Christian Darkin

2010-04-23T10:26:00.001-07:00

Well, I haven’t written here for a while –not so much because I’ve been busy, but when you stop for a while, it gets to a stage where there’s so much you think you should write up that you never have time to do it….

Except, of course, I have been busy - with George (just being potty trained) and Ernest (just going on to solid food), there’s always a lot happening….

Anyway – I’ve decided not to try to bang on about everything that’s happened since I last wrote, so here’s just a quick scene from George a couple of weeks ago:

Lisa and I are trying to teach him to be polite – saying please and thank you . it’s working fairly well, but he sometimes forgets.

..so he wants a biscuit. “biscuit!” he says.

Lisa ignores him

“biscuit!” he shouts.

“I can’t hear you.” Lisa says

“biscuit!” he yells.

“what do we say when we want something?” lisa asks

“biscuit!” responds George.

Lisa has an idea. “Christian, would you like a cup of tea?”

“yes PLEASE!” I say helpfully.

“Ok, then” says Lisa “George, would you like me to get you something?”

George thinks for a moment. “coffee!” he says.

So, I’m struggling back towards running regularly – the cold, long winter, and the fact that I’ve been pretty tired have meant I haven’t been running much in the past few months. Also, every time I run, I get a hip and knee pain… I think it’s a combination of the cold and the fact that I’ve no idea how to warm up and warm down.

Anyway, it’s been warm so left without excuses I’ve been forced to go back out there. Now that it’s light I’ve also been able to take up my old, much longer route through the park. I now realise I needed to build up to that! It’s a long way!

Just one other thought – The election. It looks like we’re likely to have a hung parliament (something I’ve wanted for years – forcing the parties to work together for a change) – BUT what that’s likely to mean is that Labour will be in charge, but with a minority of the votes. The Labour party will dump Gordon Brown in favour (probably) of David Miliband. The Libdems will have to be offered something – and Nick Clegg will probably end up as deputy PM. So the number of seats the Libdems get will really decide what else they can demand – so if there’s a good showing, they’ll probably ask for Vince Cable to be made chancellor.

That doesn’t sound like a bad outcome to me….

In the meantime, we’ll have to have a reform of the voting system (because it’s going to look pretty dumb by the end of this election) and that will mean much higher chances of having balanced parliaments in the future.

But in a hung parliament, the liberals will never work with the tories, and the tories will never work with Labour, so whatever the outcomes, you’ll always end up with a liberal, labour coalition, and the Tories will never get power ever again.

Unless, of course, they move towards the centre ground, or make alliances with the tiny little right wing parties like UKIP who will probably get the odd seat in a proportional system.

Interesting times ahead…

2010-01-11T11:25:00.001-08:00

The house is sounding pretty empty – the last of our Christmas guests left on thursday– Lisa’s sister over from Switzerland and her family (two girls of similar ages to George and Ernest) and Lisa’s Mum – all snowed in for the last couple of days.

It was lovely to see them all, and now the house is back to normal, Lisa and I feel suddenly quite tired… (not helped by Ernest’s deciding that he’s not going to be quite as co-operative in sleeping through the night as we first thought he might).

I thnk George was beginning to believe that his cousins were here to stay (a couple of months ago, Ernest arrived and shows no sign of leaving, so it’s a reasonable assumption) and there was a certain amount of friction between he and Livia. The two turned choosing toys from the toybox into a complex political game of strategy and confrontation.

Since the year started we’ve only really left the house for George to play in the snow. Still, hopefully it’ll be warmer soon… I’m hoping to get back to running more regularly – but not in this weather.

2009-12-23T06:50:00.000-08:00

George and Ernest
George seems to have accepted Ernest without too much of a problem. He keeps cuddling him, and introducing him to anyone he meets. He’s basically being very sweet (if you ignore the occasional outbursts of “hit baby Ernie!” and “eat Ernie’s ears”).

George is having the occasional nightmare now – waking up screaming and crying – he usually settles quite quickly, but he’s taken to getting up and trying to get out of his bedroom while screaming his head off. He did that last night, and after trying to settle him, we had to force ourselves to just leave him crying until he went back to bed.

So how is it having two of them? Well, they’re a handful and obviously as Ernest gets more independent that will only get worse, but initially it doesn’t seem too bad As long as we remember to keep giving George attention so he doesn’t feel he needs to demand it, we seem to be able to cope (except on the occasional night when they’re both ill or restless).

Which is a bit of a surprise to be honest because we’d had heard that having two is a bit like having ten…. Still, there’s time…

Plans for Christmas
So, it’s Christmas eve tomorrow… and a sudden cold snap has turned everyone’s Christmas travel plans to sludge. My parents probably won’t get up to us from Cambridge, which is a shame. Lisa’s sister may or may not arrive from Swizzerland, and what will happen for new year is anyone’s guess.

We’ll probably end up with just local people – and we’ve hosting it at home. We’ve decided that Christmas is the ideal day to try out an experimental meal that we’ve never cooked before and lot’s of people don’t like – so we’re going for eel in red wine.

Running
I’m not running quite so often as I have been. A combination of the cold, the dark and tiredness plus the fact that my hip seems to develop a pain every time I go running (probably because I don’t know how to warm up properly before I go) means I’m running slower, less distance and less often.

It’s a bit annoying actually – Just before Ernest, Lisa persuaded me to go to a running shop (there is, of course, a specialist triathlon shop at the end of Melbourne Grove) and get fitted for some trainers.

Buying running shoes isn’t like buying other shoes – you don’t sit in a shop trying to decide whether to go for the ones that make you look like a gnome or a teenager or a pimp. Instead the shopkeeper measures your feet in various places, makes you run on a jogging machine, and then disappears into the back of the shop.

When he returns, he’s carrying one pair of shoes.

“these are yours” he says.

Not “what colour do you want?” or “how do they feel?” or “how much do you want to pay?”

There are one pair of shoes in one colour and one style and they’re the ones for you.

It’s quite a refreshing change.

However, I also asked him about keeping warm while running in the winter. He recommended a kind of skin tight lycra body-stocking.

I don’t think either I, or the other residents of Dulwich, are quite ready for that.

Apologies

2009-12-23T06:43:00.000-08:00

Apologies for not updating this in a while – but now on Christmas eve eve, I’ve finally got a bit of time to get back up to date. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably got a fair idea of why it’s taken me so long.

Here’s the main reason:

The new boy
Ernest appeared on 22 oct at 9:50 in the morning. He was good enough to turn up at a reasonable hour, by caesarean section just like George but unlike George, I wasn’t actually allowed in to watch.

Lisa was in labour for a good few hours and had just reached the point of asking for an epidural (at one point, a midwife came in wanting to take the gas-and-air – assuming that Lisa had already had an epidural because she wasn’t making enough of a fuss) when it became obvious that Ernest’s heart rate was slowing. The decision to go for a caesarean was pretty much instant (after Lisa – high on gas and air – had to sign the release papers) and I just had time to don my surgical clothes and let Lisa know I was there in the operating theatre, when they suddenly realised things weren’t going well, and I was whisked out to wait for the results.

The problem was that Ernest’s heart rate wasn’t returning to normal, so instead of the normal epidural, they decided to go for the quick option – a general anaesthetic. And presumably a general is a lot less gentle than an epidural and they don’t want husbands cluttering up the place while they delve around looking for the baby.

In any case, it was a good couple of hours before Lisa had recovered enough for me to tell her she had a baby boy (I wouldn’t say anything until she was properly conscious because I knew she’d forget!).

Anyway, Ernest is here and making his presence felt. He’s learned to cry pretty loud and practices often. He’s also fairly good at eating and sleeping. He’s started off with a good nighttime routine, giving Lisa a few hours between feeds to get some rest. Although the last couple of days haven’t been great, we’re pretty convinced it’s a battle we can win, and he will eventually get into a good sleeping pattern.

Midwives
Midwives talk a lot of crap. Throughout the entire process of having a baby, there seems to be a ban on anyone in the medical profession using the word “pain”. Childbirth is described as causing “discomfort” - whatever that means. Occasionally there’s “extreme discomfort” mentioned, but that apparently is rare. It’s usually just bog standard discomfort.

When we dropped in on my grandmother, Grace a few weeks before Ernest was born, she mentioned her experience of midwives.

When she went in to have my dad, she was a little naïve herself. She asked the midwife if she was going to cut her open to get the baby out.

“no” she was told. “it comes out the same way it went in”

“Oh” said my grandmother. “Won’t that hurt?”

The midwife looked at her. “oh, God, yes” she said.

2009-10-09T10:55:00.001-07:00

If you hear something repeated often enough, it often starts to develop deeper meanings for you…. Whether that’s a catchy song that grows on you or a favourite film that seems to get better each time you see it.

There’s a lot of repetition involved in children’s entertainment. Especially 2 year olds. They never seem to get tired of hearing the same things over and over again. Whether that’s the story of the Very Hungry Caterpillar or the phrases of Mickey mouse coming from the aeroplane toy he rides around the kitchen.

It’s tempting to think these simple verses are all the same, and at first I thought they were… just simple words and phrases designed to hold kids interest.

But the more I hear it, the more respect I’ve got for the very hungry caterpillar… On the face of it, it’s just a few sentences about a caterpillar eating various fruit and then turning into a butterfly. But as you hear it more and more (and believe me, I have), you realise that on top of the simple repetition, there’s teaching about numbers and counting, about the days of the week, about change and the processes of nature, the sun and the moon, and there’s even a message about healthy eating.

But on top of that, it doesn’t talk down – it uses long words (butterfly, caterpillar), and difficult concepts (metamorphosis, getting ill from eating too much). And it doesn’t bypass things just because its audience won’t immediately understand them. It makes them work, and they respond to it- or at least George does – with enthusiasm and passion.

And it does all of this in a form that’s so economical with words and meanings that it’s a kind of poetry.

Contrast that with the Mickey mouse aeroplane toy - whose words are basically just sales pitches for disney’s empire. Constant mentions of the names of other characters in the Disney franchise are all you really get from it. The lyrics of his theme song are particularly good:

M-I-C-K-E-Y- M-O-U-S-E
Mickey mouse
Mickey mouse
Mickey mouse
Mickey mouse

…and so on.

All toddler’s literature is not the same.

2009-10-02T10:18:00.001-07:00

I haven’t been sleeping too well this week. I keep waking up in the night, and I have to assume I’m worrying about the new baby. Not that I shouldn’t be – it’s within 2 weeks of its designated arrival date, and by all accounts it’s going to drop a nuclear bomb in the middle of our lives, changing everything in ways we can’t even imagine.

Except I’m not actually waking up thinking about that. The problem is, there’s nothing to think about – the baby’s not here yet, and what it will bring with it is beyond speculation… on a conscious level, it’s hardly entering my mind at all – because there’s really nothing I can do, forsee or plan for.

Instead I’m waking up thinking about when I can go and see Andrew’s new flat (which he finally got the keys to last week). I’m thinking about work and whether I need to hire a salesman to go out and get my work known to TV companies, and whether if I do, it’ll result in me spending all my working day doing pitches for work I don’t actually want and won’t get anyway. I’m going through the lyrics of songs I can’t remember (for some reason whenever I wake up I have a few lines of a random song running over and over through my head – and usually it’s not even a song I like).

I’m trying to solve a problem my friend Raoul (who turned up from Switzerland at the weekend because he was at a paleontological conference in Bristol) put to me over a Jamacan meal. He wanted to devise a way to work out when a fossil was found somewhere in the world, where that part of the world would have been 500 million years ago when the fossil was deposited. (I decided there was a way, and it involved the same kind of maths that’s used to morph one person’s face into another in special effects work – but I didn’t want to be deciding that at 2am).

Only rarely am I actually waking up for a good reason (like the fact on Monday at 2am that our next door neighbour’s new alarm system suddenly decided to ring for an hour).

So that’s what I’m thinking. In the meantime, Lisa is sleeping like a log. Partially, I think because she’s more and more tired all the time. It’s her last day at work on Friday and that won’t be a day too late.

I say only partially because I think her perception of the new baby is very different from mine. From my point of view, the new baby appears in the world in a couple of weeks, and that’s when everything changes.

For her, the new baby is already here. Every moment, it’s quite literally right in front of her. She’s been living with the new baby as a reality for months now, and if anything it’s actual delivery will mean it’s making less of an impact on her life than it is now…

2009-09-21T10:18:00.001-07:00

There’s a saying that if you want something done, you should ask a busy person. I think I probably qualify.

So, for the last four years I’ve been looking after a flat for a friend who’s living abroad and wants to rent the place out. As time’s gone on it’s got harder and harder to deal with and (not helped by the fact that the tenant turned the place into a S&M dungeon and didn’t pay any of the bills), somewhere along the line it became less a job (my friend paid me a few pounds for looking after the flat) and more of a favour. An indicator, I suppose of just how much my life has changed in the last four years.

It’s got to the stage now where I have less and less time to devote to the place and need to hand it back to her… (to be honest, it was probably a mistake carrying on with it after the first year I agreed to manage it – I wouldn’t consider acting as agent for a property I owned, so what made me think I should do it for someone else’s I’m not sure). And it’s become a problem for me and for her.

Now, the actual business of acting as an agent shouldn’t be that hard – just a few phone calls here and there and the odd visit to make sure everything’s going OK – or so you’d think - so what is it that makes it impossible for me to find the time to do it?

I find time to do extra pieces of work when they come my way. I find time to do all kinds of things I don’t plan to do – and it seems to work. So what is it that transforms what should be a few easy tasks into something I just can’t find the time to do?

Maybe it’s more finding mental space rather than time. If I’ve got lots of things on my plate, I tend to make lists – when something comes in, I don’t necessarily do it immediately, but I do decide when I’m going to do it and leave a note for myself in my diary. Even if it’s something like “make a decision” or “send someone an email” That way, I can safely forget about it and it won’t be cluttering up my mind in the meantime. A lot of stuff that doesn’t go in the diary, I do forget about, or delay for months – sometimes forever… calling people, doing admin, birthdays, etc.

But on the other hand, a lot of stuff I don’t put in the diary does get done. I found the mental space to think up a new recipe for Lisa and I for dinner on Wednesday (king prawn bloody mary cocktail followed by spaghetti with beetroot and a watercress pesto – very nice actually). I manage to do this blog. I manage to find the time for all kinds of stuff...

On Monday, when I was out running, it was getting dark. I realised I was all alone in the park except for a fox, some bats and a woman out walking a weasel (no joke). I got half way round before I discovered that the part of the park I was in had been closed. The gates locked (I’ve no idea why – there are no gates at the other side, so locking the gates serves no purpose). I had to run all the way back round to get out.

The point being that despite spending five minutes or so stumbling about in the dark trying to find a way out, my running time was the same as usual and I got back in time for University challenge… Somehow, I found the time because I wanted to.

So perhaps that’s it. Perhaps the reason it’s impossible to find time to deal with my friend’s flat is quite simply that I don’t want to do it. And having lots and lots of other things on my plate just means I feel justified.

Then again, I don’t just do things I enjoy. Mostly, I grant you, but not exclusively – and a lot of things I really want to do I can’t find time for either.

I think the real reason is that I really resent jobs that overrun. When I can’t get the job done in the time I think it justifies, I really start to get annoyed with it. And renting a property is one of those jobs that never can be scheduled. Almost everything you have to do on it is unexpected and additional and everything is (to everyone but you) an emergency. Anything that’s not an emergency is trivial and ends up being put off (by everyone involved) until it becomes one.

Which, I suppose, answers my specific question about the flat, but not the general one of how I – as someone who undoubtedly has a busy life – manages to fit everything in that needs to be done.

And the answer to that, I’m afraid, is that I don’t. Things do go missing out of my mental and physical filing systems. Jobs do get postponed either because I don’t want to do them or sometimes because I do. A lot of stuff gets done, and a lot of stuff doesn’t. juggling lots of balls just means it’s more acceptable when you drop some.

So I suppose, if you want something done, ask a busy person. But make it something concrete and definable, not expanding and open ended. And try to have a plan “b”….

2009-09-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

George had his first real full on tantrum last week – 12:30 in the morning he’d given up trying to sleep and decided to scream the place down. I took him to our room and sent Lisa to his because she had to work in the morning. It wasn’t the best timing as Sam was recovering upstairs from a tooth operation.

The restoration of Lisa’s “new” house in Worthing is slowly grinding on – despite Lisa’s mum’s valiant efforts, the refurbishment has now taken a year. The next door neighbour has been the main hold-up - complaining about problems Lisa is trying to fix which were actually caused by the previous owners, and making things more difficult for herself in the process.

Andrew is having completely different problems trying to buy his flat in Grimsby – with the vendor’s solicitor delaying things by not bothering to forward information at almost every stage, and Andrew’s own solicitor apparently deciding he knows what Andrew wants to do better than Andrew does, and refusing to carry out his instructions. In the meantime, Andrew is forced to live in a lorry in a car-park. Not ideal, but not unusual in house-buying.

We, on the other hand had last weekend away – staying at a B&B run by a friend of my Mum’s in Norfolk. It was actually our Christmas present from my parents – and it’s taken us this long to get around to going… but it was lovely. The owners looked after George so we could go out in the evening, and we had a really relaxing time. We even got to visit my parents on the way back…

I went to Russ’ Mum’s funeral this Monday. She died after a short stay in a hospice. Russ and Pietro came over later in the week. I think both of them are having a tough time right now…

2009-08-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

Went to see the Walking With Dinosaurs live show at the Milenium dome at the weekend. Not for my own benefit, you understand – it was Ethan’s birthday present and as Lisa’s his Godmother…

It was basically robot dinosaurs running around an arena while an actor playing the part of a time travelling palaeontologist tried to enthuse the audience about footprints and fossil dung… But really good despite that. The dinosaurs were surprisingly well done – and were very nimble for remote controlled animatronics. We were a long way up, so didn’t get much of a feeling of scale, but Ethan enjoyed it.

The dome itself never ceases to disappoint – Ethan thought it could do with a bit of colour. I thought it could do with some transport links as we and 20,000 others tried to get on the only bus back to civilisation. We’d taken the boat on the way in, but it was chaos – an entire wedding party was left stranded on the quay. Having been told they had tickets booked, they arrived to find there was no room on any of the boats into the city. We eventually got home using a creative combination of bus, train and taxis…

Anyway – our 3rd wedding anniversary was this week – apparently the traditional way to mark this is with a gift of leather…. Though I’m not sure quite what’s intended by that.

We marked it with a meal in on the night, and we’re having a night out together on Saturday – which will be nice.

I’ve just heard today of the debate that’s sweeping America about the future of healthcare and how bad the NHS is. As far as I can see, free universal healthcare is what they call in the US, a no-brainer, but regardless of the rights and wrongs of the new plan, I’m frankly astounded by what passes for debate - how the kind of laughable inaccuracies I’ve heard today manage to replace proper argument in the US, I can’t imagine. Hearing the level and quality of argument over this issue, I really have to take my hat off to anyone who manages to remain thoughtful and level headed in that environment.

2009-08-07T10:27:00.001-07:00

We took George to see his lion at the weekend. We sponsored a lion for him at safari park near Canterbury for his first birthday and this was our first chance to go and see the beast. George, of course loved it, going right up to the window onto the lion enclosure. As the lion followed him around throwing itself at the glass, leaping up trying to scrape its way through to eat him, George simply stood there giggling and roaring back at it.

We always tell children that animals are more scared of people than we are of them, but I can’t help feeling there should be exceptions.

But that wasn’t “his” lion. His lion was in another enclosure – it turns out to have had a birth defect and has a pronounced limp which means it can’t be kept with the others.

George can say lots of words now – and if you ask him whether he can say something he’ll usually give it a pretty good go.

Spent the rest of the weekend with Sarah in Canterbury – the first time we’d seen her new house - always good to see her.. As a dietician, she’s entertainingly incensed by everything that’s said about nutrition in the media. She’s also a breath of fresh air when it comes to the mess of conflicting advice on what you can and can’t eat when pregnant…

Went out with Russ, Pietro and Ellen on Monday – primarily to cheer Russ up as he’s going through a tough time with his Mum. We did our best, and I think he’s at least had a good night out… Sam’s flatmate is moving out – and it seems to have become acrimonious for no good reason… just one of those times when a combination of tiny things snowballs into something bigger… anyway, we’ll now discover whether Sam’s chickens are a plus point or a minus point for new tenants when she starts advertising the vacant room….

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve actually been running my running course for the first time – by which I mean, not breaking into a walk every so often. There’s a path up though Peckham rye park – used only by joggers and just wide enough for one. When I first started I struggled along it, constantly dodging out of the way of other joggers as they overtook me. I consoled myself that everyone has their own pace and they’re all running to their own (shorter) courses. It wasn’t that they were just much fitter than me.

Now, I’ve noticed I’m running with more confidence. The other joggers see me on the path from a long way ahead and some even get out of MY way… plus I’m overtaking people now… not on purpose, but they’re obviously running their own, (longer) courses…

The result is that I’ve knocked 5 minutes off my time – so that’s five minutes more I can spend gasping on the floor like a stranded fish.

2009-07-31T10:39:00.001-07:00

the weekend before last we went to the Southwalk village fete in Herne Hill –much bigger than the village fetes I remember where the biggest attraction was trying to throw a wooden hoop around a 2nd hand china figurine…. Sally and Colin and the four boys came up for the event and I joked to Sally that the park was the ideal middle ground if the Peckham gangs and the Brixton gangs wanted to have a fight.

After we left, apparently that’s exactly what happened… there are lots of blurry phone-cam pictures on youtube of the police evacuating the park. However, I’m not sure the coverage of the event was accurate. The reports said the police commandeered a 37 bus to block the road, but I can’t believe that.

They’d have had to find one first.

Lisa got up last Tuesday morning and suddenly found she felt so weak she could hardly stand up. She did the sensible thing, of course and went to work anyway! The doctor diagnosed anaemia (apparently very common for pregnant women) due to a lack of iron.

I think we generally have a pretty good diet – considering I don’t eat meat so Lisa tends to eat it rarely (although, following government guidelines it has to be cooked through, so rarely but well done) – but I cooked her a steak for tea, and we’ve been having spinach with everything all week. My first time cooking steak, but it seemed to work!

Anyway, she’s much better now – and I have told her not to go to work if she’s ill. Of course, she’ll go anyway….

Lucinda’s new baby

Sam’s gone off to see Lucinda in Berne this week – leaving us to keep her chickens away from her cats – and it seems she went just in time. Lucinda gave birth last night (2 weeks early) to a baby girl. Giancarlo had just left for a wedding in Italy and ended up missing both the wedding and the birth…

We, on the other hand have a constant supply of eggs from what George calls the “chick chicks”

We went to a restaurant with George at the weekend and ordered him the kids meal. When it arrived, it was chicken. “chick chick” he happily said before tucking in.

I don’t think he’s going to be a vegetarian.

George is counting everything he sees now. Although nine appears to be his favourite number and can appear anywhere in a sequence. Often several times. He’s also developing sarcasm.

This week when Lisa was at work, he called me Mummy. When I pointed out that I was in fact Daddy, he simply repeated “Mummy” and then laughed. He then spent the rest of the day calling me Mummy.

Running
I’ve lost weight through running. Last time I hopped on some scales (while waiting for Lisa being scanned at the hospital I was 90kg – which is about 14 stone in real money…. And I’m probably a bit less than that now – a quick check on google tells me that makes my body mass index 25.4 -which is still just overweight, but fine really… I’m not sure I trust the BMI thing completely – it seems a bit arbitrary to be a judge of anything to me.

Anyway, running isn’t about weight anymore for me – I mean, OK – it’s good to be able to have puddings and tempura without worrying about it, but now it’s got more to do with redundancy:

A lot of the time, it’s really easy to end up living your life at fill speed. You feel as though you’re running flat out all the time – coping with things as they come up, but not having the extra capacity to cope with anything unexpected – either in terms of time, money or energy. It’s as though there’s a view at the moment that if you’re not working absolutely at the edges of your capacity all the time, there’s something wrong.

But, as the financial crash proved, that doesn’t work very well because you’re never prepared for things to change. I want to know that if I decide to step on the accelerator (or the break) in any area of my life that something will actually happen. Just as you need to have something in reserve in your savings account in case you get an unexpected bill, it’s worth having something in reserve in terms of energy for if your life suddenly gets more tiring…

As I’m expecting it to sometime in the middle of October.

I need to have some redundancy. When the new baby is making me so tired I don’t know who I am, I want to know that I’m just a little bit fitter. Plus, of course, I’ll know if I’m really tired I can make my life a bit easier by not going running.

All of which sounds a bit like saying it’s a good idea to hit yourself repeatedly over the head with a plank of wood because it’s nice when you stop.

Anyway, the result of running is that I’ve lost weight and I know that even though I don’t weigh myself very often because when Lisa and I went out to dinner on Wednesday, I realised that I’ve lost my wedding ring. It’s fallen off and I’ve no idea where.

Aside from the short trip to the restaurant (about 200 yards) I hadn’t left the house all day, so I’m fairly sure it’s somewhere in the house… but I’ve looked everywhere I can think of to no avail…

2009-07-17T11:01:00.001-07:00

The Isle of Wight is a great place to take small children. It was a great holiday – not exactly relaxing, but you learn not to expect that with a young child – but the entire island seems to be perfectly set up.

We stayed in a little chalet – not much in the way of amenities, but that didn’t matter. We were staying in every night and making our own food, so it was fine. But the island itself has zoos, beaches, museums, and all kinds of child friendly entertainment. We even went to a farm to feed the lambs…

Nothing is more than a 20 minute drive away (go any further and things start to get wet), and although it’s not the world’s greatest shopping hub (our accommodation had a sign outside announcing the way to Tescos, but Tescos turned out to be on the other side of the island), it’s full of really good restaurants. We took full advantage going to nice places for lunch (even the posh restaurants were able to provide high-chairs) and eating great seafood all week. Even most of the pubs served lobster (at least most of the pubs we went in)!

So the whole holiday was great for both George and us..

We returned to find Sam’s new chickens have started laying already. Two fresh eggs were waiting for us on the dining room table… George ate them both, of course.

Andrew’s flat purchase looks to be going through – he and Dad feel as though they’re running into problems and hold-ups all the way along, but actually that’s how all property purchases feel. In reality, this one’s progressing quite quickly and smoothly.

2009-07-03T10:05:00.000-07:00

Leather straightjackets and chickens

Phil’s 40th birthday on Saturday, which meant a meal in Hertford. I haven’t been back to my old home town in years… and it’s a bit of an odd feeling. I know the place, and yet I don’t. it’s not home to me, but whenever I go, I get the feeling I should do something, go somewhere to remind me of something, but I never quite know what.

Still, it was a good night. George was with us until his bed time, and we got a babysitter in to the hotel to look after him for the evening. I managed to speak to John for the first time in ages, but he’s still in the same position – basically waiting for his job to end and training the Indian call centre staff who will be replacing him.

I ended up taking most of this week off work. Monday for a hospital appointment to see about some mouth ulcers I had a couple of months ago – of course, this was the earliest appointment I could get, and of course they’re gone now. But they took some blood anyway and seemed awfully well informed about what might be wrong without actually committing themselves. Anyway, I was told it was probably something related to stress… can’t imagine why that would be...

Tuesday was my day with George anyway, but Wednesday I was off as well because Lisa had managed to get tickets to see Fedora and Andy Murry play matches at the Wimbledon quarter finals. It was the hottest day of the year, so far, and the 2nd hottest day at wimbledon ever (the hottest was the summer of 1976), but Lisa somehow managed not to faint or give birth, which surprised me.

I went for a run on Wednesday evening and throughout, I was constantly surprised by runners bursting out of the undergrowth, and sprinting off in odd directions carrying maps. Every so often one would grab hold of a randomly placed marker sticking out of the ground and then run off in a different direction. There must have been some kind of run/orienteering race going on. I wouldn’t usually describe it as an extreme sport, but in this heat, getting out of bed was an extreme sport.

Thursday I also took off work. This time it was because I’m supposed to be looking after my friend Mary’s flat for her while she’s living in China. I say supposed to be because for the last months the tenant has been un-contactable and when we went round to do an inspection we discovered that the place was kitted out as a gay S&M dungeon complete with whips, chains, Nazi memorabilia and unfeasibly large sex toys.

It appeared that the flat was being used as a professional premises. We also discovered that the tenant had neglected to pay any of his bills and was being pursued through the courts by every utility company imaginable.

All in all, a bit of a mess – and a good reason for not getting me to manage your property for you.

Anyway, eviction notices were issued and the deadline passed on Monday. I got no response from the tenant, so I was surprised and delighted to discover that he’d actually moved out this week leaving nothing but a load of unopened mail and a leather straightjacket. So Thursday was spent getting the place cleaned, the locks changed and the flat valued by agents who will be able to take over managing it from me.

…and the chickens? Sam had three chickens delivered this week. Not frozen ones – three live chickens to live in her back garden in an “eglu” – a chicken run designed to look as trendy as an ipod – and provide her with eggs. George was a bit nervous at first, but now loves the chickens. We’re awaiting our first egg with anticipation.

Meanwhile, George is definitely talking now. Cheers! Appears to have been his first word (predictably enough), but he’s moved on to keys, Mummy, yes and no.

He seems to understand a lot more than he says though – every time you ask him a question, he responds instantly and definitively with a “yes” or a “no” – and strangely, he seems to follow through his answers with actions even when you think he can’t possibly know what you’re talking about.

He’s also taken to offering the new baby in Lisa’s tummy some of his food or milk. Quite how much he understands about what’s going on in there, I’m not sure.

Anyway, next week we’re off on holiday

2009-06-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

Last Friday we had dinner with Kate and Darren – Mum and Dad. It’s always a late night, but everyone – including Mum and Dad and Lisa managed to make it through pretty late into the evening. It was 2 before I got to bed.... which didn’t set me up well for Saturday….

Still, Sunday was father’s day, which we spent in the Herne Tavern - as well as being a great kids pub, it also has the surprising ability to produce a tuna Nicoise salad without opening lots of tins. (tuna nicoise is my test of a good restaurant – if they’re good, the tuna is real –and rare – the olives and anchovies are decent ones and the eggs are soft boiled…. If it’s bad, it’s a tin of rubbery olives, a tin of dried up tuna and a handful of iceberg lettice with no dressing!)

I can see us spending a lot of the summer in the Herne Tavern.

Pig Flu
After a dose of pig flu was diagnosed in one of the children in George’s nursery, the nursery were advised not to close. However, the East Dulwich fretful mothers’ club had other ideas. When I took him in on Monday morning, there were 3 children (out of about 15 usual visitors) present.

The thing is, all the advice we have says that pig flu will return in the winter when the symptoms are likely to be more severe and the NHS will be under seige… so in other words, if you’re going to catch it now would be the best time…

Oh well…

Wildlife
We met a stag beetle in the garden last week. Stag beetles are apparently quite rare, but they’re doing well in South East London for some reason. Apparently, the beetles are only beetles for about 6 weeks. The rest of their 7 year lives are spent as grubs in piles of rotten wood.– – and we’ve got one in which they lay their eggs at the bottom of our garden.

Our resident mouse – Lionel – seems to have given birth to a family. I found 2 baby mice (well, young adults – teenage mice) sitting on the stairs this week, and managed to catch them and re-introduce them to the wild. Hopefully, we can get Lionel himself soon, and deposit him (or her) somewhere else before the numbers grow any further….

We’re back down to two fish this week with the passing of recent addition, Martin… not sure why we’ve had such a spate of fish deaths, but still… the other two seem fine.

Gang war
Apparently, Goose green was the site of a gang war between Peckham and Brixton last week. Not sure why. I suppose it’s a nice spot. Anyway, lots of police tape, helicopters, and a couple of stabbings – but it was all over quite quickly.

Andrew
Andrew’s suddenly decided – after years of living in a caravan that he’s looking at flats (in Grimsby – where his work is moving). Great news – but having put an offer in on a flat and had it accepted (prices are very low up there) he’s just been out-bid, so the deal’s off…. Hopefully he’ll find something else soon…

2009-06-19T10:32:00.001-07:00

On Friday night, my ipod gave out half way round my run. I didn’t realise quite how much difference it makes - I barely struggled back home, making a mental note not to let it go without charging it up again.

The weekend was a fairly full one – why I even bother saying that, I don’t know. It always is… This time, it was Lisa’s birthday – which co-incided with Mons’ 40th, so it got a bit swamped. We started with a champagne Breakfast for Lisa, then moved on to the Herne Tavern for Mons. The Herne Tavern turns out to be a great kids pub with a huge enclosed garden full (today at least) with lots of Mons’ friends most of whom we hadn’t seen for ages.

Anyway, it was the hottest day of the year so far, and I tried to give Lisa as much of a chance to socialise as possible while I played with George (or actually, followed George around chatting to people and putting his sun hat back on every time he pulled it off – a job which I obviously failed in because he was sick in the night – a sure sign that he’s had too much sun).

On Sunday, we went to see Waiting for Godot. Patrick Stewart, Ian Mckellen, Simon Callow – an incredible cast and a play that most people are suspicious of because it’s Beckett and people think Beckett is obscure – rather than just funny. Actually it’s a fantastic play –and these actors made the play anything but obscure. And they’re right in saying it’s actually quite joyful – despite the nature of some of the subjects it covers. By creating a really simple world in which nothing really happens, Becket manages to explore what really drives people from day to day – and although it doesn’t come to any trite answers, it’s really powerful in a quiet sort of way.

It was a shame Andrew couldn’t make it – he would have loved to have seen it and we wanted to get him a ticket – but his work is changing and it looks like he’s going to be moving to Grimsby….

Lisa’s parents came – for Lisa’s Dad’s birthday – and he’d seen the play before, in 1961. he said this performance concentrated more on the humour – I think that’s a trend actually. We tend to treat “classics” with a bit less somber reverence than we used to (which can’t be bad) – hopefully they’ll start to loose their reputation for stuffyness and elitism.

Doing my O level English Literature, I remember feeling quite releaved on discovering that the “classics” we’d been given were actually quite good. I thought I’d had a lucky escape.

It wasn’t until years afterwards that it occurred to me that this was the point - that the fact that they were quite good was why they were called “classics”.

…Anyway, I’ve decided not to go for the Action Aid half marathon. Simply because it’s going to be run at the end of September, so the question is not whether I can be prepared to run a half marathon… it’s whether I can be prepared to run a half marathon, then go straight to the hospital, hold Lisa in a stressed position for 8 hours, not sleep for the next six weeks and not complain about it.

and I can’t. not for Africa – not for anyone.

And, of course, if that’s the real reason, then I’ve no choice but to book in to do it next year…

This week we got our first crop of mushrooms from the DIY mushroom farming set I bought at B&Q a few weeks ago. Shiitake mushrooms are – well, mushrooming from the block of spore covered brick I keep in the bathroom.

The four small results are almost worth the foul smelling stagnant pond and clouds of tiny flies the mushroom farm also produces… almost, but not quite.

This week we also went for our scan for the new baby. As usual, everyone involved is trained to talk only to the mother, and ignore the fact that I even exist. Fair enough, really, I suppose. However, what really surprised us was that everything was fine. Every measurement, all the chambers of the heart, all the fluids and timings were perfect. No veins going in the wrong direction. Nothing. However hard they looked, they couldn’t find anything wrong.

This is profoundly at odds with our experience of scans… but it’s quite nice.

2009-06-12T10:26:00.001-07:00

Sunday before last, we had dinner in jane’s garden. The weather was lovely and it was nice to sit out and spend the day with George playing in the paddling pool. The only problem was one of the guests was taking ketamine (horse tranquilisers to you and me) and became slower and duller as the afternoon progressed. If there is any such thing as social etiquette for the 2000’s, this falls outside it.

Skipping on a week, the next Sunday was the South London Food club – for the first time in several months, and we all chose traditional Polish dishes. Everything contained cabbage and pickles, and it was all loaded with calories, but lots of nice food.

The beetroot soup was really good – and for pudding I made bread –which was actually more like cake and contained more butter and sugar than I’ve ever put into anything! Mind you, I’m not a great cake maker, so maybe slabs of butter and pounds of sugar is normal in patisserie…

Lucky I’m running really – now I can justify the occasional polish desert.
But it has bought me a dilemma… I just got an email from actionaid… it turns out they’re doing a sponsored run at the end of September – and it’s around Greenwich.

Trouble is, it’s a half marathon… I’m not sure I planned on getting that fit… hmm… I’ll have to think about this one.

Tuesday saw Russ’ birthday do – six of us at his favourite Victoria restaurant, Il Posto http://www.ilpostovictoria.co.uk/ - Russ and Pietro always chat to the manager and the chef, and of course, we got to see Russ’ recently awarded MBE – along with proof – pictures of the Queen handing it to him. I’m sure this won’t be the last I see of that photo.

Seriously though – it’s good to see the honour’s list honouring achievements like Russ’ (he set up a gay society for members of the Department of the Environment)…

Wednesday night was for Lisa and I. We decided a few weeks ago that we were seeing far too little of each other, and that we should reserve every Wednesday night for ourselves. We’re developing quite a routine – trying to make sure we spend time together in the face of our busy lives… Wednesdays we stay in, and have a romantic meal – no TV, just some nice music and the chance to catch up with each other. Ahh..

So don’t phone on Wednesdays! – or if you do, do it between 7:15 and 7:45 when one of us is cooking!

I managed to loose my wedding ring today – I went out into Lordship Lane to pick up a few things (nothing useful, obviously – they don’t sell anything useful). When I got back, I realised my ring was missing.

I spent an hour re-tracing my steps and put the whole house into a panic.

I eventually found it –before I went out, I’d grabbed some cache from a jacket pocket and the ring had fallen off in the pocket, and through a hole into the lining….

George is really trying it on as a safety inspector now. He nearly gave me two heart attacks in 10 minutes on Tuesday. First, he was following me down the stairs – I was carrying a tray full of cups – and he suddenly let go of the banister and toppled from right at the top. I dropped the tray and caught him as he rolled down.

Once I’d calmed him down, I set to clearing up the mess, and when I went to find him, he was sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by small, red pills.

I grabbed him, forced him to spit out what he’d eaten and then tried one. They were breath fresheners.

Phew.

What else? Oh, yes.

I’ve decided to sue Johnson’s baby products for false advertising. Specifically, Johnson’s “No more Tears” baby shampoo.

No more tears, my arse.

2009-06-05T10:05:00.001-07:00

Plans for baby2 are well underway.. This week the drive was finished and for the first time we can actually park in our road. The insurance people even paid up for the damage done by our neighbour across the road when he backed over the wall a couple of months ago… We didn’t want to pave over the front garden, but we have got an eco-friendly surface (basically, bricks, but laid over a porous bed that allows water to drain through). That’s part of the planning regulations now – which is a good thing.

Anyway, the drive’s finished, and Lisa’s been told by the midwife that everything’s fine. The midwife probably isn’t the best person to ask actually – last time at this point, we’d just been for an ultrasound scan where we’d seen the baby, heard the heartbeat and had every conceivable dimension on the growing George measured to a fraction of a millimetre. When Lisa went to the Midwife, she produced a tailor’s tape measure and told her the baby was far too small. Nonsense, of course.

This time, it was a lot more positive – confirmation that everything they can tell you with a stethoscope and a tape measure is absolutely fine.

In celebration, we’ve bought a new pram 2nd hand on ebay. Not just any pram… this is it. – the ultimate in baby carrying technology. This is the pram all the yummy mummies in East Dulwich are clamouring for: The Phil & Teds Vibe… and surprising though it may seem, the competition between both pram designers and owners is every bit as sharp as it is in the car world… if you’re a baby, the Phil & Ted’s Vibe is the ultimate – on Lordship Lane, you daren’t be seen in anything else.

And it’s expensive too – around £600 new. In fact the only reason lisa went for it is because it was second hand and thus about the same price as a normal buggy…

So what makes the vibe so special? Well, two things: first, you can steer it with one hand – and that’s all you have most of the time if you’ve got a baby. Secondly, it manages through a clever series of zips and handles to carry 2 babies in the space you’d normally only get one – thus allowing you to get into the same doorways and annoy the same other shoppers you annoyed when you only had one child.

I can’t work out if George is talking or not. When do you say – “this is it he’s talking?” He says yeah! And “na” and something that might sound a bit like mummy but doesn’t seem to be applied to anyone in particular… he burbles all the time – but how do you decide that this or that is his first word?

London
George and I spent Tuesday together in Central London – Tuesday’s my new day for looking after him since Lisa shifted her working days around.. I had to deliver a hard drive with my latest documentary on to Stanleys in Central London so they can put it on tape for me…

For Lisa, doing 3 days per week instead of 2 is tiring, but it’ll help to cover us for her maternity when she won’t be paid at all… and anyway, having George for a day isn’t that much less tiring than going to work!

However, this Tuesday was more relaxing. After I’d delivered my disk, we went and sat in the park by embankment. It’s a lovely little park and full of London workers on their lunch breaks. There was a bandstand with a live band (Jazz, but then you can’t have everything) so we sat on the grass and ate a picnic lunch. I got some sushi from a little shop by the station and fed George the cooked bits – which he loved (especially those green soybean pods they sell)

All in all a lovely day – and I would have come away quite relaxed if it wasn’t for the fact that my 3 times weekly jogging regeme means I’m almost constantly tired…

I’ve upped the distance very slightly – instead of running through the jungle, I’m now running around it. almost getting to the badlands at the back of the park – out there pitches are marked out and running tracks… areas of long grass, and woodland – I’ve never dared to go that far…. Anyway, that takes my run up to about 2.8miles according to www.mapmyrun.com – oh yes… if you can do it, you can do it online...

Except voting. That’s still done with a stubby pencil in a grubby booth in a church hall. The European elections are taking place with the government falling apart – quite literally – the cabinet is looking more like a colander with people quitting left, right and centre.

We’re all supposed to be angry about the expenses scandal, but I can’t muster the energy to be outraged – I’ve never met anyone who didn’t stretch what was possible on their expenses and although it’s clearly something that needs sorting out, it’s a symptom of bad organisation and the fact that we don’t pay politicians enough rather than dishonesty, I think.

There are lots of things that were wrong with the culture to cause this and lots of people doing things they shouldn’t have, but it sounds as though all the civil servants were telling them it was all fine right up to the point where they all got told it wasn’t – and that’s a bit rubbish.

Strange though it may seem, I don’t think they’re a crooked lot – I think they generally try to use everything they get to it’s best advantage and they’re keen to push the limits they’re given, but then we wouldn’t want politicians that didn’t, would we?

Anyway – what’s interesting to me is that this whole thing has caused an explosion in little parties – maybe I should make a documentary following some of the no-hope candidates around before the election next year (or next week, which seems more likely)…. It’d be interesting to explore what democracy means when you’ve got no hope of being elected…

Mind you, I vote Lib Dem, so what does that tell you?

2009-05-29T13:14:00.001-07:00

I recently picked up a fashion magazine which informed me in authoritative, but breathless tones that as a man in my 40s I can no longer go on dressing the same as I did in my 20s. I now have to project an air of quality and individual self assuredness rather than trying to ape the fashions of youth…

I’ve always had a tense relationship with fashion – as far as I’m concerned it’s a kind of circular dictatorship – run by nobody but with each link in the chain of command (designers, shops, customers, critics) kept so terrified of being out of step with everyone else that they have to keep the intimidation going. It’s only purpose is to keep people intimidating each other into buying stuff they don’t need at over inflated prices from idiot corporations.

Still, we all like to look good, and since everyone else judges what that means by the rules they’ve been given, there’s not much point arguing. If you’re living in a dictatorship, you can either fight it or go along with it…but there’s not much mileage in pretending you live in a free society.

…. So anyway, I read this article and although most of it is mindless dribble designed to fill the four pages in the magazine that aren’t dedicated to arty photos of people standing around in demolished buildings in pin-striped suits and pants, they do have a point.

There are massive gaps in my wardrobe and despite the fact that I have by and large been buying the same kind of stuff for years, I don’t really like much of it.

Plus, it’s just been my birthday, so on Saturday I bought a whole lot of new clothes – actually choosing things rather than grabbing them as I passed the rails before George got bored….

I’m planning to buy more on ebay soon….

In the evening, Lisa took me out to dinner for my birthday – it was a little restaurant near Victoria which managed to take the strange, but tasty fashion for the “amuse bouche” (tiny snacks served in flash restaurants before the main dishes) to a tasty, but silly extreme.

They served four different minute add-ons to the menu randomly throughout the meal – even giving us an extra one to take home. On Saturday morning I served lisa’s breakfast with an amuse bouche of warm porridge served in a shot glass…

Gardening
Gardening is a lie… Gardeners always like to think gardening is about caring for things and growing things and looking after things. The truth is that most of the time, it’s about destroying things – pulling them up, poisoning them, cutting them down or smothering them. That’s what we did on Sunday anyway – and that seems to be what everyone does when they do gardening…

On Monday, the weather forecasters warned of rain on bank holiday Monday – so we cancelled our planned trip to Osterly house – only to discover the weather was perfectly good… As it turns out a lot of people were fooled… the city of Bournemouth seem to have done very well by putting out a press release claiming that the met office are responsible for them loosing millions in tourist revenue… but they got lots of publicity out of it.

Running
Running three times a week is tough, but getting less so. George falls over about 20 times a day, but you don’t hear him complaining. I tripped over once while jogging on Wednesday and I’ve got a feeling I’ll be suffering from it for weeks - that’s the difference between falling over when you’re 2 and when you’re 40.

Luckily the crows weren’t waiting on Peckham Rye park. They’d obviously been scared off by the football team and the two skidivers who’d touched down just before I arrived and were rolling up their chutes as I passed. I suppose you have to be quite a skilled skydiver to avoid landing in the middle of Peckham High street (which would be a very bad idea).

Kate Bush’s “hounds of love” kicked in on my ipod as I entered the jungle at the top of the park. It’s not a great running song, but I’ve got it on the playlist for sentimental reasons.

I first jogged in the summer of 1986 and that was one of the tracks on my Sony walkman (actually, my Alba walkman, to be pedantic). It juddered repeatedly as I pounded along the beach on the family summer holiday.

I was running because of a philosophical debate I’d had a few weeks earlier with Neil Davies in the sixth form common room. He insisted that some people were just naturally good at things and others weren’t – whereas I argued that hard work and dedication were what really made the difference between success and failure.

As it happened, every year, just after the summer holidays, there was a school cross country run which everyone had to take part in, and Neil was regularly up there with the front-runners. I on the other hand, along with a few friends competed over who could come last without actually stopping.

So, I thought the best way to prove my argument was to issue a challenge. This year, instead of loosing, I would win the race – or at least finish along side Neil.

All summer long, I ran every day, raising my fitness and improving my time. Wherever I was and whatever I was doing, I made time to run and by the end of the holidays, I was feeling fit and ready.

Two weeks before the cross country run, the teachers went on strike and cancelled the event, but I invited Neil over anyway to run my course.

We kept pretty good pace with each other until the final straight, where Neil effortlessly stepped up two gears and left me as though I wasn’t there, settling the Nature Vs Nurture debate once and for all.

Mind you, I still don’t believe him. I still think hard work is more important than innate skill… Or perhaps, I’ve just moved the debate on a little in the intervening years. Perhaps, my actual argument isn’t about being the best, it’s about not acknowledging your limits.

I guess my real argument with Neil isn’t that someone with natural skills can’t beat someone without them, but that if you accept that you’re good at some things and not at others, then you’re giving yourself the ceiling of your own self belief.

Before the 4 minute mile was run, nobody was GOOD at running a 4 minute mile because nobody thought it was possible. Once the 4 minute mile barrier was broken and people knew it was possible, it started being broken all over the world by lots of different athletes. Not because they were suddenly capable of something they couldn’t do before, but because somebody’s refusal to accept their limitations allowed everyone to stretch what was possible.

Before the first powered flight, nobody thought they were good at building flying machines because nobody had done it. Afterwards, there was a road-map to the sky.

It may be that people are naturally better at some things than they are at others, but believing that keeps you locked within the limits of normality….

Food fads
We’ve finally found a food George doesn’t like, but we persevered and got through it. It’s one of those things we thought he needed to learn to like, so we just kept patiently giving it to him until finally after a lot of fuss and a lot of mess and a lot of tantrums, he accepted it.

Phew.

So what was it? Broccoli? Carrots? Liver? Nope. Jelly.

Lisa has been off some of her food too during this pregnancy… she’s fine with most things, but she can’t bear truffle oil. I don’t know – and she calls herself middle class!

We haven’t had a kick from the new baby yet, but it’s making it’s presence felt… and Lisa’s tummy sounds like a half filled hot water bottle, so there’s definitely something going on in there!

Sleeping
I went to check on George last night just before I went to bed. I opened the door expecting him to be sound asleep, but instead found him sitting up staring back at me. He froze as though being caught out and we stared at each other for a few seconds, agreeing non-verbaly that I wouldn’t say anything about the encounter if he didn’t. I shut the door and went to bed.

Ethan has been down this week staying with Sam and doing mosaics on the wall of her garage (which she is, of course turning into a cocktail bar). He’s a nice kid and loves playing with George, but he’s not as responsible as he’d like to be. It’s a shame because he thinks he can be left to look after George, but he doesn’t quite have the skills to do it yet.

2009-05-22T10:44:00.001-07:00

I’ve managed to start running – this time ipod fuelled and believe me that makes a difference… having the right music seems to push you on a lot further and faster. Last year, I ran a course that took me along Peckham Rye park and back. The area of the park I ran through is a big, field over which crows scatter themselves throughout the day. Crows aren’t like other birds – they don’t live alone and the don’t flock. Instead, they spend their days staked out over the fields at 10 metre intervals just standing, watching. It’s as though they’re waiting for a corpse to drop – which is of course exactly what they are doing. Rumours from the highland farms say that when food is scarce, the crows don’t wait – they just get together and pick a victim.

The East Dulwich crows have never got that far, but you just know they could if they saw a weak enough victim.

Another good reason to get in shape.

Anyway, fuelled by the ipod, I pushed on through crow country into the jungle – an area of undergrowth through which a maze of winding paths are carved. The jungle is home to wild terrapins and parrots.

The wild parrots seem to have taken over South London – I now probably see more of them than pigeons. And they’re not secretive – they’re loud and bright green and they fly around in flocks of 10-20…. All of which means I’m rather surprised that so few people have actually noticed them.

I guess people just never look up.

Anyway, I managed, on my second run to get lost in the jungle – only escaping once I’d discovered a strange looking playground – which on closer inspection turned out to be a set of outdoor gym equipment provided for the use of Peckham and East Dulwich residents.

A nice idea, but I was too tired to give it a try….

We spent last weekend in Worthing for Lisa’s Dad’s birthday – no room to stay so we stayed at Ann’s instead.

On Monday, Lisa was out with some work friends – but luckily, Sam had picked up a seabass big enough for four in Worthing and had to find a way to eat it – so I invited her, Jane and Gareth over – great because I hadn’t seen Gareth since Christmas.

Tuesday, Sam came over to babysit so that we could go out… well, partially…. She came over to watch CSI and we snuck off for dinner. When we got back, we rather stupidly decided to watch a late movie, so we ended up being tired for the rest of the week.

With children, things become a little more rigid. Your catch-up times tend to vanish and when you loose just a couple of hours sleep, it’s a week before you get it back… Which is a little worrying since we’re expecting what we’re now affectionately calling “baby 2” in October…

As a result, Wednesday which was supposed to be a quiet night in for Lisa and I, ended up as a barely concealed attempt to go to sleep on the sofa…

My birthday was on Thursday – Russ came over and acted as cheerleader for Geroge’s swimming lesson – but I didn’t actually do much else (apart from an Indian with Lisa’s mum, Lisa and Sam. My birthday celebrations I’m postponing until June 5th because may is frankly too mad to celebrate anything… although I haven’t actually told anyone yet, so my celebrations may be a subdued affair.

East Dulwich
I had a great example of East Dulwich nonsense this week. Popping up to our local fish shop (which is a great fish shop – the owner always recognises us when we go in, and this time I wanted a dressed crab. They didn’t have any, but he offered to do the job for me – which is great because it’s a real pain) anyway – I happened to notice their latest sale item: seagulls eggs at £4 each.

Seagulls eggs? – why? What can they possibly be to justify a £4 price tag? Surely they must be just for showing off at dinner parties…

Also, it turns out that the up-market butchers on Lordship Land has just bought another shop down at the other end of the street to set up as an even more up-market butcher’s…. I’m not sure how that works, but having just heard that the dormouse population has become more healthy recently, perhaps they plan to revive some old Roman delicacies. Roast dormice (as well as starlings, and pretty much anything else) were popular with the Romans in England…

At the weekend, Mum held her first family party for years. Many of the guests I barely recognised, but it was good to see Ian and Brian and Frank and Vera (as well as Mum, Dad and Andrew). At one point I asked Brian whether anything had happened since I last saw him. “not much” he said.

It had been 20 years.

It’s looking as though Andrew is going to loose his job. Hardly surprising – the recession has hit lorry drivers harder than anyone in the real economy. The numbers of lories on the roads have plummeted and those still there are driven by imported staff. The papers are even reporting it – and you know it’s serious when the media describes the lack of traffic jams as bad news.

This week was George’s last swimming lesson. It’s a bit sad, but at least he’s started enjoying them again. I think we may be on the way to getting him to enjoy having his bath again, but that’s a tougher struggle involving us basically forcing him into the bath each time…

His sleep was a bit disrupted too this week – and for the first time in months we had to bring him into our bed to calm him down.

And finally….

I wrote here a few months back about the red vans with “man with a van - £15 per hour” scrawled on the side in badly painted emulsion… I’d noticed them all over South London and seen the 0800 number on the side, so I decided this must mean they were part of a huge corporation whose image consultants had told them to look a bit amateurish so they could project a friendlier image and avoid the need to have any proper systems of customer service.

It turns out it’s not far from the truth.

An article appeared in the papers this week about the vans. It turns out they’re never moved. They’re registered and taxed and then dumped in parking spaces on public roads for years at a time simply to provide cheap advertising.

2009-05-08T10:30:00.001-07:00

Last weekend was a pretty full one. Sam’s birthday was a trip to Berkhamstead cinema a 1930’s art deko cinema beautifully renovated, but with the addition of a bar with tables and chairs at the front. So, you can sit in comfort and watch a movie without disturbing or being disturbed by other people, or being crushed into rows of tiny seats.

It’s great – and despite the fact that we had to watch “Marley and Me” or (“Marley and I” as it should more correctly be called), I don’t want to watch films in any other way now. In fact, given that most cinemas are half empty anyway most of the time, I can’t see why more don’t do it….

On Sunday, we went over to Adrian’s for a roast lunch – made from the fruits of Adrian’s garden… We managed to organise George for most of the day – by strategically keeping him awake so he slept through the meal, then by taking him to play outside (the flat isn’t really baby friendly)… however, he got a bit grouchy as it approached his bedtime.

As an offshoot, Adrian proposed that we always end up talking rubbish (which might have something to do with the amount of wine present) – and that we should have a dinner where we’re only allowed to talk about philosophy – and we each have to bring a philosopher (or at least their ideas) instead of a dish…. Well, we’ll see.

Bank holiday Monday saw us meeting up with Sarah and Chris at Kew gardens and picnicking in the rain. The gardens have a treetop walkway consisting of iron pylons with a gangway stretching between them in a circle. I took George up, but the structure was wobbling so much in the wind that he couldn’t stand up, and I couldn’t look at the view because I had to watch for people bumping into him. I’m sure it was fairly safe, but it didn’t give that impression to the stream of crying children who descended its staircase at the end of the walk.

Gillian came round on Thursday and came with George and I to the swimming class. For the first time in 3 weeks he didn’t cry – and actually loved swimming again.

He still hates his bath, though, and that shows no sign of abating.

My ipod has been mugged
I’ve decided to start jogging again. Now that the weather’s a bit better. And I thought I’d use my ipod with a few suitable songs.

Unfortunately, my ipod has been mugged by classical music. Since I downloaded Lisa’s Dad’s collection onto the ipod we got him for Christmas, and I put the music onto mine too, it’s completely swamped my rather modest collection of music, so if I hit Shuffle, I’m more likely to get one of the 18 CDs that comprise Wagner’s ring cycle than anything I might be able to run to.

I can’t even find the Electric Light Orchestra hidden among all the other orchestras now competing for room...

It’s not all bad, though. I’m making some good discoveries, and I’m really impressed with Flanders and Swann’s comic songs from the 1950’s . There’s a live album of theirs among the music now resident and at one point they stop in the middle to tell the audience they’re being recorded for posterity, and they stop to say hello to posterity (which I guess is me and my ipod) before going on to sing a song about the new concept of “high fidelity”.

It strikes me that people used to talk about music quality a lot – going on about how the amplifier was important and where you put the speakers was important and you had to have gold plated plugs and special equipment to get the best quality.

Now, all that’s gone. There is no hi-fi or lo-fi. Nobody says the amplifier matters anymore and people don’t spend anything like as much time and energy finding the right speakers or equipment.

Now there’s just one quality: IPOD – and one speaker : earplugs…

Anyway – as Ronnie Corbett used to say – I digress…. I was talking about jogging. And I’ve solved the problem of ipod mugging by using another ipod (given to me as a press freebe by adobe!) just for jogging music… will that get me out on the road?

Hmm… we’ll see. It won’t have the ring cycle on it. I’ll tell you that much.

Wired
I’ve now subscribed to the new UK version of Wired magazine. What’s great about Wired is that it’s got all the blokey stuff that makes GQ and the like popular – like style and gadgets and the like, but it also delivers some really well researched articles that aren’t afraid to be serious and complicated. There was an article last month about the maths behind the selling of sub-prime mortgages. This month, there was a piece asking (but not answering) whether the modern inability to concentrate on the same thing for more than a second actually had some advantages to it.

The idea (which is interesting, but I don’t entirely buy) being that we don’t often recognise that the most complex, mentally over-stimulating environment – i.e. nature itself is the most relaxing for us – so perhaps we’re designed to work best when we can keep changing our focus every five minutes. If we can set ourselves up to grab all the stray and irrelevant thoughts that occur to us while we’re concentrating on something else and file them without having to go off and deal with them right there and then, we should be able to come back later and make our lack of focus practical.

As I say, I don’t quite buy it – but the randomness of this blog is perhaps testament to the fact that there’s something in it….

2009-04-29T09:47:00.001-07:00

well, it’s been a couple of weeks since I updated this – not because of one massive reasons, but more because of lots of little ones…

Easter weekend George, Lisa and I spent together – we pottered about and did very little apart from relaxing. We didn’t see anyone, or go out or do anything particular. We just relaxed together – which was great.

Ok, we did a couple of things – we replaced one of our goldfish – Kieth who died last week. Our new goldfish is called Martin – for no good reason. We were asked to do a survey at the pet shop in which we were asked how long we’d had our fish. They seemed surprised they’d all lived as long as 2 and a half years…However another fish, (Kathy Rindhoops) bit the dust less than a week later, and the new replacement (Dave Thermos) is now swimming happily in its place.

Is there a mystery Goldfish killer on the loose?

We also managed to go clothes shopping in Croydon – where I speed-shopped (you have to with a baby) grabbing random garments and rushing them to the checkout before either George or I lost the will to shop. George is at that stage where he’s suddenly grown out of all his clothes and for the first time, we’re into an age range where we haven’t got a dustbin bag full of handmedowns for him to move into.

In addition (and I realise this is now sounding pretty full for a “free” weekend) we made a trip to Hampton court. It’s an excellent day out, and they’ve really brought it to life this year with a selection of actors wandering around in costume planning one of Henry VIII’s weddings, and trying to work out whether to invade France (similar conversations have gone on daily in the British establishment since they rather embarrassingly invaded us in 1066).

George loved it – he’s at the stage now where we just set him down and follow him around rather than trying to tell him where to go. This means we generally miss most of what’s going on, but it gives him a chance to explore….

The next weekend, Mum and Jan came up to stay – and seemed to have a good time pottering round London trying to track down ancestors (Mum’s latest project) and going to see theatre plays featuring puppet horses….

We went on the London Eye – George taking far more notice of it than he did last time (last time he was just a couple of months old). And we had lunch in Covent Garden.

After they’d left on Sunday, we went round to Mons and Abi’s (via the Peckham dog show – in which two enterprising youngsters entered a remote controlled k9 in one round). Mons and Abi have just bought the last part of their flat, so were celebrating with roast potatoes and prosseco.

Having run out of prosseco early on, we decided to make our own using cheap white wine and a soda-stream…. Mons decided the result couldn’t be called champagne because it came from Peckham, so Pec-va it is….

Lisa went to Krakow in Poland this week with Sam. Sam had decided she wanted to see the concentration camp at Auschwitz. I’ve been already, but I can’t say much about it. There isn’t much to say. It’s worth seeing. But you won’t want to go back.

Obviously it leaves you wondering how it could have happened and how we can safeguard against it in the future – and it’s tempting to talk about a charismatic madman taking over a country– to look at extremist groups and try to work out what makes some of them able to seize power. But I think that’s too easy. It’s like trying to create a contraceptive by trying to work out what made the sperm that fertilised the egg so special and how we can neutralise it.

The truth is that there are enough potential Hitlers in every town – and that all they’re waiting for is the right mixture of pride and desperation in the public – just waiting for the views of the Daily Mail and the Sun to become the centre ground. And the only thing that stops that happening is ordinary people keeping their eyes open for the erosion of civil liberties.

I don’t think we’re ever more than 10 years from Auschwitz re-opening. In 1929 we had the great depression and global financial crisis. By 1939 we had a world war.

As a side note - It’s strange how the London Dungeons – where similar atrocities were committed (not on such a scale, but nonetheless…) and that’s done up as some kind of gruesome theme park. Why? What makes torture fun in the London Dungeons? Just the time that’s passed since it happened? Doesn’t make any sense to me.

….anyway, Lisa’s trip left me on my own with George for the week – which was nice. We had days out in the park, and generally played. On Tuesday, I looked after Nathan as well (he’s acquired a broken arm in a dog-related biking accident and he’s great with George). And the weather’s been great, so we’ve had a nice week.

I even managed to file (or, at least pile) some of the paperwork that’s been forming in untidy heaps all over the living room over the past few months… essential recipts and warning letters are now separated from take away fliers and 3 month old copies of the Guardian Guide…

I’ve even made a special pile for all the greetings cards Lisa has bought. Lisa has a strange and uniquely female ability to buy greetings cards just because she likes them. Hence we’ve now got about 6 blank get well soon cards. I don’t know whether they had an intended target who got weller sooner than expected (or didn’t) but certainly, the next time someone gets sick, we’ll be well prepared on the sympathy front thanks to our teamwork (her work in buying the cards, and my work in retrieving them from the pages of Marie Claire so we stand a chance of actually finding them when we need them).

It’s good to have Lisa back now though. Although we haven’t really caught up – we’ve had Lisa’s Mum staying last night, and Anne staying over this weekend (she’s attending some kind of brownie conference – as a leader, not as a brownie).

George is learning all the time now. He’s suddenly decided he hates swimming though. He’s gone from loving every minute of it to screaming all the way through it in a matter of a couple of weeks. I’m not sure what the problem is. He also can’t bear having a bath – to the point that we have to push him into it. He’s gone from loving it to hating it in a week… perhaps he’s got hydrophobia…

It’s tempting to assume that something must have triggered it, but it’s possible it’s not something external, but something internal – in other words, he’s just simply thought about it and decided he doesn’t like being pushed underwater, and now he’s equipped to remember when it happens, he’s not best pleased with the whole experience.

Instead of just living for the moment and enjoying it as 90% fun, he’s weighing up the experience and deciding there are bits of it he can do without, and that’s spoiling his enjoyment of the fun bits – I guess we all do that to some extent.

His transition from cot to bed has worked really well – except that he’s worked out how to get out of it. I’ve gone in a couple of mornings and found him curled up on the floor with his bottle of water beside him – so he must have climbed out of the top of the bed, made it over to the chair where the water is left on the arm, taken it back to the bed, drunk it, found a pillow and gone to sleep on it… all without waking us up in the next room.

2009-04-08T10:38:00.001-07:00

ok – I managed to rescue my Premiere file – I had to load it in with all the clips Offline and then re-link them one at a time from within the programme… not sure what happened there.

Anyway, this week saw the re-appearance of 10x10 (http://www.dfgdocs.com/Events/1746.aspx) – a great resource for (London based) documentary makers. It’s a meeting in which filmmakers can screen 10 minutes of their work in progress and get 10 minutes of feedback from an audience of (mostly) other filmmakers. It’s very useful if you can go along with very specific questions you need answering (rather than just because you want to show off your work).

This month, I got a slot for my trilobite movie – so I spent a day or so cutting together a 10 minute sampler. This was a great help in itself actually – just the process of creating something “finished” rather than just slogging through hours of footage picking out the odd usable clip without knowing quite how it will be used is a great tonic.

I got the edit finished at about 5pm on Tuesday and hit render – expecting it to take about 10 minutes on my quad core 8gb machine. In fact, it took close to 80 minutes to write the DVD and I had to get taxi through London in rush hour just to get to the venue minutes before the deadline.

The showing was very helpful – lots of constructive criticism – the characters need to be explored more deeply (probably a symptom of me trying to cram everything into 10 minutes – but it’s a bit of a worry that I haven’t really got all of them opening up about the roots of the passion for prehistoric bugs….) - and I need to watch the balance between emotional and scientific content closely.

There was also a consensus that there’s too much narration in the version I presented and I need to let the characters speak for themselves. However, people did set my mind at ease about the actual quality of my voiceover work.

Basically, I’ve been quite nervous about my ability to do a competent job as a narrator and so when I’m editing my own voice, I’ve always got a bad feeling about what I’m doing – this probably stems from about 10 years ago when I did a short radio package for radio 4.

The producer of the programme liked the interviews I’d done and the editing, but thought my voiceover work was awful – eventually I had to bring in a friend (Mary – a journalist with a great broadcast voice) to voice the piece for me.

Since then, I haven’t really been comfortable appearing at the pointed end of a microphone.

So, that’s given me a bit more confidence – apart from anything else because my next project (if I ever commit myself to doing such an ambitious project) is going to have to have me at the centre of it….

In the meantime, I’m now re-energised about the trilobite documentary and I can almost see it taking shape. I’ve realised that editing all day every day isn’t the way to go once you get to fine-editing. After about 3-4 hours of this kind of work, I tend to start slowing down – it’s so tiring. Doing regular half days rather than irregular whole days will get the job done faster.

MIPTV
In other news, my last documentary, “how to colonise the stars” is now in the hands of the distributors, Electric Sky http://www.electricsky.com/catalogue_detail.aspx?program=2424
And they’re on their way to MipTV the TV market. Hopefully lots of TV channels will want to buy it!

We’ll see…

In the meantime, they’re still trying to track down the guys who stole my last documentary (Shark Story) and released it without permission as a DVD in WHSmiths. It turns out, the company got hold of a screener for the programme, duplicated it and put it out without permission.

They then promptly went into receivership, so the chances of me getting to know exactly how this happened and who’s responsible seems pretty low.

Still, I’ll get some money for it once the receivers cough up… As much as anything else, I’m looking forward to knowing what the sales were like!

Backlinks
Another plus is the story of my website’s popularity (with search engines at least).

Having removed my advertising on Google (because it was costing so much) I put a lot of effort into SEO (search engine optimisation) and had my site www.anachronistic.co.uk re-written with search engine keywords in mind.

This made my site appear on google, but, to be honest, not very highly.

However, I also wrote some articles about commissioning animation for film, documentaries, museums, etc. and put them up on the site, and employed a company from elance to go out and get other sites to link to the articles…. A process known as backlinking.

Now, the thing about backlinks are that they’re one way google uses to work out whether your site is useful and popular, so the idea is that the more other (relevant) sites that link to yours, the higher you’ll appear in searches.

Only a few of the 150 backlinks I’ve now got are showing up, but already the content from my site is figuring highly in searches (try looking for “cgi for documentary films” or something similar).

Is this permanent? Will it drive more traffic to my site? Will it be the right traffic and generate enquiries and work?.... only time will tell…

2009-04-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

Another weekend – another Sunday lunch – this one not hosted by us! We went round to Mons and Abi’s for a lovely afternoon…

I’m looking forward to this coming weekend though– because we’ve got nothing planned. For the first time in ages, we’ve got the whole four day weekend to ourselves. We’re going out on Saturday night, and we’ll probably have a day out at Hampton court or somewhere on one of the days, but we’re not putting anything in the diary – which is pure luxury and well overdue.

Lisa and I are feeling like we don’t get to see each other much right now. We’ve had a lot of visitors (all welcome) and the next few months don’t look any less busy (we’ve even considered putting up an online diary so people know what’s already booked!). And Lisa’s work have just announced they’re going to try to catch up with their backlog by doing 18 months work in the next 9 – which means Lisa is having to work an extra day (Friday) right up until she starts her maternity leave.

All of which is fairly rubbish – especially with her being 3 months pregnant and tired most of the time.

And the recession for me has meant not getting the big jobs I was doing last year and instead doing lots of smaller ones (magazine articles, etc…). This in turn means lots more deadlines, admin and fiddly jobs.

Still, I managed to show a section from my latest documentary to a group of other filmmakers last night and the results were pretty positive.

George is getting closer and closer to speaking - lots of burbling and something which sounds a lot like bye-bye... or it could be baby.... or it could be David Hasslehoff....

2009-04-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

New baby
So the big news this week is that Lisa is pregnant again… Of course we’ve known for a while, but Thursday was our first scan.

Scans haven’t been a particularly good experience for us up to now – with our first (before George) revealing that there was no baby, and our second (for George) giving us danger signs and making us believe George had a potentially very damaging genetic disorder…. which turned out later to be a false alarm.

Anyway, this one was better, revealing that everything was fine, and giving us our first pictures of the new baby…. The doctors measured its head, and it’s neck, and took lots of blood tests so they could give us a series of statistics involving how likely it was that our baby had downs, how likely it was to have chromosome deletions and how likely it was to fail geography at GCSE level….

To discover these things, we had to sit in a hopelessly overcrowded waiting room for four hours in front of a TV showing David Dickinson and a programme about autistic children while a succession of Nurses called our names using accents which would have been unintelligible even if they hadn’t been spoken in a low, embarrassed murmur…

Mary
My friend Mary stayed for a few days as part of a whirlwind trip from China, and we had a nice afternoon out on Wednesday. We then learnt some strange and deeply disturbing things about the London flat that she’s renting out and I’m looking after for her… this one will run and run, but I won’t say anything about it for now….

The wall
The saga of our wall being knocked down continues to roll on… George, our neighbor is knocking on our door every other day wanting to know if we’ve contacted the insurance – Which of course we haven’t because we haven’t got anything to tell them until the quotes for the repairs come in. And that’s at the mercy of the builders.

I’m pretty sure that trying to claim through George’s insurance is going to turn into a long running and pointless waste of time…. It’s never in an insurance company’s interest to pay up and while they delay, works are stopped, and it costs me time, money and energy….

All of which, I realise comes out sounding quite downbeat and weary considering I’m announcing our new pregnancy – but I’m a little tired right now….

2009-03-30T10:16:00.001-07:00

George had the best few days he’s had for a long time, smiling and giggling for most of the week. Then on Thursday night, it all went wrong. He’s spent the last two days and nights throwing up. Not very nice.

We’d planned to go away on Saturday for a day trip to Brighton. It doesn’t look like this will happen – which is a bit of a shame, not least because last week, after Mum and Dad left to go and see Grace and Igor, we decided we’d take a day trip to Windsor Safari park - a jaunt which George would have absolutely loved – if it weren’t for the fact we discovered just before leaving that Windsor safari park closed 12 years ago.

The fact that neither of us realised this was a bit embarrassing until we discovered that everybody we’ve so far told didn’t know it had closed either….

In the event, we had a pretty low key weekend – although we still managed a roast dinner at Sam’s…

Jade Goody died last week. With newspapers and the TV news all trying to tell us that she wasn’t as stupid as she seemed – primarily I think because of a need to justify our fascination with her. I’ve never been much of a fan, but I still found her strangely fascinating.

In science class I remember an experiment. The idea was that atoms and molecules are far too small to see even under a microscope. However, if you look at large particles you can see them moving about under a microscope even though they’ve got no power of their own as the atoms of water bounced off them.

By watching the erratically moving particles, you could see the unseen engines of the universe. It was called Brownian motion.

That’s the way I think of Jade Goody – as a character with no means of propelling herself through the celebrity firmament, she bounced erratically without direction – but through her, you could see the action of the forces that shape the media…

But there’s something else too. For me, she’s who I think about whenever I hear a policy proposed on social inclusion, education, the unemployed or pretty much anything, I wonder how it would have affected someone like her.

It’s a tough test for any policy, but there are enough Jade Goodys around, and by and large they fall through pretty much every net put into place….

2009-03-20T12:07:00.001-07:00

George, the neighbour who crashed into our house seems to have turned the exercise into an effort to make friends with everyone in the street. He’s been calling round regularly – sometimes up to 5 times a day – trying to sort out insurance and other stuff.

I admire the sentiment, but he seems to be able to choose the most inappropriate times (usually George’s bathtime, or when we’re eating). He’s also got the idea very firmly in his head that because his accident was important to him, it’s going to be just as important to us… which it wouldn’t be if we didn’t have him knocking on the door every five minutes asking why we haven’t phoned the insurance company for the 14 th time….

At the weekend, we had a couple of Lisa’s friends around for Sunday lunch – which was nice. I tried out my breadmaking, and it seemed to work – although I’ve still got a long way to go before I get the technique right.

My mum and Dad came up for the end of the week – and it’s lovely to see them. Mum’s leg is much better – and she even went out for a walk around London today (trying to track down our family tree), so that can’t be bad. She’s getting back to her old self which is great. And Dad is such an amazing hit with George who seems to think he’s the funniest person on the planet.

…Even if Lisa and I are both a little tired right now, so not very good hosts!

2009-03-13T12:39:00.001-07:00

Over the weekend, we went to Bristol for a break. I had a breadmaking course in Bath which Lisa got me for Christmas. It was run by a French baker who has a serious objection to, among other things, sliced bread and kneading.

The first objection is mainly due to the huge ingredients list you get on shop-brought bread – when all you really need in it is flour, water, salt and yeast.

The second objection has a lot to do with getting the right amount of flour and the right amount of air into your bread. The technique he taught is difficult – and I’m planning to try it on my own this weekend – but it was very successful.

We managed to make (using one recipe) bread sticks, fougassi, ciabatta and a tin loaf… there was even a bread-based quiche…

A really good course… although I’ll see on Sunday whether I manage to pull it off.

However, it was hard work, and what with that and Lisa’s day looking after George in Bristol (and the fact that we hadn’t got much sleep on Thursday night), we were both a bit tired. A pity really because we had a baby sitter booked to come to the hotel room so we could go out and have dinner. We could barely keep our eyes open.

Having returned from Bristol, and met up with our next door neighbour who’s wall was also demolished last week, he showed me what his CCTV camera (which he’s got pointed at the street – partially as a sign of the times, and partially because he suspected that this would happen sooner or later).

It shows quite clearly what happened as the car from across the road sped backwards into our front garden, paused for a couple of seconds, then screamed off into the road to crash again.

What surprised me was how quick it all was. From the time he started out of his drive to the time he left our garden was only about 5 seconds – and yet, although I was asleep when I heard the crash, I was at the window to see him drive out…. It must have been loud because I’m not out of bed that quickly when George cries!

Met up with Russ in town on Thursday, which was nice. We went to an itallian restaurant next to the Silver Cross pub on Whitehall… a rather bizarre experience as its management has changed since I was last there. It’s now done out like a Greek temple, but filled with full sized knights in armour for some reason. The menus are huge laminated books with what pretends to be a photo of each dish – only the photos are of generic pastas with other ingredients badly photoshopped into them so that the whole thing looks like a child’s collage….

Anyway, it turns out at the end of the meal (while they were hoovering up the floor around us) that they no longer take cards – only cash. Helpfully they accept euros, although we didn’t have any – so we had to simply give them all the cash and bits of fluff from our pockets and hope it was enough… it wasn’t, but they let us off.

2009-03-06T04:30:00.000-08:00

Lisa’s Mum’s Birthday
Last week was Lisa’s Mum’s 70th and we had a house full. Sally came up (without Colin or the kids because their dog was having its leg amputated due to a tumour). Lucinda, Giancarlo and Livia came over from Switzerland, and Lisa’s parents, of course, joined us.

Friday night was a bit frantic – but luckily we also had Jane’s Son, Nathan round as we were babysitting him, so he was able to help me make dinner.

Saturday, we went out for Wendy’s birthday to Beauberry house http://www.beauberryhouse.co.uk/ - in Dulwich for dinner. It’s a great place which serves a strange fusion of Japanese and European cooking – you can have a sushi starter, a pork hock main course and a sticky toffee pudding for afters.

They were also offering everything half price, which was nice. A small problem with Lisa’s Uncle didn’t dampen the evening too much, but we were both ready to sleep when the weekend was over…

It was also my mum's birthday this week. Her leg seems to be improving and she's getting out a bit more. I'm looking forward to seeing her in a couple of weeks when she comes up to London...

The recession has hit
Ok – there’s no getting around it. The recession has well and truly hit me. Having decided at the beginning of the year to plough money and effort into advertising my work in an attempt to grow my business, I find myself at the beginning of March with little to show for it.

By putting a huge amount (£40 per day) into advertising on google (my best source of business so far), I’ve got one job, and a few positive enquiries from January, but nothing at all of any use in February.

I can’t keep up that level of spending, so I’ve taken the decision cut it right back. Which in turn means no chance of getting the work that is out there.

The other strands of my advertising are more positive, but not any more promising. I’ve now had two email mailing lists compiled:

One of 2,000 museums to which I’ve sent a note letting them know I’ve written a guide to commissioning animation. This is a very “soft sell” – I’ve offered them a feature they might find interesting along with a note that they can contact me if they need any animation done for future displays. From this, I’ve got lots of people saying how much they like my work, and that they’ll keep my details for the future – but no actual work right now.

The other, of 500 aquariums to which I’ve offered a very specific animation idea – to create a “virtual fishtank” containing animations of extinct, or un-exhibitable sea creatures. It’s a much more direct offer (albeit one at quite a high value), but the response was pretty similar “love your work, but haven’t got any money” was the overwhelming view.

Although the responses I’ve received have all thanked me for sending my email - I also did a little checking, and am worried by the legalities of sending out mail unsolicited – (something I hate doing – but running I’m a little short on ways to make people aware of my work). It turns out that generally, you can send out emails to companies as long as you give them a valid email address to respond to and tell you if they don’t want your emails. You also have to not disguise who you are.

The one problem is that you can’t send emails to named individuals. Only there’s no way of knowing whether you’re talking to a company or one individual trading as a company, so it’s all a bit confused.

Anyway, this means I have to worry about the legal side of emailing, but it doesn’t mean I can practically do anything about it.

In addition, the company I’ve employed to build up my website traffic by writing a couple of articles about my work and putting them on sites which link to mine have come back to me with the articles to check – and they’re awful! They’re really badly written and say absolutely nothing of any value. I wouldn’t be happy having my work associated with them at all, so it doesn’t look as though that avenue is going to work either.

To make matters worse, my website stopped working this week – somehow it’s code became corrupted (possibly as a result of someone hacking into it), and it’s taken 3 days to get it working again and I’ve changed all my passwords.

All in all, I’ve been a bit despondent - there’s not a lot of work out there. By the looks of it, there isn’t going to be for a while, and I have to re-think my strategy. And this is not going to be a cheap year – either professionally or personally…

Solutions!
I’ve worked out that if I finish the documentary project I’m on now, and manage to keep the monthly newsletter I write for Pinnacle (there seems no likelihood of that going under – in fact it may expand) and I get a few more pieces from magazine articles, then as long as the images I’ve got on stock libraries keep generating income, I’ll make enough to survive.

This also depends on the tenant in my property in Manchester starting to pay his rent again (he hasn’t been able to pay for 6 months now and the council are being scandalously slow in processing his benefit claim. I may have to evict him.

So what else can I do? –well, my new plan is to develop a series of emails making different offers every month to different sets of people… the next one will be a very low-cost offer (just a few dollars for giving video footage a certain “look”). It’s not something I can make a lot of money at – more of a “loss leader” but my thought is if people aren’t buying high-cost projects, might they go for something much lower cost initially?

There are a few other low cost, small projects I can pursue – like writing articles and doing one off illustrations… but I still need to get the work.

Relentlessly optimistic
Ok, so to be optimistic about it. The good thing about having no paid work is that it means I should have the time to work on some of my own projects that nobody’s going to pay me for anyway. Having no other work means working on personal projects isn’t taking time away from paying ones, so if I’m organised, I should be able to do some of the things I’ve really wanted to do:

A feature film documentary idea about something I think is really important… and a children’s animated series. Both, huge undertakings, but if other work is short… I’ll do a breakdown of just what it would take to get these projects off the ground…

Hmmm….

New drive
We started work on our new driveway this morning… or more specifically somebody else started work on it at 1am this morning.

George, the guy from across the road who I picked up the other week when he fell over outside his house and broke his ribs, has been getting more unsteady on his feet over the last couple of weeks. The ambulance has been outside his house a few times, and he’s been put on medication.

He still spends a lot of his time standing outside his house, chatting to passers by during the day and feeding the foxes at night. In fact, he’s out there almost constantly.

He’s never been a particularly careful driver – bumping various cars on the way into our out of his driveway in the past few years. He hit Lisa’s car a couple of years ago, as well as running into a big yellow skp a few weeks later.

However, since his falls, he’s been on heavy medication, and last night at about 1am, he decided to go for a drive. I was woken by a crash and rushed to the window to see his car had skidded across the road in reverse, knocked over two walls and ended up in our garden. As I watched, he revved the engine, screamed off over the wall, smashed into our neighbour’s mini opposite, and accelerated into someone’s garden three doors down…

Some of the neighbours came out, and by the time I got there, he’d decided (against most people’s advice) to climb out of his car.

I always find, at the scene of road accidents that there are a few common responses:

The victims always want to get out of their cars – despite the danger of injuries being made worse if they do. They then invariably decide they need to go somewhere else or do something they clearly can’t do.

Anyone peripherally involved but not central tends to initially try to start an argument – but pretty soon realises it’s going to do more harm than good…

And most people tend to assume, having watched lots of movies, that the biggest danger is of the car exploding into a fireball (in reality, cars – even ones packed with explosives – rarely explode).

On this occasion, I managed to stop George from wandering off in shock, and tried to focus people on sorting out the mess rather than arguing about it (which as a polite middle class bunch, they seemed to do pretty easily). George seemed pretty un-harmed, but there’s a lot of damage in the street.

I made a cup of tea for his wife (who wasn’t in the car, but was mortified by it all), took his keys, and pointed the ambulance men and police in the right direction.

Hopefully, this will stop George from driving (I’m sure the police, his doctors and the lack of a car will also help), because it could have been a lot more serious. As it was, we had been wondering over the past week how we were going to get the wall taken down to make way for our new drive. It seems, that’s not going to be a problem.

He’s done us a favour.

Our neighbours, Jo and James were not in when the car ploughed through their wall as well as ours. They’ll be quite glad too – because if they had been at home, their brand new Porsche would have been parked directly in George’s path…

2009-02-25T10:23:00.000-08:00

We spent the weekend doing very little. Lisa’s not up to much – feeling a bit rubbish, so we stayed in. I thought I’d make toad in the hole for Sunday tea, and made the batter before going out for a run.

I was a bit longer than I expected – mainly because a shooting had meant the police closed off some of the roads, and I had to take a detour. When I got back, Lisa told me she’d been helpful and put the batter on the sausages. She’d only realised a few moments later that she’d taken the wrong jug and accidentally covered them in banana smoothie….

Anyway….

George is still making a fuss when he doesn’t get his way, but we’re working on it – generally by ignoring him when he does it. Most of the time, he’s still a joy, though, and he continues to eat just about everything we present him with. He seems to love olives – rather strangely for a 15 month old baby, but still…. At least he doesn’t ask for them to be relaxing on a bed of rocket.

He’s starting to put things together – blocks, puzzles, ideas. He’s piling things up instead of knocking them down and he’s pretending too – feeding his toys with his milk bottle, and making the noises he associates with different animals. He’s using his own words for lions, snakes and elephants – by imitating the sounds they make… very cute.

Yesterday was pancake day – so we had a few people round bringing their own fillings and making pancakes. Actually Nathan made half of them and Sam made the other half so all we had to do was eat them.

We also got a chance to try out our Christmas present from Andrew – a chocolate fountain. Which was a real hit. Unfortunately, it takes a kilo of chocolate just to get it working, so you need to be able to eat a fair bit of chocolate coated fruit to make it worthwhile.

It’s not so easy to clean though, and does tend to coat most of the room and everyone in it in chocolate. Still, you have to make sacrifices.

I read this week that the average person in Switzerland gets through 500g of chocolate a day. That sounds like a hell of a lot… My suspicion is that this is how much is sold per day and that most of it goes to British people on holiday there, staggering back home with suitcases full of the stuff for their relatives….

fossil hunting in vegas

2009-02-16T10:27:00.000-08:00

Ok – back from the frantic whirl of Vegas to what I’d like to call the real world.

I left London in the biggest snowstorm in 18 years. The snow made the whole of the South East grind to a halt, but for me, the worst problem was the post. Two deliveries I was expecting before I left didn’t arrive – one (a wireless microphone) I could do without, but the other, spare batteries for my new camcorder were essential.

I ended up with a practical, but annoying solution. I had to buy a new camera at the airport just to use as a charger and spare battery. Hopefully I should be able to re-sell it on ebay once I get the new batteries, and not loose to much money.

George is walking
When I got back to London, after a 10 hour flight, Lisa, Sam and George were there to greet me at the airport. George walked over to greet me.

Some time in the last week, he’s made the transition from staggering two steps and then falling over to being able to walk confidently wherever he wants. He’s now fairly steady on his feet and getting steadier every day.

It’s great to see him tottering about…

He’s also getting grumpy – more specifically, he’s crying instantly if he thinks you’re not paying him enough attention. He’s going to need to get over that pretty quickly!

The trip
I’ve spent the last week in America following a group of fossil hunters round and making a documentary about their visit to the world’s biggest fossil show and their attempts to dig up a rare species of trilobite…

How did it go? Well….

Vegas
We arrived in Vegas late, and the place really is larger than life. Everything’s bigger – even the queue for the check in desk at Caesar’s Palace for which we had to stand and wait for an hour and a half before being told they’d “lost” two floors of accommodation.

This seemed a bit careless to me, but still, if there’s one thing that really works in America I’ve found, it’s the ability to make up for it when things go wrong. They instantly offered Lisa and Sam accommodation in another hotel, an upgrade, and free beauty treatments…. I, of course, am working, so stayed only for one night before jetting off on my desert adventure.

There was really just time for dinner and bed as I had to fly out at 6 the following morning.

Pheonix
Met up with Enrico and Luc, two of my fossil hunting companions and documentary stars at Vegas airport for the hour long trip to Pheonix where we immediately got in a car and headed for the fossil show in nearby Tucson (I say nearby – nearby in American terms, so a 3 hour drive. Nearby like Birmingham is Nearby to London).

Tucson
The Tucson Fossil show is a strange event. All the rooms in several of the town’s hotels have been taken over by fossil sellers – each with their own stall or shop marketing everything from pieces of meteorite to shark’s teeth to dinosaur fossils smuggled illegally out of China or Brazil.

There’s an ambiguity about fossil collecting – in that lots of academics and museums don’t like private collectors and accuse them of removing and damaging important finds. Also, most countries have strange and complex rules about what can and can’t be collected.

However, at the same time, academics and museums don’t have the time or resources to collect much, and a fossil left in the ground once exposed by the weather will quickly erode and be destroyed. In addition, if you took away all the finds made by private collectors from museums, there would be very little left at all…

For this reason, filming is a little dicey. Some stallholders (in fact most) are delighted to be interviewed and to show off their wares. Some are secretive and suspicious. Looking pretty amateur with a small camcorder and mic, and promising not to use anything I didn’t get a release form signed for seemed to placate most of them, but some of the most beautiful collections were pretty much off limits for me and my camera.

The group, Carlo (the collector) Jason and Jake (the diggers), Dave (the fossil preparer) and Enrico and Luc (the scientists) make a good team, and everyone there is enthusiastic. But there’s often confusion about what’s going to happen next, so it’s very difficult for me to plan my shooting. We change our minds two or three times about which day we’re leaving the show.

I’ve taken the decision that this is a rollercoaster. And you ride a rollercoaster, you don’t try to steer it. Instead of coming up with a set of things I plan to shoot to make the story I want to make, I decide to film everything I can, and hope it fits together into something that makes sense.

It’s a documentary and I’m documenting. It means I have to think on my feet and make sure I get the covering shots that will make any potential story I end up wanting to tell work. It’s quite scary in one way, but freeing in another. I have to work for the moment – thinking of ways to combine shots into sequences over which narration can be played before I know what the narration is going to be. I have to constantly ask myself what is happening right now and how can I make it into a sequence of shots without pre-judging what’s going to happen next.

Carlo is rushing from stall to stall, and constantly calling for me to catch up – but I have to get outside shots, and wide shots, and have people sign release forms….

I discover the microphone is making a strange ticking sound, but it’s too late to do anything about it. I’ll have to rely on being able to remove the noise in editing. I also find I’ve lost the screw which attaches my tiny hand held camera to the flycam – a weighted device for steadying my shots. I have to gaffer tape it in place and tear it off each time I need to change the battery or memory card.

Vegas (again)
Eventually we leave Tucson (coincidentally just when we’d originally planned to) and head back to Vegas. I’ve got a plane ticket, but I go by car instead – taking the opportunity to film as we travel.

After 5 hours on the road, we arrive at Stacy and Jake’s home in Vegas, and Lisa and Sam come over for dinner. This trip is filled with late nights and early mornings, and Carlo asks me to meet them at Caeser’s Palace (where Lisa, Sam and I are staying for tonight) at 6 am. They turn up at 7:30, giving me a chance to take a look around the Strip.

Time here doesn’t seem to make the slightest difference - whether it’s 6am or 6pm on the Las Vegas Strip, the lights still flash, the music still plays everywhere, and the streets and casinos are still full. It’s as though the whole city is dedicated to stopping you from thinking or acting for yourself. “do this now!” screams everything.

I can’t escape the feeling that Vegas is taking up valuable space which could more productively used as desert.

California – the marble mountains
We’ve received information that our original dig site – a town famous for polygamy just outside Vegas is under snow, and so we can’t dig there, so we set off early for California where a more sparsely populated fossil bed allows us the opportunity to search for one of the world’s rarest trilobites.

We reach there around lunch time, and it’s not snowing. But it is raining… something it continues to do on and off for the next two days.

During that time, we find very little, but eat a lot of cold beefburgers and get very wet.

We stay in a couple of really expensive hotels (expensive mainly because we turn up late to book in and have to take whatever’s going) and eventually get rained off the mountain.

That said, I think we’ve done well. We do find one of the rarest trilobites in the world, and there’s a lot of material shot for the documentary. I think I’m beginning to see a story forming in all this….

Vegas (again)
Back to Vegas again, in time for dinner at New York New York – which Carlo is paying for because he didn’t find the “big find” of the day. Several of the team accidentally order the wrong meal in the chaos and end up with a huge steak and a massive lobster each….

It’s Sam and Lisa’s last night so they’re off doing touristy things and don’t join us. Plans change about four times during the evening and I end up leaving to go and stay with Lisa at about 10:30 leaving Jake on the roulette tables. I hear later that he left about 5 minutes after us anyway….

Somewhere outside Vegas
Our last day is spent two hours outside vegas – in the place we’d originally planned to dig. The snow’s gone. It’s a sunny day and the digging is easy – plus, we’re eating slightly better since the remaining steak and lobster form last night are packed away for lunch. There are lots of fossils in this mountain and soon most of the team (including me) have made finds.

It’s a great day to be out in the mountains, but from a filming point of view, it’s not so good. The fossils here are common ones and there’s not the tension of the previous digs. Jake and Jason, the professional diggers see this as an amateur dig site – lots of fun things to find, but nothing really special like the $10,000 trilobite they found yesterday.

It’s clear to me that the climax of the documentary was yesterday, and I’ve got to find a way to put today’s dig before it in the film – without explicitly saying that it happened in that order. I don’t want to lie, but I don’t want to make the ending a damp squib.

Hmm….

Home
At the end of the day, it’s agreed we’ve had a good trip. I think I’ve got everything I need – at least I better had!

Over dinner, Carlo starts talking about wanting to dig up a Triceratops. A triceratops is a whole different ball game from a trilobite – for a start, it’s the size of a truck – and for another thing, virtually everywhere you’re likely to find one is filled with men with guns.

Still, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was serious.

2009-01-30T10:37:00.001-08:00

George seems to have given up on the idea of walking. He was about ready to do it on his first birthday. Now he’s happy to wander round holding onto things, and can walk happily holding one of our hands, but he doesn’t seem interested in taking it any further.

He’s had an ear infection in the last couple of weeks, which gave him and us a couple of sleepless nights, but he’s over that now, and back to his happy self.

George fell over
George, our neighbour from across the road fell over the other night. We were just getting into bed, and I heard a crash and went out to find him lying in his driveway. His wife had phoned an ambulance while he lit up a fag. I offered to help him up, but he said he’d rather wait for the ambulance…

George was outside late at night because he always is. Every time you enter or leave the house, he’s there, watching the world go by, and stopping anyone from parking anywhere they shouldn’t.

Late at night he comes out to feed the foxes, who have learnt to cluster round his gate waiting for him.

It’s tempting to say that at his age, he shouldn’t be being so silly. But, why? We don’t criticise young people for doing risky things (like skiing or parachuting) we think that’s somehow Ok, whereas when someone older does something that, for them, is just as dangerous, like going out in the rain, we think it’s irresponsible..

Doesn’t make much sense to me. He’s old enough to know what he wants to do and make his own mind up.

Housing benefit
My tenant in Manchester has, by the sounds of it, got another job – which is good news as he hasn’t been able to pay his rent for the last few months. Hopefully, the housing benefit he’s applied for will come through to pay the arreas eventually.

It’s a major, and completely inexcusable problem with local authorities that they can’t process benefit claims for months on end.

I had the same problem when I had to claim benefit years ago – it took Lewisham council 6 months to pay my benefit. By which time if it hadn’t been for my parents, I’d have been on the streets.

I can’t think how councils are allowed to get away with this level of negligence.

However, all I can do (unless I want to evict my tenant, which I’m sure many landlords do in this situation) is wait for however long it takes, and hope I can cover the mortgage myself – which luckily, I can.

Vegas
Next week we’re off to Vegas to film the new documentary – I’ve ordered lots of new equipment, but I can’t help feeling I haven’t done enough planning. The trouble is I don’t know how to plan this shoot – the people I’m following will do whatever they’re going to do, and I just have to follow them and hope I can make a film out of it when I come back.

I’ve got a vague plan of how to do that, but I’m really going to be winging it.

Lisa and Sam meanwhile are going to be living it up in Caesar’s palace while George is looked after by their long suffering parents. Hmm…

Work
Ok – it turns out my documentary is available in WHSmiths, un-edited and packaged with a book in a very neat looking bundle and as part of a series of videos on all kinds of subjects –whether these are done without copyright, I’ve no idea.

It’s still looking very much as though whoever released them has done so without the permission of Electric Sky, my distributors, and I’ve posted off a copy to them so they can take action….

What they can do about it, since the company publishing the DVD has now gone into receivership, I don’t know…

New year, new website
I’ve now got my new website set up – due to a very helpful company http://www.agdesignpro.com/ who I found on Elance – as part of my new year resolution to do more outsourcing.

2009-01-16T09:17:00.000-08:00

Have now been back at work for a couple of weeks – and only just getting time to write up my blog – so here’s a quick roundup….

Christmas Day was fun – without being stressful. We asked Sam, Claudia, Adrian, Jane and Nathan round and everyone had to bring some food – with the result that we didn’t have to cook it all, and could concentrate on drinking Christmas pudding flavoured martinis and unwrapping George’s huge pile of presents.

Boxing day was, as usual, full of intentions. We intended to go out for a nice long walk, but it never seemed to happen.

I managed to pick up some kind of bug – maybe it was the flu that almost everybody appears to have contracted over Christmas – but I had a sore throat and my neck swelled up…. Nice.

Over the last year, it seems that every time I’ve stopped work for more than 3 days on the trot, I’ve got ill. It’s tempting to put that down to overwork, but the last six weeks have hardly been frantic. With both the yacht video and the museum animation out of the way I’ve been working on a couple of less difficult projects and generally mopping up administrative jobs. Nothing stressful.

It’s more likely that it’s a combination of working pretty hard – Even when I’m not on tough deadlines, I do fill my work time pretty comprehensively – and having George. George isn’t a difficult child by any stretch, and he’s a joy, but he does mean neither of us are ever really off duty.

Of course, that’s set to remain the case for a good few years – in fact the rest of our lives if I’m honest, so I’ll have to be able to cope with it without getting ill all the time…

We managed a visit to Lisa’s sister and nephews in Worthing – lisa’s parents were away in Italy for Livia’s Christening.

By new year’s eve, we hadn’t done very much and didn’t feel much like doing much. We spent the evening in with Sam. I went to bed around 10:30 because of my sore throat, but couldn’t sleep, so I was up again in time to watch the London fireworks from the loft.

So, then: new year’s resolutions:

1) outsource: I’ve decided to instead of doing all the work myself, hire people in so that my work can expand without me having to do everything. This is quite a big change and I’m a bit scared because it means trusting other people with some of my creative work, spending money, and leaving my advertising going so I’m generating work even when I’ve got enough to keep me busy!

2) Get fit – no change there then – it’s a bit cold for running right now, so maybe I should be going swimming one day per week…

3) Make a charity offer – offer my clients the option of paying 5% more on their bill and offer to match it so I can pay 10% to a charity. Hopefully I can set this up once I find a way to make it make sense, and find a charity to work with…

Lisa’s is to not buy food with packaging – so she’s trying to buy veg and fish loose rather than pre-packed. She’s been going into Somerfield unpacking vegetables and leaving the wrapping at the counter when she buys if she can’t find loose veg – letting the supermarket dispose of the waste….

New year’s day didn’t amount to much either, with both me and Sam not up to much – me because of the sore throat – Sam for other reasons… and by now, lisa was desperate to get out of the house.

Still, Friday and Saturday we went to my parents’ for another Christmas – My Mum’s hip seems to be getting a bit more mobile and even though the doctor’s not letting her leap about, she still managed to have a lunch for some of her friends. George was happy and popular throughout and even Dad seemed very cheerful.

Andrew has now recovered sufficiently from his back injury to go back to work, and is hoping the company, who are laying off drivers left right and centre keep him on.

Vegas
It looks like the trip to Vegas at the end of the month is on – I’m going to be shooting a documentary in the desert, meanwhile, Lisa’s Mum is looking after George and Lisa and Sam will be staying in Vegas and having fun.

We’re booked and planning the trip….

Documentary in the shops – but shouldn’t be
In the meantime, I’ve just been told today that my last documentary is now available in WH Smiths. Which would be great – if it wasn’t for the fact that my distributors haven’t given anyone the right to make it into a DVD, so somebody somewhere is distributing it illegally.

More on that story as it comes in….

Anyway, what other news?
We made a bungled attempt to set up two of Lisa’s friends with a Sunday dinner at the weekend. Bungled because all but one of the guests were ill (everyone seems to be this Christmas). Still, it was a nice dinner

Lisa and I went out for a nice meal on Tuesday (to the OXO tower restaurant). Very good food – and rather poncy – crab salad with sweetcorn icecream – along with mashed potato that appeared to be mostly butter and had to be served in a cup!

It’s a great place to eat, and they had a wine water. I can barely keep a straight face talking to wine waiters. I mean, really, it’s very nice, but it’s only a drink. You don’t have a pea waiter, do you, or a mash waiter…

This one had a French accent which always helps and always somehow seems as though it’s being put on when it comes from a wine waiter.

We got back to find George had been sick in his cot… he’s still running a bit of a temperature, but seems OK, and happy enough.

Oh, and Russ has been made a Lord… well, he’s got an MBE for running DEFRA’s Civil Service’s gay society. A great surprise to him, but he’s delighted and we’ll never hear the end of it!

2008-12-23T09:28:00.001-08:00

On Sunday – after a trip to the Rothco exhibition at Tate Modern (how many different ways can you draw a brown square?) We had our annual mulled wine and mince pies do – with the mincemeat made to my mum’s recipe, the pastry made to Sam’s and the mulled wine to Jamie Oliver’s. We didn’t have any cake baking tins so we cut the pastry into squares and made mince pie pasties – nobody seemed to notice.

It was a really good do – with lots of people having a really good time – and some surprising good news from Russ… which I can’t reveal until next year… Stay tuned.

After the party we watched A Wonderful Life and all cried!

Lisa’s parents were up for the weekend as Lisa’s Mum had to go and work for her brother today – she went over to his flat in Docklands late last night only to find he was in, but wasn’t answering the door – so she had to come all the way back alone at midnight.

He phoned this morning at about 8:30 am to ask where she was – but I told him he could wait until she got up. He’s not in anyone’s good books right now.

2008-12-19T11:24:00.001-08:00

Nothing if not adventurous, we spent Friday night at a salsa class followed by a music-hall-hip-hop fusion review. The salsa class run by a mad couple in lurid green spandex took us through a few basic moves which I totally failed to master – or at least I managed to clomp through the steps by the end of the class in a John Sergent sort of way. When the class ended, we went on to the revue – a Christmas show by an Australian who took on the character of an elderly woman blending the likes of “doing the lamberth walk” with hardcore rap – actually quite successfully as it happens.

Sunday was the Mark and Debs’ Christmas mulled wine do. George made a lot of friends – mainly because Mark and Debs have daughters who all wanted to play with him. As a father, Mark is amazing to watch – he always manages to find time to give the children attention without seeming to be constantly distracted by them. It’s quite a skill.

Gearing up for Christmas, I took George to the nursery Christmas party while Lisa was at her work’s do. The party was basically a few of the mothers of the nursery’s children along with about a dozen babies. Actually, it was less stressful than it sounds. The babies were all well behaved, and played happily while we sat on the floor and ate ice-cream. George had his MMR vaccine this morning, along with an extra bonus pneumonia injection - but it doesn’t seem to have slowed him down.

Earlier in the day I had wanted to get a bit of last minute shopping done, but failed totally because I couldn’t get George’s pram into any of the trendy, gifty overpriced shops I Lordship Lane. Not because they were full of people – they weren’t – but because they’d all ordered in extra quantities of pointless gifty nonsense which nobody was buying, so it was all crowding the shelves and isles, making the shops inaccessible.

Funny thing, this recession. I think retailers – or at least advertisers have got the wrong end of the stick over it. Just because the statistics are showing that spending overall is going down, there are lots of sales on – fair enough – but I don’t think that’s how it works. If overall spending goes down 5% that doesn’t mean anyone’s spending 5% less – it means most people have still got their jobs so they’ve got exactly the same amount to spend as they had before, but some people have lost their jobs and have no disposable income at all.

A sale means the first group buy the things they were going to buy anyway, but cheaper, and the second group couldn’t buy them if they weren’t on sale, and can’t buy them when they are. – so it may be counterintuitive (as the Americans say) but I’m not sure sales actually help the economy. Except, of course, if the shop down the road is having a sale, then you’ve got to have one too.

Another case of the free market shooting itself in the foot – which it seems to do more often than the political mood of recent times would like to admit.

Crushed by the wheels of Industry

2008-12-12T09:20:00.001-08:00

At the weekend, we went to a concert in Brighton featuring 3 of the best electronic bands of the 80’s: Heaven 17, ABC and the Human League (who I’ve seen before – just after sitting my A-levels 22 years ago!).

I never liked ABC much, but the other two had great music which sounded new and different then and now.

This kind of retro concert is a real winner. Want to see Britney spears, but don’t want to sit in a 50,000 seat stadium? – simply wait 20 years, and she’ll be playing on the same bill as Eminem and the cast of High School Musical. Believe it.

Plus you’ll be able to get to the front because there won’t be a massive crowd – and those that are there will be too mature and middle class to push.

We’d hoped to be able to meet up with Grace and Igor on the way home from Worthing, but both of us have very slight colds, so we thought it best not to risk it. We don’t want to pass anything on to them.

George is on his feet
George is now walking – well, tottering – well, standing for a few seconds and then pitching forwards. Every day he manages to stay on his feet for a second or so longer before tipping over, and he’s now quite controlled about how he does fall.

He’s very very close to being able to balance, and he’s happy going up stairs and increasingly confident going down. He’s also fast – very fast – at crawling.

He’s getting noisier too – constantly burbling to himself or to anyone who will listen. Not words yet, but a wide variety of sounds which he seems to have some control over.

Crushed by the wheels of Industry

2008-12-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

2008-12-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

Christmas meal
this weekend was basically about eating. I guess I won't be much of a surprise. Most of our weekends tend to feature eating on some scale or another. This one was a couple of what are becoming traditional Christmas dos having nothing to do with Christmas whatsoever.

The first, the Doctor Who fans Christmas meal (this year hosted by James in Guildford) steered us well away from Christmas into a local Indian restaurant. The same restaurant, in fact, which we ended up in on the evening of my stag night.

It was a really good night, marred only by the fact that I had somehow got the timing wrong, and the meal was taking place a lot earlier than I thought. Consequently we couldn't get a babysitter to cover it and so Lisa to stay at home and miss it.

It sounds like John and Cathy aren't having a terribly good time. John's work, seem to have decided to move his department, lock stock and barrel to India. They suggested there might be the opportunity for John to go out and help train the people replacing him. But he's not keen, not least because they're moving to Mumbai -- the scene this week of the biggest terrorist attack since 911.

Mind you, they have given John, about six months notice. So doesn't need to panic just yet.

Sunday's food fest was Nick's now traditional Christmas Mexican lunch. To which everybody was encouraged to bring their own home-made Mexican treats. Ours was Quorn Mole -- a sauce made from chillis bananas, tomato and chocolate. Sam bought along (as well as the obligatory margaritas) scallop seviche – or raw scallops in lemon juice. Scallops aren't cheap, though, so we all had to make do with an “amuse bouche” - Sam's favourite expression of the moment. An Amuse Bouche is the tiny mouthful of food you sometimes get offered in very posh pretentious restaurants while you wait for your starter to arrive. It's supposed to cleanse your palate - or some such nonsense

E-mail from Gareth.
I got an e-mail, this week from Gareth's e-mail address -- obviously purporting to be from him. Here is the text of it. Take a look at this and see if you think it comes from someone who works as a sub editor on a national magazine:

Hi friend: Introduce you a good website;* www.xmas-buy.com * My friend introduce me this website, it is a large wholesaler who trade mainly in all kinds of electronical products. To my surprise,their products are very low in price and high in quality. I bought an iphone from this website last month, and the iphone works very well! I think it is a shopping paradise which can bring you much benefit, so i want to share it with you!Christmas will come soon,won't you want to present your friends/family/colleague/ etc... the brilliant gifts ?It is really worthy to have a try.Their contact information is: Email: xmas_buy@vip.188.com MSN: xmas-buy@hotmail.com Merry Christmas in advance! best regards!

Hmm… I don't think it's really from him.

Peter’s Christmas drinks
Peter, Lisa's uncle, held his regular Christmas party last night. We took George along, and he spent most of the evening. Crawling around the floor giggling at people. He’s becoming a very sociable baby seems able to remain happy, right up to the point where it falls asleep. Peter's party is always full of characters. One regular there always repeatedly points out how much she loves Sam. Another never fails to miss an opportunity to call Zimbabwe “Rhodesia”. Among the party are always a few people wearing sharp pinstripe suits (Peter lives in an apartment block at Canary Wharf -- somewhere that never quite seems like anybody's home -- you have to sign in reception). I resisted the urge to take a poll in the room of who thought they'd still be in work this time next year -- or next month.

2008-11-28T10:31:00.000-08:00

Weekend
This weekend was another trip down to Worthing. We met friends of lisa’s, Suzanne and Richard, for dinner. It was a nice evening, and I always feel a bit sorry for them, because they don't really ever cook fish or vegetables -- they are committed carnivores, a so they are always a bit stuck when it comes to dealing with me.

Lisa's parents are away. They're having a couple of weeks of well earned rest, and spending Thanksgiving with Lisa's brother in America. This meant at least, we had a bed in Worthing. It was actually good to be able to spend a little bit of time with the children -- we went out shopping with Morgan -- I helped Ethan with his homework -- and Lisa was able to have a bit of a chat with Kieren on the way back from Scouts. It seems Kieren is really missing all his friends in Manchester, and that seems to be manifesting itself in him getting into trouble. Helping Ethan do his homework -- although it took about two hours for him to write a page -- was good fun. He was writing an essay, and since that's pretty much what I do for a living a lot of the time, it was interesting trying to explain the process and lead him through it without telling him what to write or how to structure it. What he came out with in the end, I think was imaginative and funny.

On Sunday, we came back and spent most of the afternoon at Sam’s. She decided, for reasons I'm not quite clear on, to prepare lunch in the style of the American deep South. I never had grits before, but it's actually very nice. Most of the food we had seemed to be made, mostly of corn.

where’s all the money?
Woolworths went into receivership today. So did MFI. For the first time in this whole financial crisis, the BBC's correspondent Robert Peston (a reporter who’s really come into his own during this crisis as the only person who seems to be able to not only understand what's going on, but also explain it in terms that most of us feel we can understand) sounded genuinely upset. At least it seemed that way. It is quite hard to tell because he has a very odd delivery, stressing apparently random words by drawing them out to four times their usual length.

You'd think that the Woolworths would do well, being a bargain hunter's paradise in this current climate. However, it seems that people are turning to supermarkets and the Internet instead. I wonder what all the empty stores will become. I can't think of any retailer who will want to buy up 800 odd stores, right now. So they could well end up simply empty. Big holes in the middle of every shopping high Street in the country.

And another set of government backed rescue plans have cropped up. Another few hundred billion dollars, thrown into the ring in an attempt to reverse the global economic slowdown. Which makes me wonder a couple of things: firstly, where is all this money actually coming from -- I mean, if the government has got to borrow stacks of money to give to the banks, isn't it borrowing it from the banks in the first place? The government does not have these huge piles of money just sitting there waiting to be spent. It's got to get it from somewhere, so somebody must have it. The idea is that there is supposed to be a shortage of money, but that can't really be true -- there always is the money out there and somebody must have it. The banks may not be lending each other money, but unless there’s some elaborate game of musical chairs going on, even with no lending between banks going on, the money still has to be there. It's a closed system - nothing in nothing out.

Secondly, the whole idea of refloating the economy with injections of cash presupposes that the boom we were experiencing before all this happened was the natural state of things. And that this downturn is some kind of blip that needs to be corrected. I'm not at all sure that's true. In fact, I don't think that the rabid spending, fuelled by debt. We've had over the past few years is something we should be attempting to get back to -- though we may have built our economy on it and though the end of it might cause a great deal of trouble, I think it probably has to happen. And just throwing in more money to artificially hold up the crumbling system isn't going to work.

Doing my taxes
I decided really quite responsibly to spend Friday getting all my accounts up to date. In preparation for doing my taxes. I managed to do some of the dull and irritating work in the morning, popped out to grab something for lunch, and returned to discover I'd locked myself out. Lisa had gone to IKEA, with Sam (the only other person with a set of keys), and I knew they'd be there most of the afternoon.

It was raining, far too hard to do any Christmas shopping. So reluctantly, I was forced to spend the afternoon, sitting in the pub reading a book I bought on Lordship Lane.

Its book called “bad science”, written by a guy named Ben Goldacre, who writes a column I always read in the weekend Guardian. Basically it's about the way people get intentionally or unintentionally hoodwinked by pseudoscience or badly done science. So, the column covers everything from how to fool fingerprint detectors using household jelly to why people end up dying unnecessarily because they abandon proper medicine in favour of homoeopathic nonsense.

I always find the columns entertaining, if a little shocking.

The first part of the book was concerned mainly with homoeopathy (apparently a really good homoeopathic “cure” is one where the active ingredient has been diluted to a level at which -- and this is no joke -- if the entire universe was filled with water, there would be one molecule of the ingredient in it) and the way clinical trials can be skewed by the researcher’s subconscious intentions.

It's fairly obvious that if in a trial, you don't take care to make sure that neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is taking a placebo and who is taking a real drug you’ll mess up your results. However, I was quite surprised by the degree to which this kind of mistake is made in real trials, and the degree to which the results are affected.

Apparently they've actually done analysis, to discover that simply by letting the person doing the testing know which patients are taking which drugs, even if they don't tell the patients, the results could end up being skewed by 40%.

The power of the subconscious is pretty impressive - which made me wonder how it was that I managed to lock myself out on the one day in the year when I was supposed to be doing my taxes, rather than a job I actually wanted to do.

2008-11-20T10:18:00.000-08:00

George and his fear of floats.

George has developed some curious preferences. He seems to like lions a lot, but he is afraid of swimming floats. This doesn't seem to me to be a very good survival instinct.

I don't think he'd last a very long in the wild.

The final payment for the trilobites animation came through yesterday. My bank account is now in positive territory for the first time in years.

My latest new toy arrived yesterday. I'm having a go at replacing typing (I'm actually quite a good typist -- I took touch typing at school and that's one of the few things I learned there that I use regularly in my life now) with speech recognition. I've invested in Dragon dictate and the best microphone I can buy for that with £15. I'm actually quite amazed at how good it is. I can speak almost at normal speed and as long as I pronounce my words pretty well, it recognizes moral less everything I say.

I once say using it is instinctive, but it really is pretty good from the moment you install it. I've spent about 10 minutes training it (and all that means is reading a few paragraphs aloud), and it's spent a few minutes going through my “ my documents” folder getting used to my style of writing. It's probably been given a bit of a head start because I write a lot, and most of it I have to say is probably fairly formulaic -- after all, I write a lot of tutorials and reviews for similar kinds of magazine. There are also couple of books I've written in those folders, so there's a lot of material for it to do what it calls a collocational analysis on. Basically this means working out what words are unlikely to say given what's already in the sentence. As a writer, it's a bit dispiriting to realise that a computer can predict with a relatively high accuracy what you're going to write based entirely on how similar it is to what you've already written in the past. And there was I thinking I was being original.

And it said that the success rate is very high. I'm having to get used to saying the word comma and the word full stop, so this entry is probably lacking in punctuation. Dictating this sentence I realised that I don't know how to actually write the word comma -- I have decided with the keyboard because whenever I say it the computer adds a punctuation mark.

Not sure to what extent using voice recognition will change the way I write. The problem with typing is that however fast you type you tend to forget what you were writing before you get to the end of the sentence and that means you tend to rewrite as you go along. With voice recognition things go onto the page almost as quickly as you think them, so perhaps it's possible to be a bit more flowing. On the other hand, maybe that's not a good thing. Maybe you need the time it takes you to actually type to work out whether what you were going to say makes sense or not.

Probably, it's just about getting used to the system.

One problem I think and have is that the programme takes a lot of processing power so if I'm doing something else, which I usually am, it slows right down. Given that if I'm writing a tutorial I'm usually running the programme the tutorial is about in the background that might be a problem.

Andrew
Andrew's back problem, which has been troubling him for a while, has got a lot worse. He's had to take several weeks off work (something he never does) and move back into my parents house. And with mum recovering from her operation and unable to bend down and him on painkillers and unable to stand up it sounds like things are a little difficult in the house. It's a lot for dad to cope with I imagine.

2008-11-17T10:23:00.001-08:00

The weekend was a gentle one – relatively. Our only real event was our antenatal group’s first birthday re-union. We all met up without our babies for a dinner on Saturday night… at least most of us did. There was one no-show – from a couple who fall into the “fretful parents” camp. Who drop whatever they’re doing as soon as their baby sneezes and rush off to accident and emergency. This time, they cancelled because their baby had a temperature – despite the fact they live 10 minutes walk from where we were meeting and the babysitter could easily handle it….

Anyway, it was a fun evening comparing notes on babies, the potential chances of having more babies – and on the state the economy in the various lines of work we’re all in. The couple I was sitting next to are in graphic design for advertising – and although they’re both doing fine, it seems like the bottom has dropped out of various parts of the market.

I’m a bit concerned because just before the economy hit the rails, I had so much work that I turned off all the advertising I do on Google. I didn’t need more work at that point, so it seemed silly to advertise. However, I’m getting to the end of that work, and in a few weeks I’m going to switch the advertising back on. I have no idea what will happen when I do – maybe there’ll be no work out there. Maybe there’ll be loads…. I don’t know.

Still, at least it looks like I’ve got this job in vegas for the new year, so things shouldn’t be too difficult in the short term….

Decorating
It looks like Lisa has found a tenant for one of her properties – which is good news because the work on the new one is (rather predictably) taking longer and costing more than we’d predicted.

Also, my tenant in Manchester has stopped paying rent. Apparently he’s lost his job and is applying for housing benefit. I’m inclined to give him the time he needs because I’ve been in the same situation and the councils tend to be so slow in processing housing benefit applications that people can easily get into problems. Lewisham council were six months behind in setting mine up when I had to claim and if I hadn’t had savings I’ve no idea what I’d have done.

In any case, even if the tenant moved out now, I doubt I’d get anyone else in before the new year, so there’s no point in making things difficult. I’m going to give him all the leeway I can…

More Decorating
Sam moved in with us for the week while her place was decorated so we moved into the spare room, turned the heating up to full and got some extra wine in…. the decorating was done by Eric. Eric is a really good decorator – but it’s difficult to get anything done in the house when he’s working as he tends to have plenty to say about almost every aspect of the job. He knows his way around the differences between the different makes of paint – even when they’re producing the same colour – and isn’t afraid to give you warnings about different finishes and different applications. When doing our hall, he praised our work on undercoating the woodwork – which was nice, except we’d thought we’d finished it!

Nevertheless, he put on a couple more coats and the results did look a lot better.

When he’s finished a job, he usually likes the result so much that he has to go home and re-paint his own house in the same colours. That is, after he’s done his paperwork, which always gets done in his “Office” – the pub across the road.

Wasting half the day
On Friday, I got a knock on the door at about 10am – it was a guy from the electricity company helpfully informing me there was a problem with the power and they’d have to turn it off for about 2 hours at about 12 oclock. A bit of a pain, but I was pleased I knew about it, so I could turn everything off before it all fused.

So I did – at half 11 I switched everything off, and took a long lunch break with Sam at the Bishop.

When I got back at 2, the electricity hadn’t gone off, so I’m left with a problem. Do I wait until they do turn it off, and not get any work done, or do I guess that they haven’t needed to and risk a power cut.

I took the risk and they never did cut the power.

In other words, although it was helpful and well intentioned telling me what was going to happen, the fact that they didn’t tell me when they changed their minds meant that I wasted 2 hours and was worried for the rest of the day about loosing all my work.

The warning did more harm than good.

Weekend
This weekend we prevailed upon Lisa’s parents, leaving George with them, Sally, Colin and their children and taking ourselves off for a break. We stayed over in a five star hotel in Southampton for a night and had dinner in their restaurant which was great.

We’ve come to the conclusion that a couple of days in a really nice hotel every so often is a better way to relax than a two week holiday once a year. You come back refreshed, and relaxed, but you don’t come back to a mountain of stuff that needs your attention!

We got back to Worthing in time for me to play a muddy game of football with Ethan and Morgan….

2008-11-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

On Friday night my parents arrived, and later so did Giancarlo, Lucinda and little Livia. It's hard to remember George being as small as that, or as quiet, but Livia is a happy little soul.

We ended up chatting until about 3;30 am.

Although Friday was George's birthday, we celebrated on Saturday with a trip to the London aquarium

A trip out with Sally and coin’s 4 boys always feels a bit like a juggling act. There's always the feeling that however many adults there are, it's not enough and we're constantly on the brink of loosing one or two of the children. This Time Kieran provided a distraction by an unprovoked rugby tackle on Ethan. There's an ongoing primeval dispute between the two oldest boys. if they were any other species one of them would probably not survive. You can't really blame either for the natural competitiveness that's an essential instinctive part of survival, but it's certainly tiring. One day the wider competition of the world will kick in and they'll probably become an inseparable team.

In the meantime, the attack distracted everyone for long enough for Donavan to wander off into the crowds around the London Eye. Eventually we got to the more controlled environment of the aquarium and it was less of a problem. Kieran carried George around most of the tanks and he loved it, but in the melee I ended up rather neglecting Mum and Dad's needs.

After the aquarium it was back to ours for cake and champagne. I put George to bed, gave him his milk and waited for him to drift off to sleep - Saying goodbye to him on his first birthday knowing I'm not going to see him for a week (not a long time, but the longest I've been away from him in the last year). Lisa's feeling a lot less ill, but I didn't want to leave her either...

As I type this I'm somewhere over the Atlantic and it doesn't look like the journey I started in a taxi at 4:30am is going to be an easy one. The clerk at check in looked through my travel itinerary and shook his head "you should change your travel agent" he said.

Anyway, the flight information boards weren’t working so Heathrow was full of bleary eyed passengers wandering aimlessly about, but after a change of plain and some trouble with the doors, we finally left 2 hours late. Meaning the trek across Washington to get my connecting flight from a different airport is probably going to be in vain.

It looks like I'll miss my flight and I've no idea how I'll get t Cancun. Given that I'm supposed to have a meeting as soon as I arrive, things are looking a little tricky. Oh,, and the flights are with different airlines so my current carrier will probably wash their hands of me in Washington.

The airline as always forgot I was a vegetarian, but as always, they found something for me anyway. Consequently breakfast was a Muslim meal. Hurrah for religious inclusive.

Monday
I'm very impressed with United Airlines. They didn’t abandon me in Washington. As soon as I found their counter they looked for the first way to get me to Cancun, quickly realised it wouldn't be until tomorrow, put me up in a hotel, got me a meal voucher and organised a cab to get me back to the airport for my 6am flight the following morning.

I'd have expected this if I'd been flying United all the way, but my connection was with a different carrier in a different airport, so the fact that they just dealt with it without hassle was a welcome surprise.

Customs was a bit odd - the guy took my passport and papers made me scan my fingerprint and have my photo taken and then handed everything back to me. A few minutes later in the toilet while waiting for my bags, the same officer approached me and asked to see my passport again. I opened it and it was someone else’s. I checked my pockets and found I was carrying my passport as well.

The guy must have kept the previous visitor's passport and handed it to me along with my own... for all I know he's also registered my photo and fingerprint on her details or vice versa...

Anyway, I thought I might wander over to the Smithsonian while I was in town... but this is America and nobody wanders anywhere. The hotel was far from the centre and all I managed to do was have a nice dinner in the restaurant and go to bed at about 8pm in time for my 3:30 wake up call.

I did turn the news on for the latest on the election and saw an unsettled looking McCain protesting that his campaign was still viable... It looks like Obama will win - which looks like a surprisingly good choice by the voters... I flicked through a few other news channels - I think my hotel was for businessmen as it only seemed to have news (and pay per view porn).

I thought the Simpson's newsreader, Kent Brockman was a caricature, but he's pretty representative of US journalism from what I saw.

From Washington to a very cold Chicago on an early flight, and then a connection to Cancun. Chicago airport is huge - big enough to make a good home for a Brachiosaurus - the tallest, heaviest dinosaur known. I can say this with a fair degree of confidence because there's one - or at least the full size replica skeleton of one - standing in the arrivals hall. Very impressive. it's an advert for the museum which also houses Sue - the world's most complete (and expensive) Trex.

The epic scale is even more in evidence outside. On the way in, we seemed to taxi for ages. And because I had a window seat, I could see we made a complete circuit of the huge airport, joining a long traffic jam of planes. Eventually our sarcastic pilot gave us the reason. New contracts had meant all the air traffic control staff had left, so the airport was in the hands of trainees who didn't know their way around the place.

For miles outside Chigago. the landscape is gridded. Sliced by perfectly straight roads into identically sized squares. Each square is given over to something different - a farm, a housing area, a car park, but they're all identically sized and they extend out of Chicago for miles... there seems to be nothing truly wild in this landscape - even as the towns give way to countryside, it's still just squares of different crops all the way out until you reach the messy border between land and water that I assume is the Mississippi delta.

I was met at the airport by the brand new wife of enrico through who I've been mainly working on the animation and the very soon to be wife of Jake the American Fossil hunter. Their wedding will take place apparently at Carlo's new hotel complex in five days time.

We drove out of Cancun to the resort and trilobite museum and I quickly realised what a project Carlo was involved in. The resort is far from finished. In fact the main lobby is pretty much a building site.

As for the museum, it's being worked on constantly by Jake, Enrico and their partners - who seem to have been completely sucked into the project. Enrico I'm told has barely left the museum all week.

The museum itself is not huge. It would take about 2 minutes to walk through, or 15 if you stopped and read everything. Nevertheless, it contains probably the best collection of trilobite fossils in the world.

Enrico is tall, Italian and the intellectual of the group. Jake is a cross between Indiana Jones and a Hollywood dealmaker, who travels the world unearthing and selling fossils, working with museums and private collectors like Carlo.

Carlo soon put in an appearance. He's quite a character, who lives with both feet on the accelerator and everyone around him is sucked into the vortex of whatever project he thinks up next. When Carlo wants to do something, I'm told it gets done - and I don't doubt it.

I've got a lot of time for people like that, but I realise that they can be dangerous too... You have to be careful not to loose sight of your own needs in their enthusiasm. but it's hard not to respect someone who's seen an alligator infested swamp smelling of bad eggs and built paradise there.

It's not eco friendly but you've got to admire his vision.

This is his third hotel complex. I'm staying in his second - just down the beach - it's an all inclusive luxury resort with fine dining and free drinks served by "beach butlers" Nice.

what's Carlo got planned for me? well, he's got an idea for a documentary series which basically involves visiting the world's most significant fossil beds on a series of five day expeditions. The three of them certainly have the characters to turn this into an interesting series, but it's a big project and my part in it would be demanding....

In the evening we all went into Cancun town - about half an hour's drive through the foul smelling swamp. Carlo took us to a steak house (I don't think he'd understand vegetarianism) but they did tuna steaks (very well). As an initiation the men all had to eat whole chillies. Oh joy.

it’s clear to me that Jake, Enrico and Carlo's partners (who are all with us) have become very involved - they all seem to have been digging in deserts despite the fact that none have chosen palaeontology as their passion.

Later we had tequila back at the resort before finally falling into bed at 12~30... a long day which didn't stop me waking up at 3 next morning.

Tuesday

Carlo meets us for breakfast at 8 and we're taken back to the museum to talk more. Carlo is spending a lot of time with us considering he's got a wedding in his unfinished hotel in five days (he's not only hosting, he's also the padre)

He's as busy as you'd expect but seems to take it all in his stride. I don't think this is going to be a relaxing break....
_
Ok, it looks like this documentary is going ahead. 2 weeks in February we're heading for Vegas - or at least the desert around Vegas. "What Carlo wants, Carlo gets" is a phrase I hear a lot around here. Carlo is an Italian who turned up in Cancun 15 years ago to open a dive shop. He's certainly done well for himself.

At lunch we ordered a dish which wasn't on the menu - called, in typical style, pasta Kier (Carlo's surname). It’s actually a traditional Italian dish, only with far more chillies (because if you don't eat very hot food you're not a "real man").

In the meantime, Guests are starting to gather for the wedding. First, a surfer dude and his girlfriend appear. They fit the stereotype so well that it's hard to believe I'm not watching one of those Californian beach movies. When I say I've never skied they look at me as if I must be from another planet. Still, they're nice enough.

Later, Dave the preparer turns up. A retired teacher, Dave's the guy who turns the finds from marks in the rock into beautiful intricate fossils. He spends his time with a .1mm sandblaster carving away the rock to reveal the creature within it. It's somewhere between dentistry and sculpture. He lives next door to Alaska and smokes his own salmon.

I hope Dave can be in the film. He’ll bring some careful sanity to proceedings.

Enrico and his wife should have flown back to Belgium but their plane was delayed so they joined us for dinner. The restaurant we ate at had three different menus - one serving only lobster. Mine was a stew in which pieces of bacon appeared unannounced (I of course ate them anyway - out of a mixture of politeness and the fact that it tasted good).

Wednesday

I suggested a few ideas for the film to Carlo and one of them involved a pre-expedition meeting. Carlo decided instantly that today would be the best time to start filming... I guess that was predictable.

He found me a tripod and two extra cameras, but then was so busy we couldn't actually have the meeting. I'm not unhappy because the museum is so noisy with all the building works and its acoustics so bad that with my one microphone, covering a meeting would be very tough.

Anyway, I now have to think of what I can shoot while I'm here without relying on Carlo - or at least by taking into account the fact that he's only ever around randomly (and at mealtimes).

It turns out Carlo 15 years ago bought up a whole strip of swamp along the coast at next to nothing. Now he owns a string of hotels. the new one has 500 rooms and there are 400 people working on site in the run-up to opening. However, his office contains two desks and a computer - and he's rarely there. He seems to run the whole show from an iphone. He's involved at every level from installing the lighting to putting the pictures up.

More guests are arriving for the wedding all the time. The free bar is taking its toll of most of them. Enrico and his wife made their way reluctantly to the airport last night. It's a shame I couldn't have done any filming of him, but it'll work out somehow.

Thursday

The meeting still hasn't happened, and with the wedding approaching it's looking less likely. There are too many agendas around here already without me trying to have one too. I've abandoned trying to organise things for a policy of simply taking the camera everywhere and being prepared for whatever happens.

So I managed to film a little of Dave repairing some of the specimens that were damaged in the building site that is the hotel.

The hotel is pretty much finished now - the roof did cave in in the morning and there was water dripping from the light fittings, but by the afternoon it was all repaired and the wedding guests moved in.

Jake's business partner turned up too – Jason, another digger who will probably be on the expedition. He explained to me over dinner that he has very dense bones so needs to eat a lot. mind you, he'd drunk a lot too by then.

Dinner was in the brand new restaurant in the brand new resort, and the chef was doing his first service - 60 guests all appearing at once, so there was no menu - spaghetti carbonara for everyone. I ate it - after all, in Italian meat cut up small counts as vegetarian food... besides, I too have dense bones.

I also met Jake's Dad. I liked him a lot despite the fact that he's a rampant republican and supports America’s foreign policy. We had quite a political discussion - mainly about American healthcare (he's an anesthesiologist).

I'm missing Lisa and George a lot. Everyone here knows everyone else and although they're doing their best to include me, I end up as a spare part a lot of the time.

Friday

Went for a snorkel in the morning, but there wasn't much to see. Then I walked over to the new resort along the beach. Between the two complexes is a third which was built by Carlo and then sold to another company. It's now called Desire and is a naturist/swingers resort. The beach was lined with fat naked Americans.

Grabbed an interview with Carlo in the museum. There's still a lot of noise going on there but I think it may be usable. I also managed to interview Jake, but the meeting I really want to cover looks as unlikely as ever.

Later I was moved over to the newly opened complex. My new room has a hot tub and a large screen TV. However, the TV isn't connected yet and neither is the hot water. The restaurants here are just running in too so they don't have choices, just set meals, and there's nowhere else to go, the resort is surrounded by mangrove swamps. I've come to the conclusion that it's not viable to be vegetarian here. If I want to eat, I have to eat what I'm given.

The evening is Jake's stag night, which involves Jason, his digging partner ordering tequila and whiskey shots throughout the night. whilst watching a display of world dancing in the Mohita lounge and listening to a band of big hatted Mexicans playing La bomba around our table at the Tapas restaurant

I'm not 25 anymore and I can see where this is going and rather than argue, I quickly pour each tequila shot away before the toast is drunk. Consequently I remain relatively sober. Which is lucky because when most of the party disappear off to the Desire camp, I remain behind and help Dave and his wife get Jason who's completely drunk by now despite his dense bones back to his hotel room (where his key doesn't work, so I have to get him a new one.

The new resort is clearly having a few teething problems, but not any more than you'd expect. My alarm clock goes off at 3am and again hat half past. I eventually pull its plug out.

Saturday
The day of the wedding. There's not a lot going on around the site today. The problems with the water have persisted and almost everyone seems to be having trouble.

I eventually get an interview with the dense boned Jason who comes from a family of trilobite diggers. The meeting with Carlo hasn't taken place and I'm loosing hope that it will.

The wedding itself takes place on the roof of one of the apartment blocks as the sun goes down. Carlo is the padre and Jake and Stacy are duly married. It's actually a sweet ceremony which seems to take place without anyone getting stressed or apparently organising anything.

Afterwards we have drinks on the beach accompanied by the Mexican band and for some reason a donkey which the Americans take turns in being photographed next to wearing big hats.

The tables at the reception were of course different trilobites. Carlo explains that the open area the reception was held in was going to be a garden until he went out and drew a large circle in the ground . I get the feeling that much of the architect's plans for the place were revised on the fly by Carlo. He tells me that by being involved in every level of the hotel he saved $27,000,000 on the price.

I grab video messages from thee guests for the couple - which I'll have to edit later, then grab a whiskey with Dave and his wife before going to bed.

Sunday

At breakfast I meet Jake’s Dad, the Rampant republican again. It turns out that he's not too convinced by global warming. However. I'm surprised to find he does humanitarian work in Peru. He's an anesthesiologist and helps out in hospitals there every year.

I'm determined to make this planning meeting for the vegas trip happen before I leave. if the film is going to work it'll be a useful starting point. Carlo has said he'll make some time this morning, but there's a problem. The water is off again and it turns out there's something big wrong with the whole water system for the entire resort. The system can't handle the 150 guests here now, and they're booked for 400 by the end of the year. Carlo is in meetings with plumbers.

In the end I pretty much give up, and start grabbing interviews with people about how things seem to get done without prior planning. Carlo, it appears just says "let's go" and everyone goes.

That’s one thing about documentary making – there’s a conflict between shooting what you think is what’s happening and shooting what does actually happen. Part of me says that there must be planning for a trip like this, and I ought to film it. The other part says if they’re not organising a meeting, trying to set one up is false – maybe there is no plan and trying to create one is my doing…

Eventually with about half an hour to go before I leave, Carlo turns up and we have the meeting. However, it's a little forced - possibly because it’s not a meeting they’d normally have – possibly not…

I say my goodbyes and get a cab to the airport. When I get there I find my watch is wrong and Carlo's estimation of check in times is a little optimistic. Check-in is closed. I'm half an hour late and have to run for my plane. I'm less than surprised. Order is the Mexican word for Chaos.

I end up getting my holiday gifts from Chicago airport – I’ve gone the whole week without finding a shop that sells anything.

by the way, didn't all aeroplanes used to provide sick bags? They don't now – not that I need one, but did air sickness just disappear when everyone started taking regular flights? Was it a psychological thing that we all just got over suddenly when everyone stopped talking about it?

Back home

Back home, I arrive at the airport to meet Lisa and George. It’s lovely to see them both again. George seems pleased to see me – I’d wondered if he’d take a while to remember who I was, but he knows immediately.

Lisa has had a busy week, and she’s been feeling ill too. I’ve been busy, but it feels like time off – she needs some now.

The prospect of the Vegas trip seems to have gone down well – since while I’m breaking stones and sleeping in the freezing desert, she, George and Sam are going to live it up on the Vegas strip.

A couple of days later, and I’m back into the swing of work. I’ve got one big deadline – an animation of Stafford Castle – but there are another two or three waiting in the wings. That said, things aren’t nearly as busy as they were before I went and soon, I hope to have things a little more balanced.

When I heard the news that Obama had been elected, US president, it was mostly a feeling of relief – pretty much as I guess the rest of the world was feeling. But later on, watching the news, it was really quite moving. The general point of most of the coverage was that this is something even the republicans will eventually feel proud of – that America is a different country now. I think of Jake’s Dad. I don’t think he’ll be feeling proud just now. Maybe in a few years.

We take George to fireworks at Brockwell park on Wednesday, and he absolutely loves it. None of the explosions bother him. He just points and giggles through the whole thing.

We were going to light sparklers, but as we were lighting them, a security guard rushed up to us and stuck his face in the firework to blow out the match.

Apparently health and safety had decreed there be no sparklers. However, I can’t help thinking that his attempt to blow them out was more dangerous than anything I’ve ever seen anyone do with a firework.

Mum
While I was away, Mum had her operation – which has apparently worked out well – and she’s now back home. She’s got to spend 3 months in a cast – which I suppose was predictable, but not fun. Ironically, this means the shower room which was such a struggle to build in time, won’t now be used for months… oh, well…

2008-10-24T09:10:00.000-07:00

it’s George’s birthday, and people are gathering for our trip to the aquarium tomorrow. Mum and Dad have arrived and Lucinda, Livia and GQ are expected later on. Lisa’s still not very well – don’t like to leave her, but the tickets are booked and she’s got Sam and others around her…

I’ve just found out that Andrew won’t be there for George’s birthday do tomorrow – he’s making a delivery in Spain. I’m disappointed, but I’m not surprised. He just doesn’t seem to be able to tell the bosses that he’s not taking work – and that means he often misses out.

2008-10-24T00:59:00.001-07:00

Ok – so the phone arrived on Wednesday and I’m actually quite pleased with it. It does do several things other than just make phonecalls and I’m sure I won’t end up using any of them. Most of them won’t work anyway as I’m on pay as you go. The “free” £10 voucher you had no choice but to buy with the phone didn’t of course work – it was tied to the sim card you also had to buy with it which I didn’t want. Still, it’s quite smart and I’m waiting for someone to call me on it…

Meanwhile, George has learned a new trick. I put him in his pram to take him swimming and nipped upstairs. When I returned, the pram was on its back and he was crawling up the stairs…I should have seen that coming!

He’s better from his most recent bug and has stopped throwing up after every meal. I too seem to be better. Lisa isn’t though and is off work – for the first time in years - today. Yesterday she went to pick up Lucinda from the airport where she and George met Livia for the first time.

2008-10-23T05:51:00.000-07:00

The shortest party ever
One of Lisa’s friends is moving to Saudi Arabia and invited us to a leaving party on Saturday night. We really wanted to go, but we’d also earmarked that evening for ourselves. We were determined to get some “US” time, so we booked in for a late dinner at a restaurant in Godalming (the Bel and Dragon – it’s a converted church which offers a really good menu).

By the time we got to the party, we only ended up having half an hour there before going on to the restaurant, and all the rushing around meant we arrived there so tired we could barely make it through the meal…

I guess we don’t just need to schedule “us time” we need to schedule it with big gaps around it…

From Saudi Arabia to Egypt
Sunday was the South London Food Club again – with Egypt as its destination. I’ve actually been to Egypt, but it was a bit of a package deal and we were very firmly discouraged from eating anything Egyptian throughout the trip. And we weren’t inclined to either after seeing a few Egyptian markets – where the backside of a donkey covered in flies seemed to be the display item of choice for most buchers.

Anyhow, the food we ended up cooking and eating was really good – we made falafels, humus and stuffed vine leaves (which went completely wrong – the recipe required wrapping the rice in the leaves uncooked – and of course we forgot that as the rice cooked it would expand, so we ended up with everything as a tasty but unattractive mush).

We spent the morning doing lots of cooking, and by 4:30 in the afternoon, I was so tired I fell asleep on Sam’s sofa and had to come home and go to bed. The work of the last few months has really got to me by the looks of it, and the mouth ulcers I acquired on holiday have been coming and going ever since. Mexico will hopefully be a break and I’m not taking on masses of work after I come back (it’s not just work of course, George is always there to make sure neither of us are ever off duty).

Still, Lisa seems to be bearing up well, and hopefully with a bit of rest, I’ll be back to normal by the end of the year.

Voiceovers and showreels
The trilobite animation is nearly done – and last night, the voiceover artist came over to record the narration. It was good to finally meet him – he’s narrated both my documentaries and we usually only speak by email.

This project was a bit of an exchange. He needed his acting showreel edited, so I spent the evening cutting that in exchange for the voiceover.

Editing somebody else’s work is actually quite relaxing – when everything’s working. You can immerse yourself in the finer details of getting cuts right knowing that somebody else is worrying about the bigger picture.

Somebody needs to explain growth to me
Somebody needs to explain economic growth to me. Everyone (even the lib dem leader on the Today programme this morning) seems to thing it’s essential, to a good economy, but I’ve got this nagging feeling that if that’s true then the whole system is some kind of a pyramid selling scheme…

See, the way I understand growth is in biological terms. You plant a seed and it grows into a plant – and that’s how people understood it for a long time. Then they realised that plants didn’t just grow, they had to take energy from somewhere to do it. And that somewhere was the Earth. if you kept planting plants and never put back the nutrient taken out by them then pretty soon, the soil was useless.

Ok – so the green analogy is pretty predictable, but it’s just the first one that occurred to me. This is actually a fundamental law of everything – it’s the law of thermodynamics. You can’t get more energy out of anything than you put in.

So if economic growth is what it seems to be then it’s not possible - the different parts of the world economy can grow – basically by nicking stuff off each other – but the whole – the global economy itself can’t grow except by taking something from outside. So what’s this economy thing (whatever that is) feeding on? The only things I can think of are people’s hard work and the resources of the Earth itself. Which is fair enough, but so long as its expanding, surely it’s needs have to expand too don’t they? In which case, it doesn’t matter how much we like the idea of an expanding economy, we can’t have one.

Maybe I just don’t understand what growth is – that’s quite possible – or maybe economists are just living in cloud cuckoo land. That again isn’t unlikely given recent events.

Meanwhile there seems to have been a lull in the economic crisis – a slowdown in the slowdown, but it’s not a lull, it’s just a gap between what you can call news and evidence. The news headlines aren’t full of people talking about calamity any more – which is good because as I said last week, they’ve run out of superlatives. And that means it’s easy to think it’s all gone away. But still in the background there’s the steady drip of figures coming out – each one pointing down further than the last. Nothing big enough to be Shock Horror headline news, and nothing on its own people weren’t expecting. Still, taken together, it’s not got any less momentous than last week…

As an economist said on the news this week “a few billion pounds here – a few billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money”

A survey out today says the gap between rich and poor has been narrowing since 2000. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t have got wide coverage if Gordon Brown had been on the ropes… it’ll be interesting to see if it gets buried now.

Don’t recycle
I learn from “Confessions of an eco sinner” that recycling isn’t quite as green often as it’s made out to be. Although aluminium can recycling produces massive savings over mining “fresh” ore, paper and cardboard seems to be being transported around the world so much and recycled with very little efficiency. At the same time, most “virgin” paper comes from sustainable forests in Scandinavia which actually help reduce global warming – so all in all, recycled paper takes twice as much energy to produce than fresh paper.

In addition, the treatment of sewage now means that many of our rivers and seas are now too clean to support the filter feeding creatures at the base of the food chain.

Mind you, as with all the problems with recycling, these things are only true because it’s not being done in a sophisticated enough way – and the only way it gets to be done in a sophisticated enough way is to keep on doing it… recycling is still the way to go in the future.

The mobile phone language
There’s a strange language understood only by mobile phone users. I’m not talking about txtspk – I’m talking about the language you have to learn to even buy a mobile. The language of roaming, tribands, tarrifs and 3g bandwith.

My mobile has been fading for some time, and I now have to assemble it from a sequence of shattered parts every time it rings before I can answer it. I also can’t hear anything anyone says to me since the speaker is now rattling about somewhere inside the casing.

In short, it’s failing to provide the only service I want from it, and since I’m going to Mexico, I figured I probably needed some way to keep in touch, so I went into sainsburys (I just couldn’t face the idea of talking to someone at carphone warehouse – five minutes of being told about price plans makes my brain begin to shut down).

I was surprised and pleased by the sainsburys assistant who quickly admitted she didn’t know the answers to any of my questions (for example, “what kind of phone works in Mexico?” and “why on Earth can’t I use any sim card in any phone?”) and said I should go to Carphone warehouse.

Anway, I’ve eventually ordered a phone (from carphone warehouses website).

What I want from a phone
I already have pockets full of techy devices -a palmtop PC for word processing, an ipod, a GPS, a phone (OK – not very often, but I should) a camcorder, a camera, etc. etc.

I either want a mobile that does all those things so I can dump all the excess techno crap, or I want one that just makes phonecalls (I specifically don’t want one that does texting – it’s a dreadful pointless habit. If I could find a phone that wouldn’t receive texts, I’d definitely go for it.

The phone I really want will give me instant access to my phone numbers, my email, my music, and videos. It will let me write word documents (on a proper keyboard), it will let me record HD video and take 6mp photos with a decent lens. It will let me browse the whole of the Internet with a perminant connection wherever I am in the world and it will know where I am and provide me with maps to wherever I want to go along with information about any service I want along the way.

But I don’t want it to have any of this information on it – It must allow me to access all my data, but not store any of it on the machine. I’m bound to loose it and when I do, I want to be able to pick up any other device and immediately treat it as my own with all my information available.

I don’t want to have to charge it up, I want it to charge using the motion of my body as I walk with it.

Oh, and by the way I want it to replace money – I want it to detect whatever I pick up in a shop and deduct the money automatically from my bank account when I walk out. Likewise, it needs to replace tickets to trains, busses, live events, and anything else.

And as for phonecalls, they need to be free – no reason why they can’t be – if someone can tell me why putting up a few transmitters costs more than the whole underground wired telephone network, then I’ll understand why land lines have lower call charges than mobiles.

The funny thing about this phone is that it’s perfectly possible – all the technology is there to do all these things, it’s just that nobody’s built one yet. Instead, we have to fill our pockets with devices, change and paper.

So in the meantime, the phone I’ve ordered is the most basic, cheapest one I could get with coverage of mexico (apparently that’s what “triband” means – although there’s some debate about whether I really needed to have “quadband”), and I’m going to continue using pay as you go because I really can’t face trying to understand the various insanely complex contracts.

The credit crisis and the end of the dinosaurs

2008-10-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

I haven’t updated this blog in a week or so – mainly because I’m right in the middle of a piece of work that’s difficult, complicated, large, and has a tight deadline. What’s more it’s something I really want to do well, so it’s a bit exhausting.

Last week, some of the rest of the financial world collapsed – that is, the bits that were still up after the week before’s crisis are now tumbling.

People are using words like “blind panic” and “historic” – in fact, I’m quite concerned that the economy has a long way further to fall and everybody’s run out of hyperbole already. I’m expecting some new words to be invented to describe what happens next week.

“polytasrophic” and “plumultuous” are my predictions.

Gordon Brown seems to be having fun, though – going from “Lame Duck within weeks of being toppled” to “global saviour and hero” in the time it takes to nationalise the banking system. And it’s because he’s suddenly done something brave – rather than cautious. Who knows, he might have got a taste for it.

I must admit a little sympathy for him there though, I quite like a good crisis. After all, when everything’s going pear shaped, you can get away with doing just about anything and whatever you achieve, people will be delighted that you managed to do anything. It’s easier to be a hero in a burning building than in a library.

I also must admit to being quite fascinated by it all. Rarely do we get to see the raw workings of the system that supports us quite so exposed. It’s only in a real crisis that you get to see what really makes our world tick. Not just money – although that’s part of it, but also a desperate fear of the unknown, the banding together of the people that make up “the system”, and the suspension of disbelief which allows us all to assume that those with money and power are somehow brighter than the average guy in the street.

Actually, it’s fascinating in the same way as watching sharks in a feeding frenzy – along with the same thrill of knowing your shark cage isn’t really that secure.

The credit crisis and the end of the dinosaurs

People seem to describe the credit crisis in apocalyptic terms, but there have been apocalypses in the past – at least five of them – which have wiped out most of the planet.

And there are some similarities.

When the meteor which destroyed the dinosaurs hit the earth, it wasn’t the meteor itself which killed the dinosaurs. What happened was that the sun was blotted out for some months and the plants stopped growing.

In other words, the energy which fed the base of the food chain dried up. The grass itself didn’t suffer much – as soon as the sun came out again, the seeds could regenerate, but for a time, there were no plants – and that’s pretty much what’s happened in the financial crisis. It’s not that there’s no money – it’s just not moving around the food chain.

So what’s the anatomy of an extinction?

Well, the first thing that happens is the biggest creatures which feed directly on the plants are the first to be hit. it’s those that need lots and lots of grass, 24 hours a day that will fall first.

And in the credit crisis, that’s the banks.

So far, so metaphorical. The thing that palaeontologists tell me about global catastrophes though is that when times are good, the specialists do well – that is, those who have found a specific niche that nobody else is covering and exploited it. When there’s a catastrophe, the niches vanish very quickly and unpredictably and it’s the generalists – those who can turn their hand to anything – that do well.

They tell me something else too. Just after the catastrophe, there’s invarably a huge blossoming of scavengers. When there are a lot of dead bodies lying around, the rats, the flies and the carrion feeders come out.

That’s the period we’re in for most immediately if the palaentologists are to be believed.

Who are the scavengers? Well, there’s obvious ones – asset strippers, pawn shops, debt collectors…

If Al qaida has any power left, it must have realised that right now is its best chance of bringing down the west and the fact that they haven’t done anything suggests they don’t really exist in any meaningful way anymore. The war on terror was always a bit of a sham - and if they don’t act now, it will be very obvious they’re not the threat they’re made out to be.

but there are bigger scavengers lurking too – When the Soiviet Union collapsed, the scavengers did very well – to the extent that they now control Russia and many have enough money to pick up anything they want from the falling stock markets… When the dust settles, will the Russian billionaires own more than just our football teams? Will they want to pull the same trick on the Western authorities they did on their own government?

As for effects closer to home – well, my advertising site is currently suspended because I’ve got too much work, so I can’t tell you if there’s been a drop off in enquiries. In fact I don’t know if I’m going to put the site back on when my current work comes to an end at the end of November – It’s been a bit rushed over the last few weeks and I might just slow things down a bit and get to work on a couple of my own projects…

It looks like Claudia, Sam’s flatmate is going to loose her job (she works for a German bank in the Gherkin) so while I’m in Mexico showing off my trilobite animation, Sam, Lisa and a few others are going to eat at the Gherkin restaurant (and presumably nick anything valuable before the repo-men get there and gut the place).

I, on the other hand have done rather well initially – what the credit crisis has meant to me is that I’ve made a profit.

The trilobite animation pricing was agreed before all this, and it was agreed in dollars – and it’s been paid in instalments. Last month I got $5,000 – which translated as £2,600. This month, I got $5,000 more – and that’s come in as £2,900 – so, the less the pound is worth against the dollar, the better I do.

Also, for future work, as the pound goes down, Americans are more likely to employ me because to them, I’m cheaper!

This weekend was fairly relaxed. On Saturday we took George to the zoo for the first time. He loved it – particularly the butterflies and the coloured birds. He’s also got a bit of a thing for lions (even though the ones at the zoo do little other than sleep).

His cuddly lion is his favourite toy – so much so that while at the zoo, we found another identical one so we can swap them over to wash them.

Because we don’t want to buy him any more toys right now (he’s got as many as he needs) we decided that for his first birthday we’d sponsor a lion cub at Howlet’s zoo (<http://www.totallywild.net/jaf/animal_bio_popup.php?id=28>

Ahh…

Work
Work is frantic – trying to get the trilobite animation finished in time to take it to Mexico for the opening (I’m leaving on the 26th) is quite a job – mainly because I’m being very fussy about getting it right.

Well, actually it’s because it’s so long (10 minutes of animation) and complex (trilobites have many many animated legs!) and has to be scientifically accurate.

However, I’m getting there and I think it’s going to be really good.

I’ve had to down-size the rendering – even though I’ve now got 3 dual core pcs and 2 quad core machines working on the rendering. I’ve gone from HD to SD video – mainly because I know they’re not going to show it in HD and I was just doing HD to give them the option in the future.

SD feels very low resolution now, but it’s solved my rendering problems – what was going to take 20 days was done over a weekend!

I’m now at the stage of choosing music and writing the script – I’ve gone for the blue Danube which gives the whole thing a graceful, but unusual feel…

Mum
My Mum’s finally got a date for her hip operation. It’s while I’m away, but at least it’s getting done. I was beginning to worry that once winter set in, there’d be emergency operations to be done and Mum would end up at the back of the queue, but it sounds like it’s all going ahead.

My computers and poisoned baby milk

2008-10-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

So on Friday my two new PCs arrived – fresh from (and I’m assuming here) a factory in China. Ordered, built, packed, transported and delivered in around 48 hours. They’ve already clocked up a good few thousand airmiles and are filled with rare and unpronounceable metals. Their mining “rucksack” is huge and as they’re purchased as render machines they’ll be running pretty much continuously day and night consuming electricity.

They and the components they contain have been assembled in Chinese factories by young women from rural villages. Apparently, the companies prefer to use young women because their fingers are faster on the production lines.

I’ve come across this idea myself. I once, when Britain still had manufacturing industries, worked as a temp in a factory putting bottles of peach schnaps into gift boxes. Crates of the stuff moved through a production line on which about 10 girls packed the boxes. Girls were said to be much faster. When there weren’t enough girls, they reluctantly bought boys in, and I was one.

It was indeed true that the girls small hands packed the boxes faster and more nimbly and I struggled to keep up.

However, as they days wore on, it became clear that I had an advantage in terms of body mass… The girls, being smaller got drunk faster, so in the afternoon, the boys caught up.

Anyway, back to China.

Because all the young women from the rural villages are working in factories in the towns, their babies are left with their grandparents. The grandparents obviously can’t provide breast milk, and that’s why so many Chinese babies are fed bottled milk. And that’s why, when a scandal blew up last week about chemicals being put into baby milk to artificially increase protean levels, it affected not just a few but tens of thousands.

Apparently, the chemicals affected milk from 20 or so companies – which I found odd, because why would they all start using this chemical at the same time. However, I’m told by Mary who works as a journalist out there, that stories don’t tend to break until they’re ready to – in other words, this has probably been going on for a long time – but the communication in China is such that the media hasn’t got hold of it. It’s not a sudden outbreak but a long term problem.

Saturday
Sam – a friend of Lisa’s visited with her two children on Friday, and we spent the weekend at Sarah and Chris’ with their two, so George has had a good chance to play with other kids. There’s an age group, a few years older than himself, but still playing with similar toys – that he seems suddenly absolutely fascinated by. He can pretty much be left to his own devices with them, playing and laughing with them.

There really seems to be a level of communication between very young children that us adults just can’t key into.

Both Sarah and Chris have pretty high pressure jobs in management and the credit crisis isn’t doing them any favours. Constant reorganisation of management structures and changes of direction over the past few months are making everyone feel as though the ground is shifting.

They’re both under pressure, but when it comes to the weekend, children help to bring them both back to Earth. When we went for a walk in a local park on Sunday, they seemed as relaxed as ever.

Maintaining that division between work and home life is tough sometimes, and it doesn’t mean pretending there’s no crossover – sometimes I end up thinking about work stuff at weekends and sometimes I actually need to do work. Equally, sometimes, I have to stop work in the day to deal with home stuff. However, those boundaries need constant attention.

As usual, we returned with a boot full of Sarah and Chris’ old baby stuff for George’s age group. A set of new toys including a baby walker which he took to immediately. In fact, I think he’ll be walking any time now.

Monday
George has been feeling out of sorts over the weekend. He’s had gungy eyes, and today, his temperature suddenly shot up.

We called the Doctor, but because they’ve got a new system to allow them to meet government targets, it’s a lot harder to book appointments (because, if yo don’t have an appointment booked, the doctor can’t have a long waiting list). The nurse who saw us sent as to accident and emergency - which he didn't need to, but he obviously didn't have the confidence to treat George as normal because of his heart problems.

We've always been told that after the operation he wouldn't need any special consideration, and it seems to be true. However, everyone still uses a "better safe than sorry" approach so it looks like we can look forward to going to A&E for a couple of hours every time he has a cough only to be told to go home... still. Better safe than sorry.

By the time we got home, the world had colapsed.

George bush's plan to save us from the end of all banking failled to get through congress because althugh everyone agreed with it (not for any particularly good reason), their voters were a bit pissed off about having to bail out people who earned far more money than them.

Nobody was expecting the vote - which seems a bit odd in itself because noowadays we don't tend to have surprise votes.

The plan isn't dead yet, and will be voted on again, and again they expect it to pass. However the main reason for this expectation is the same as the reason for the confidence in the plan itself - it's that "this just has to work!".

That's never a particularly good arguement as it's based on the idea that people generally can't comprehend change on a huge revolutionary scale. Everyone's got so much invested in the status quo they can't imagine it falling.

However, history doesn't back up this belief. Empires do crumble and systems do fall. "because it just can't happen!" didn't stop the Roman Empire falling and it didn't prevent world war II (which was one of the results of the 1929 crash).

Everyone's talking about catastrophe but nobody has really explained what that means. What if the American plan doesn't work (and frankly why should it work?)? what happens if nobody can trust banks again? what happens if the suspention of monopolies law means that the world comes out of this undr the control of one or two massive organisations - or if states come out of it owning so many private companies that there's no difference between publicc and private companies?

The trouble is that the only people who know about the system are the people who are up to their necks in it. So when they say the world is ending they mean that their world is ending. Quite how their world is connected to ours we'll find out in the next months and years. Once the US plan has been passed and has failed.

work
having set up my new PCs, the render farm is having a few teething troubles. One or more computers in the network seem to be dropping off randomly so rendering isn't going as fast as it should.

I've also come to the conclusion that my schedule is impossibly tight for the trilobite animation. I've stripped it down a little. listing only those shots which are absolutely essential and concentrating on getting them rendering rather than working through the project scene by scene as I was doing.

hopefully there will be the chance to go back and finish off with some of my more interesting shots later, but I'm cutting it fine. I've just been contacted by the yacht people asking when the other project will be ready and I've proomised them something by early next week. in addition it's time to do the newsletter again and I've been given a small writing job by Computer Arts. This is something I can't turn down just now as I want to keep my hand in with the magazines.

All in all, I'm going to be doing overtime for the next couple of weeks. I'm not happy about that. but doing a couple of nights should make things more doable. Once my current projects are done I can relax the schedule a little, finish my documentary and look into developing the children's tv show I've just had an idea for....

Today I had to take most of the day out to go to the Avid offices in Pinewood studios for a meeting about the newsletter I'm writing. Most of it was stuff I already knew well, but it's always good to go to these things because it's the only chance you get to meet the people you're working for.

Pinewood seems to be about the only place in the UK you can still see people building things. There are carpenters, metalworkers, plaster of paris moulders, all busy building sets and props. In fact the site isn’t just a studio, it’s everything you need to make a movie – including the post production which is why I was there.

Our part of the complex was named Broccoli road – and went right past the Bond soundstage. You couldn’t see in though…

On the way back, my taxi driver gave out some free tips on the benefits of declaring yourself bankrupt… how to have £100,000 on credit cards and have them all wiped clean. He spoke from experience apparently.

2008-09-24T10:40:00.001-07:00

Friday, Lisa took George to Worthing to do some decorating on her flat and rather than join her in the evening to impose on Lisa’s parents in their already crowded house only to return the following morning, I stayed at home.

Actually I went to Pietro and Russ’ for dinner and ended up staying over. They’ve been through a bit of a rough time in the last year, but we had a good evening

Sunday was the South London Food Club – this time the Philippines were the destination, and Jane’s Garden, the venue. This was the first time this summer we’ve actually been able to eat outside – it’s been such a cold summer.

Everyone made different dishes and they were all really good. When we pick a nation at random and all try to cook food from it, the results can be mixed. This time the foot was great – even though my mouth ulcers are just about clearing up and my taste buds don’t seem to be working (everything tastes strongly of salt and I can’t taste sweet food for some reason) – anyway, here are a couple of recipes:

Baked fish

6 Red Snapper fillets
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 cup olive oil (we used about half as much oil)
1 whole onion minced
1 cup fresh tomatoes with skin and seeds
½ cup pimentos cut into strips
1 tablespoon parsley finely chopped
2 tablespoons breadcrumbs
salt and pepper

Preheat oven 350 degrees
Season the fillets in the lime, salt and pepper and leave in a dish to marinade
Medium frying pan with the oil and sauté the onions, tomatoes and pimentos until a sauce-like consistency is obtained
Pour the sauce on the fish, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and parsley
Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes, serve hot

Aubergine (Adobo)

5 cups diced aubergines (1-1.5 inch cubes)
1 pinch of salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup soy sauce
¼ cup red wine vinegar
6 cloves crushed garlic
½ teaspoon fresh ground pepper

Spread aubergine with salt put on paper towel to drain for 30 mins, rinse and pat dry
In a non stick pan – fry with small amount of oil, brown and set to one side
In a small saucepan simmer soy sauce, vinegar, garlic and pepper for 5 mins
Add aubergines, cover and cook on a low heat for approx 7 minutes, stirring occasionally
Serve hot

Monday Lisa and I both had dentists appointments. Lisa has always had a good dentist – she got to watch films on a pair of futuristic glasses while they did her work – but now that dentist has gone private so she’s got a new one.

Not mine though, and a good job too. My dentist ended up giving me a filling without anaesthetic the first time I met her – or rather she gave me three anaesthetic injections none of which had any effect beyond paralysing my face.

I haven’t had a filling since, but this time, she decided that although there was nothing wrong with it, one of my fillings needs replacing – at a cost of £200. I suppose it’s good in a way – hopefully this one will be less painful and I won’t have to dread dentists so much….

Footprints and rucksacks
Reading more of my new book, the author has moved onto talking about mining – basically calculating (and I love a good formula) his rucksack.

Rucksack isn’t a term I’d heard before, but basically a product’s rucksack is the amount of mining that’s done to produce it – so for an aluminium can, there’s something like 2kg of material mined out of the Earth to produce it (unless it’s recycled) but for a gold ring, there’s something like 2 tonnes of rock that’s had to be taken out and crushed to create enough gold to fashion it (with all the pollution, wasted water, and other environmental damage that this means – not to mention the danger faced by the miners).

Apparently we all carry round an annual rucksack of about 50 tonnes… in other words 50 tonnes of rock get taken out of the earth and ground down every year to give us our stuff – 15 tonnes of coal and oil provide the electricity we use, 9 tonnes go into the buildings we inhabit… and so it goes on.

Anything to be done about that?.... hmmm… not sure.

The Myth of quality
Everything we own is made in China – but apparently there’s one city Yiwu – which is just one enormous market – selling the majority of the stuff we buy. And by that I mean 300,000 product lines, supplied from factories in towns all around it – each specialising in one or two products. 60% of the world’s zips come from one town. 80% of our Christmas decorations from another. And for each product Yiwu has a street. Stalls selling nothing but fake Mona Lisa’s or combs, beads, or artificial flowers.

One of the things that really comes across to me from reading this is that whatever you buy, the idea of quality means very little because wherever you got your products from – the pound shop or Harrods, they will have got them from the same markets in Yiwu and those markets will have got them from the same factories in neighbouring towns. Even if there are resellers who are determined to provide only the highest quality items, those items will have been put together from component parts which in turn have been assembled from smaller parts in a long and untraceable chain leading back to the factories of China.

Not that I’m saying those factories produce poor quality goods – only that they produce similar quality goods because the supply line is so long and complex that it must be impossible and pointless for a producer of the individual components to make themselves known beyond their ability to produce goods at speed and volume. Even if the idea of quality is what’s sold to us, it’s really only about speed of turnover by the time it gets back to the source.

Computers
Anyway, today I bought 2 new computers for rendering this trilobite animation. Basically these machines will run day and night while I’m doing this project, drawing out the frames of animation without me needing to be there.

I went looking through ebay, pcworld, and all the other options all of which offered widely different prices.

A lot of the companies talked a lot about build quality, and said how their competitors used “sub-standard” components.

The thing is, I’m as sure as I can be that whether I pay top dollar to Dell, or buy from a bloke on ebay, my computer will have been assembled on a production line in China in about 10 minutes from components bought somewhere round Yiwu from the same factories.

I can’t get a more reliable or better product by paying more, so perhaps I shouldn’t expect to.

In the end, I shopped around and paid about £1,200 for my two PCs. Buying them from PC world would have cost me about £1600. have I saved money or wasted it? No idea, but I do know that paying more wouldn’t have lightended my rucksack. There’s no such thing as a PC PC. Yet.

2008-09-19T09:49:00.001-07:00

One of the pieces of post we discovered on getting home was our wedding video – Ok, we’ve celebrated our 2nd anniversary already, but the video was delayed by the fact that one of the cameras malfunctioned, so it was hell to edit.

The company producing it did an excellent job though and we’re really pleased with the result.

We can now take orders for copies….

Hide and seek
George is very close to being able to walk now, I think. Sally has offered to get him a walker for his birthday, but I think he’ll be up and about by then.

At swimming this week, he also worked out how to hold onto the side of the pool. I let go of him and he just clung on. I think if I’d got out of the pool, he wouldn’t have minded.

He’s started playing hide and seek too. He holds a towel over his head, and then leaps out to surprise you and giggle – which is very cute. It’s not a game I think he’ll ever tire of.

Tonight Lisa’s taken him down to Worthing again – mainly because she’s got to do a bit of painting on her flat. I did offer to help, but she thinks she can do it all in one day, so instead I’m going to have tea with Russ and Pietro…

2008-09-17T10:51:00.001-07:00

Thursday
Woke at 2:30 and again at 6. Sleeping is something we all do every day , but when you actually thing about it, nobody has any idea how to do it. We both have mouth ulcers – a good sign of being run down – but since we’re half way through our holiday now we should really be feeling less tired.

Undeterred, today we went on an Arthurian quest. Armed with a leaflet detailing the Cornish trail of the fictional king, we went to Tintagel – one of the five castles around the country that claim to be Arthur’s. We discovered that it was actually built about the time the Arthurian legend was being first written down – i.e. some 500 years after Arthur was supposed to have been king.

The road to the bottom of the hill the castle’s built on was so steep, and the climb ahead contained a hundred stairs, so we opted to quit and search for the grail instead.

That quest took us to the scene of Arthur’s last battle, and the Arthurian centre in Slaughterbridge. The Arthurian centre turns out to be a small shack, the walls of which are covered with wordy explanations of the legend’s history along with a few pictures and photocopies of wood cuttings. It resembled the kind of display you see in detective dramas – where the police cover the walls with unreadable scribbles, photos and documents which don’t appear to have any connection with each other.

They did have a lot of toys for George, on the floor though and a video which allowed us to rest our legs before the long tramp carrying him to Arthur’s Stone – a stone with some words on it, but no obvious connection with Arthur whatsoever.

Beside the viewing platform there’s a sign - can't remember the exact words but the sentiment was, why does it matter whether the legends are true as long as the myth gives you the inspiration to take on your own barbarian hordes – and I guess that’s the point. The tintagel ruin is younger than Arthur and built of the strongest materials known at the time. And yet it’s nothing but a pile of rocks now – whilst the Arthurian legend is even now being re-written brand new as a BBC series. Stories are so much stronger than stones.

Carrying george the distance to the castle foot and the carved stone tired me for the rest of the day, but it was worth it. Not least because even though I didn’t run this week, when I went to tighten my belt, I discovered there were no more notches to tighten it to…

But our quest wasn’t over… it became a quest for lunch. And turned out to be a tough one. We toured the county looking for someone who would serve food. Most restaurants here seem to close for lunch and those that don't were either missing chefs or were directed to by signs which in true Holy Grail style disappeared before we found their source.

Eventually we tried driving to the nearest 'big town' Bodmin. Here after touring a few closed restaurants we found a pub who told us they weren't serving (even though a sign on the door said they were) but who directed us to another pub who were. I wanted to ask if there was anyone in this god forsaken county whose idea of food didn't involve chucking a rat in a deep fat fryer, but I didn't and we eventually found a pub with food.

I say food - I ordered the only thing I could have "catch of the day in lemonade batter" no joke. I didn't ask what today’s catch was but it could well have been rat.

Beside us some girls were discussing the difficulties involved in getting broadband... My this is a primitive land.

I think I’ve solved one mystery though. The fabled “Beast of Bodmin” is a creature said to roam the moors devouring the local livestock. Its origins are clear to me now. After a few days sampling the culinary delights of the down, I think I’d find a raw sheep pretty appealing.

On the way home we had what we both decided was the worst mineral water we'd ever tasted (and neither of us had ever noticed the taste of mineral water before)... I looked on the label and it was bottled in Bodmin.

At home I read a little of my new book. The author is tracing the ethical footprint of everything in his life and this chapter was on coffee, booze and cheese.

One of his favourites was cathedral city. when he looked into it Cheddar wasn't involved and nor were any cathedrals. It turns out to be made by one of the biggest daries in the country... who made cathedral city the best selling cheese in the world then used their power to cut the price they paid farmers for their milk. It turns out Cathedral city is in fact made exclusively - you've guessed it - in Bodmin.

The author then went on to trace his favourite whiskey lagavulin... which turns out to be made by the same people as bailies... which won't please my father in law. still, the company doesn't seem to have ruined the local nature of the brand...

George continues not to eat his meals... he seems to want to choose them for himself and this is a well known phase for babies.... and a messy one. we just have to give him things he can pick at as he wants to because if he doesn't want to eat. you can't force him.

This doesn't really matter as most of the world's babies do perfectly well on less protein than George puts in his nappy.

Friday

A relaxed day today. trampolines and swimming pools being the only action.

I read some more of my book - learning amongst other things that king prawns from Bangladesh -and that includes at least half of those you get in Asian restaurants are farmed by very poor farmers who get virtually nothing for destroying their environments while the profits are taken by a series of virtually criminal middlemen. The author won't eat them after what he's learned and I think he's probably right.

He also has a lot to say about palm oil (the commonest product we don't know we use - featuring in a huge number of products from meals to soap and toothpaste).

By the way did you know bananas are seedless sterile mutants - so there can never be any variety in the species - each variety (and their are very few) is created from cuttings from a single plant so a disease affecting one will wipe out the global crop forever. This has already happened once, so they've nothing to replace the plantations with if the current variety fails...

The biggest problem seems to be mass production. we can't be allowed to all eat different things s production is forced into huge country sized plantations of single crops or farms. The result is that the vast majority of our agriculture is dedicated to just four crops. with the resulting dangers of destruction of the environment and lack of resistance to disease… Eat variety - that's got to be the only solution. At least that’s my plan.

Saturday
Holiday over, we made our way back via Grace and Igor’s new home in Bognor. It’s a great improvement on the last home (they even get wine with dinner) – and their both a lot happier there. Although Igor continues to insist on being miserable anyway.

I’m so glad they’re in a nicer place, though.

We met up with my aunt Carole and introduced her to George for the first time, then we sat out on the lawn outside before making the final leg of the journey to Lisa’s parents.

To break the journey home, and to have Sunday lunch we decided to stay over in their crowded house. They’ve got Sally, Colin, their dog, and four boys living with them while the look for a house and it’s a bit chaotic.

No – it’s completely chaotic. I think Lisa’s parents need a break, already and since Sally and Colin have got to find and buy a house before they can move out, it’ll probably be a while.

Lisa’s parents in the meantime are putting a room into the garage… which is seaming like quite a good idea suddenly…

After Sunday lunch we leave for the journey back to London.

The holiday has been a good one – but I’m annoyed with myself for not ending up as rested as I’d have liked.

When I get stressed I tend to get mouth ulcers. Usually one – just to let me know I’m run down. Today I have 10 – and can barely eat…

2008-09-17T10:07:00.001-07:00

We haven’t had a holiday for over a year and both badly needed one, the news of “extreme weather” from north Cornwall didn’t really put us off. However, George throwing up in the car wasn’t so good and the GPS gave us the strangest detour I’ve ever had (we were directed onto 100 meters of road parallel to the road we were on and then back onto the original road – there seemed to be no reason for it).

By the time we got there, we were both very tired. I hadn’t done any of the driving, but I think I’d let the last year’s work catch up with me and was ready to collapse. So tired I wanted to burst into tears…
Instead, we watched King Kong – or at least the first hour of it (being an “epic” meant the film had to be 14 hours long). At the point where the girl and the monkey were sitting together looking out over the sunset, we decided things weren’t going to get any more cheerful if we watched the rest, so as far as I’m concerned, it was a fun action story with a happy ending.

Actually there are lots of films that are best off abandoned at bed time – I’ve got very fond memories of “the deer hunter” – after retiring just as the main characters enlistined in the army. To me, it’s a feelgood buddy movie.

The thing you can guarantee with all Hollywood movies is that if it’s going to be happy, it will need to be bloody miserable just before everything goes right, and if it’s going to be sad, there will be a moment of happiness somewhere near the end. That’s the optimum time to leave if you don’t need things to change. Try leaving a bond film just when the main villain walks out on Bond who’s about to be executed – that way you can be fairly sure the smug secret agent has been sawn in half and you don’t need to endure his absurd quips as he drifts off into the sunset.

Anyway, George wasn’t so keen on us having a peaceful night. He decided to scream until we took him into our bed and stayed awake all night with him…

The next morning we had a bit of a look around our accommodation – a sweet little cottage in a tiny village and directly opposite what appeared to be the only decent place to eat within 50 miles. The farmhouse around which all the holiday cottages were arranged also provided an indoor swimming pool and a lot of child friendly stuff….

Bude – the nearest “town” wasn’t impressive. It’s major feature was a castle – or at least it was called a castle, but it was made of red brick, positioned on a flat instead of a hill, and had large sashcord windows through which any attacking horde would have made an easy entry.

In the grounds, a brass band was playing “I want to break free” by Queen…

George got a good night’s sleep and we began to unwind. The next day we went to the Big Sheep – a sheep-related theme park created on the cheap by an enterprising farmer. It’s actually a great day out with tractor and train rides, sheep racing, lamb feeding and some slides and ball pits. It’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds and George had a great time (apart from throwing up at lunch – which he seems to be doing every day). I’d have sent a postcard, only I don’t. If there’s one thing I hate more than clearing up baby sick, it’s writing postcards. I mean I write every day at work. My days are an endless stream of articles and emails. Why would I spend my holiday telling people who aren’t on holiday how great it is? Postcards are such a rubbish idea. It’s like having homework – and it’s no better being on the receiving end. “wish you were here?” well clearly you don’t or you wouldn’t have left me at home.

When we got back from the pub, we ordered a take-away from the pub over the road. It arrived on china plates – which was a nice touch.

Tuesday
My unwinding stopped when I woke at 4am. I spent the next day feeling generally rubbish. Lisa was left looking after me and George and I barely made it from the bed to the sofa without feeling sick. Maybe I’d got a version of what put Sam in hospital the previous week – but whatever it was, the real reason was that despite the fact that George is an easy baby as babies go, I have been working hard trying to fit 5 days work (or 6) into four days, having a new baby isn’t easy and we have been 15 months without a break. We work hard to get time to ourselves, but there are still a lot of demands. It’s not that surprising I suppose that I should collapse at the first opportunity. The only real surprise is that Lisa hasn’t. Yet.

Despite not leaving the cottage, we somehow managed to spend £203 in Gabon – we got a call from the bank to say that someone had cloned our card. They spotted the error (you can’t spend money in Cornwall and Africa on the same day) and refused the payment, but it’s a hastle.

Funny – at least 3 other people in our road have also had their cards cloned, so we have to suspect one of the local businesses. Suspicion falls on Summerfield – but that might be just snobbery.

The new chip and pin system doesn’t seem from my reckoning to have reduced fraud. In fact I’ve heard of it happening more since the change than before. And I’m not surprised. Rather than revealing our pin number once a week or so, we now do it every day and rather than doing so in trusted locations (bank machines) we now do it everywhere we spend money – with no security what so ever. What’s more we now have to have so many pin numbers that the only way to manage them is to either write them down (which the banks tell you not to do) or to change them all to the same number (which the banks tell you not to do). In other works, chip and pin isn’t designed to make transactions safer. It’s designed to make the fraud our fault rather than the banks. It’s not about safety it’s about blame.

Of course, most of the fraud is done without any cards changing hands – it’s all on the bank side – but the banks don’t like to talk about that, they just take the hit and keep it secret. After all, it’s much better to blame their customers than to let anyone know that their security is the equivalent of writing your pin number on the back of your bank card and leaving it on the bus.

Wednesday
The first day George isn’t sick and I’m back to normal too. We decide to go to the Eden project. I was expecting it to be good, but it was not just a big greenhouse, it was actually a very intelligent, non-patronising, optimistic campaign. It’s really obvious when old hippies have created something – there’s this lack of limitations – this idea that you can think on a huge scale and be completely unashamed about wanting to change the world – and it’s infectious. All that’s needed is that attitude and you can create things of real value and real change… or so it seems.

George loved the place too – especially the rainforest – although he wouldn’t eat anything all day. We’d run out of home made food and bought a jar of baby food with us. He doesn’t seem to be at all interested in anything except home cooked food. However, that wasn’t all it was – he wouldn’t even eat Eden’s home cooked organic fair trade non biological nutritionally balanced gluten free unbleached free range pasta… he wasn’t interested in his tea either – until in desperation we tried making him a sandwich… it turned out all he really wanted was something he could eat for himself. He’s not being fussy – he just wants to do it himself.

We came out of the Eden project with a pile of eco friendly stuff – including a solar ipod charger (I’m not sure what my ipod’s footprint is, but it’s invaluable to me – not because it’s got music on it, but because I’ve rather sadly uploaded about half of the Doctor Who video back catalogue onto it – which is great for long train journeys).

I bought a book which I can highly recommend – “confessions of an eco sinner” by Fred Pearce. Basically he’s a journalist who decided to go around the world trying to work out where all his stuff came from – and what his environmental footprint really meant. He’s actually surprisingly like me in what he does and what he consumes, and as I’m trying to work out my footprint (not just carbon- but everything else too) it’ll be an interesting read.

2008-09-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, we had a night out. We went to the Proms to see the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle. In other words – one of the best combinations you can get. It was my parents’ birthday present to Lisa.

It was a full house, and we had great seats – and the response to the performers was about the same as you’d have got if the Stones had been performing. I’ve never seen a flutist whooped and cheered – and judging by his reaction, neither had the flutist.

The concert was probably the best I’ve been to – but listening to classical music isn’t like other forms of live entertainment. It’s sort of a background rather than an intense experience – Watch a good film or a rock concert and you’re transported to another place, but that place is decided on by the author. With classical music, the place you’re transported to is your own. It allows your mind to wander rather than taking it somewhere specific.

I started to wonder about making a feature length animation… a story of a train making a journey across a huge fictional country. Every so often, the train would stop to pick up a passenger. Each passenger would be an outcast – for some reason unable to live in the town the train stopped at, but presented with a ticket out by a mysterious conductor. So the film would begin as a series of short stories – all about the various things that isolate and disconnect people in a modern world… but as the train travelled on, the group of passengers bonded… there’s more, but I’ll develop that a little further before I decide whether and where I’m going with it.

By the end of the performance, I have a style in mind too – I want it to be very slow moving, very gentle, and the images to be like oil paintings fading one into the next – so not a traditional style of animation, but more a series of still lifes slightly and slowly moving. I also had the strange idea that the film should be subtitled on the rare occasions when words are needed – with a spoken voice heard, but not in any real language…

Hmm… another idea I don’t have time to pursue….probably.

In Casualty
Woke up on Thursday morning to a call from Sam – she’d been taken ill, but also left the key in the door of her flat, so nobody could get in to help her. Sam is usually pretty able, but there’s the occasional day when her arthritis flares up and she can’t get out of bed. This time it was accompanied by a virus, so doubly bad.

We eventually managed to contact her flatmate, Claudia (the geography of her flat is such that Claudia would have left without knowing that Sam was incapacitated in the living room) and I was able to get in. By the time I got there, Claudia had called an ambulance.

I dropped George off at nursery and joined Sam in Casualty. Casulty is an awful place – not for the reasons you’d think but just because it’s so grotty. It’s like a bus stop or a job centre. Full of people queuing for no reason and sitting around for hours waiting for something to happen. When something does happen it’s usually due to the social ineptitude of one of the waiting public – on this occasion it was a guy who decided the receptionist was a racist and went on to add that she worshipped the devil before being thrown out by security.

Anyway, Sam managed to get out pretty quickly into a ward of her own where various tests confirmed that the chest pains she had were not due to a blood clot or anything else serious and that this was simply a virus which would pass in a day or so.

Lisa returned home early from work and took over while I got home and managed to do a little work. Sam stayed over with us, but is much better today.

3d stuff
today I spent the morning at an Autodesk press event. Taking time out to go to these things is always worthwhile, but I could have done without it today – with the pre-holiday rush and the fact that I got very little done yesterday.

I really must make an effort to get some writing work about the 3d packages – otherwise my position as a journalist writing about 3d is going to drift… Don’t quite know where I’ll find the time, but it’s well worth doing.

Anyway, one thing worth noting is that even though the company is absolutely right at the cutting edge of technology, they still couldn’t get either their coffee machine or their TV to work… it’s not just me, then.

A weight off my mind
Back at my parents’, Mum and Dad seem to have got things going. After a frustrating set of delays, Mum has now been able to order a chair that she can sit in without putting her hip out of joint and she has got on the waiting list for another operation. They’ve also, got a quote in for fitting a shower for her and hopefully building work will start soon. Getting the shower fitted is now very urgent and despite her assurances that I shouldn’t worry, I feel that every day she’s without it is damaging.

Grace and Igor have now moved to another home – hopefully one which treats them better and allows them to get on better together. It’s down in Bognor close to Carol and Roy, my uncle and aunt. Dad is a bit worried about driving that distance to see them, but I hope he’ll try.

They certainly seem to be enjoying the place a lot better – and we plan to drop in on them on the way back from holiday (we’re leaving tomorrow for a week in Bude).

2008-09-03T09:58:00.001-07:00

Last weekend, George started climbing stairs (he’s not keen on going downwards yet) – and his crawling is pretty expert and fast enough to escape if you don’t keep an eye on him.

He’s training as a safety inspector by instantly seeking out the most dangerous part of any environment he’s placed in.

The Circus comes to town
This weekend, Zippo’s Circus arrived on Peckham Rye and Sam thought it would be a good idea for us all to go along… in fact, when we turned up, it seemed the idea was pretty universal… Abi was there, Debs was there, and Phil turned up too – all with their children.

Now, I know circuses are supposed to be for children and I wasn’t expecting it to be the greatest show on Earth (whatever the publicity said). However, these people put on shows every day of their lives and move from town to town with a vast infrastructure – or at least a lot of lorries, so I did expect it to be polished and professional.

This was rubbish – the juggling involved throwing things into the air and waiting for them to land. The high-wire was a very low-wire and the guy balancing on it didn’t seem at all sure he could do it. The dancers didn’t actually dance and the trained horses just walked around the ring in different directions – if there was supposed to be a routine to it, I couldn’t tell.

It was also hot – very hot. It was like watching the first round of “Britain’s Got Talent” in a sauna. I had to keep taking George outside for fresh air and water – something which I didn’t mind since the show was so poor.

Later on we had a dinner party and we spent much of the day preparing for it – which mainly consisted of trying to locate a working pasta maker – something which I thought would be readily available on Lordship lane – since there are almost as many posh cook shops as there are estate agents. We eventually borrowed one – and made ravioli (or raviolo because each person only got one!).

Mushroom and ricotta stuffing and saffron and truffle butter no less….

We followed this with salmon and veg baked in packages made of grease proof paper – so that the fish and veg steamed in the oven and everyone had their own parcel to open.

I’m not sure how, but 2kg of dauphines potatoes managed to get eaten by the 7 of us. However, one explanation might be that my brother turned up and Andrew’s appetite can make even the most ample portion disappear.

It was good to see Andrew – fresh from a whirlwind tour of what appeared to be most of Europe. His first intercontinental lorry delivery had taken him on a grand tour. He was on good form – and even spotted that Claudia (Sam’s flatmate)’s wedding ring was being worn only for effect…

Sunday was another feast – this time at Adrian’s. This was a Sunday lunch that started at 1 and hadn’t finished by 7. It involved several courses culled from Adrian’s allotment including edible flowers, pie and a paella. I’d never been to Adrian’s flat before. He’s a picture frame restorer and his home was a little like a step back four or five decades. Everything seemed to be homely, but nothing modern – and everything was in perfect restored condition. On the sideboard sat a picture of Adrian’s mother at the age of 17 beside a sofa . Today the sofa has been expertly re-upholstered, but it’s still in the living room.

Nathan – Jane’s son looked after George for much of the day. He’s always happy to play with him and as I told him, it will probably be twenty years before he realises just what a valuable service he was performing for us…

The dreaded openwide mail out
On Monday night, Gillian and Nicky came round to lay out the yearly mail-out they send advertising their plays to schools and theatres. The mailout is a ritual which always involves a late night of discussing the minutiae of where each picture goes, exactly what wording is needed for the blurb of every show they perform and what colours, styles and shapes the text needs to be.

I guess I must have been doing this for a while now because I remember that it was their mailout I was working on when the news came in that the world trade centre had been hit by an aeroplane.

This time, we worked until midnight, but got the job done.

2008-08-28T10:34:00.001-07:00

The South London Food club had another meeting on Saturday. Each time, we choose a different nation, and everyone who comes along has to research and cook something from the chosen country. This time, the venue was Cuba – everyone made traditional Cuban food. Most of it was meat and most of which was quite spicy – so not my favourite, but we seem to have (by random selection) come up with the Philippines for the next destination

George has again seen fit to grow out of all his clothes, so Sunday saw another session of archiving his old clothes ready for the next nuclear device we plan to detonate in our lives - which we’re charmingly calling “baby 2”. We then spent the afternoon in Bromley buying cute little shirts.

Monday was a bank holiday – which I’d completely failed to take into account in my work plans. When you’re freelance, nobody tells you about things like bank holidays. They just tend to appear at random in your schedules.

Not that they’re a bad thing – I just never seem to see them coming.

This one was filled with the terribly traditional pursuit of DIY. Or rather what passes for DIY in an age when everything that doesn’t come with foolproof instructions is a job for a contracted in expert who earns £100 per hour…

My DIY was putting together the ikea cupboard that’s been blocking the bottom of our stairs for the last month or so. And I have to give credit where it’s due to the master cabinet-makers at Ikea because even though the process took the whole day, and even though I had several screws and (worryingly) two large pieces of wood left over at the end, I was able to put the cupboard together without problems.

Now this is impressive not because I’m rubbish at assembling cupboards (actually this is my 7th similar wardrobe – and two of them I’ve done twice), but because I had George helping me throughout by crawling on whatever I was trying to assemble, re-sorting all the various lengths of screws and eating the instructions.

It’s clear to me that Ikea instructions are written to be followed while a 10 month old baby is learning to walk on the same piece of floor.

I’m not that keen on DIY – even the very limited kind involved in putting cupboards together, and part of me wants to put that down to the fact that when I was young, my Dad could do anything practical very well indeed and his perfectionist approach meant that I was never really allowed to help – or at least anything I did had to be gone over again by him to make it right.

However, that’s not quite the whole story. In fact, I’m not scared of DIY – and I’ve painted my fair share of houses. I just, like the rest of my generation, can always find something else to do. I tend to think my free time is worth something, and if it’s worth more than it costs to get someone else to do my hoovering, painting or car maintenance then I’ll do it.

Is that being lazy? I’m not sure. I do still end up doing a fair bit of that kind of stuff, but not all the time, not every weekend.

Lisa managed to get home early enough to take George swimming on Tuesday. It was the last of the current session of swimming lessons and George spent most of the time underwater – which he seems to love.

2008-08-20T10:41:00.001-07:00

Met up with Raoul on Wednesday. We had dinner in the Palmeston ( a great pub restaurant) in Lordship Lane while Lisa sat at home and had to do some work. He was in London doing some pointless paperwork for the Natural History Museum before jetting off to his next bone-digging assignment in South Africa – on a quest for Permian fossil fish. He arrived in a leather fedora hat, but claims never to have seen an Indiana Jones movie.

Personally, I don’t believe him.

This Saturday was Jane and Dan’s birthday – featuring their annual Hastings barbecue – which basically means lots of cava, Dan acting as DJ with all the latest gismos and Jane and I ending up cooking most of the food in the oven before bunging it on the BBQ for five minutes. This is generally because neither of us eat meat, so we don’t have a clue how to cook it – and with Dan making music and Lisa introducing George to all the guests, we’re trying not to kill anyone…

An hour or so after George was put to bed and with the baby alarm safely in the DJ room, we hadn’t heard anything from him. I went upstairs just to check and found him crying his head off. Unfortunately I’d put the alarms the wrong way round so instead of us being able to hear him crying, he was listening to a well mixed selection of 80’s classics.

I met Jane’s Dad for the first time and he spent much of the night telling Gareth and I about the preceding 40 years…. Apparently, when Jane was a baby, he was working full time, but in his spare time, he was building a house for his family. No kidding – building it from scratch without help (he got a plumber and an electrician in, but that was it). It took him 18 months. Oh- I forgot to mention his other job – working nights as a DJ on the pier as a warm up act to bands. In fact all the well known bands of the early 70’s – from the Stones onwards. Jane tells me that his main hobby (like you need a hobby when you’re doing all that) is reading – but he’s got a bit bored with his local library having read everything in it.

Lisa and I went to bed tired – but knowing that the following morning George would wake us up at the normal 7:30am… You can’t ever sleep in with a baby, but for some reason that never occurs to you the previous night….

In preparation for the BBQ, we spent Friday night in Worthing (Lisa went in the morning, and I met them from the train after work – I had a late evening conference call with someone in California who wanted to talk about fairies – specifically animated ones). We took Lisa’s parents out to dinner – mainly because we know they’re about to have their house taken over by Sally and the kids and because Lisa’s mum has offered to help Lisa out with organising the refurbishment of her new house. The restaurant was full, but half way through the evening when we were waiting for our starters, I suddenly looked round and noticed that absolutely nobody in the place had any food… Eventually, it did all appear.

George is starting to make a real effort to communicate – he now waves and makes faces and claps in direct response to you. He obviously now know that communicating with people is important and he’s trying his best to crack the speech code.

At swimming, he also managed to hold onto the side of the pool on his own – which I guess is useful if he wants to avoid drowning. However, he’s a little too eager to let go and dive off for another length

Coke is it
I think there’s a shift going on…. It used to be – in the 60’s and 70’s that new was good. Everything new and scientific was heralded as great – so if your car was built by robots, it was a better car and if your food had chemicals in, then it must necessarily be better for you. This obsession with everything new pervaded the whole of society.

Then things changed – I don’t know how, or when, but suddenly, traditional was best and natural was wholesome. Nowadays, bread and cheese has to be “artisan” before it’s considered good. A hand made car is thought to be better made than one assembled on a production line and if your food has anything in it that can’t be called natural then it’s considered poisonous.

This obsession with the natural is as absurd in its own way as the obsession with futuristic man made rubbish in the 60’s. Deadly nightshade is just as natural as potatoes – and it’s sustainably “native” to the UK (no air-miles there) – but that doesn’t make it good for you. Likewise many E numbers are natural components of home grown food.

It’s as if we can’t handle the idea of things being a bit more complicated than simply science bad, nature good…I’d wondered how we made that switch of obsessions, but I think I can see it happening again.

Advertisers of things that are plainly not natural or wholesome have started leaping on the bandwagon – and the most recent one is Coke who’s new adverts are claiming that it’s made from only natural ingredients.

This is plainly a load of old pants and you wonder why they’ve spent millions on an advertising campaign that’s so transparently unbelievable.

However, what the advert really does is to devalue that whole “natural is great” claim – with everyone now claiming their stuff is wholesome and un-messed-with, the natural claim becomes so diluted it’s no longer worth making, and advertisers can – with a little time gap start claiming their products are “improvements on nature” again.

2008-08-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

2008-08-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

The olympics
The Olympics opened at the end of last week with what everyone seems to have called the greatest show ever staged – a massive emerging superpower throwing a hundred million pounds at stating its intent for the next hundred years to the world… which is fine, except London’s up next and has to match it.

Personally I’ve never really been a fan of massive spectacles – they tend to leave me thinking “so what?”. I mean, you can have 14,000 people holding up placards to form the shape of a logo, but all it really proves is that you can. 100,000 fireworks really just makes each firework less impressive. More is less.

They climaxed the whole thing with a bloke hanging from a piece of string pretending to run around an animated screen surrounding the entire stadium to finally light a huge torch. I mean, it’s clever – but the more cash you spend on being clever, the cleverer you have to be to stop it seeming pointless. It gets to a point where you just can’t be clever enough to avoid looking ridiculous.

Or maybe it’s just me.

In any case, it’s London’s turn in 4 years, and we can’t compete with that level of spectacle. Then again, maybe we don’t have to. To me (and I’m not a massive sports fan) the thing that makes British sport great – and actually one of the things the nation in general is most proud of is almost the opposite of the amazing exercise in formation organisation that China displayed.

It’s a more chaotic sort of mass action – where people spontaneously en-masse decide to join forces each for their own reasons and each bringing their own unique ideas and skills to the event. London’s great events aren’t formations of troops marching in step to somebody else’s beat– they’re a hundred thousand people all doing their own thing. Like the London Marathon or the naked cyclists that ride through London every year.

There’s something chaotically creative about this country at it’s best – something that inspires people to do something extraordinary not because they’ve been told to but because they just want to.

Maybe what our Olympic ceremony needs is more like a Flash-mob than a military parade…

I heard on the radio the other day that the last London Olympics just after the war were a little more low key – the cycling went on just down the road from us in Herne Hill – and apparently the British team stayed with the editor of the cycling magazine rather than in an Olympic village. Catering was provided by one of the competitor’s mothers.

Full House
Lisa completed on her house last week – so now all that has to be done is a total refurbishment on it…. It’s a sweet little house, but hasn’t been done up properly for 63 years. That means there’s probably a fair amount of problem lurking in the walls. Still, we’ve planned for re-plastering, new electrics and some work on the roof, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock.

Hopefully it’ll be done in a couple of months – or at least nearly done. However, I’m not sure if Lisa will want to rent it out immediately. With Sally, Colin and the four children moving into Lisa’s parents’ house while they look for a place of their own, visiting them will probably be quite difficult and the idea of a “guest house” a couple of streets away will probably be quite attractive for visitors. Even if it doesn’t have a bathroom, a kitchen, walls or any electricity….

House prices are still falling – with the average estate agent selling about one property a week. And we all feel very sorry for them I’m sure….

People are trying to predict the end of the crash – and wondering if removing stamp duty would kick start the market.

Well, it wouldn’t.

Of course it wouldn’t.

Prices aren’t falling because of some mysterious magic curse – or even because of American Sub prime lending. They’re falling because they’re too high. They’re too high because people can’t afford to buy houses.

The only reason they didn’t fall before was that investors were buying instead. Investors will only buy if they think it’s a good investment – and that means only when prices are going up. The moment prices started dropping, all the investors stopped buying.

It’s not rocket science.

So where will it all end?

Well, surely the bottom line is that someone on a reasonable wage (say £35,000 per year) in London is going to think of a one bedroom flat as a first step on the housing ladder. At lending of 3 times earnings plus a reasonable deposit, that’s about £120,000.

In other words, I’d stick my neck out and say when you can get a one bedroom flat for £120,000 in the cheaper parts of London, the market will stop falling.

We’re not there yet.

Saturday we decided to take George to the London Aquarium – but it turned out that on a rainy school holiday, other people had the same idea. We abandoned the idea and went to the Natural History museum instead – which although we knew it would be crowded, we thought it was at least big enough to hold the numbers.

It was so busy we had to seek out one of the less popular halls to find a little room. George was completely rapt by the size and noise of the place (somewhere I’ve been fascinated by since I was only a few years older). He was especially intrigued by the giant stag beetle above the door of the bug room – and I’ve been told since that lots of other children have the same reaction to it… Not sure why – he’s never seen a real stag beetle…

Anyway, we came out with a bathtime book of dinosaurs (which George liked the first time he read it, but now seems to cry whenever it appears) and a “babyTV” DVD - a montage of shapes and colours from the natural world which he seems to love.

TV is very attractive to George and he watches (especially children’s programmes) with great attention. It’s so tempting to put the TV on to keep him amused, but we try not to do it too much. Even so, he’s already identified that corner of the room as a site of entertainment and loves to pull things off the TV table, wrench wires out of things, and stick his fingers in the DVD player.

He’s also developed a fascination with phones – having realised that we spend a lot of time talking to them. I’m not sure if he knows that remote controls are different devices, but he goes for them with equal vigour.

Sunday, we aimed to take George swimming, but failed to get up in time, so we pottered around drilling holes in the house to put up pictures with hooks we realised we hadn’t got.

It wasn’t a good day for going out, so he played in the living room most of the day. He’s started using the rocking horse my parents got him for Christmas to balance on – pushing it along as he learns to walk. At one point, he suddenly let go of it, and stood there in the middle of the floor swaying slightly for several seconds before collapsing.

Lisa and I just looked at him in amazement.

Work
Work is distracting me. I’ve got these two big projects on right now – the safety video for the yacht and a trilobite display for a museum in Mexico. Both are big, complex jobs and both have deadlines in September.

The problem with having these long term projects is you’re never quite sure where you ought to be on them at any point and you need to set (and keep to) goals throughout the project.

There are so many different aspects to these animations (both are really like mini films – involving narration, music, characters and editing as well as animation) that are all both exciting and difficult – so I sometimes end up getting preoccupied by them.

Although, obviously I want interesting and challenging work, it’s hard to turn that off when it comes to the end of the day.

I end up getting distracted – as though the real world is happening somewhere else with me – or my mind not connecting fully with it, and I don’t like that about myself. It must be obvious to people around me sometimes that I’m not all there…

The only real solution is to be as organised as I can – to plan out what I’m doing on what days. For some reason when I know I’ve got a difficult problem to tackle, knowing WHEN I’m going to tackle what portions of it frees me up somehow – it allows me to forget the problem for the most part – knowing that even if I don’t have the answers, I’ve at least dedicated a time-slot to dealing with them.

On Saturday I scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper, planning out the next couple of weeks. It helped a lot – and even if some of those plans don’t work out, I at least know I’ve got time for most of what I’ve got to do.

Hopefully that made me a little better company for the weekend….

Aniversary
Tuesday was our 2nd wedding anniversary. Sam came over to look after George and we went out to a lovely restaurant in Crystal Palace…

2008-08-08T10:33:00.001-07:00

On Wednesday we had a night out – we went to the Globe to see Timon of Athens – which, as it turns out is a Shakespeare play which most people agree was only partly written by Shakespeare. Apparently the editors of the first publication of Shakespeare’s plays in the 1600’s wanted to leave it out entirely, and there’s no record of anyone performing it in Shakespeare’s time.

Ok – it wasn’t up to the standard of Macbeth – it was a bit simplistic – but nowhere near as dull as Midsummer Night’s Dream which gets performed all the time because it’s got fairies in it.

No time to write more now – I can hear George crying because it’s his bath time….

2008-08-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

Lisa went swanning off to have champagne on a yacht on Saturday, leaving me at home with George… Claudia’s company had some kind of wine tasting jolly going on and she invited Lisa to go along with her.

George is well and truly on the move now, and although he requires more supervision than he did before, he doesn’t actually want as much attention. He’s happier to play on his own, practicing getting around and banging things together, so he doesn’t want you to follow him about. However, he’s never more than 10 seconds from destruction of property or fatal injury, so you have to keep an eye on him (he nearly fell down the stairs a few days ago – so we’re busy leafing through catalogues trying to find stairgates that will fit onto curved banisters….)

Anyway, in his new role as resident safety inspector, he was happy to spend the morning checking the house for sharp, electrical and unstable objects.

In the afternoon, I thought I’d take him out for a short walk, so I put him in the pram and set off round the block… just as I was on my way home, I met Mons and Abi and their children on the way to Dulwich park. I decided to join them, and it only occurred to me once we were there, and it started to rain that I had come prepared only for a walk around the block.

We try to be as minimal as possible with George and don’t carry round the trailer loads of baby stuff most parents seem to require, but being caught out made me suddenly aware of how useful a change of nappy and clothes, a rain cover, some milk, a couple of rice-cakes (fair trade, additive free, organic rice cakes –obviously), a muslin, a raincoat, some toys, a book, some baby suntan lotion, a rubbish bag and a box of wipes would have been…

At the park, we met up with a few of their friends. One guy turned up with a double push chair, and a confident air. A couple of weeks earlier, his wife had given birth and he had delivered the child himself…. In the world of the modern father, it’s no longer enough to be there at the birth – if you want real kudos, you have to be the midwife too.

That said, I don’t think even East Dulwich Dad Etiquette would have required me to perform a DIY caesarean…

When Lisa returned, just after her parents arrived (Lisa’s Dad was going to a couple of Proms with Sam this weekend and her Mum was working) we left her mum looking after him and went off to Soho – where we found the best Thai restaurant I’ve ever been to (http://www.pataralondon.com/) There’s only one other that comes close and that’s in Australia (and run by a chef to the King of Thailand).

I think Sam and Lisa’s Dad had a less successful evening – they went to a concert of classical music by a composer who described himself as the greatest composer in history – but who didn’t find many other people to agree with him.

Sunday was a little more relaxed and basically revolved around Toad in the Hole cooked by Sam – toad in the hole is such a good meal – and I wonder why I never make it.

Recipe
Toad in the hole

6oz/150g plain flour 2 large eggs 6fl oz/150ml milk salt pepper
6 sausages (I use Quorn sausages)

Make a pancake batter from eggs, milk and flower whisked together – it’s best to leave the batter to sit for a couple of hours before cooking it.

Meanwhile, brown the sausages and put a little oil in a baking dish. Heat the dish up in the oven until it’s very hot, then pour in a little of the batter (it should sizzle and start to rise). Put the dish back in the oven for a few minutes before adding the sausages and the rest of the batter.

When the batter is cooked through and brown on top, serve – with onion gravy, and some steamed greens….

Great comfort food.

We intended to spend the afternoon at a Malaysian market which was apparently taking place at Tower Bridge, but we just didn’t feel like it…

2008-07-31T10:41:00.001-07:00

Tuesday was George’s swimming day – which he always loves. This week he was top of the class. We’re in the 2nd level now which means dipping the babies underwater pretty regularly… We’re told they have some kind of flap of skin that automatically stops them breathing underwater – but I think it may just be one of those things they tell fretful parents to stop them worrying..

Either way, under they go, and George has always been pretty good. This week, we had to do successive dips – where I dip him underwater, tell him to breath when he comes up, and then dip him again taking a step across the pool as I do it. George managed to get all the way across the pool and all the way back – about 6 dips in a row - without showing any signs of being upset. The other babies started crying after about three tips.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, this baby thing –mothers will fight tooth and nail to make sure you know their baby’s ahead of yours. George won this round, but you always have to watch your back – somebody will be walking, or talking, or waving before you and you need to be there to fight your corner.

It’s more competitive than working at the stock exchange. I think I’m a little insulated against it though –being a father. Mothers don’t see you as such a threat I think.

This week, the hospital authorities (the pool is in Guys hospital at London Bridge) decided that we couldn’t use the changing rooms behind reception. Up to now, the mothers have used the proper changing cubicles, and any dads that showed up used the kitchen area behind reception – not ideal if you’re trying to change a baby and yourself into swimming trunks. Now, we can’t use that area (probably for health and safety reasons – who knows?) so George and I have to wait until everyone else has finished and use the women’s changing rooms. In the end, I got bored with dripping on the woman behind reception (who doesn’t need to be any more drippy than she already is) and got changed in the disabled toilets.

As a father looking after a baby on a weekday, you’re not that unusual anymore but you do occasionally find things aren’t quite set up to accommodate you.

It reminds me of when years ago I tried to find temping work. I went into countless agencies and told them my typing speed. They all said “more and more men can do secretarial work – it’s not as unusual as you’d think, you know” then they patiently took my details and called me a few days later to send me to work on building sites.

Anyway, Lisa went Power Pramming yesterday.

If you don’t know what Power Pramming is, it’s the new form of keep fit for yummy mummies… a gang of mothers basically run around a park taking it in turns to run, walk and probably juggle with their prams.

Apparently, it’s quite fun, but I don’t think they have dads doing it… after all, they don’t want it to become competitive…

I think I’ll stick to running anyway.

The lion
On our visit to The Three Lions at the weekend, the bedroom had a cuddly lion toy sitting on the bed waiting for us. It wasn’t for George (I remember from our last trip that all the rooms have a cuddly lion) but he absolutely loved it.

Being a bit of a softy myself, I took the name of the manufacturers and ordered one for him online. It arrived yesterday and it’s already become a firm favourite…

Andrew
Yesterday, Andrew made a surprise visit – parking his lorry at the end of the road. He’s just got his international driving licence and passport, so he’s going to start doing trips to the continent. Good to see him…

2008-07-28T10:21:00.001-07:00

Russ and Pietro came round on Thursday - good to see them and we had a great time, managing to eat in the garden – although the BBQ we’d planned ended up being done on the cooker because the disposable barbecue didn’t do anything….

The trophies which line their bookshelves (where the Doctor Who merchandise allows them room to be seen) proclaim Russ to be an excellent tennis player – but testing his skills on Wii tennis told a different story…

Anyway, I hope we managed to distract them for an evening.

Weekend away – another one
We left on Friday for afternoon for our weekend in the New Forest. We booked in to the Three Lions http://www.thethreelionsrestaurant.co.uk/Hotel_Fordingbridge_New_Forest.html - a place calling itself a “restaurant with rooms” rather than a B&B. we’d been to the Three Lions three years ago and noticed that not only do they have a great chef (Michelin stared no less) but also that they have a jaccuzzi in the back garden and baby monitors in the rooms that stretch to the restaurant. All this, aligned with a total ban on mobile phones made it a great choice for a weekend away..

A very relaxing weekend in which we had great food and took George for a long walk in a specially designed rucksack baby carrying thing some friends had given us. It’s a great – although hugely cumbersome device which makes it feel as though George is precariously balanced somewhere among the overhanging treetops, but which is actually quite safe and even almost comfortable for a couple of hours.

My shoulders still feel it, but George absolutely loved being high above the ground, bobbing about looking at ponies and trees and all kinds of non-London scenery. He was laughing and giggling – especially when I had to climb over stiles with him – for about 3 hours. It was only towards the end of the walk that I felt a solid weight on my back, lolling from side to side as he fell instantly to sleep.

By the way – we found the route for our walk at www.go4awalk.com – a useful website providing maps, walks and descriptions for rambling all over the country…

2008-07-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

We managed to get to visit my parents on Saturday – Mum’s still wearing what looks like a piece of scaffolding to protect her hip and although she’s doing her best to look after it we still don’t know when the apparatus is coming off, or what can be done to keep her hip from coming out again when it does.

The doctors really need to do an examination to find out what’s causing it to come out, but it looks as though they’re going to wait for it to happen again before they do. This strikes me as pointless costcutting by the NHS. The fact is they know there’s a problem and they know they’re going to have to deal with it sooner or later. They should just get on with it.

Anyway, it sounds like my parents are going to put in a shower my mum can use – Lisa’s suggesting a wet floor, but that might not happen. It looks like they’re going to build a new room for it in the garage – and Lisa’s suggested a few alterations to their design idea which it sounds like they might take on board.

At least I hope so. Lisa is after all an occupational therapist and does this kind of adaptation all the time. It would be pretty rubbish if they had someone offering that kind of expertise and didn’t take her advice… Mind you, as Andrew pointed out, he’s a professional driver, but that doesn’t stop Dad telling him how to drive.

It fell off the back of a lorry…
Andrew joined us for part of the day – again, his penchant for crisis managed to give him an improbable set of obstacles to overcome before he could have lunch.

Firstly he was left waiting in his lorry for 3 hours while the warehouse people messed around instead of loading his lorry. This meant he had to leave empty, so he told the people running the warehouse he was doing so, then pulled away.

Unfortunately somebody had chosen that moment to drive a forklift onto his lorry. The forklift fell off the lorry and got jammed at 45 degrees between it and the warehouse loading bay.

Just the kind of improbable accident that happens to my brother all the time.

He then had to go and give in a form for a passport… but of course, that involved the woman in the post office being unable to fill in her own forms (it had also previously involved them taking all his documentation and loosing it).

Uncle Jim
It looks like my uncle Jim is back in trouble with the law. He’s been arrested for getting angry with someone at the council offices for some reason nobody’s been able to establish. Since we have to rely on Jim to tell us the news, we get at best a garbled mishmash of anger and denial. He’s incoherent at the best of times, and you generally get more information from what he says he hasn’t done than what he says he has.

His barrister has told him to plead guilty – and I can see why. It doesn’t matter what Jim is accused of or indeed whether he’s guilty or not – if you put him on a witness stand, he’ll make such a case for the prosecution he’ll be found guilty without a doubt.

That said, people working for councils must come up against upset, angry and incoherent people every day – partially because councils are generally in the business of failing such people on a regular basis and generally because you wouldn’t go into a council office unless you were angry, upset or incoherent. In other words, council workers are pretty well trained (or should be) in diffusing difficult situations (generally without resolving the problems that cause them) so if Jim has gone far enough to get arrested he must have done something pretty extreme.

George
George is teething again (surprise, surprise) and although he coped Ok with the visit, he let us get just out of my parents’ village before being sick all over the car-seat and himself.

Andrew – who’d followed us out – pulled up and produced towels and wipes from his car and combined with those we had, there was just enough to clear up the mess.

On Sunday morning, he did the same thing with his breakfast milk, but he seemed fine by the end of the day….

Sunday was the Dulwich country fare – a yearly event which doesn’t quite allow the people of Dulwich to pretend they live in the country. However, it does allow them to buy a huge selection of potted herbs (which we’ve been meaning to do for ages), eat fresh coconuts, jerk chicken and low-fat-fair-trade-doughnuts, and watch displays of sheep sheering and falconry (no, really!).

There was also a tent demonstrating the wii fit board, but no chance of buying one, a selection of sickening rides, and an entire canvas boulevard of council “awareness” schemes… although I’m not aware or what kind of awareness they were promoting.

After the fare, we went to Sam’s with Mons, Abbey, Claudia and Fee for a long afternoon of lunch and cava.

We returned home late, giving George another disrupted bedtime.

The bad parent’s club
I had my first taste of the bad parent’s club – having put George on the top of the washing machine in the bathroom to brush his teeth, I turned away to grab some toilet roll to wipe his mouth.

In that couple of seconds, he rolled over and fell off onto the bathroom’s tiled floor.

He’s got a graze on his back, but doesn’t seem to have suffered any damage… but I felt awful. I won’t be leaving him on anything from now on.

2008-07-18T10:24:00.001-07:00

Ok – so I’ve given in and bought a wii with my birthday money. If you don’t know what a wii is, it’s the latest in videogame consoles – the games are pretty simple, but you actually have to get up off your backside to play them. To play tennis, you stand in front of the TV, batting the ball back and forth as though you’re playing tennis. The same for bowling, snooker and boxing…

The bit I haven’t yet got is the wii fit – this is a balance board which is supposed to help you exercise by measuring as you step on and off it , lean back and forth or do press ups.

Getting fit is on my to do list and I’m hoping the wii will help…. And of course, it’s fun.

George is crawling
As of today, George has decided he’s not going to sit around anymore – while the health visitor was here (her 9 monthly visit to test his development) and Lisa was telling her he couldn’t crawl yet, he suddenly got up and crawled over to take a look in her bag.

There’s no turning back now – and I think he’s about to become a much bigger handful.

Anyway, he’s also got an insane number of razor sharp teeth now – we discovered the back ones coming through yesterday. I’m expecting another row to appear soon…

Forearmed is half an octopus
I also got a call this week from someone wanting an animation of how to assemble a gun. It’s for a ministry of defence training video. Now, I do think we need an army – even though I disagree with most of the things they’re asked to do right now - and I certainly think that army should be well trained. However, this video isn’t just for training – it’s for sales as well – in other words, it’s an arms dealer and I’ve no idea who their other clients are.

While I’m happy to do work for the British army, I’m not quite so happy about doing an animation that will be used to train random gun buyers all around the globe….

I’ve asked them to send me more info, but if I can’t get more safeguards, I’ll have to turn this one down.

2008-07-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

2008-07-14T10:21:00.001-07:00

Went to see Kate and Darren at the weekend – and inevitably ended up playing on their new toy – the Wii fit. Wii fit is a balance board that allows you to play videogames by measuring the way your weight balances – with the result that it can detect movements like leaning and stepping.

The idea is that you can ski, dance, play hula hoops and do lots of keep fit excercises while playing videogames.

The games are pretty basic, but they’re great fun and you can persuade yourself that you’re getting fit by playing them (the game actually works out your body mass index - 28 for me, though I don’t really know what that means apart from that I’m overweight) and nags you if you don’t play on it regularly enough.

I’m very tempted to get a Wii Fit… it’s great fun – although at Kate and Darren’s we do need to eat a couple of thousand calories and drink more alcohol than our robotic trainer would approve of before turning it on.

Sunday was another food-fest, with Sam cooking Lisa and I as well as her parents a roast dinner.

It’s now looking as though Lisa’s sister, Sally, Colin and their 4 children are going to be moving down to Worthing. They’ll be close to Lisa’s parents’… actually very close as while they’re looking for a place to live, they’re all going to move in. Which should be entertaining.

Lisa’s parents had their own large family so they should know what to expect, but that was a long time ago. I just have to trust they haven’t forgotten the chaos four children can cause.

I think we’ll have to arrange some holidays – or at least days out for either the kids, or the grandparents sometime soon.

2008-07-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

Ok – I eventually got to see it – and as it turns out, it was one of those holywood style affairs. You know – when you walk out thinking it was all very exciting, but with this nagging doubt that something was wrong… then as time goes by, you realise you’ve been had – that actually the plot hidden under all the action and fireworks didn’t actually fit together properly….

Anyway, I did manage to go jogging again on Tuesday evening – despite trying to convince myself that the fact I wanted to pack my shorts for Wednesday’s trip was a good enough reason not to go….

This getting fit thing isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s not the running that’s the problem. It’s the stupid excuses I keep coming up with not to go… Still, they say there’s a three month cut-off period for this kind of thing… it’s a sort of momentum - if you can keep on going for three months, you create a new habit for yourself and it becomes harder to stop than to carry on.

Or so the theory goes. Apparently it applies to new years resolutions… if you’re still carrying them on by the end of March, you’ve probably succeeded…

Palma

On Wednesday I went to Palma. A two day business trip – I’m doing some animation work for a superyacht (more than that, I can’t say as I’m under a confidentiality agreement). And it’s quite a yacht too. The sort of thing millionaires take their holidays on…

The flights out and back were absolutely fine, but I still don’t like flying. The trouble isn’t really the safety of planes – and I don’t feel any more or less secure looking out of the window or sitting in the isle. In fact, looking out is always beautiful… it’s just that for some reason I always feel better knowing that what I’m standing on is solid right through to the Earth’s molten core. No good reason for that, but it doesn’t matter what the plane’s doing or where I’m sitting in it – I can’t escape the constant uneasy feeling.

The woman next to me in the queue had a Tee shirt bearing the words “I’d rather be jogging”…. I don’t think I’d go that far, but it’s a tough call.

I managed to pass the journey by watching Genesis of the Daleks on my ipod… sad I know, but there you are…

About half way through, the stewards came through selling ropey sandwiches. At the same time, I noticed the smell of baking bread – coming not from the sandwich trolley, but from the air conditioning….

I didn’t know Easyjet had adopted the same selling techniques as supermarkets and house sellers, but apparently they have.

As we landed at Palma, we passed the wreck of a small plane upside down beside the runway. Reassuring.

At the end of the day, some things are scary - but you can’t decide what to do based on what worries you. It’s scary getting married having children, running a business… Nothing worthwhile comes without leaving your comfort zone… you just have to be worried and do it anyway.

the view from my hotel

The job
The trip itself was useful in that I got to meet the people I’m working for and get drunk with them… That’s a pretty important part of a project sometimes – once you know each other a little bit socially, it’s a lot easier to work out what each other wants and can do.
We also got to check out the boat (which right now isn’t finished) and we got to talk the project through a bit more.

It was a bit of a flying visit (in one day and back home the next) and I’ll probably have to go back in a couple of weeks when things are a bit more complete.

This certainly looks like a promising job – with possible other jobs coming from it too….

We’ll see…

check up
Yesterday, George had a check up and the hospital told Lisa he doesn’t need to come back for two years…. His heart is working fine… which is great news.

My mum also seems to have got her broadband working, which is great (although they haven’t yet become comfortable with the idea that you leave it attached – they still plug it in only when they want to go online and then unplug it afterwards – mind you, they do that with the answerphone too, so it’s not a surprise).

Mum seems to be doing well with her hip, and she’s doing the right amount of resting and exercise. They’re even thinking about making some of the changes to the house that will allow her to look after her hip once she’s better.

One of these is the addition of a walk in shower. Right now, the plan seems to be to build a new room for the shower by extending into the garage. It would be easier to fit it in the upstairs bathroom – but apparently this will involve re-doing some of the tiling, so it’s not a good option. Not quite sure why moving a few tiles is harder than building an entire new room – but sometimes it just is. Sometimes, the psychological challenges are harder than the physical ones.

On a similar note, Grace and Igor are still very unhappy with their home (it sounds as though they’ve got good reason to be – the carers last week didn’t know how to operate Grace’s oxygen cylinder. Something I can’t believe they’ll get away with because when she needs it, it’s a matter of life and death!) Carol has now found them a place near Rustington, and they seem interested in taking a look.

However, that would take them further away from my parents and when it comes down to it, Grace isn’t going to want to get further away from Dad and risk seeing him less often.

The last Episode of Doctor Who

2008-07-07T10:29:00.001-07:00

This weekend was the last episode of Doctor who for ages… not just the end of the series, but no series next year, so just the odd special before David Tennant is replaced as the Doctor…

Massive hype for this last episode, and even the press weren’t allowed to see previews so that the Russel T Davies rumour mill could play havoc churning out wild speculation all over the Internet and the media.

Added to that, the return of Davros and a huge cast list of current and historical companions and stars returning and the spinoff series’ Torchwood and Sarah Jane Smith combining in this huge finale.

In other words, as a fan, I was quite keen to watch it.

The Mighty Boosh
It was on on Saturday night, and Saturday we went to the Mighty Boosh Festival… a collection of bizarre musicians including Garry Numan… and a collection of bizarre comedians including Ross Noble came together to entertain an even more bizarre crowd of people dressed as futuristic prostitutes (not including us). That meant I was going to have to wait for Sunday for the final episode…

Anyway, the promised rain never showed up, so it was a great day which we (Lisa, George, Sam and I) used as an extended picnic.

I think festivals are getting better and better organised. Toilets are now approachable, the food is varied and not entirely “freezer to fryer”, everything that can be recycled is and there are even inflatable sofas on sale for those visitors who don’t want to sit on the grass…

On second thoughts, maybe they’re not getting better organised. Maybe they’re just going middle class… instead of serving one type of canned lager, you now get a choice of wines or a recycled plastic jug of Pimms. Instead of ultra-processed zebu offal burger, you now get tempura or Napolitana pizza.

This was an “alternative” festival – and that used to mean the audience was living or exploring alternative lifestyles – society was being challenged by “alternatives” that nobody quite understood… you didn’t used to be able to move without being offered CND badges, signing anti-aphartied petitions or buying a copy of the Socialist Worker.

Now, alternative means just watching somebody else – and they don’t even have to be alternative – they just need to pretend to be alternative in a post modern ironic sort of way. You can be alternative by putting on a gold leotard or a funny hat. You don’t actually need to do or commit to anything. You can just watch.

It’s a lot easier…. and it’s fun. Zimbabwe and the food crisis don’t impinge on a good rock festival…

The young folks of today, eh? Don’t know they’re born…

The happiest baby in the world
Speaking of the young, George managed to make it through the whole day (up to about 11pm) with just a little nap at 7pm. He absolutely loved the acts – especially the mighty Boosh themselves who came on at 9:30. he laughed and clapped and giggled and despite having to be held up by us (we all came away feeling like we’d had a workout) he didn’t cry at all.

In fact, George is generally happy most of the time… OK, he does cry when he’s tired, or in pain, or when he’s being neglected, and he doesn’t always have good nights, but his crying just seems to be punctuation in a general mood that’s surprisingly bright and cheerful most of the time.

Even the people at the nursery are constantly telling Lisa that they want to adopt him.

I think we may have the happiest baby in the world.

Of course the one thing I’ve learnt over the last 9 months is that nothing stays the same. He’s constantly changing and every week he learns something new. Right now, I can say he started smiling at a few weeks old and hasn’t stopped since. However, it may just be that his misery genes haven’t yet kicked in and that as soon as he works out what life is all about, he’ll fall into a deep morose.

He’s just on the verge of learning to move around on his own and that might trigger a whole world of things he discovers he doesn’t like…

The reactionary
This week’s discovery has been the idea that it’s other people’s reactions rather than just things that happen that’s important.

He’s started to, when he encounters something new, check my or Lisa’s reaction to it before deciding what he’s going to do himself. If he goes to pick something up, he doesn’t know what to do with, he’ll quite often look around to one of us to see what we think about it before deciding what he’s going to do.

Of course, it doesn’t usually matter what we do – he’ll mostly just put the thing in his mouth, or bang it on the floor and then giggle – but it’s nice to see he’s realised that other humans have reactions just like he does and that most of the time, people are more interesting than things anyway.

At least that’s my take.

Sunday
Having missed Doctor Who on Saturday I decided to watch the repeat on Sunday night.

Sunday we had a gentle day, working up to a late lunch with Lisa’s parents in Sam’s new kitchen – Sam’s kitchen seems always to have been in a state of flux with experimental work surfaces and layouts going in and out of vogue, sinks appearing in dining tables, then moving around the room and Sam’s hatred of kitchen units causing wave after wave of welsh dressers, 70’s style sideboards, and shelving to sweep through the room in disruptive waves of chipped Formica.

This latest incarnation offers room for a proper dining table and to celebrate this, she invited us all round for a roast heart (except me – I had a veggie alternative). The one constant in Sam’s ever changing kitchen is the slow cooking pots of offal.

Anyway, Lunch went on late, and melded into the men’s single’s final at Wimbledon. This turned out to be the best (and longest) tennis match ever played… apparently… and ended with Federer loosing to Nadal in a nail biting finish.

The main nail-biting from my point of view was the tension of whether we’d get home in time for the repeat of the final episode of Doctor Who. In the event we left just as they were going into the last few games, and got home at 7:35 – fine because Doctor Who started at 8pm.

Except that they’d moved it, so it in fact started at 7:30… no point watching if I missed the first 5 minutes, so I went upstairs to download the episode and put it onto DVD.

Unfortunately, this process for some reason took until 10pm – and we ended up watching the remainder of the tennis followed by Midsommer Murders… Ahh!

Of course, we could have put it on at 10… but Lisa had to get up at 5:30 – so that was a no go….

In other words, as I write, it’s half six on Monday night, and I still haven’t watched it.

Which would be fine – except I can’t open emails because all my friends are Doctor Who fans and talking about it… I can’t open a newspaper… I can’t turn the radio or TV on… in fact just by looking out of the window, I risk finding out what happened…

Doctor Who is the most popular programme on British TV – which, although it means I’m no longer a pariah for being a fan, also means avoiding finding out what happened is a bit like trying to get through the 1966 world cup final weekend without knowing the result.

A weekend without George

2008-07-02T10:19:00.000-07:00

We spent our first night without George since he was born on Saturday. Lisa’s parents looked after him to give us a night off.

So did we go to a nice hotel and open a bottle of champagne?

No. we went to a campsite in The New Forest and slept out in a tent.

It was Gareth’s 40th and he invited a group of friends to spend the weekend playing rounders, eating barbeques and generally enjoying the outdoor lifestyle. well, I say the weekend… actually it started off at midday on Saturday because I spent so long on last week’s film project that I ended up having to stay at home on Friday and meet Lisa on Saturday in Southampton. It ended about 10am on Sunday because we had to zoom off back to London for the Police concert in Hyde park.

In fact, we were quite tempted to book in at a B&B for the night just to get a little peace… only we figured we’d never live it down.

I’m glad we didn’t, though because the day was great fun and the evening sat around what would have been a campfire if it hadn’t been warm anyway and if we’d been allowed to light fires which we weren’t – was nice too. Even though I was so tired I went to bed about half ten.

Camp sites are not as I remember them… I remember 1 man tents that took 2 men to carry them and 3 to put them up. Nowadays a tent comes in a flat lightweight disk which pops up as soon as you unzip it.

Of course, it still takes 3 men 3 hours to get it back in the pack again at the end of the holiday, but you can’t have everything.

The campsite seems to divide between people who have never camped before and those who have some experience. The way you tell them apart is that those who have never camped go into a camping shop and say “I’ve never camped before – what do I need” consequently they show up with trailers full of inflatable wardrobes, three story tents and solar powered self inflating cooking stoves comprising a four ring burner and a double oven.

Those who have camped before turn up with just a tent because they’ve watched a survival programme and think they can make fire from some dried up bark and a stick… Consequently, they then spend the rest of the weekend trying to borrow all the other stuff from the non-campers who find they don’t need it anyway because they’ve accidentally bought four duplicates.

Next to us on the campsite were a group of identical tents containing a selection of teenagers and a man in an army uniform who took great delight in tying them to trees.

I’m guessing it was a reality TV show destined for BBC 3.

On Sunday we cleared the tent away before most people were up – our SAS training came in handy – you should see Lisa assembling an AK-47 – and left to find a Little Chef for a greasy breakfast before moving straight on to lunch with Lisa’s parents.

We also got to see George again briefly (he didn’t seem to have missed us, but he can now clap which is useful) before we got on the train to London for the last Police concert ever in the UK…. Or so they say.

It turned out that this wasn’t just a Police concert… after a couple of acts we hadn’t heard of (no surprise there – we’re not great on the up-and-coming music scene – in fact the already-here-music-scene’s a bit of a mystery to me) suddenly the Bangles came on!

We also got somebody called TK turnstile – or something… OK, ok I know who she is. And she was really good – and funny too. Although she did do something I’ve never seen anyone do at a gig before… she forgot the words and had to start again.

Apparently the Stranglers were on a different stage, but we’d staked out a good picnic spot on the grass so we didn’t move.

The police did 2 hours in the end. I was impressed – they even did Invisible Sun – the only police record I ever bought. For some reason I really like the song. Perhaps it’s because I like my music not to say what it means quite… it’s a song that sounds like it’s really downbeat, but it’s actually about optimisim… the same as “Every Breath you take” sounds like it’s a love song, but it’s actually quite dark…

Anyway, Invisible Sun isn’t their most popular number, but obviously the band think it’s something special because it’s the only song they did with a slideshow (I get the feeling it’s some kind of charity record, but I’d never heard that).

Lisa loved the show too – which is lucky considering it was her birthday present.

By the time we got home, we were about ready for the end of the weekend… getting back to work seemed like a rest.

Jogging
On Tuesday night I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time… I went jogging… half an hour, but it seemed a lot longer.

I’ve been aware that I’ve said I need to take some exercise for about 5 years now and hardly done any. Now’s the time to start. Lisa’s running tonight and we’re going to do one run per week each from now on.

The trouble is, it’s so easy to find reasons not to go out… you feel a bit ill… you’ve got a heavy day tomorrow.. .you’ve had a heavy day today… it looks like it’s going to rain. I nearly got out of it last night because my jogging shorts are also my swimming shorts – and since I’d taken George to swimming class (his first time underwater without me holding onto him – the teacher dunked him and pushed him over towards me for me to catch) they were wet…. Unfortunately it was sunny and they dried… curses!

I think you have to commit and say “I’m going whatever”… and that’s what I’m going to try to do.

It was Lisa’s suggestion, but it’s on the “things I’ve been putting off for 40 years” list, so it’s time to tackle it!

Palma
Just to make everyone jealous for no reason… I’ve got an animation job which means I’ve got to go to Palma for Two days next week to hang about on a super yacht.

It’s all right for some….

Actually, the yacht’s not finished yet and I’m flying in one day and back the next, so it’s not going to be that much fun.

Still, more on this story as it develops…

taking on crap jobs

2008-06-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

This week I took on a job I knew I shouldn’t have. In fact, there were a couple of them.

The main one is a short film someone’s making for a competition. He had a grand idea involving multiple CGI characters in a hand drawn animation style running around in a real filmed environment.

However, it quickly became clear that the script involved a lot of CGI work and that the money and timescales weren’t nearly sufficient to do the job.

I took it on on the basis that I’d do the work in a day, but of course the director added shots and didn’t really know what he needed and it grew and grew.

Even on the basis I accepted the work, I knew it was going to be a struggle. It’s now taken 2 and a half days, and been very stressful. I’ve had to delay going away for the weekend and I feel as though the job was a bodge.

I really owe it to myself not to take on projects where the budget and deadlines aren’t sufficient for the work being asked for. I’m getting enough work now and I really am having to delay real properly paid work to do this.

The film will end up being a lot better than the producer thought it was going to be and I’m sure he’ll be happy in the end, but I’ve had a rotten couple of days doing something that was far too ambitious and getting paid the kind of rate I’d have been on 15 years ago.

It’s so easy when you’re freelance to just take on whatever is handed to you, but it’s not always worth it, and you really have to see beyond “I could do this” to “why should I?”

All I’ve really done, actually is convinced a young director that if he demands the impossible, he can get it. And that does nobody any favours.

I’m a professional and I need to treat myself as one.

presents
On the plus side, I’ve already used the money I did get for the project to buy a new widescreen monitor and a proper graphics tablet – two things I’ve been meaning to get myself for ages. It’s so good to be able to see High definition work in High definition as I’m working with it, and it’s also useful to be able to edit pictures and do 3d sculpting with a more responsive tool than a mouse!

Raoul
We went out with Raoul last night to say goodbye to him - he's off to dig up prehistoric fish in South Africa. I met Raoul last year while I was making the shark documentary - he was one of the interviewees and is now just leaving his job at the Natural History Museum (which is a shame, because it was good to have a contact there!).

anyway - a night out with Raoul is always a drunken one, I'm afraid, so we all started this morning a little under the weather.

not so good for my rubbish day at work - but worse for Raoul who has to pack his library and papers...

Anyway, due to the overrun on this film project, I've now missed the chance to go down to Worthing tonight with Lisa and George and I'm going to have to stay here alone and meet them in Southampton tomorrow morning.

It's a packed weekend coming up with Gareth's birthday at a campsite in the New Forest on Saturday and Sunday at the last ever Police concert in Hyde park.

The strange case of the 20,000 fish

2008-06-23T09:31:00.000-07:00

Ok - World stocks of fish are in a pretty bad way. If we treated the land the same way we treated the oceans we’d hunt chickens by dragging huge nets through entire forests, decimating the entire area and then throw back dead everything but the chickens.

And as a result, fish stocks are collapsing all over the world… if nothing’s done, cod, haddock and tuna will soon be extinct. The rest of the ocean’s life will quickly follow.

Apparently, eating farmed fish is just as bad – as it’s usually fed on the mulched up remains of… yep, you’ve guessed it… wild fish. It takes 3kg of wild fish to make 1kg of farmed salmon.

And I eat a lot of them. I don’t eat meat, so I pretty much replace that part of my diet with fish.

What’s worse, I’ve no intention of stopping. I’ve estimated that if I take fish, shellfish and everything into account, I’ll probably eat the equivalent of about 20,000 fish in my lifetime. And that’s a big dent in the world’s resources.

OK – I do try to buy sustainably fished varieties. line caught seabas, mackerel, sardines are all good – and I’ve all but stopped eating cod (swapping for coley or Pollock when I can). Apparently there’s only one type of tuna that’s not overfished, and there are a few sustainable fish farms – but there’s very little labelling to tell you which ones they are.

The problem with the oceans as opposed to the land is that they’re violent places – whereas on land most of the animals are vegetarian, in the oceans almost everything is carnivorous and that means that for every fish I eat, I’m taking out of the sea the nutrient from everything that fish has ever eaten too… People are just starting to farm plant eating varieties (look out for barramundi – a good replacement for white fish – it’s a staple in Australia and just beginning to be farmed over here)

Marks and Spencers and Waitrose are apparently good sources of sustainable fish.

But I’m not here to moan about the end of the world. I’m here to put a stop to it…Or at least to negate my own contribution to it.

So if I’m to fulfil my aim of making my effect on the world at least neutral, the search is on for a way to add 20,000 fish to the world’s aquatic population.

And as it turns out, this is more difficult than it looks… more difficult in fact than any of the other projects I’ve taken on in the last couple of weeks.

I can offset my carbon emissions. I can make up for my contribution to the exploitation of third world workers. I can even create more land to make up for the land used to fund my excessively normal lifestyle. But this is another kettle of … um…. Fish.

My online search has turned up nothing in the way of concrete practical ways to re-introduce fish to the oceans, and no groups singularly involved in projects to encourage the growth of marine ecosystems.

All the big organisations (friends of the earth, Greenpeace, WWW etc.) are putting all their efforts into bringing about political change.. it appears that the one thing everyone agrees is that this of all problems is just too big for them to make a dent in. the only way to allow fish stocks to recover is to stop overfishing.

Ok – there are a couple of angling associations re-stocking rivers with salmon and trout – but only so they can fish them. And there are a few organisations trying to create artificial reefs to replace those that are being lost, but it’s not the reef fish that are being overfished – it’s the open water fish).

It would appear I’ve hit a dead end. The Cod, the Tuna, the haddock are only going to survive if the EU acts to reduce fishing and set up safe zones and if the man in the street stops buying overfished varieties.

I just can’t put back my 20,000 fish whatever I try to do. They’re gone.

And that’s a bit of a blow. I know there are no magical one-pill solutions to the problems of the world, but it has to be possible to undo the damage you do on a personal level at least…

But how?

This is going to take a bit more research...

2008-06-23T09:06:00.001-07:00

George is really moving on…. the last week has seen him work out how to clap and how to control his tongue (mainly to prevent us from cleaning his teeth).

But he’s most impressive this week in his moving around. He’s got a kind of davros-style wizzy chair with casters on the bottom which we put him in when we’re in the kitchen. It’s a flying saucer complete with the compulsory noise making buttons. And up to now he’s just sat in it, pressing the buttons (and occassionaly falling asleep with his head on the buttons despite the noise). Anyway, this week, he suddenly figured out how to move the thing around by running along the floor. He’s now whizzing up and down the kitchen.

He’s also suddenly got the strength in his legs to allow him to stay standing up –he still has to hold onto something to balance, but he can now stay upright as long as he likes.

In addition to that, on Sunday, at Lisa’s parents’ he started pulling himself up on the coffee table so he could stand on his own.

All of which is a bit odd because he still shows absolutely no interest in rolling over or crawling. I think he’s decided that none of the adults get about by crawling, so why should he?

Typical English Pooh Farmers
I sometimes wonder what he thinks we’re all about –we expect him to learn our language and yet we make very little attempt to learn his (typical English)… and from his point of view it must be quite obvious that we keep him around primarily to harvest his pooh and wee which as soon as it appears we promptly take away for our own as yet unknown purposes.

The East Dulwich Posh Pram Brigade
The other day, two women passed Lisa in the street pushing their own prams one remarked to the other quite audibly what a shame it was when people couldn’t afford to buy a new pram for their baby.

Bizarre behaviour – I guess some people just have nothing in their lives.

Lisa didn’t react, but the woman behind her (also pushing a pram – this is East Dulwich after all) had a real go at them.

We went to Worthing this weekend and had a nice time – even meeting up with Suzanne and Richard in a pub on the way home– except that when we got back, we were both violently sick. For me, it had been building all weekend, but Lisa suddenly got hit by it on Sunday night. Still trying to work out the cause. Lisa got over it pretty quickly, but I didn’t sleep at all last night, so today’s work has felt painfully slow. I really need to go to bed, but if I do, I won’t sleep tonight either!

PS I just got a call from Lisa. It looks like George has got it too - he's just thrown up in the park and they're on their way to the doctor. it looks like this is a bug. Sam's not feeling too great and Lisa's mum's gone down with it too. pretty miserable all round!

How much room do I take up?

2008-06-18T11:15:00.002-07:00

OK, in my search for a neutral life, I’ve discovered how hard it is to find a carbon offsetting scheme that everyone agrees with, and I’ve concluded that the best way to make account for all the abuse that goes on in the industries that make my clothes and pick my food is (given that I can’t always know how every product is produced) to sponsor two children in the third world…

But living on this planet in a consumer society does more than create a few tones of co2 and build a market in non-ethically produced goods.

What about the landfill I create with the waste I can’t recycle? What about the pesticides used in the production of my food? What, for that matter about the land used to grow the food itself? All these things damage the world, but they also take up space which could otherwise be used more positively.

And it’s a complex thing – I’ve no idea about how to start working out what my effect is… and a quick search around the Internet reveals that nobody else really has a clue either.

Carbon offsetting calculators are everywhere, but what about all the other footprints we leave? Nobody seems to know.

So, in keeping with the rest of my Neutral Life project, I’m going to make an uninformed stab based on half hearted research and garnish it with a bit of slapdash maths….

So here goes:
The one factoid I’ve managed to pull from the Interweb which appears to have some kind of basis is a calculation of the amount of space each person takes up… the idea is that this is a calculation of the land needed to produce the food they eat, deal with their waste, manufacture the goods they use…. Etc.

In other words, it’s a calculation of the amount of the Earth’s resources that are taken up by the person over their life. And it’s where the much copied “3 earths” statistic comes from – the idea that if everyone lived the way we do, we’d need 3 earths to support them.
It turns out that the figure is about 5.5 hectares (13.5 acres) for a British citizen.

So far so good… but aside from living on another planet (and I’m sure there’d be “food miles” issues associated with that) – there’s not much I can do – I mean, I can’t just create more land, can I?

Or can I?

Ok – how about this:

There’s a lot of the world where the land is pretty tough to make use of. It’s not land of great ecological importance – it’s just barren. And there are a lot of people trying to turn that land into usable farming land – to produce crops the world needs.

What if I could contribute to turning 5.5 hectares of that land from desert into farmland? That would give back the 5.5 hectares that my life takes out of the system, wouldn’t it?

Ok… how do I do it?

A quick check on Oxfam, farm Africa and similar charities draws a blank. They’ll let you make a donation of course to lots of worthy projects, but there’s no way to distinguish between (for example) buying goats, and irrigating fields… and there’s no way to quantify what 5.5 hectares of land actually equates to in terms of seeds or irrigating farmland.

It seems really hard to find any quantifiable way to help with the recovery of farmland…It’s relatively easy to protect rainforest areas - http://www.worldlandtrust.org/projects/past-projects.htm

You can protect an acre for £50 – my problem with this is it’s land that’s already there – I’m not adding new useful space to the world to make up for the acres I’m using up. I keep going back to this, but my benchmark here is practical solutions with measurable results – and that’s what makes it so difficult.

However, what I do find is Self Help www.selfhelp.ie – an Irish charity helping people in Africa make use of land for farming. Their site tells me that 22 euros is how much it costs to enable a small plot to be farmed…

but how small is small?

A quick check on another site reveals that the average private farm in Ethiopia is about 1 acre, so my slapdash maths tells me if I can commit 11 euros per month to that charity (about £7) That will put 6 acres of land into production every year.

Works for me.

So I’m nearly done… this 6 acres is the amount spent on growing my food, burying my rubbish and handling the pollution created by my consumer goods…

But there’s still one more thing to tackle…Tune in next time, when I take on the strange affair of the 20,000 fish…

Underwater George

2008-06-18T11:15:00.001-07:00

George is still recovering from his cough (and I’m still getting over mine). He’s not eating properly – which is unusual for him. He’s either refusing food (he’s learned to shake his head and I wonder whether the universal sign for “no” actually evolved from a reflex to stop yourself being fed something you don’t want) or he’s eating and then throwing up. And this is not just normal baby puking which happens all the time – it’s full on everything in the tummy coming up!

Anyway, he seems to be improving, so I took him to his swimming class yesterday. We had to dunk the babies underwater – which a lot of the mums were a bit nervous of. George spluttered and cried a bit the first time, but soon got over it and enjoyed his swimming lesson.

Chiswick
Having sold her flat in Chiswick just before George was born to Nina and Jahad – a couple who had split up years previously, but who were both still buying the flat together, Lisa got a call a couple of weeks back from Nina.

Nina was the primary reason Lisa sold the flat – Nina had been doing her utmost to make trouble for years: illegally doing work on the flat’s shared wall without getting permission, laying a patio with paving slabs Lisa had bought, complaining about Lisa’s tenant…. All stuff designed to make her sell – to the point that I eventually had to phone her myself and tell her to stop behaving like a spoilt child.

Anyway, when you have two flats owned separately, you need to have a management company to run the freehold – and Lisa, surprisingly enough always looked after the company, so it was no surprise when after she sold the flat, Nina came back to her a couple of months later wondering why Companies House had fined her for not putting her books in order.

Lisa forwarded the details and explained what she had to do.

Fair enough.

Then, this weekend, the other part of the buying pair, Jahad called.

Apparently Nina had told him that Lisa hadn’t exchanged on the flat. Nina had simply taken Jahad’s £175,000, bought the flat and run off with it.

This happened just after he told her he was getting engaged, so you can draw your own conclusions.

It looks like Lisa may have to give evidence…

Absolutely outrageous behaviour – Nina can’t possibly thing she’ll get away with it!

2008-06-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

on Friday night a few of us went to the top of the Gherkin (the giant pointy thing in the middle of London – apparently one of the most expensive buildings in the world – valued at 1.6 billion) – we had a champagne to celebrate Lisa’s birthday and Claudia even brought a birthday cake in.

From the top you get great views over London as the sun goes down. Below us, the two buildings from which London has been run over the past 1000 years face each other across the Thames. On the South side, the Mayor’s building – entirely made of glass. On the North, the stone fortress of the Tower of London – built by William the Conqueror to let England know that it was under the control of France.

It’s a good indication of what’s changed – then, our leaders had to protect themselves with moats and armies to stop terrorist attack. Today their buildings are glass and they come to work by bike.

We’re being constantly told we’re living in a dangerous world where people are out to bring down our civilization… and they’re using that excuse to put fortresses around the glass buildings, to give the police more power - to move us slowly back across the river towards the Tower.

Mum
My mum is out of Hospital now – although she’s in some kind of suit that stops her moving her hip and it looks like she’ll be in it for 6 weeks at least. She’s in good spirits, though and seems receptive to the idea that she may need to make changes to her house so she doesn’t do her hip any more damage.

I’d like Lisa to go in as an OT and do an assessment for her, but I don’t want her to do it unless my parents agree that they’ll take on board her plans – which are likely to involve a new shower, different living room chairs and an eye level oven.

None of which my parents will want to do because they’ve only just finished redecorating and they’re thinking of moving anyway (thinking of moving can become a long term practice for my parents – they were thinking of moving from their last house for 20 years before they actually did anything about it).

Still, we did set up a broadband internet account for them over the weekend. They’ve been thinking about setting one up for a couple of years at least, and it will be such a benefit to them… hopefully Mum will be able to do her shopping online. Hopefully she’ll also be able to have something to do while she’s recuperating.

Hello, Mum – if you’re reading this, it means your broadband is working!

Lisa’s Birthday
On Saturday we had a lovely night out together for Lisa’s birthday. Every time we do get out, we promise ourselves to do it more often.

We went to beauberry house http://www.beauberryhouse.co.uk/
For dinner. It’s a great restaurant in Dulwich – French and Japanese if that makes any sense.

I think there must be some kind of trend for posh chefs to use king crab right now. I had it on Saturday, but it was also served on the Orient Express…

I think the chefs may have seen the TV series “deadliest catch” in which the king crab fishing expeditions are described as the most dangerous in the world… I think they’ve decided that because they’re really difficult to catch, they must be great to eat.

They are – but I’m not sure how much better than, say, Cornish crabs they are. The reason I’m not sure is partly because I’ve still got a cold and couldn’t actually taste anything on Saturday night….

Modeling Sunday
Sam’s fashion and tailoring courses are coming to an end and on Wednesday there’s a show at the college in which she’s exhibiting clothes she’s been making – a suit, a corset, some underwear and a cloak.

She wants to put up some photos in the background, so we had a photoshoot on Sunday with Lisa as the model and me as the photographer.

We went for a paparazzi style shoot in the street, but nobody in East Dulwich thought Lisa was overdressed for Lordship Lane….

sweatshops and sponsorhips

2008-06-13T09:26:00.000-07:00

Ok –following on from my post yesterday: with my carbon neutrality restored, is the Earth now safe? Can I float off on a white fluffy cloud, levitated only by the power of my own smugness?

Not a bit of it.

Much of what I buy – what we all buy - has been made by people in third world countries on wages I wouldn’t approve of.

Now, I can try to buy less (though I don’t quite know how – I barely even register in the world of consumer goods and don’t even own a supermarket loyalty card on the grounds that either it's an afront to my civil liberties or that I keep loosing it - can't quite work out which) and I can try to buy fair-trade goods, but labelling isn’t always there, and I don’t always have the time or energy to find out everything about every garment, piece of food, or factory produced item I buy.

Of course, there is an argument that says it’s better to have someone employed than not employed, and that the money is going into a country it woudn’t otherwise have gone to. This is true, but it’s not the point. The point is, I'm responsible for sustaining the marketplace which forces people into slavery.

So let’s take a guess. So let’s say I estimate my spending on goods that have been made, assembled, picked, packaged or built using underpaid workers and children. Let’s say I take a guess that 2/3 of the purchase cost of these items goes in getting the goods to the UK and in profits to the shops that sell them. Let’s say of the remaining 1/3, 1/5 is justifiable profit for the manufacturers. The rest should be paid to the workers.

In other words, for every £100 I spend, there’s £26 that should be going to the workers and probably isn’t.

A quick bit of research (I’m copying from another website here) says some of the biggest problem industries are:

Shoes: Many types of shoes are made in sweatshops. However, the biggest problem is found with sneakers and athletic shoes.Most athletic shoes are made in sweatshops in Asian countries.Child labor is also very common in the shoe industry.

Clothing: Clothing is very often made in sweatshops and with the use of child labor.In the U.S. the majority of garment workers are immigrant women that work 60-80 hours a week, usually without minimum wage or overtime pay. Overseas, garment workers routinely make less than a living wage, working under extremely oppressive conditions.

Rugs: A lot of child labor is used in the rug industry. Nearly one million children are illegally employed making hand-knotted rugs worldwide.Approximately 75% of Pakistan's carpet weavers are girls under 14.

Toys: A lot of toys are made in sweatshops and by child labor. Especially toys made in countries like China, Malaysia, Thailand or Vietnam. The average North American toy maker earns $11 an hour. In China, toy workers earn an average of 30 cents an hour.

Chocolate: 43% of cocoa beans come from the Ivory Coast where recent investigators have found child slavery. In addition, cocoa workers who are paid, receive wages that leave them at the edge of poverty and starvation.

Bananas: Banana workers are some of the most exploited workers in the world. They have to work long hours, get low pay, are forced overtime and are exposed to dangerous pesticides.

Coffee: Coffee is the second largest US import after oil.Many small coffee farmers receive prices for their coffee that are less than the cost of production, forcing them into a cycle of poverty and debt.

so how much do I spend on this kind of stuff?

Well It’d be really tough to work out… however:

Let’s say I spend £500 per year on clothes (I don’t think I do, but probably if I add George’s baby clothes in, I’m sure it comes to that)

Food: um… well, let’s say another £500 on foods picked under bad conditions (I’m not sure about this either…. I try to buy seasonal stuff, but not all the time). I haven’t got a clue about the processes behind every food item on the shelf and I don’t know that finding out would help much with the calculation.

And let’s say another £800 on sundry other stuff – bits of plastic, toys, etc…

Ok – so that’s £1800 per year, of which I’ve decided £468 is money that should be going to underpaid workers.

Now there are a lot of charities out there doing good work trying to get sweatshops and slave labour abolished.

But as I’ve said, though the political stuff is all very well, and very important, my aim in this is clear – I want practical measurable results. I want to create a solid positive benefit.

So what to do?

Well, a number of ideas occur to me, but the favourite – and the one I’ve gone for is to sponsor 2 children through Actionaid. http://www.actionaid.org.uk/ … the idea being that the money that should have been going to the poorest communities instead of lining the pockets of retail chains and manufacturers gets used where it should have been in the first place.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode – in which I try to work out how much space I really take up…

Lisa's birthday

2008-06-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

It’s Lisa’s birthday today, but it’s a working day for me and she’s with George, plus, we’re going to the Gherkin this evening with a group - all of which means we had a present opening session before George got us up this morning and we'll have a glass of champagne later, but our real celebration will have to wait until we have our night out together tomorrow night.

David Davis
After the Government barely managed to get through legislation allowing them to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days (although the bill will almost certainly not survive the house of Lords), David Davis – one time runner for leader of the Tory party has resigned on principle. His idea is to force a by-election which he’s going to campaign on the basis of fighting the erosion of civil liberties.

Good for him – and I told him so in an email:

Hi
Just a note to say that I thought your actions today were honourable and intelligent.

You may be feeling isolated without the backup of the party mechanisms you’ve become used to right now, but be assured, you are not alone in believing that the principles on which our democracy was founded are worth defending.

The British have always guarded our freedoms jealously, and the veil under which they are now being eroded is thin indeed. Our freedoms were forged in times far more dangerous than these, and we forget sometimes quite how hard won they are.

I am not a natural Tory supporter – and I’m unlikely to become one any time soon, but I’d like to commend you for your stand today. As an IT journalist I’m constantly reminded of the small, technical developments that are eroding our personal freedoms piece by piece and of the difficulties of bringing the real issues underlying those changes to the public eye. The excuse of terrorism may be allowing our police and our leaders to persuade themselves that more and more draconian measures are needed, but it is good for them to be reminded that democracy makes them our servants, not our masters.

Good luck with your stand.

Christian Darkin

footprints

2008-06-12T10:23:00.001-07:00

Ok – so following on from yesterday’s post…. Let’s start with something easy: carbon footprints.

There are lots of carbon footprint calculators out there, so it ought to be easy enough to work out what to do about it…

You feed in your details, you get a figure, and you pay to some scheme or other that will help fund carbon reducing initiatives. Fair enough.

But digging into it, you discover a huge range of different schemes and an even wider range of people criticising the schemes they’re not a part of.

There’s even plenty of criticism about whether carbon offsetting is the right way to go anyway. it all boils down to the idea that if you ofsett your carbon (always assuming you find a scheme that actually does what it says it will do) then aren’t you just going to go around behaving as though you’ve got a right to pollute rather than doing what you should be doing to reduce your emissions in the first place.

My favourite quote as a satire on carbon offsetting is this one:

“If you have an extramarital affair, don’t worry – you can always offset any emotional damage caused by simply paying someone else to remain faithful”

and it’s a good point.

But not good enough.

The people wanting to do carbon offsetting are going to be people who are aware of the problem and are doing their best to turn off lights and stop using cars anyway – people who don’t give a toss aren’t going to do it anyway – so the argument that it discourages people from cutting their own carbon doesn’t make any sense at all to me.

Besides which – going back to my initial “mission statement” – it’s all about net results. If the net result of my existence is that less carbon goes into the atmosphere than if I hadn’t been born, then it’s a good thing, surely, however I get to that point.

The trouble is that this “don’t pollute in the first place argument” is so loud on the Internet with so many people shouting their own uninformed opinions that you can’t actually find out the important information when you need it.

You can’t see from most sites whether they’re serious – whether they know what they’re doing and whether they’re worthwhile. Also, most people (offsetters as well as environmental organisations) are desperate to persuade you that one scheme is better than another – and with so many competing schemes and everyone with an axe to grind, you can easily spend all your time hopping from one site to the next.

So all that the endless repetition of the advice to use long-life lightbulbs is actually doing is preventing people from getting to what they’re looking for.

As I search, I’m reminded of a vegetarian restaurant I got taken to in Australia (where vegetarianism is a little further back than it is in the UK). The restaurant was filled with pictures and descriptions of dreadful farming techniques and animal slaughter.

Now, obviously everyone going to the restaurant was already convinced by the vegetarian idea – so all the politics achieved was putting people off their food…

When I look for a vegetarian restaurant I don’t want to eat surrounded by photos of tortured animals. That much should be obvious even to the most political vegan. Equally, when I look for a carbon offsetting scheme, I don’t want to have to wade through the hard sell on global warming (because clearly if I’ve landed up at a carbon offsetting site, I’ve got some knowledge of that anyway) and I don’t want to contribute to my house’s already burgeoning long-life lightbulb mountain!

Anyway – I persevered and here’s the most useful thing I did find:
http://www.which.co.uk/reports_and_campaigns/house_and_home/Reports/Greener%20living/Getting%20started/Carbon%20offsetting/Carbon_offsetting_report_657_134684_4.jsp
a comparison of carbon offsetting schemes.

Of which this one:
http://www.carbonbalanced.org/
seems like one of the best choices (plus it’s got David Attenborough as a patron – so that gets my vote).

There’s a detailed carbon offsetting calculator on the site, but as soon as it started asking me about the make age and mileage of my car (of which I’ve no clue), I realised I’d already spent way too much time on this and with no end in sight I opted to bypass the calculator and simply describe myself as an average UK family.

Cost: £168 per year.

The national average is 10 tones of Co2 emmitted per year (unless you’re an American in which case it’s 25. 2 tonnes is about right apparently….

And that’s the one I’ve gone for.

Let’s have a crisis!

2008-06-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

You’re supposed to have a mid life crisis, right? Well, I don’t seem to be having much luck on that one, so let’s try to manufacture one.

Well, not so much a crisis as an assessment - to put in place some of the things I’ve been meaning to do for the last 40 years, but never got around to. You know, all those vague ideas you always have floating around about getting fit, donating to charity and doing all that other stuff?

So it’s not actually much of a crisis at all really… I mean, a few years ago, I went traveling to find myself.. most people didn’t notice because I only went to Cornwall, and I went for the weekend.

The thing is, I pretty much knew where I was to begin with.

I’m not really one for having total re-thinks about who you are every few years – I’ve seen people do it and it leads to them creating havoc around them most of the time…

So what do I want to do? Well, to start with, let’s have a mission statement:

“I want the world to be a better place for my having lived in it.”

Pretty straightforward, that, but when you start unpacking it, you find that as a middle aged, middle class westerner, you’re not starting from a good point.

So the first real question is where am I at now?

Well, I can start by calculating my carbon footprint… trendy, so it’s easy to work out.
But carbon’s not the only pollutant my life produces – There’s pesticides, nuclear waste, and poisons created by any number of chemical processes that wouldn’t have been needed if I hadn’t existed. And how much landfill will I create in my life that will need to be recycled?

Then there’s the damage farming the foods I’ve eaten done in terms of water use, the destruction of rainforests, etc..? Plus, how many fish have I taken out of the oceans to eat – they need replacing if I’m to make my life a positive effect on the world?

How about my clothes and other consumer goods? How much exploitation has their been in their creation throughout my life – and more importantly what can I do to redress that?

So the question is, going back to my mission statement: Is it possible to make yourself an asset to this overcrowded world rather than a drain on it? What would it take to do it? And if it is possible, given that I don’t have lots of time to donate to worthy causes - how much will it cost me?

Solutions
I’m not going to go for political fixes – It might be very worthwhile to (for example) contribute to lobbying African governments to pay a minimum wage (or even campaigning to make our government take stronger action)…but it’s not an immediate and practical response. Instead, in this project I’m only going to look at things that actually have a measurable effect.

Also, I’m trying to do the best I can to recycle, reduce waste, buy ethical stuff, and buy locally produced food, but the effect of this is not measurable, so I’m going to ignore it. I mean, I can recycle and do my best to reduce my carbon footprint and I can smile at people in the street, and that’s all good stuff, but sometimes it’s worth looking at the big picture.

Ok – over the next few days I’ll take a look at the parts of this plan and see what I can do.

Well, it’ll be an interesting exercise if nothing else….

mum and George

2008-06-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

My mum’s hip came out of it’s socket again on Saturday and now she’s in hospital. This is the second time it’s happened and nobody seems to know why.

it's possible Mum is just not being as careful as she should with it. It's hard to tell as she'll tell me it's all OK and that she's doing everything right whether she is or not.

Anyway, it's been put back in place and she's hoping to be out of hospital this week. but she'll have to wear a leg brace for six weeks.

Hopefully they'll give her excercises and send an occupational therapist to tell her what needs changing in her house. Of course, Lisa could (and does) tell her that she needs a different toilet seat, handles and a shower in the bathroom, a different chair, and an eye level oven in the kitchen. but Mum and Dad have just changed the kitchen and bathroom and won't change it again unless they have a very good reason.

I think Mum's hip coming out of joint IS a very good reason, but what do I know?

George isn’t well either. He’s coughing and being sick… pretty much the same stuff babies do all the time, but he’s doing it a bit more than usual, and a bit more messily. I had to cancel his swimming lesson yesterday, and Lisa was up for 3 hours in the night with him, so it’s probably time to take him to the doctor’s.

Of course, the doctor will almost certainly advise calpol – which seems to be the only thing you can give children. (probably because it doesn’t actually do anything).

As for me, I'm getting over my illness of the weekend, and I'm back into the thick of work.

House!
Lisa got the news today that her offer of £160,000 on the house we went to see in Worthing has been accepted. The offer was refused to start with, and for the last week, various estate agents from the firm representing the old lady who owns the house have been phoning several times a day falling over themselves trying to get us to up the offer.

None of the estate agents seemed to have any idea what the others had said to us.

I guess that's no surprise. The news yesterday said that things have got so bad in the housing market that estate agents are on average making just one sale a week! no surprise then that the first thing the agents do when there's an offer on the table is to start trying to steal the sale from each other - fighting over who gets to close the deal.

Come to think of it, Estate agents are supposed by law to act in the best interest of the vendor. I wonder how many of them do so when the vendor's best interest would be served by not selling.

breeding stag beetles - or not

2008-06-09T10:43:00.001-07:00

The fact that I’m working too hard is starting to show – I’ve caught a cold from George and although I made it to the end of Friday’s work, I pretty much collapsed on the sofa and felt under the weather most of the weekend.

Of course, I also ended the week having taken on two extra pieces of work with short deadlines (one is a print advert for vodaphone - the other is an animated rap video!) both I’ve got to do in about a week …. The joys of being freelance!

Anyway….

Saturday didn’t offer much recouperation. Apart from the fact that Lisa, Sam and about 8 others went to see sex in the city on Saturday night leaving me with George and the job of making sushi for anyone who came back for a nightcap.. The people living in the house that backs onto the end of our garden are cleaning up – and that means knocking down the wall of our garden and replacing it.

In our garden – between the greenhouse and the wall was a big pile of rotting wood. Our neighbours kindly offered to get a skip and help us move the wood through their garden (since we can’t get to it from behind the greenhouse).

Fair enough. Only, I don’t really want to move the rotting wood. I want to keep the rotting wood just where it is. Not because I’m ill, but because it’s what makes our garden unique.

That pile of wood is where the foxes chose to raise their young last year – which is why we had little baby foxes in the garden. But more than that, a big pile of rotting wood is just what stag beetles need for their breeding cycle.

Stag beetles do live in our wood pile – we’ve seen them flying in the summer – and it turns out they’re very rare – and south east London is one of the most important sites in the country for finding them.

The problem is, that stag beetles aren’t stag beetles for very long. In fact, they’re only stag beetles for about 2 months. The rest of their 7 year lives is spent as grubs living in piles of rotting wood.

No rotting wood. No stag beetles.

So I didn’t really want to remove it. However, what can you do? The wall was collapsing and if the neighbours wanted to reclaim their garden they had to replace it. As soon as they did, the wood pile would come crashing into their garden.

So it had to go.

And there were stag beetle lavae. I didn’t know what they were until we looked it up later – but there definitely were some big white grubs among the wood.

Luckily, the skip was too small and only half the wood pile was behind the section of wall we removed, so half the wood pile remains.

Still, I can’t escape the feeling we’ve destroyed something we can’t replace.

I’m hoping we can keep the rest of the wood pile… I did also find this:
http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/projects/insects-stag-beetle-bucket/
which might be something we can do to add to our stag beetle population…

2008-06-06T09:33:00.001-07:00

Last night, after George’s first full day at nursery, we left him with a babysitter and went out with Raoul – he’d booked what appears to be the only Swis restaurant in London and we had Fondue. The first time I’d ever tried it.

Eating a Fondue is a lot more complex than it would first appear. Apparently a bit like tightrope walking. You have to be sure to eat and drink the right things in the right measure to avoid the fondue turning into a solid ball in your stomach. The right thing to drink is a kind of peach schnapps – although, it tasted like pure alchohol to me – if you don’t drink enough of it, the cheese in your stomach will coagulate. If you drink too much, it will make you sick.

Surprisingly this dish – effectively cheese on toast in another form (with potatoes as a quite unnecessary side dish) is actually quite nice – although I was aware of a vague longing for something green.

George and the Dulwich wives

2008-06-04T11:08:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was my day with George and a packed day it was… his 2nd day settling in to nursery basically involved me taking him over there, then sitting in the staff room for a couple of hours chatting to the mother of another new intake while George played happily barely even noticing my absence.

I think these inductions are mainly for the parents’ benefit. After about an hour one of the minders came up and asked if we wanted to check on the children. We looked through the window, but didn’t go in. both were enjoying themselves and didn’t need us poking our noses in…

At midday I collected George and took him home. He’d fallen asleep before I got back, which was good because due to an American client on a ridiculous deadline (I’ve no idea when the employees of this company sleep as they seem to be able to contact me any time from 7am to 1:30am, and don’t see any problem with doing so) – I had lots of minor, but fiddly changes to make to a video animation that needed to be done by 6pm.

There was just time to do some of the work, and get George fed before I had to take him out to another baby event! This time it was a swimming class in London Bridge (called little floaters – or something like that). Anyway, this was a class in the hydrotherapy pool at Guy’s hospital.

Another chance to chat to the South London New Mothers… This time I was met at East Dulwich station by one who recognised George (not me, of course) and deduced that I was Lisa’s husband.

Having a baby means you can’t move in Lordship Lane without bumping into someone you know through your baby. Putting names to faces is tough (in fact you end up remembering the baby’s name rather than the mother’s because it’s the baby you end up talking about).