Symbolic Forest

Today is apparently One Day In History, a day for creating a “mass blog” which will be stored by the British Library. It sounds like an interesting idea, but I’m not convinced.

The grandfather of this sort of event is Mass-Observation, an organisation set up to record everyday life in the 1930s, and still going today. It, though, was directed centrally by anthropologists, and still tells its writers vaguely what it would like them to write about. One Day In History, by comparison, is broad but shallow. It wants to know what people did, not what their opinions are. It wants you to talk about an ordinary day, but also wants “history” to be an important part of what you do.

In any event like this, there’s always going to be a contrast between the drive to make sure people write about “ordinary things”, and the pressure to write something interesting. My day today will probably be fairly boring. Get up, office, home, dinner, spend the evening sorting and filing the photos I took at the weekend. If One Day In History had been last Saturday, say, I’d have had something much more interesting to write about. It’s also a very self-selecting event.^* How many people are only going to write if they have something interesting to say? How many are going to feel an urge to do something special, to paint a slightly more interesting life? I’m going to write about my own boring day for them tonight, if only to balance things out a little.

* But then, so is the current incarnation of Mass-Observation

Keyword noise: anthropology, blogging, British Library, history, Mass-Observation, One Day In History, social history.

When I looked out of my hotel window, I remembered why I missed the place. In a tower block above Charing Cross station, the random architecture of the city looked lovely in the early morning light. To the west, I could see the spire of the university.

I sprawled across the hotel bed. An enormous thing, it took over the entire room. I was alone in my bed that night, so I laid right across it diagonally, just because I could. An awful lot of things over the weekend, I did just because I could do.

Not bothering with breakfast, I showered, dressed, and wandered across Blytheswood Hill, up St Vincent Street and down towards Central Station. Glasgow always seems slightly American in flavour to me, with its city blocks, the street plan ignoring its hills, its urban motorways slashing through the city and over the river. It makes it awkward to navigate, though, if you can’t remember street names. I found my way without too much trouble, though, down towards the station. I was scared, and excited, but I wasn’t scared for very long.

Keyword noise: Charing Cross, Glasgow, holiday, Scotland, travel.

It’s Friday afternoon, and the office is in a cheerful mood. I keep hearing little babbles of laughter when I pass office doors. Noone has been phoning me up with stupid problems, and Big Dave isn’t here at all, having gone off to Italy for a week. No doubt he will come back with tales of bizarre events he stupidly got himself into, going by previous holidays – sneaking out of the country incognito after an accidental run-in with the local Mafia boss, or something along those lines.

I’m in a cheerful mood too. I know I haven’t been blogging much lately, but it hasn’t been because of gloom and doom. I’m going away for the weekend, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m taking the camera, and I’m going to come back with a full memory card.

Anyway, I’m going away to clear up lots of those little jobs that are nice and easy to get cleared; and then, come five o’clock, I’m zooming off down the motorway. See you soon!

Keyword noise: Big Dave, holiday.

…is one of my favourite cosy, romantic songs. It’s by The Clientele, and it goes something like:

The taxi lights were in your eyes
So warm again, St Mary’s spires
The carnival was over in the rain
And on and on, through Vincent St
The evening hanging like a dream
I touched your faith^*
And saw the night again

When I lived in Edinburgh, I thought it was a song about the city. After all, the Clientele did record one song almost definitely set in Edinburgh,^** and it has both a St Mary’s Cathedral (with distinctive spires)^*** and a Saint Vincent St. Glasgow, though, has both too.

And in your arms, I watch the stars
Ascend, and sleep
The loneliness away for a while
Your fingers wide and locked in mine
I kiss your face, I kiss your eyes
Until they turn to me and softly smile

Edinburgh or Glasgow, I wish I was up in Scotland this weekend. I’m sure I will be again soon.

* Until writing this post, I thought it said “I touched your face”. Listening very carefully just now, for the first time I realised it’s actually “faith”.

** A B-side called “6am, Morningside”

*** Actually, it has two St Mary’s Cathedrals, just to confuse people. One of them, the Episcopalian one, has three distinctive spires that are a major city landmark, especially when you look down the length of Princes St. The Catholic one, on the other hand, is tucked away inconspicuously behind a shopping centre.

Keyword noise: Edinburgh, Glasgow, indie, lyrics, Morningside, music, romantic, Scotland, The Clientele.

Why is it that, at work, we always get the blame for other people’s stupidity?

I mean, if we do something and the computers break, it’s our fault. If we forget to do something, and they break – email stops working, the databases seize up – then that’s our fault too. Fair enough.

But when people say “I sent an email but it didn’t work, it came back to me,” and you point out that they spelled the recipient’s name wrong, why do they still look at you as if it’s your fault? That’s hardly fair, is it?

Keyword noise: blame.

This is something that Big Dave pointed out to me today:

If you go to the post office, and buy foreign currency, with cash, they’ll happily give you it.

If you go to the post office, and buy foreign currency, with a debit card, they expect to see photo ID first.

But if you go to the post office, and give them your Link card, you can withdraw money over the counter, without ID. Even if you just hand that money straight back over the counter, in exchange for foreign currency. Even if you’re using the same card that you can’t use to buy foreign currency with, unless you’ve got ID on you.

What’s the point of that, then?

Keyword noise: bureau de change, foreign exchange, identity, anti money laundering, money, Post Office.

This week has mostly consisted of: coughing fits. Coughing until bent double, sometimes. It’s not fun, but it seems to be fading now.

The worst part is, I didn’t even take any time off work. My sinuses and ears were all aching, and due to the earache I was wobbly on my feet, and having trouble moving my jaw. At one point, I even fell down the stairs.* Why the hell I didn’t take any time off work, I don’t know. I might have had plenty of important work to do, but I sure as hell wasn’t up to doing it properly – I’d spend half an hour at a time changing the wrong file, and making Big Dave think I was about to cough up a lung. I’m unlikely to get any respect or kudos from the management for trying to get my work finished despite feeling shit, so why did I bother to do it?

* Why is it that I never lost my balance and fell over on flat ground? The one place I lose my balance has to be at the top of a flight of stairs, so I go thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk on my arse all the way down to the bottom.

Keyword noise: coughing, falling, sickness, sinuses, sore throat.

Off on another kissogram-escorting job last weekend. We had a booking in Marthwaite Hill, a little village overlooking Wooldale.

When I was younger, I had one particular type of recurring dream which I found slightly disturbing. It would involve setting off on a journey but never reaching the destination, because the road would get narrower and I’d get more and more lost as the dream went on. And that’s pretty much what reaching Marthwaite Hill is like. We turned off the main road, onto a country lane which went up into the moors, twisting and forking, until eventually we reached a little cluster of houses lodged on the edge of a high hill,^* with half the county spread out below.

We trundled slowly up and down the village street – there is only one – looking for the Working Men’s Club. We passed a reasonable-looking pub, and approached a run-down looking building with a small patch of rocky wasteground for a car park. “I hope that’s not it,” said Kissogram Girl.

That was, of course, it.

We were supposedly there for a stag do – but the lad in question looked to be about fifteen. There was no sort of party going on, as far as you would notice, just a typical crowd of people drinking and playing pool. The lad was a drunken tosser, who wouldn’t do what he was told. The crowd wasn’t impressed by the performance, either. “Can I have a word, mate,” one of them said to me. “Is that all we get? Is that all we get for what we paid? Is that it? We’re expecting a bit more than that, mate.”

“Sorry, mate,” I said, trying to work out how many of them were between us and the door, “we don’t set the price.” He tried to get some more of the crowd interested in arguing with me, but fortunately none of them felt like starting anything. We stalked out of the building as quickly as we could, without trying to make it look obvious, hoping like hell that none of them followed us back to the car. And we didn’t look back, just headed straight back to the A-road and didn’t look back until we’d returned to civilisation.

* I checked on an OS map later – the village is on the 1200ft contour

Keyword noise: countryside, kissogram, remote, rural, Wooldale, yokels, Yorkshire.

Hello to internet friend Angeldust, who starts at university today as a mature student. How she’ll cope with having to be mature, I really have no idea.

It reminded me, though, that it’s ten years this month since I started at university myself. Ten years, and it feels like no time at all. It certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve grown up at all in that time, although I almost certainly have without realising it. And ten years since starting university also means ten years since I got my first email address, and ten years since I first went on the web,^* using university public labs with Apple Macs running Mac OS 7.5. I did even, occasionally in that first year or so, browse the web in black and white, because some of the university Macs only had monochrome screens. It wasn’t very impressive, partly because given the state of the university computer network at the time, the effective download speed in a busy lab was about the same as the 56k home dialup connections which were starting to appear around then too.

I didn’t get my own PC until I was in my second year at university, and didn’t get internet access until late in that year. Even when I did, the university was my ISP – I applied for, and was given, access to one of the university dial-in lines, available to any student who was good enough at navigating the university bureaucracy to find and fill in the right form. Somehow I doubt that universities offer that service now – but, then again, offering full network access to hall bedrooms was unheard of ten years ago too.

It really doesn’t feel like ten years that I’ve been on the net – but then again, I couldn’t imagine life without it now. In the past ten years, it’s gone from being exotic and new, to being an everyday part of life.

* Using Pegasus Mail over a Netware network for email, and Netscape Navigator 2 for the web

Keyword noise: Apple, Apple Mac, Classic Mac, email, internet, Mac OS 7.5, mature student, Pegasus Mail, university.

Taloollah: Oh, something happened the other day, and I’ve been waiting for someone to tell.

Me: Yes?

T: I came home from the pub the other night, and I was feeling hungry, so I got a packet of crisps out of the cupboard … and it was full of crisps. You know how most crisp packets have lots of empty space inside? This one was packed full.

Me: Wow.

T: I know! I only realised when I’d been eating crisps for a bit, and I suddenly thought: hang on, this packet of crisps is lasting a long time.

Me: That’s the ultimate packet of crisps ever. The best crisps in history.

T: You should blog about it. Say it happened to you.

Me: No, I can’t do that! I’ll blog this phone call, though.

Keyword noise: crisps, food, miracle, phone call, surprise, ultimate crisps.