IT perspective. If I make this list public, it stands a good chance of actually being something I get round to doing. I’m not married to any particular company, brand or action so if you have any better ideas or experiences to share, I’d *really* be interested in hearing them.

1) Bite the bullet and spring for BT to come and put a landline back into the house. Hopefully they’ll do it for free.

2) Get Zen Internet to swoop in and give me some form of obscenely powerful pipe with a static IP

3) Get myself setup with some form of cloud storage so I can sync music and files across locations. Ideally G-Drive - so hurry the fuck up and launch it, Google.

4) Reformat cranky old 300gig warhorse hard drive and use it as a physically present backup drive probably using Time Machine or something automagic. I will rename this drive “Failsworth” as it will be a failover and this is howlingly amusing.*

5) Think about finally and forever throwing away the 5 year old, 1.8 MHz Pentium 3 Shuttle PC that currently powers the office UNLESS networking it and using it as some kind of central music repository turns out to be easier than it sounds.

*All drives and computers in the Saunders household are named after Manchester boroughs - except my new one which is currently named “Serious Callers Only” after one of the ships in Excession.** I may have to change this as I hate inconsistency almost as much as I love a good naming convention.

** Many have expressed surprise at how dorky this is. My reply? Go boil your head.

The footage in the second video above was only uncovered a few days ago - the guy who filmed it donated it to the Space Exploration Archive shortly before his death - and they themselves have released it in the run up to the anniversary of the disaster.

I know its kind of macabre, but I’m fascinated by the two videos considered together.

One is horrifying because of its detached professionalism; that long, awful silence after “Go with throttle up” that leads to the almost comically procedural “”Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.” I think its the helpless inevitability of it; we do this thing, we do that thing, we do another thing - a thing we’ve done a thousand times before - and then, from nowhere and for no reason, disaster.

The other video’s folksy dismay horrifies me equally though. ”That’s trouble of some kind, George.” he says, all Bedford Falls about it; unaware that history is happening around him.

This just happens to have been on my mind recently - and there’s an unpleasant aspect of voyeurism to all of it, so to make up for it, I thought I’d draw your attention to the speech that Ronald Reagan made in the aftermath of the disaster that is possibly unfamiliar to most of us here in the UK. It’s a great example of a beautifully and sensitively written piece of oratory from a man not remember (by history, at least), for that kind of thing.

The speech brilliantly references a beautiful but still relatively obscure poem, High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr. which I’ve reproduced below. The last line, for my money, still has the stopping power of a punch to the solar plexus.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air… .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

James Ward recently wrote a blog post about tracking down the owner of a secondhand book in his possession. Its excellent, and worth giving your full attention. But the reason I mention it is that he quotes from Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road - which is the book we bought my sister and her husband as a wedding present, and is the starting point of the following semi-literate wankery. The quote goes:

“I wish you hadn’t been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It’s the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you’d decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.)”

And the reason I mention that is that only moments before I read James’ post, I was thinking about Emma C, my first proper girlfriend, and an inveterate margin-note-maker. Like Wooster’s Honoria Glossop, she was trying - I felt at the time - to mould me into something a little less like the adolescent mouth-breathing masturbator I was, and a little more like the rakish and sophisticated polymath that I could have been. (She was a whole school year my senior, and a rakish and sophisticated polymath to boot - which made me *very* happy, though presumably I was something of a worry to her.)

So she’d lend me books, and the books were all very improving and I suffered through all of them. But the remarkable thing is that they’d all have little hand written annotations and comments highlighting significant passages or bits that resonated with what we were doing at the time. Appallingly, horrifyingly, at the time, I hated this tendency of hers; A) Because I interpreted it as a form of passive-aggressive intellectual bullying and B) because she had the most amazing tits I’d ever seen and sitting around reading seemed to be the acme of wasted time.

Reminiscing on this (my wife has been in Shropshire all weekend and I have had nothing better to think about,) I wandered over to the old bookcase and pulled down the copy of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote she gave me. (A book that, despite what I’ve written above, I loved on first reading and continue to love.)

What I’d interpreted as an invasion of my intellectual space; an attempt to drag me to a level of respectability that I was falling all too short of, I now realise was her way of making it seem like we were reading the book together. Akin to the gentle elbow in the cinema I’d give a friend if we were watching Ghostbusters and the bit where Bill Murray collects the mucus was coming up. “This”, she’s saying, “is awesome, and I’m glad that you’re here with me to enjoy it.”

The realisation of this made me feel first guilty, for what kind of person is so selfish as to not appreciate something like that, then it made me glad that at least after 18 years or so I finally got it. (Yes, another blog post wherein I realise I am a schmuck. Deal with it.)

Emma is now as lost to me as its possible to be in the digital world: Our relationship was short and pre-email, she married, I don’t know her second name and I’m no longer in touch with anyone who even knows her. (Except, I think, her younger sister who its possible will see this and pass on my sincerest of regards.)

On first deciding to write this blog, I’d intended just to quote the passage I liked and not tell the above story. Then reading James’ post made me think again. Now having completed it, I’m actually not going to quote it at all, just give you the photo and tell you its on page 49 of the Penguin edition. Truth be told, I can’t tell you why she liked it - or thought that I would - but that’s not the point.

The point, I guess, is that we should all be so lucky to have girlfriends with amazing tits who think enough of you that they’d annotate books just for you. Thanks Emma!

EDIT: Video died. Embedding disabled. Click here to view on the Youtubes

I was watching Casablanca again recently - one of my favourite films, but I guess I’m not really alone in that respect.

Anyway, above and beyond being a fantastically executed film, its also a fantastically crafted story - it has emotional depth but wears this depth lightly and with fabulous economy.

(And, yes, we can argue until we’re blue in the face about how much of this most perfect of all perfect films is intentionally brilliant and how much was just dumb luck, but let’s save that for the pub on saturday night, hey?)

This economy; this lightness of touch is (I reckon) nowhere better illustrated than in the above clip.

You know it anyway, I’m sure, but briefly, this scene takes place just after Rick tells Laszlo that, not only can he not have the stolen travel documents, but also that he’s been going at his missus (or at least, that’s how I interpret his “You’d better ask your wife.” line.) So far in the film, its the high water mark of both the “Will Laszlo escape” subplot and the “How much of a bastard is Rick” story.

As the preceding scene ends, we hear the commotion of the German troops singing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ downstairs, and the scene above unfolds. In less than 2 minutes of screen time we establish (nay, brand indelibly into the brains of the audience) the following:

* Laszlo is a good guy - maybe the good guy - and not the second banana love interest that he’s been so far. For me, this scene is the first demonstration that he isn’t the sinister, louche. European nancy boy that Henreid always struck me as, (Yes, even in Now Voyager) This is a man of action.

* This is the first time that Bogart lets the emotional monster out of the box - the monster he’s kept locked away since he’s been in Casablanca and which he keeps docile with hard liquor and wise-cracks. As the band look up at him imploringly and he nods his permission, see the regret in his eyes. This, he’s saying to himself, is going nowhere good. Basically - we see that Bogart’s character, already and shaded and subtle role, is considerably more nuanced than we might have thought.

* The key thing for me is the reaction of the bar room customers and what it means in terms of the tone of the film.The customers are (apparently) sitting there silently tolerating ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’. They are cowed and intimidated by the song and its singers. Its only when the La Marseillaise is played - when they’re offered an alternative to seething silently - that they leap from their seats and rebel. (And they do leap. Look at the fuckers go!) This is what Laszlo represents: Leadership and inspiration

A couple more things leap out of the scene for me - firstly, the scoring of the two songs together so that they sit one on top of the other almost perfectly is such a clever and unnecessary touch - presumably by Max Steiner and, also presumably, one of the reasons he got an Oscar for the score.

Secondly, as I perused Wikipedia to find Max Steiner’s name, I found this telling quote:

Part of the emotional impact of the film has been attributed to the large proportion of European exiles and refugees among the extras and in the minor roles. A witness to the filming of the “duel of the anthems” sequence said he saw many of the actors crying, and “realized that they were all real refugees”.^[37] Harmetz argues that they “brought to a dozen small roles in Casablanca an understanding and a desperation that could never have come from Central Casting”.^[38]

And that leads me to pretty much my favourite bit of the scene - possibly the whole film - the shot of Yvonne (Madeleine Le Beau), the sympathetically played but (so far) unsympathetically treated local Slapper, tears rolling down her cheeks as she belts out her anthem. It becomes clear in the 3 seconds of screen time afforded to this shot that the tears aren’t just for an abstract, patriotic Mother France. For Yvonne,  in this song, in this place, these are tears for a dimly realised forlorn hope of redemption.

One more thing - and the thing that still confuses me about Casablanca, though maybe its because I’m Dreadfully Modern: Ilsa. What the fuck? She’s the only one who isn’t singing. All the time she’s just gazing adoringly at Laszlo - and not the symbolic “Saviour Of Europe” Laszlo I’m talking about above. Not at all. She’s looking at him as though she’s thinking “My husband. He’s such a dreamboat. And what a nice singer!”

I guess basically I’m saying that I’ve never really got Ilsa - never understood what was so special about a 17 year old girl that she literally *broke* a man like Rick. The film (obviously) doesn’t discuss whether she was mustard in the sack and it doesn’t appear that she was, like her two lovers, some kind of Resistance Heroine. If anyone can explain it to me, I’d love to hear it.

The recording that Bernstein did of the West Side Story soundtrack when he was 70 or so is remembered mostly for how badly Jose Carreras fucks it up. (And rightly so. He fucks it up good and kipper - a dreadful choice for lead.)

But, having just been reminded of this documentary of the recording, this is a great excuse to break out a bit of Youtube of the orchestra rocking bells - and Bernstein being a sassy old bastard to the producers.

Don’t miss this clip of one of the takes of America - on which embedding has been disabled for some reason.

And, finally, my favourite, only because it captures a lovely moment of everyone at the top of their game (ignore the duff voice acting at the beginning.)

They stopped at the Hermit’s Nest for a rum to keep out the cold. “I played for Aberavon in 1898”, said a stranger to Enoch Davies.
“Liar”, said Enoch Davies
“I can show you the photos”, said the stranger.
“Forged” said Enoch Davies.
“And I’ll show you my cap at home”.
“Stolen”.
“I got friends to prove it”, the stranger said in a fury.
“Bribed”, said Enoch Davies.

(from The Outing, by Dylan Thomas which, if I were you, I would make a point of reading in your lunch-hour today.)

         MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy Price!

        MISS PRICE

Mr Mog Edwards!

        MR EDWARDS

I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the
flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino,
tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill
in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take
you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums
on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh
wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric
toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

        MISS PRICE

I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the
money, to be comfy. I will warm your heart by the fire so
that you can slip it in under your vest when the shop is
closed.

        MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy, Myfanwy, before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer
will you say

        MISS PRICE

Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.

        MR EDWARDS

And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for
our wedding.

              [Noise of money-tills and chapel bells]

On the need for an informal meetup of a certain type of digital media professional in the North West.

I have noticed the imbalance; the injustice

The designers have the estimable Northern Digitals, the propeller-heads have the marvellously enjoyable Geekup and the Merely Curious have the invaluable SMC_MCR. Both are beloved and increasingly institutional events - its arguable in fact that they wield more influence than they know.

But, as wonderful as they are, I always feel like they’re not for me.

And its probably because they’re not.

Geekup trends towards the hard-tech end of the game; I’ll never be cool enough to go to a Northern Digitals meeting because, at the end of the day, I don’t care about  bevelling, kerning or whether you want to be known as a developer not a designer because you can put an on_Event on a fucking button.

[And, while I’m ranting, how typical of an event organised by designers that they’ve got a typo in the logo. (“Lets get together” indeed. Let’s also have a meeting about the correct use of the apostrophe showing omission while we’re about it.)]

Meanwhile, while I continue to attend and enjoy the monthly SMC_MCR meetings, I have to ask myself whether I’m ever going to want to monetize my blogging. (And that, I think, comes across in my posts.)

So I’ve identified a need for a night that achieves something else.

Now hold that thought.

About 4 years ago when I was working at Lightmaker Manchester, me and the boys in what we laughingly referred to as Senior Management, used to go out for the occasional beer after work. We noticed that the nights were holding to an unwritten agenda that went something like this:

1) 1 pint of civil conversation; everyone making a concerted effort not to talk about work.

2) 1 further pint of civil conversation; everyone realising that, hey, we may as well talk about work because, hey, we work together, right? Ha ha ha.

3) 1 pint of increasingly diplomatic attempts to talk around the real issue that everyone’s come to the pub to avoid having to deal with through working late.

4) The tipping point. Fuelled by *just* enough beer to heighten the emotions, loosen the tongue and give one the magical eloquence of alcohol, there would follow anywhere between 3 and 5 more pints of unbridled, no-holds-barred complaining, bitching, pissing and moaning that would usually reach a heady climax some hours later with someone frantically scrawling a work-flow onto a beermat and mumbling earnestly “You see, I’ll show you what’s fucking wrong with this fucking company…”

Now, nothing was ever done. All this piss and vinegar did not lead to the writing of letters of resignation, bold new business plans or insightful revisions of company policy. But that’s not what the night was for; the night was intended only to begin the healing.

We started to refer to it as the 3 Pint Bitch. In fact, we still do.

Now remember that thought I asked you to hold a few hundred words ago?

Venting is merely important. Venting with like-minded individuals is where the magic happens.

And so I propose the need for an evening for a certain type of Manchester-based digital professional to come forth and throw off the oppresive shackles of good-natured social events.

Which type? I’ve tried to nail that down in the past, but it basically boils to whether you can agree with any or all of the following statements:

• You can accurately guess how much a client has got to spend by the way they format their RFI documents
• William Goldman’s adage “Add a third for the shit” is basically your approach to costing new work.
• Milan Kundera’s adage “Everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed” is basically your approach to project management.
• There is a time and place for new and bold approaches to application development and this isn’t fucking it, right sunshine?
• You, like me, have a deep and wonderful thirst.

The idea is still forming, and many details remain to be worked out, but the germ of an idea is here. I will write more on this soon.

I’m being super-duper busy and important at the moment; splitting my time between some freelance crisis management and desperately trying to get the living room finished before my family arrive for our first Christmas in Manchester.

I only mention it because I want to stress how tired I am at the moment. And when I get tired, my bladder moves closer to my eyes.

So when I chanced upon this poem earlier today, it literally made me sob. Just once, but quite loudly and unexpectedly.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

I haven’t really been able to study it in depth, but I think that the emotional belly-punch is in that beautiful last sentence - and I’m thinking on, but I don’t think that I’ve ever read a poem in which I find myself being able to identify with both the narrator and the subject.

So anyway, I’ll leave it here on the blog so I don’t have to read it for a while and I can continue sitting at this strange desk in a strange office, shouting the odds at people I don’t know.

This widely linked story about a recent attempt by Ford to control use of its logos and graphical assets online should be required reading for…well…everyone.

Whenever I read one of these stories about lawyers for [Insert Corporate Monolith here] acting like douchbags, I always get the mental image of a gang of drunken cowboys wandering into a quiet frontier town and attempting to whoop it up in the whorehouse. A figure is suddenly sillhouetted in the doorway of the tavern. Stepping into the light, we see that the figure looks familiar. It’s only Gary bloody Cooper.

“This is the internet, boys,” he says slowly. “We do things different here.”

Dave Gorman’s post over here reminded me of my own fist-shaking, rage-inducing Post Office moment this week. We got a note through the door from the postman telling us that the Postie had tried to deliver SOMETHING EXCITING to us but had been unable to because insufficient postage had been paid by the sender. Long story short, if we wanted it we’d have to pop into town and hand over £1.42.

(All parcels contain SOMETHING EXCITING and every single one of those little notes the Postie puts through the letterbox is like a golden ticket to a fabulous world of adventure; like the end of Crackerjack.)

Anyway, a week later I finally remembered the thing was there; a week after that I’d kicked myself enough for forgetting and, finally, a further 7 days passed in which I really began to wag my finger at myself.

Eventually I pitched up at Chorlton Post Office, forked over the £1.42 to recieve…

Junk Mail from Debenhams…

Congratulating me for using them as my Wedding Service….

And reminding me that we still have a £50 gift voucher to spend with them…

Except now it’s more like £48.58.

The pricks.

Sighing softly, I screwed the mail up into a ball and threw it onto the streets of Chorlton. A passing old lady tutted at me and shuffled crossly on.

And the cycle of violence continues.