Congratulations John

My friend John just announced his engagement through his Facebook status. I thought about commenting...

And I've passed my exams too!

...so that everybody who leaves a comment saying congratulations to him in one way or another is also inadvertently congratulating me. Having not yet got my exam results, I dare not tempt fate in this manner.

EDIT: 22:30, and 27 comments later, I wonder if I made the right choice. Gems of comments like...

Congratulations to you both. Great news. Hope you are very happy.

oh my god never thoght i'd see this day. way too grown up to compute but congratumalations

Wow, guys thats awesome news!! Congratulations to you both

I can only echo the shock and well-wishes above... Congratulations!

...make me wish I had posted the comment. Well done John, and boo to me, DTRMCR, for listening to my conscience at the expense of a gag. So it goes.

Imaginary girlfriend

The formal offer of employment from my new job came today by email, so I formally handed in my notice shortly afterwards. It was a mild anticlimax, but it felt good to have put the wheels into motion. A little later, there was a meeting scheduled about how things would run next year. In advance of it, I was asked into the office of one of the senior managers in the team. He started to explain how the job I’m leaving is going to change quite drastically: more publicity and PR; less data handling; increased front-line involvement with communities; and much less time behind a desk. Whilst he didn’t say so directly, he was heavily suggesting that the work of my job would change in such a way that I’d find it much more rewarding than I do at present.

I felt confused, and a little angry. The impression I got was that if I hadn’t have handed in my notice, then the job wouldn’t have been redesigned. I felt I’d been mismanaged, as the changes that were made, if needed, should have been spotted and acted upon before now. I felt undervalued, in that I wasn’t asked about the proposed changes, even though they were to a job that I was doing. I felt really angry that they’d waited until I’d said I was leaving before they set about addressing how shit my job is. I felt even angrier that they’ve made it quite a good job. I feel like I’d planned to leave a party, and, as I’d put my coat on, the music started to get better. I feel like I’d planned to break up with an imaginary girlfriend, only for her to appear at the door that day looking drop dead gorgeous.

I was subjected to a barrage of bodily noises during that meeting, and it really distracted me. On one side of me, there was a guy with a gurgling tummy and a consistent accompanying refrain of “Excuse me,” or “Pardon me.” I didn’t particularly mind, except that every word that the gurgler said in the meeting was in response to his rumbling gut. Lunchtime meetings suck. One the other side of me, one of the attendees made it her business to communicate her agreement with the speaker with a loud “MMMmmmm!” or a “Yes, yes,” or a slow groan. The more she agreed, the more often she groaned. The more often she groaned, the more sexual it sounded, like an office-based When Harry Met Sally. It was gross, and it really put me off. I’m glad I’m leaving.

I quite like some of the work that my job involves, but I don’t like my working conditions, which I express by saying, “I don’t like my job.” Even though the work of my job is going to change, my working conditions won’t. So I’m still getting out as soon as I can.

The imaginary girlfriend still gets the boot too.

Digging and baking

Of all of these photos, this one tells the story best.

Coachloads of ideas

I spent an hour talking to a careers coach from Learn Direct this evening, and it was enormously helpful. I knew that I wanted to move into a career that was centred on the outdoors, but I wasn’t sure how to finds out more about it. My coach was very good at asking the right questions, and then pointing me in the right direction to help me to find my own answers to them. I’d loosely put together a plan in my head, and my coach helped me to put some flesh on its bones.


1 Research

- find out what types of employment opportunities exist in my sector, and of those which appeal to me, and discovering the specific requirements and person specifications of those jobs
- look into relevant local volunteering opportunities in the sector
- look into appropriate courses and other training that are relevant to those jobs

2 Resources

- save money to pay for the cost of courses and other associated expenditure
- devote time to volunteering, researching and studying around the subject
- specifically, save enough to learn to drive, and to get a car, and to cover other associated costs

3 Skills

- driving, which is vital
- GIS, (through work, if possible)
- environmental science level 1 or 2 OU course or courses
- through volunteering / short courses, job specific skills (eg dry stone walling)

4 Job Search

- this remains the loosest area of the plan, which makes sense because it should be fluid and open-ended until I’ve got a specific idea of what I want to do


I’d recommend Learn Direct to anybody. The number is 0800 100 900. I feel invigorated, enthused and excited about changing jobs. Feeling like I’m going somewhere makes every drab day at my desk more bearable.

Eureka in three easy steps

I found out last week that my friend Lisa’s sushi bar has had to close down, which is a real shame because it did great food at a reasonable price, and just around the corner from where I work. On Friday, I left a note and some chocolates there to cheer her up. In my note I wrote: I hope this setback doesn’t stop you from taking risks in the future, for our dreams mean nothing unless we dare to chase them. This was the first of three things that combined.

I went to Sheffield on Friday to catch up with the good friend the Colonel, who I haven’t seen since Christmas. I’ve known him for four or five years, and I really value his friendship. He’s armed with razor sharp wit, tempered with no small amount of humility, and I admire his confidence to do what he wants to do regardless of the opinions of other people. Over a beer or two, he told me that he’d recently taken a week off work and trained in industrial abseil techniques. He said that he’d wanted to do it for ages, so he pulled out his finger and got on with it. This was the second of three things that combined.

Until today, I haven’t been in work since 18th March because of a variety of factors. I’d been away for my first aid course, off for the early Easter Bank Holiday weekend and using up the last of my annual leave before the end of March. As you’ll see from the ‘jobmoan’ tagged posts, I’ve not been much enjoying my work of late. On Saturday I started to get anxious about having to go back to work after a blissful period of absence. This was the third of three things that combined.

I dislike my job. Dreams mean nothing unless we pursue them. Re-training is a realistic and achievable goal. So I’m going to follow my heart and re-train so that I can change the direction of my career. It feels exciting and liberating, and at the same time scary. I feel hopeful.

Sweet potato and goats cheese mash

Chance dictated that my partner on last week’s first-aid course was someone that I got on with quite well. The physical intimacy of touching each other from head to toe each morning – to practice checking a casualty for injuries – was beyond that with which our nascent acquaintance ought to have been comfortable, particularly as my partner was a young woman my own age, Marianne. There wasn’t any romantic attraction between us, but I thought that we’d make good friends. After the course ended, most of us students took the same tram home. Marianne and I got off at the same stop, but we didn’t exchange contact details, we just said goodbye. I regretted it immediately, but didn’t do anything about it.

I’d arranged to go for a walk with Clare this morning, but I found myself awake long before I thought she might stir, so I decided to do two walks, one without Clare, and one with her. I set off on one of my standard routes - down Palatine Road, along the Mersey, and around the lake at Chorlton Water Park, listening to “Black Holes and Revelations” as I left the house, NWA and Rage Against the Machine along the back end of the river, and switching to something more jangly as I arrived at the lake, “Dear Catastrophe Waitress.” It was beautiful out - a clear, bright morning.




There was a pair of young ladies walking ahead of me on the path that I’d not really noticed. As I moved to overtake them, one turned and said, “Can I give you this?” It was Marianne.

“Hello! Sure, what is it?”
“It’s a leaflet. We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses? The associations I immediately make when I hear that phrase aren’t positive – knocking on other people’s doors uninvited, not celebrating Christmas, something about refusing blood transfusions – but I think I did quite well at hiding my gut feelings and maintaining a smile. We chatted a little longer, and exchanged surnames – or rather I gave mine up to her – so that we could get in touch through the internal email system at work. Then I bounded off.

Fear crept over me, founded in my own ignorance. I’m not religious; in fact I’m slightly wary of those who are. Could I be a friend of someone whose values are so massively different to my own? I’m being presumptuous - being a Jehovah’s Witness is a particularly involved approach to religious practice, but I should judge people on their merits, not on my prejudices about their beliefs, shouldn’t I? I ought to be more concerned that Marianne reads the Times and doesn’t like the Guardian.

Of course, I don’t have her surname, so I can’t look her up on the internal email system. We’ll have to see what happens next.

I met Thom and Ed in the Vic for the Liverpool derby, with their friends Ozzie, Sam, Ali and a handful of others. After the game, Thom invited me to his house for Sunday dinner. This is what we had.
-----
Roast chicken, in bacon
Roast potatoes
Sweet potato, mashed and creamed with goat’s cheese
Roast butternut squash, with cinnamon, five spice and star anise
Wilted spinach, with garlic and onion
Steamed green beans, with chopped tomato

Rhubarb, apple, prune, apricot, walnut and pecan crumble, with custard.
-----

I made the crumble.




These two jokers were there.

Things I find attractive in women.

Until reasonably recently, I'd absolved myself of all responsibility for not having a girlfriend by deciding that I didn't have a type, and that I'd judge every possible candidate that crossed my path on their individual merits. Such passivity also meant, naturally, that it wasn't down to me to do any form of looking, that it was down to Miss Right to fling herself in my direction, that doing nothing would result in the best possible outcome. Recently, I met Miss Wrong. The things about her that make her Miss Wrong have made me realise that I do have potential partner preferences. These are:

Intelligence
- I love mental agility, someone who is naturally comfortable with complex ideas and abstract concepts, which leads into...

Articulate conversation skills
- Not only someone who's smart, but whose sharpness shows through as they speak. Someone who can put forward their side of an argument convincingly, and can unravel someone else's. Again, leading into...

Strength of opinion and principles
- If being intelligent is a measure of the ease with which difficult ideas can be conceptualised, and if being articulate is a measure of the ease with which those ideas can be expressed, then strength of opinion is about why it's worth arguing. My principles and values are central to the way I live my life, and I'd want the same in a girlfriend.

Indie sensibilities
- Without meaning to sound superficial, this is mostly about personal style and look. I don't mean skinny jeans and backcombed hair necessarily, but that I'd like the kind of girlfriend that looks more charity shop than Topshop, more Hot Hot Heat than Heat Magazine. Indie as in indie music, but also as in independent from mainstream fashion. And not even necessarily an indie music scenester type, just someone who doesn't dress like an identikit High St mannekin.

Sexiness
- I can tell if I think a woman is sexy almost as soon as we meet. If she's intelligent, articulate, principled and 'indie,' then we're off to a good start. There must be physical attraction, but I can't specify how that manifests itself except that the prospect of making love should be exciting.

No fuss attitude
- I find someone who's willing to get their hands dirty, to put up with the cold for ten minutes of walking rather than seek out a cab, to clamber over the occasional fence much more attractive than someone who won't go out if it's raining.

Creativity
- Inspire me! Surprise me!

Shared values
- I couldn't be in a relationship with someone who doesn't believe in recycling, for example. Or with someone who steals. Or someone who's always smashed on drugs. I've laid out some of my values above, I'd hope that the things I've mentioned would be important to the sort of woman I'd fall for.


Miss Wrong does have some of these traits, but there is something about the overall package that mean that she just isn't Miss Right. I don't think I'm being too picky.

An hour or two on Dave’s allotment

I helped Dave for a couple of hours this afternoon. We dug a couple of trenches, and sowed potatoes, then turned over the soil in a patch and planted 200 onions. We fashioned a net to protect the onions from hungry birds, and came up with a rudimentary scarecrow using a crowbar and a carrier bag. It looks bleak now, but – weather permitting – it should bear rewards, other than rhubarb, by the end of the summer.

Darren Fletcher's house.

Helen Wallis is my stalker. On my walk today, I texted and asked her about a nightclub in Sale that I’d passed. She asked what I was doing in Sale, and I explained that I was walking to Dunham Massey. And then who should I run into there? Yes, Helen Wallis. She’d brought Max along as an alibi, but I knew her game, the viper! I’ve never heard anything quite like the sound of skimming chunks of ice over a frozen pond. It was like a bird singing through a vocoder as it flew overhead, or a rattling tin of jumping beans running away through a tunnel. It echoed, distant, and mechanical. We ate freshly baked scones with cream and jam, a perfect treat given the crispness of the day. We drove back past Darren Fletcher’s house. It’s horrible.

"It's just this bleach making my eyes water."

Our office cleaner used to come round in the mornings, until about three months ago, when a different cleaner started. The new cleaner comes at night. Anne, formerly our morning cleaner, now works on a different part of our floor. She still bases herself in our kitchen. I used to dread making tea whilst she was in there because she'd inevitably start a boring conversation. She's harmless, but cursed with not being very charismatic.

I clicked the kettle on, and heard Anne's voice behind me.

"I miss all you guys. They've got me cleaning somewhere else now. I really do miss you all. You're all so nice."

She was wet around the eyes. She went on to name three or four people that had, she said, been especially supportive when she'd had a bad day once. Who was it? Take a guess.

My heart sank. As I poured the milk into the teas, she mopped up each spilled drop almost before it fell. I looked at her, smiled and walked out. I had to walk out, because I was disgusted. Every single person that she named had been savagely rude about Anne behind her back.

"Has that cleaner been? Not that you could tell..."
"It's disgusting, I don't know how she dares leave it like that."
"She's useless..."
"...lazy."
"...stupid."
"I'm going to do it again when she goes."

Robbie arrived at his desk as I came out with the trayful, so I took his cup and went back to the kitchen.

"I miss all you guys. I really do. Everyone's so lovely."

I bit my lip, and smiled. And inside I boiled.

Birthday Walk

New Mills, Strines, Marple, Romiley, Bredbury, Stockport, Didsbury.

Louise says...

"Step 1: Measure rice, one cup per person

Step 2: Put rice in sieve and rinse under cold water

Step 3: Put rice in saucepan

Step 4: Boil kettle and add boiling water to saucepan. 2 and a quarter cups per person

Step 5: Put lid on saucepan

Step 6: Cook on high heat for five minutes

Step 7: Take off the heat, do not remove lid. Leave off the heat with lid on for ten minutes.

Note - in theory this can be longer, if you're not ready with the rest of the meal - but if you leave it too long it could go soft. Best then to take off the lid as then the steam can't keep cooking it.

Step 8: Remove from pan and put on plate. Eat and enjoy.


NB: Cooking rice with coca cola should not be employed using the above instructions. Cooking rice with coca cola should only be undertaken with the immediate supervision of a Colombian.

References available on request."

I love how she's ended the instructions as one might end a CV.

I love Hugh FW

I watch very little television, partly because my irregular weekly routine means I can’t guarantee that I’ll be in on a particular day to see the next episode of a series, and partly because I’m a culture snob who thinks most telly is pants. An exception, for me, is the wonderful Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who never fails to make me smile. I’ve really enjoyed watching his recent series, Hugh’s Chicken Run, in which he tries to change the nation’s attitudes about cheap chicken. Baffled that two chickens can be purchased from Tesco for a fiver, he tries to find out the detail of why they’re so cheap. Of course, they’re battery hens, and intensively farmed, which is why they cost so little. But what does that actually mean?

All of the supermarkets refuse to appear in a filmed interview about chicken. No intensive farm will let him film inside one of their sheds. To understand chicken production, Hugh sets up three different chicken farms: one smallholder-style, on an allotment with a single coop; one larger free-range farm, and; one intensive factory-style farm. Both the free-range and the intensive farms had been set up according to poultry industry guidelines. There isn’t a smallholder industry to speak of, and so no official guidelines exist, but Hugh’s probably the nearest thing there is to an authority on smallholding. The central point is this: all three farms were set up to be as close as was possible to the normal conditions of farms around the country.

I suspect that Hugh’s example of a factory farm was less horrific than its larger cousins. Nonetheless, it was still grim. The floor was rammed with fat birds, waddling a few steps forward to feed, then a few back to sit down again in their own effluent. The hens have nothing to do all day except eat. And worse yet, the lights are left on for twenty-three-and-a-half hours at a time - if the birds think that it’s ‘daytime’ they’ll eat and eat and eat. I think Hugh’s made a difficult moral choice in deciding to publicly undertake a practice that he finds abhorrent in order to expose it. I think he’s made the right choice.

And will it change the eating habits of Axminster or the rest of the wider TV watching audience? I don’t know. But I’ll be buying free-range hereafter. One down…



The Lie of the Land was also superb.

EDIT: Here are some links to feedback from HFW's TV series. It made me angry when Hugh was driven to swearing in the last episode of the ...Chicken Run. He's so nice that anything that makes him swear must be really infuriating.

Manchester Evening News.

Hugh's Chicken Out Campaign Page

BBC Farmers' World Feedback Podcast

David Lynch knows...

It was a heart attack.

After the away day at work, I met Pip for a drink before she started work and my Christmas party kicked off. In Sam’s Chop House, mum called and said that dad had been moved from Kettering to Glenfield hospital in Leicester because he’d had a heart attack. It turned out that he’d had a heart attack before when he’d had chest pains on Thursday, but it wasn’t as severe as Friday. Everybody was flustered, not least me, and so the facts aren’t clear: was it two or three attacks by Friday night? Anyhow, I ditched the work party and went for a quick pint at Trof, then headed home to sleep, via the best part of a bottle of Jack.

Saturday was bitterly cold. Taking out my headphones to talk to mum on the phone meant putting two ice-cubes back into my ears afterwards. The announcer at Leicester station said, “First Class is reported to be at the back of the train,” as if he didn’t trust the information he was getting. Neither did mum, it seemed. She's seen a lot of death, having worked in so many old people's homes. She'd emphasise the "...they say he's..." in a way that - weirdly - wasn't distressing, as if she knew all the tricks in the book, so things weren't so bad. The platform announcer wouldn’t refer to St Pancras by its new name either, preferring ‘London St Pancras,’ to the shiny new ‘St Pancras International.’ Out with the new and in with the old, I thought. The sun danced on my notebook as we passed through Market Harborough. My dad, at 54, is exactly twice my age.

I saw him around six. He told me that he’d had an operation to re-inflate a collapsed artery involving a balloon. They entered the artery through his groin, and fed the balloon up with a tiny camera. He pulled his pants to one side and showed me the cut. He had black and purple inner elbows where he’d been on a drip, and holes in the tops of his hands where some monitoring device or other had been attached, but otherwise he just looked like dad in pyjamas. He was shaken, but looked well otherwise. I’d worried about seeing him looking ill, but he didn’t. The man in the bed next to him had grey skin. I was glad dad looked so normal. He said he’d be out on Tuesday.

Today I found out that he had another heart attack last night, and that he’d be in hospital for another couple of days. He’s diabetic too, my sister told me. One lager a day hereafter will be quite a downshift for him. He seems willing to make a lifestyle change, she said. He’ll have to, she said.

Everybody around me has been wonderful. Pippa, Louise, Clare, Paul, Woody, Sam, Robbie, Lewis, Julie, Tracy, Vince – my phone’s text inbox has never been crammed with good wishes. I'm still shaken though, and can barely grasp what's happening.

At least 12 weeks of recycling

At least 12 weeks of recycling, originally uploaded by chiptooth.

Guiseppe Lo Conte brought that box of Foster's lager round to watch the first game of this year's RWC, back on September 7th.

and possibly even more, originally uploaded by chiptooth.

Last Night of the Proms - rewound

This was the programme at the Last Night of The Proms at the Bridgewater Hall. And it was brilliant.


Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla - Mikhail Glinka


Semper Fidelis March - John Philip Sousa


or

Waltz from The Sleeping Beauty - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky


Song of the Toreador from Carmen - Georges Bizet


Hungarian Dance No. 5 - Johannes Brahms


Nimrod from Enigma Variations - Edward Elgar


Flower Duet from Lakme - Leo Debiles


Bolero - Maurice Ravel


Overture from The Marriage of Figaro - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart


Non piu andrai from THe Marriage of Figaro - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart


Great Gate at Kiev from Pictures at an Exhibition - Modest Mussorgsky


Harbanera from Carmen - Georges Bizet


Prelude to Act 1 from La Traviata - Giuseppe Verdi


Laughing Song from Die Fledermaus - Johann Straus II


The Dam Busters March - Eric Coates


Jerusalem - Sir Charles HH Parry


Rule Britannia - Thomas Arne

Seven years too late, still...

"...Bush reached an unwelcome record. By 64%-31%, Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. For the first time in the history of the Gallup Poll, 50% say they "strongly disapprove" of the president. Richard Nixon had reached the previous high, 48%, just before an impeachment inquiry was launched in 1974."

USA Today

Beaver? You mean vagina? I mean, you know the guy...

Is it weird to buy underwear from the supermarket? No, I don't think so. It isn't weird in other countries, so why should it be here in England? Then again, we don't eat dogs. Is it weird to spend £50 at the supermarket? Not if you've spent £10 on underwear and £11 on beer. Nothing spent on dog. I doubled up on tasty cereal because the last lot went so quickly. If I have one complaint about that cereal, it is that perhaps it's just a little bit too tasty. Full cupboards are so satisfying, and a full fridge even more so. It isn't just the £11 worth of beer though, but all of the colourful vegetables - peppers, tomatoes, carrots, mangetout - and the jars of guacamole and soured cream. I bought herbs too, and now we have parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

I felt rather Emperor's New Clothes about the Cafe RSA event with Prof. John Hyatt last night. Science Loves Art he said. But his approach was far from rigourous. "Forget what you know about science." "Be sceptical about knowledge. All knowledge." Given the fragility of his arguments, it wasn't that hard to be sceptical. He was making some very shaky connections between quite different things, and then dangling heavy conceptual weights on these delicate strings. Any system reductio ad absurdam can be divided into beginning / middle / end. His argument was that because x and y that he was 'comparing' shared that structure, they must be similar on axis z too. Junk science bunkum bullshit. Terrible.

He then started to carp on about spirals, but in a dopey and clumsy way. "DNA is what makes us what we are, and so is there any surprise that there are spirals everywhere in nature?" I don't know how he got to be a professor. Max from Pi was more convincing, and he's a fictional character. At least he knows his maths. Prof Hyatt did set my critical juices flowing, for which I'm grateful. I'm just naturally argumentative.

Robbie, Rachael and Louise round tomorrow for chilli con carne di Paulos.

22.37 - Fish pie all gone

Instead of pudding, Sally, Jen and Kich brought three bottles of wine, and went home leaving one and a half of them untouched. Given that I'd spent about £12 on the meal myself, and that the wine was probably a fiver a bottle, I think I've come out with a profit.