but she’s a girl…

Taxidermy

2012-05-20T16:21:00+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, Robert Brook posted some lovely photos from what turned out to be the Horniman Museum. I loved his photos, because I find old taxidermied animals rather compelling. Don’t get me wrong, I much prefer to see animals alive and well and in their natural habitats. But stuffed animals hover interestingly in that uncanny valley between alive and not alive, and I’ve always been fascinated by them.

When I was young, my Mum used to take my brother and I to London to visit the museums during the holidays. I was more interested in animals and natural history (I started young), while my brother who is two years younger than me preferred the Science museum with all its exciting machines (he’s now an engineer, and also started young). So — in a move that absolutely horrifies her now — Mum used to leave me at the Natural History Museum, while she and my brother popped next door to the Science Museum. Whenever we remember this, she covers her face with her hands and says “How could I do that!”, but it was absolutely fine. It was a simpler time, and I was a very sensible kid, as well as extremely shy. I would never have gone off with anyone, and spent the time pottering around and feeling perfectly safe and content.

I loved everything about the Natural History museum, but I remember spending most of my time wandering around the cases of stuffed animals, sketching subjects that took my fancy. I wasn’t a morbid child, and I loved live animals more than anything else in the world, but I liked the taxidermy exhibits because I could get so close and really look at them. Even though the fur or feathers were often rather faded and the poses odd, you could get a sense of the physical presence of the animal. I devoured encyclopedias of animals voraciously, but they didn’t give an impression of the size of an animal as vividly as peering at tiny hummingbird or gazing up at a polar bear in a glass case. I could study every hair and feather, the line of a snout or the spread of a paw and take my time to do so. It’s funny, because while I was absolutely terrified of shop window dummies as a child, and my parents never even attempted to take me to Madame Tussaud’s because they knew I would run out of there with a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, I was never frightened of the stuffed animals at all. I can’t explain that, because they are somewhat creepy. They are life-like but clearly not alive, gazing out of their frozen time with their dull, glassy eyes.

On our trips to Brazil, the hotel we stayed at had a dining room that had windows on two sides. The windows were covered by insect screens (vital in the wet season against mosquitoes), but despite this, small birds regularly flew straight into the windows and stunned themselves. We would be sitting eating breakfast and hear a surprisingly loud bang, then go outside to find a small bundle of feathers on the boardwalk. On our last visit, a cardinal hit the window¹. I went outside and picked it up gently — it seemed tiny, even in my small hands, but oddly heavy for its size. It was stunned rather than dead, and I could feel the tiny movement of its breathing. The weather was rather cool, so I cupped it in my hands so that their warmth would transfer to the cardinal’s tiny body. Gradually, it started to move a little so I adjusted the position of my hands so that its feet were underneath it. The tiny, delicate feet started to grip my palm and push against it, and it felt instantly lighter. I opened my hands slowly, and after a brief pause, it launched itself into the air and flew off.

I’ve had that experience a few times, caring for injured animals, and less happily when they slip in the other direction, from life to death². It always surprises me how short the distance between life and death is, but also how much difference it makes to the physical presence of the animal in your hands. That all sounds unpleasantly mystical and airy-fairy and I don’t mean it to. The way that a live animal feels in your hands is just a result of sound and movement and muscles opposing gravity. It’s just that the sum of those things is startlingly tangible as life: something that stuffed animals definitely don’t have, however life-like they may appear.

Cue the Sufjan Stevens’ song ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’…↩
Never caused by me, I should add.↩

That’s a wrap

2012-05-07T17:38:00+01:00

A few weeks ago, my fellow Twitter fountain pen-aholics and I were ogling the Enveloop: a lovely canvas and suede pen wrap which looked ideal for keeping each pen separated and safe, but easily accessible. Until now, I have been using a small black Muji pencil case, which had one separate zipped pocket on the outside, in which I kept my beloved Lamy 2000 fountain pen. However, since then, I’ve acquired (somehow — my hand slipped on the ‘Buy’ button!) a couple of other fountain pens, and I was beginning to worry about them knocking about with all my other pens in the main compartment. I looked around on the web, and found that there are various designs of pen wraps out there. It seemed to be something I could probably have a go at making myself. Since this weekend was a Bank Holiday in the UK, I decided I would buy some fabric, pull out the old Singer 99, and have a go at making one.

I must say that I had a really fun afternoon making this wrap. I should really try to do something creative with my hands more often, as I found it really satisfying. I’m very pleased with the result which you can see above (the inside is on show here). It was all done in a rather ad hoc way. I made a paper template to cut out the main pieces for the liner and the outside material, amazing myself with how inept I am at creating shapes with right angles, and — indeed — using scissors to cut a straight line. After that, I decided that I might was well wing it, and cut out the pieces for the pen pockets and flaps as I went, (mis-) judging by eye. The seams are a bit wonky in places if you look closely, and the whole thing is not entirely square, but I’m rather proud of it. There are 5 main pen slots, covered by a flap when it’s closed, and there are two further small pockets in the left edge for my Kaweco and various other bits like an eraser and pencil lead container. I was after an Asian look for the wrap, and found some lovely dragon-patterned viscose material in the market for the outer, which I paired with a fake suede material to give a soft lining. A bit of braided cord with a plastic toggle button on the end wraps around to close it.

I might still add a few features, but it’s usable as it is. I’ll see if I need to add any velcro to close the vertical pockets at the left edge, and I might also add an external slip pocket on the right edge to keep one pen handy, like the original Enveloop. However, I tend to tuck my Lamy 2000 into the pen loops of my notebook when I’m out and about, so I’m not sure if I really need an external slot. I feel a bit like a kid again, going ‘back to school’ tomorrow with my new pencil case!

Living with Vim

2012-04-29T10:39:00+01:00

I’ve written here before about how I initially got into using the Vim text editor, and how I keep cycling back to it on a tour of OS X text editors. More recently I’ve noticed that I’ve been less tempted to try out the latest shiny new text editor, and I’ve been sticking with Vim for everything. I used to find prose writing a little hard-going with Vim, so I would open Textmate or BBEdit for that kind of editing, but I seem to have hit upon (with a lot of help from the Internets) a set of customisations and settings that allow me to work very comfortably with any kind of text in Vim.

One big change has been that I’ve moved away from using MacVim to just plain old Vim in the terminal. I think I was using the familiarity of the Apple application environment and the keystrokes that have become burned into my muscle memory (e.g. those for copy and save) to help ease the transition, but actually Vim in the terminal just feels a bit more natural. I think it helps that I’ve moved to running Vim (and various other commandline utilities) in tmux inside iTerm2. This solves one of the problems I had before which was that I found it a bit tedious to have to reopen all the files I was working on before when I resumed work on a particular project. That’s easy with tmux: you just open all the windows you want, put Vim in one, work away, and then when you want to switch to another project you detach the session. When you resume working on that project, you reattach to the session, and everything is exactly as you left it. I think I had avoided tmux (and the very similar utility, screen) because I assumed it was only of use if you were logging in to a remote server, but it’s definitely worth using for saved sessions alone. The other handy thing is having separate panes within one window (or other windows) running other commands, such as having one running latexmk to compile a *.tex file, and displaying the errors as you work. If you’ve given up on tmux before, I can highly recommend reading the tmux book by Brian P. Hogan. It’s a great guide to getting tmux set up easily.

The other change I made which helped a lot was to try out Yan Pritzker’s dotfiles setup, aka ‘YADR’. I’ve tried a few different systems for managing Vim plugins and configuration files for other commandline utilities before, but this was the first that seemed to make good sense and allow easy maintenance across a number of different machines. It comes with an enormous number of plugins, and is also optimised for using MacVim rather than terminal Vim, so I have heavily customised it to my own use, removing a lot of the plugins that I don’t use and cutting down on the key mappings. Previously, one of the things that occasionally sent me scurrying back into the familiar arms of Textmate or BBEdit was the awkwardness of browsing a directory tree to look for files, or opening files where I know the name. I’ve finally configured (and learned to use) the plugins NERDTree for the former and CommandT for the latter, and this has made my life much easier.

I finally feel as if I’m becoming more proficient, and therefore more comfortable, with Vim. Some of the commands are becoming second-nature, and I’m branching out into more complex techniques and finding that it’s saving me time and effort. However, one of the joys of Vim is that there’s always something you can learn. I recently bought a copy of Practical Vim by Drew Neil, and have been amazed by the number of things that I didn’t know about Vim. The book is really excellent, because rather than just providing a set of ‘recipes’, it suggests a set of principles for working with Vim that increase your efficiency and accuracy with the editor. There is always more than one way to accomplish anything, but Drew suggests trying to use one keystroke to move, one to edit, one to repeat the edit and one to undo. When that idea sinks in, it becomes really powerful.

I like nothing better than tweaking my dotfiles and learning about complex systems, so on a cold, windy rainy day like today, I’m about to settle back in my chair in front of the computer, and continue reading ‘Practical Vim’ with a happy sigh: geek bliss.

Fitbit

2012-04-15T16:31:00+01:00

I haven’t yet written about the other item I bought with my birthday money: a Fitbit wireless tracker. It’s really a kind of fancy pedometer that tracks the number of steps you’ve taken, the number of flights of stairs you’ve climbed (it has an altimeter), and various other estimated measures like calories burned and distance travelled. There are a couple of reasons why I really wanted to get one of these units. One is that I’ve been trying for a while to become a bit more active and also to lose a bit of weight. I think it’s hard to change what you can’t measure (and even harder to know when you’ve achieved your goal), so I wanted some objective way of measuring just how inactive I am. The other reason is that the Fitbit isn’t just a bit of hardware, but comes with online software (and an iPhone app), which gives you a great deal more information about your activity and your progress over time, and I’m a sucker for a nice graph.

The bottom line is that while I want to be healthy and I want to shed a few kilograms of weight, I’m bone idle at heart. I don’t like exercise much, except for walking and cycling. However, I prefer to do both as a means of transport from A to B, rather than as exercise in their own right. If you want to get fitter, this isn’t necessarily an impediment, as any activity (even if it is fairly low intensity) can help, as long as you are active. This is where the Fitbit really comes into its own. It is small and light enough to wear all the time (it clips to your belt or to a pocket), so that you can track your activity all the time throughout your normal day. There’s a button and an LED display on the device, so you can scroll through your steps, distance, floors climbed, calories burned and general activity score for the current day. The unit syncs wirelessly with a basestation connected to your computer via USB, so you also get a more detailed breakdown (and information for past days) on the website.

The website is very well thought out, and you get a ‘dashboard’ with progress bars for each of the main measures, showing how close you are today to your goals (10,000 steps per day, 5 miles, 10 floors, a certain calorie expenditure tailored to your age, sex and weight, and an activity score of 1000). You also see a graph of your activity over the day in 5 minute blocks, with the bars colour coded for activity level: sedentary (aka ‘complete couch potato’), lightly active, fairly active and very active. A pie chart shows you how many minutes you have spent in each of those activities in the current day. If you’re in to counting calories (I’m not) you can log the food you eat and it shows you a kind of ‘meter’ display of your current consumption and how many more calories you can consume today. This takes into account your activity level in working out how much energy you have burned. I did try this for the first couple of days, but if you don’t eat many processed or pre-packaged foods, it’s a bit of a hassle to work out the calorie content of your food. However, if you are counting calories anyway as part of a diet, this would be very helpful. I just ignore that part now and try to increase how many calories I’ve burned, while keeping the amount I eat fairly constant.

Looking at the statistics gathered while wearing the Fitbit for a week was encouraging and horrifying in roughly equal measures. The good news is that when I am working at the University, I am fairly active. Commuting to work involves some periods of activity whether I cycle or get the train (I have to walk to and from the station), and the geography of the building is such that I end up walking long corridors or going up and down stairs a fair bit in the natural course of my day. Similarly, at weekends and while I’ve been on holiday over Easter, if I’m going into the city to shop or out for the day visiting National Trust properties (which we did quite a bit of over Easter), I’m also fairly active. So far, so good. The horrifying bit was what happens when I’m working from home or just spending the day at home at the weekend, footling around on the computer: a sea of terrible low grey ‘sedentary’ bars. Eeek! I suppose that I knew that I was pretty sedentary at those times, but actually seeing the figures and the difference in energy used between ‘active’ and ‘inactive’ days is really sobering.

I’ve set a target to gradually increase my activity over a number of weeks, and the instant feedback you get from the Fitbit is really helpful in sticking to those targets. Luckily, you can make quite a bit of difference by just getting up from your chair periodically and wandering around the house or running up and down the stairs a couple of times: regular bouts of even light activity can help a lot. It’s quite addictive actually. On more than one day, I’ve got tantilisingly close to 10,000 steps late in the evening, and have had to explain to Mr. Bsag that I am wandering aimlessly around the house to get myself over 10,000 steps, not because I’m going senile.

If you’re in to the whole Quantified Self thing, you’ll probably love the Fitbit. The website includes all the now de-rigeur ‘social’ aspects, but you don’t have to use it like that. I use it in a battle with myself to try to understand my activity (and lack of activity) in order to do something about it. I like measuring myself and aiming for targets. Another handy feature of the website is that you can view your position in the population of data collected by other Fitbit users, either overall or by age, gender or BMI (or all of those). Thus, you can see what is ‘normal’ (in the statistical sense, for the population of Fitbit users) and try to improve your percentile position against others. My steps and activity level are not great, but I’m in something like the 90th percentile for stair climbing for some reason! You can also opt for ‘Premium’ membership for an extra annual fee which gives you more detailed reports and access to a virtual ‘trainer’ to help you achieve specific goals, as well as a the ability to export your data. I wish that exporting was part of normal membership, as I think you have a right to your own data if you purchase the unit, and the other benefits of Premimum are still substantial enough to get people to sign up without holding your data hostage. Apart from that minor quibble, I’m very happy with the Fitbit. It is really helping to motivate me to be more active, which must be a good thing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and wander around the house and bag a few more steps…

Feline inconvenience detector

2012-04-07T17:49:00+01:00

Sometimes you can’t help but be amazed by the awesome superpowers possessed by cats. Let’s take their uncanny ability to detect the maximally inconvenient location in which to place themselves, shall we? Mr. Bsag tends to come to bed a little later than me, since I’m a lark and he’s an owl, so while I get ready for bed, I usually have the bedroom to myself. Well, not quite to myself, because the cats tend to join me, particularly Bella. What usually happens is that I turn a corner of the duvet back on my side of the bed (ready for me to get into bed), then turn away from the bed to hang a few clothes in the wardrobe. Inevitably, what I’m greeted with when I turn back to the bed moments later is Bella, sitting with her paws tucked comfortably underneath her, squarely and neatly in the middle of the turned-over corner of duvet.

This, I am fairly sure, is mathematically the Location of Maximum Inconvenience (or, LMI) on the bed. Imagine the surface of the bed as a 2D contour plot, shaded using a kind of heatmap indicating how inconvenient it would be (for the human occupant, i.e. me) to have a cat placed at that location. Less inconvenient areas would be shaded a cool blue (such as the entire side of the bed that belongs to Mr. Bsag), while the Inconvenience Hotspots would be bright red. The hottest and reddest spot would be that little triangle of folded over duvet, and Bella homes in on it like an inconvenience-seeking missile.

I think she likes this spot so much because not only is it maximally inconvenient for me, but also maximally comfortable for her, because it consists of not one but two thicknesses of lovely squashy duvet. When I turn back from the wardrobe and see her there, and address her with a weary, “Bella!”, she looks at me with her most innocent “What?” expression, and a kind of limpet-like tenacity that Occupy Movement protestors could learn a great deal from. In my more charitable moments, I try to see this daily battle of wills in a more positive light. Some fancy hotels leave a little chocolate on your pillow when they make the room up, I have a cat adorning the corner of my duvet.

Kaweco Classic Sport fountain pen

2012-03-31T15:33:00+01:00

It was my birthday recently, and I was lucky enough to be given gifts of money by a few lovely friends and family. One of the things I bought was a Kaweco Classic Sport fountain pen. I know, I know: another fountain pen? Wasn’t I raving about the Lamy 2000 only recently?¹ Well, I haven’t fallen out of love with my Lamy — far from it. I use it every day, and each time I pick it up and write with it, I love it even more. It is the smoothest, most comfortable, most gloriously tactile fountain pen I’ve ever used, and I’m pretty sure it will always be my ‘main pen’. So why did I buy a new fountain pen?

First, fountain pens are pretty addictive. Once you’ve used a few, you find out what style you like, and you get tempted to collect others. If you follow fellow fountain pen addicts on Twitter (@HelgeG, @BestofTimes and @m_s, I’m looking in your direction!), you get even more tempted by someone else’s shiny new discovery. In fact, we just end up enabling each other, but I suppose there are worse things to be addicted to. The other reason (I like to pretend this is the main reason, but who am I kidding) is that I like using different coloured inks, for which you really need more than one pen. My main writing is usually in blue or blue-black ink, but I have some lovely red, green, purple and brown inks that I’d like to use occasionally for annotating notes, marking and so on.

I think it was @BestofTimes who got me looking at compact fountain pens, and somehow that led me to the Kaweco Classic Sport. I think that I might have seen it before, but while I thought it was a really neat little pen, I was put off by the fact that it was a cartridge pen, and that the barrel was too short to accommodate a converter for bottled ink. Then I found out that you could easily convert it to an eyedropper, and that’s when I decided I had to have one. It’s actually a pretty cheap pen (as fountain pens go), so buying it and having a go at converting it seemed like a fairly low risk option, as well as giving me a very compact ‘marking pen’.

For those of you who don’t know what an eyedropper pen is, it’s a pen that you fill by pouring ink straight into the barrel, and it relies on having a fairly water-tight seal between the barrel and the section. It’s pretty low-tech, and the ‘conversion’ process for the Kaweco was absurdly easy: all you have to do is remove the cartridge, and smear a small amount of silicone grease (as used in plumbing and on scuba equipment) around the threads of the section to improve the seal between the section and barrel. Then you just use a syringe, eyedropper or a freakishly steady hand to fill the barrel with ink. Even though it is a short barrel, the Kaweco will take a very useful 2ml or so, so you can go a long time between fillings. Only time will tell how leak-proof this arrangement is, but after several days of use and of knocking around in a pencil case in my bag, there is no sign of any leaking. I’ll probably clean and renew the silicone grease when I refill, but given the volume of ink it holds, that’s likely to be quite a while.

I really like this little pen. For one thing, it allows me to use my gorgeous Diamine Monaco Red ink that I’ve been dying to use properly for ages. I don’t want to use red ink all the time, so I haven’t filled the Lamy with it, but the Kaweco is the perfect vessel for it. I deliberately choose the transparent model so I could admire the delicious red velvet/antique book leather colour of the ink. The nib is pretty smooth for a cheap-ish pen, but not quite as glorious as my Lamy. However, I think if you were new to fountain pens, you would be very pleased with it. It certainly doesn’t snag on the paper, and there seem to be no problems at all with skipping or starting the ink. It is a drier writer than the Lamy, as you can see from the photo above (please excuse my handwriting). Both pens have a medium nib², but the Lamy appears much broader, partly because of the wetter line. This actually suits my main purpose for the pen quite well, because I usually have to write quite small when annotating notes or marking students’ work.

The pen is really small and light — I couldn’t quite believe how small and light when I got it out of the packaging. Since I have tiny hands, I can actually use the pen fairly comfortably unposted, but it is meant to be used posted by people with normal sized hands, and feels better weighted that way. The cap sits right down over the barrel, so when the pen is closed, it is more or less the same length as when it is uncapped and unposted. It feels comfortable in my hands, but not as glorious as the Lamy. You can buy a clip as an optional extra, but I didn’t bother with that: the facets in the cap stop it rolling around on the desk.

I’m really fond of this little pen. I think it makes a great-value ‘alternative colour’ pen for people with other fountain pens, or it would be a superb starter pen for someone new to fountain pens as an alternative to the ubiquitous Lamy Safari.

I have to confess that I was tempted into buying yet another pen with my birthday money (I still have other colours to use!) by the Twitter Fountain Pen Sirens, so I also have a TWSBI Diamond 540 on backorder, which should come sometime next week. What can I say — I’m a sucker for a reasonably priced piston-filler. And so it begins…

Actually 18 months ago, but it does seem like yesterday.↩
See my review of the Lamy 2000 for the reasons for my conversion to a medium. Short story: I am not an Elf).↩

So

2012-03-25T18:47:00+01:00

I’ve just caught up with a great Classic Albums documentary about Peter Gabriel’s ‘So’. I loved that album to bits, and have listened to it fairly regularly since 1986, which certainly makes it a classic in my opinion. There can’t be many albums featuring such a high density of musical talent: quite apart from Peter Gabriel, ‘So’ was produced by Daniel Lanois (a wonderful artist in his own right), and features Tony Levin, Manu Katché, Laurie Anderson, Youssou N’Dour and Kate Bush.

It was a really fascinating documentary, and I loved the way they isolated parts of the mixes so that you could hear how it was all constructed. Peter Gabriel’s deep ‘shadow vocal’ on ‘Mercy Street’ was particularly lovely to hear, since it’s (deliberately) rather hard to pick out in the mix. I have to say that ‘Mercy Street’ is among my all-time favourite tracks by any artist. The mood and texture of it is so dark and yet so lovely, and the lyrics (inspired by a poem by Anne Sexton), are sensitive and evocative. Phrases like ‘There in the midst of it so alive and alone/Words support like bone’ are beautiful.

Another track I love is ‘Don’t Give Up’ which is a duet with Kate Bush. Musically, I couldn’t help adoring it because it was by my two favourite artists, but it also featured an amazing video in which Gabriel and Bush stand in an embrace for the entirety of the song, in front of a film of a solar eclipse. I had (still have, actually) an enormous musical crush¹ on both of them, so this was a kind of perfect storm of fascination for me in my late teens. I think I would have been equally enraptured to have taken the place of either of them in the video and been held while being sung to.

I was therefore rather startled to learn in the programme that Peter initially wanted Dolly Parton to sing the female part.

Wait. What?

I have a lot of respect for Dolly Parton, even though I’m not keen on her music, but I imagine that Don’t Give Up would have been a very different song with her singing on it. And a very different video. Anyway, the actual track is a fantastically optimistic, comforting song, even though it is quite dark in places, and there have been many times in my life when listening to it (and thinking about being hugged by Peter Gabriel and/or Kate Bush) has been a great solace to me. I also really like the fact that Peter gives the female voice the part of the strong, encouraging one.

The whole documentary was fascinating, and full of funny stories about the rather lengthy recording process. Daniel Lanois recalled nailing the door to the studio shut with Peter inside when he got frustrated with how slowly things were progressing. And Peter told the story of recording ‘This Is The Picture’ with Laurie Anderson in only 48 hours (which included making the video), which resulted in him falling asleep mid-take, sitting bolt upright in a chair.

It’s an album that doesn’t seem to age. I refuse to believe that it’s 26 years since it was released, but I’m sure I’ll be listening to it for at least the next 26.

OK, possibly not just a musical crush.↩

Opening hours

2012-03-18T17:50:00+00:00

Sunday trading hours are in the news at the moment, as the government is planning to suspend current Sunday trading restrictions for the duration of the Olympics this summer. ‘Small’ shops are currently already exempt from such laws, but what many people do not perhaps appreciate is how disruptive apparently ‘small’ shops can be.

But first, a bit of backstory. When we first moved into our house, there was a pub just opposite it. At first, this wasn’t much of a problem, but gradually the customers got rougher and the landlord lost of control of the situation. There were regular fights in the car park and up and down the road between lagered-up lads, and the whole thing ended tragically in someone being killed. The pub was closed pending the licence being re-issued under particular conditions. In the end, it stayed closed for months and was eventually sold. The building remained empty for quite some time until building work started suddenly. We were surprised, because we hadn’t heard about any planning applications, but when we spoke to the workmen, it appeared that Tesco had bought the building.

Planning regulations are labyrinthine, but it seems that if you buy a building, work within its shell, and you do not alter the use of the building, you do not need to seek planning permission. Changing from a pub to a small supermarket does not apparently constitute change of use, and since Tesco just gutted the interior of the pub but left the exterior largely unchanged, it could all go ahead without any of the neighbours needing to be informed.

The supermarket has been open more than a year now. Since it counts as a ‘small’ shop, it does not have restricted hours on a Sunday. In fact, it is open 6am until 11pm every day of the week (we do get peace and quiet on Christmas Day, though!), despite the fact that in a meeting before they opened, representatives from Tesco said the hours would be 7am until 10pm. The problem is, a small supermarket in a large chain is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Huge articulated trucks deliver goods to the shop several times a day, literally blotting out the light to our front room as they pass, and often having difficulty getting in to the small loading bay at one side of the shop. Newspapers get delivered (noisily, by two separate companies) at about 5am before the shop is open, and customers wait with their engines running and music blaring in the street (rather than the purpose-built car park) for their buddies to come out with a pint of milk or a pack of cigarettes.

The thing is, we live in a normal, residential street, but the shop is serviced and run like a huge hypermarket in an empty industrial estate. We had no say in any of it. We have since tried to complain about various issues (like the unnecessarily noisy newspaper deliveries), but trying to find the correct person to complain to in a giant corporation like Tesco is and exercise in frustration and futility. I have no love at all for Tesco, but in fairness they are probably no worse than any of the other big supermarket chains. The problem is that planners regard these small shops like a corner shop, but they are not. The owner doesn’t get his son to nip to the Cash & Carry in the Rascal for supplies¹, with minimal disruption to anyone else — it’s one node in a country-wide supply chain for a gigantic corporation.

If the government goes ahead with its planned changes, people living close to those shops will be inconvenienced for 8 weeks. Spare a thought for those of us who have to live with these wolves in sheep’s clothing all the time.

Obligatory ‘Fags, Mags and Bags’ reference here.↩

Chris Wood at Red Lion Folk Club

2012-03-11T10:40:00+00:00

Last week we went to see Chris Wood perform at the Red Lion Folk Club. We last saw him perform in Moseley more than two years ago at a fantastic gig, so I was really excited to be getting to see him perform again. Chris Wood is an amazing performer when you hear him recorded, but he’s even better (if that’s possible) live, because of the incredible warmth and presence of his voice, and because his banter with the audience is lovely.

The Red Lion Folk Club is a very long established club, where we saw Megson last year. It’s a small upstairs room in the Red Lion pub, so it’s very intimate and you are very close to the artists. The support act were David Gibb and Elly Lucas, who we saw supporting Megson too. They are a great couple of singers, and we really enjoyed their sets (and bought their debut CD, ‘Old Chairs to Mend’). But Chris was who we were there to see, and he certainly didn’t disappoint.

This time, he performed alone, just with an acoustic guitar. He played an amazing range of songs, from some traditional folk songs (some new to us) along with some of his own compositions. ‘Hollow Point’ (about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes) was electrifying. Even listening to the recorded version has the power to make me cry surreptitiously in a coffee shop, so hearing it live again was incredible. I stand by my assertion that it’s the Best Modern Folk Song Ever. Ever. Folk songs have always told the stories of people who do not have their own voice, so that we don’t forget them, and also criticize those in power. ‘Hollow Point’ does that very powerfully, but also manages to have a lovely, hypnotic tune at the same time, and — if you ignore the occasional references to buses and Oyster cards — has a timeless quality to it.

Chris has a kind of gruff, slightly curmudgeonly persona, and he is (justly) angry about the mess we are in in this country. Between songs he said that he had started to think that the kind of grasping, acquisitive, nasty situation that we have the moment is actually the default condition of the English, and that grand, wonderful schemes like the NHS are actually the exception. He might well be right, but he is passionate about equality, simplicity and the fellowship of other humans. He sang the wonderful song ‘John Ball’ which is about the Lollard preacher, and expressed surprise that we did not join in with the singing. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I was just so mesmerised by his lovely voice that I forgot everything else. He’s right though: it is a wonderful, evocative song. I have it on a playlist that I use to wake me up in the morning. The list is on random, but on days when ‘John Ball’ comes up, I tend to wake feeling very serene, and the song stays with me for the rest of the day. I have been known to sing it under my breath while cycling in to work, like a kind of mantra.

Despite the gruffness, I suspect he’s an old softie underneath. Certainly, he can write and sing a beautiful, tender love song like no-one else. I hadn’t heard the love song ‘The Little Carpenter’ before (from the Isle of Wight), but that was lovely, as was ‘My Darling’s Downsized’, which I know well and love to bits. No-one but Chris Wood could sing about the simple joys of making rock cakes or watching potatoes chitting with such tenderness. He said that he’s quite a fan of marriage and likes the fact that the word ‘husband’ can be a verb. He also had some deadpan advice for any young men in the audience lucky enough to get the opportunity to marry (“Don’t f*ck it up.”). I think that says it all. There were many great stories about his friend Hugh Lupton (who has written the lyrics for several of his songs). Hugh sounds like a great dude: one of the anecdotes about his rather eliptical utterances ended with the comment “It’s like sharing a car with Galdalf!”.

All in all, it was a wonderful evening of music and conversation, that seemed to be over far too quickly. Throughout the gig, he was changing his mind about what to play next (some of which was new, ‘in progress’ material, excitingly), and explained that he finds playing the guitar to be a very tactile experience, and he has to literally feel his way to the next song depending on how the guitar feels, how he feels, and I guess how the audience responds. It’s such a privilege to be part of that process, and to spend some time with such a sensitive, warm, gruff, person. Chris Wood is a brilliant human.

MailMate

2012-03-04T10:59:00+00:00

There are some categories of software that I tend to play around with a lot, switching frequently from one application to the next. The category of text editors is one (though recently I have settled fairly comfortably on vim/MacVim), and email clients is another. I think that part of the problem is that these are applications that I use very frequently, for which I have rather exacting and complex requirements. Put simply, I try a variety of applications and tend to encounter a kind of ‘Goldilocks’ situation: the application is too simple, or too fussy and complicated, and it’s difficult to find one that’s Just Right.

Recently I’ve switched email clients again¹, and have started using MailMate. This is a relatively new and not very well known application, but it deserves to be a lot better known. It reminds me in many ways of the excellent Mailsmith, in that it has powerful features but without unnecessary frills. Also, unlike Mailsmith, MailMate is under very active development and only supports modern technologies like IMAP. I had actually tried it once several months ago, and wasn’t sure that it was for me, but I don’t think I gave it enough of a chance. MailMate has some really wonderful features that you can’t imagine living without after you have been using them for a while. These are my favourites:

The ‘Correspondence’ button: this is magic. If you select an email in the list and click this button, the display changes to show you all the emails you have exchanged with that sender. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is a feature I use every day, several times a day now, when trying to quickly track down an email in an exchange in which we may have changed subject and broken the threading a few times. It’s also really fast: in my head, I hear a Steve Jobsian ‘Boom’ every time I click the button, because the listing appears instantly. You can also use it to pre-filter emails for further search. Let’s say that I hit the Correspondence button but I can’t immediately see the email I’m looking for in the list. I can hit the / keyboard shortcut to bring up search, and then narrow it down to a particular subject, a word or phrase in the body, or filter on a date range.
Handling of signatures: Signatures (and whether you ‘top-‘ or ‘bottom-post’ replies) are handled rather rigidly and inflexibly in most email clients. In MailMate, you can set up different signatures as you can in most email clients, but it learns which you prefer to use with which recipients/accounts over time. It does the same thing with top- or bottom-posting. I mostly want to bottom-post, and it always irritated me that you couldn’t get Apple’s Mail to do this by default. However, sometimes I have to reply to epic email threads at work in which everyone has top posted without trimming the content of the email. If I bottom-posted to those my reply would be buried at the end of an enormously long email and probably missed. So I set bottom-posting by default, but it’s easy to switch to top-posting using a drop-down menu in the compose window. The next time I respond to these persistent offenders, it will probably bottom-post right away, because it has learned the patten. The effect is rather magical after you’ve been using it for a while: it just seems to anticipate exactly what you want to do.
Navigation and moving emails: MailMate has emulated TextMate’s excellent popup list to jump to and move emails. The way it works is this: if you want to jump to another mailbox folder (or account), you hit Cmd+T and a list appears with a search box at the top. As you start typing the name of the mailbox you want to go to, it filters the list. Once you have the right one selected, you hit enter and jump right there. The same thing works for moving emails: you select the ones you want to move, hit Cmd+Option+T and type away. Again, these lists are sorted by recent use, so you can very quickly find what you’re looking for.

It would be some kind of miracle if MailMate was Just Right in the Goldilocks sense. There are inevitably a few things that I would like to see done differently, but they are not serious enough that I want to move to another client. MailMate displays HTML emails fine, and cleverly uses Markdown to help you to generate HTML emails, but it falls down slightly when you need to forward (and edit) HTML emails inline. I don’t need to do this often, but occasionally someone at work sends me an HTML-formatted extravaganza² to forward on to students to promote some event or other, and on those occasions, I have to go into Fastmail’s web interface to accomplish this. If I wanted to forward it un-edited as an attachment, MailMate would do that fine, but I usually do need to do some trimming of the text.

The other thing I would love to see is the ability to ‘focus’ on a particular account, hiding the mailboxes associated with the other accounts and also muting any notifications from them. Someone called infotexture suggested this in a support ticket, and I made a comment on it. I would still love a feature like this, but since making the comment, I’ve discovered a way to temporarily focus on one account, hiding another. When you have one of the accounts selected, you can choose to go offline. Unlike Apple’s Mail, this setting is easy to get to and persists across restarts of the application. Once the account is offline, you can still view already downloaded emails (and see the mailboxes of that account), but you don’t see any new mail, nor do you get any notifications. I’ve found this to be a reasonable work-around for my attempts to separate work and home lives. I put the account I don’t want to see offline and my pathetically distractible, over-stressed brain doesn’t have to be bothered by notifications until I actively choose to put the account online again.

I know. I’m also playing with the organisation of my dotfiles again, but at least it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble.↩
Hello, Comic Sans!↩

Twitching

2012-02-25T18:03:00+00:00

I seem to have developed a twitch around my eyes. At first, it was just a small twitch of the muscle at the outside of my left eye — annoying but intermittent. Then it got more frequent, and my right eye occasionally joined in. Last night I was looking in the mirror and realised that the muscle underneath my left eye is continually fluttering. I didn’t know because I can’t feel it, but it’s pretty obvious when you see it.

As I looked in the mirror, I thought that my twitching reflection reminded me of someone, and then it hit me: I look like Herbert Lom as Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films, when Clouseau’s incompetence starts to get the better of him. It’s not a great look to be honest. Next thing you know I’ll be accidentally amputating my thumb with a cigar cutter. Perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t own a cigar cutter.

This whole twitching thing is starting to get really irritating. It’s almost certainly just tiredness and stress, but it is proving remarkably stubborn, and seems to be resistant to the calming effect of listening to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington while sipping a gin and tonic. If anyone has any suggestions for how to still my misbehaving facial muscles, I would be very grateful for them.

Silence and darkness

2012-02-19T11:16:00+00:00

A couple of days ago, I came across this review of Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’. It’s an album I like very much, and have found very calming at various points in my life. One particular description struck me as being perceptive:

This is music, not just sound. There’s structure there, melody. But it’s
also something of a hologram. There’s a three dimensionality about this
piece. Listen, and you can walk around in the music. Listen, and you can
imagine and see space, the architecture around you. Listen, and become
completely centered and aware of yourself.
Randy Murray Required Listening: Music for Airports

He also mentions in the review that the original vinyl album (which I also have) has 30 seconds of silence at the end of each piece. This is an important part of the work, and one that you should listen carefully to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about silence recently. Most of us live in a noisy world. In cities, silence is an exceedingly rare and treasured quality, because there is always some background (or foreground) noise: traffic, music, alarms, aeroplanes, sirens, ringing mobiles, and raised voices. I also seem to be getting what I think is probably mild tinnitus, so it’s hard for me to find silence even in a quiet environment. But true, enjoyable silence isn’t the complete absence of sound, but deep quietness in which you can feel the space around you.

One of my favourite activities on trips to Brazil was to go out on the river in the dark. On recent trips, we have got up well before dawn to go out in the boat, looking for jaguars. We never actually saw one, but for me, that was only a small part of the experience anyway. The quality of silence on these trips was beautiful. As we set off into the darkness, the roar of the outboard motor and the slap of the water on the hull overwhelmed everything. Eventually we reached a particularly good spot (or so the guide said) for spotting jaguars, and he would cut the engine for us to listen for their calls.

The river at this point was extremely wide, with low trees and shrubs on the bank. There is little light pollution at night in the Pantanal, so the stars are overwhelming, and the great bow of the Milky Way was above and below us, reflected in the still water of the river. It was disorienting: I began to think that I was looking at the sky, until a gentle breeze caused the stars to shiver. Sitting in the dark in a boat in the middle of the river felt like floating on a plane between two gigantic dark mirrored bowls.

The silence on the water was incredibly rich. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it before. There was no noise of human activity at all, so the background silence was a deep, velvety black. However, we could hear sounds of other life. On the banks, herons and egrets were beginning to rouse in their roosts, grumbling and squabbling in their harsh, croaking voices. Around the boat we could hear the watery popping of fish surfacing or caiman submerging to the depths. Bats returning to their roosts after a night of hunting gently flicked the air, soft as a moth’s wing. All of these sounds served to intensify the silence, giving it space and texture, in the same way that shining a torch beam into the night thickens the darkness around the light. It wasn’t oppressive. On the contrary, it was an extraordinary, contradictory experience. I felt excited but serene, aware of the space around me but also taken out of myself.

We made a few of those trips over the years, and I always cherished the experience, and felt rather bereft when the guide started the engine again to take us back. I would love a bit of that silence and darkness right now.

Some thoughts about coffee

2012-02-09T18:48:00+00:00

Coffee is an amazing drink, isn’t it? I can think of few other drinks that can take on such a spectacular range of flavours and change so dramatically in character with tiny changes in preparation method. And that’s before you think about changing the way in which the beans are roasted.

I have been steadily learning how to get good espresso from my Rancilio Silvia, but while the coffee has become much more consistent and pretty good, I knew it could be better. The fruity, acidic, winey flavours of the beans were too dominating, so that the coffee tasted a bit unbalanced. It wasn’t unpleasant at all, but I personally like the more earthy, chocolate, caramel and spicy kinds of flavours to be a bit more prominent. I had got to the point where I could produce the same quality of coffee pretty consistently, which when you consider all the variables involved (grind, dose, distribution of grounds in the basket, tamping pressure, water temperature, extraction time and so on), is something I view as quite an achievement in itself. How could I get more of the rich and sweet flavours in the coffee?

After reading what felt like every article ever written on the internet about coffee¹, I stumbled on a suggestion that higher brewing temperatures can bring out the ‘darker’ flavours, while lower temperatures emphasise the more delicate, fruity ones. I had to try it out. Keeping all the other variables as constant as I possibly could, I changed the set point of my PID to 3°C higher than its previous setting. I did this in the evening before going to bed, so that I wouldn’t forget to make the change in the morning. It’s an indication of how sadly nerdy, I mean, deeply fascinated I have become with the whole process that I fell asleep thinking about what the coffee was going to be like, and bounded downstairs the next day like a child on Christmas morning.

Well. It was like night and day. I could tell it was going to be good from the way it was rolling languidly from the spouts of the portafilter and by the heavenly smell, but the first sip confirmed it. It was rich and spicy with lovely bitter chocolate notes, but that was balanced by the fruity tang I had before. It was even a different texture, with much more body and viscosity. All that transformation from a change of 3°C. This morning I even managed to produce the kind of crema on the top that you see in all the coffee pr0n photos and videos: a deep, caramel or hazelnut coloured gloopy liquid, spotted with paler colours. I was so excited that I yelled at Mr. Bsag, “COME AND LOOK AT MY CREMA! LOOK AT IT!”. He humoured me with a ‘yes it’s a lovely crema darling’ look, but I could tell that he just wanted to drink some coffee. He does agree that it’s dramatically better than before though, so I know that it’s not just my wishful thinking.

Next, I will conquer microfoam!

Oh dear. I think I may be hooked. On the positive side, it does make getting up at a stupidly early hour much more interesting.

Edited to correct the temperature difference, because apparently I can’t do arithmetic when highly-caffeinated.

A number that seems to tend towards infinity.↩

Miss Silvia is at home

2012-02-05T12:40:00+00:00

Some introductions

Aren’t they a handsome couple? That’s Rocky on the left (all young and shiny and energetic), and Miss Silvia on the right. She’s not in the first flush of youth, as you can see. Her logo is a bit worn, and she doesn’t have the fancy steam knob and drip tray patterns of these newer models. But inside she’s as strong and well-made as any new machine. She’s seen a few shots and she’s experienced.

How it all began

A few weeks ago, our Krups grinder died. It had been a bit inconsistent and unreliable for a while, and despite careful cleaning and care, it didn’t seem to be improving. It has always introduced a lot of static into the grounds, but recently it had seemed to turn into a fully fledged Van de Graaf generator, so that removing grounds from the hopper was a really messy business. Then it failed completely and we had to think about getting a new grinder.

I had been pondering trying to get an espresso machine again. We had a Krups machine some time ago, and while it wasn’t a semi-professional level machine, we enjoyed using it and the coffee it produced. After a few years, the pump failed and we had it repaired, then the pump went again a few years after that, and we couldn’t really justify getting it repaired (fairly expensively) yet again. It was clear that it wasn’t made using good quality, long-lasting components. So we switched to using the Aeropress. I love the Aeropress to bits. I think it’s a great, fun and best of all cheap way to brew really decent coffee. I recommend it to a lot of people, and we’ll certainly continue to use ours when we’re in a rush, on holiday or when making coffee for one in an espresso machine seems like too much trouble. However, it has two drawbacks: it doesn’t make real espresso¹, and you need to use roughly double the amount of coffee that you use for espresso. Since we buy fairly decent coffee beans, this was beginning to get a bit expensive.

Rocky

So when the Krups grinder failed, I decided to replace it with a model that was going to be much longer lasting², and which would also be suitable for making espresso if we decided to get a new machine. I did some research and the Rancilio Rocky grinder seemed to be one of the best models I could get on my budget. It’s made of solid, heavy components, and is sometimes used in small-scale commercial settings, so it can withstand heavy use. We’ve been really pleased with it, and after the hash our failing Krups made of beans, it’s a bit of a revelation: a fine, consistent grind with no static in the grounds.

I spent ages trying to decide whether to get the version with or without the doser. There are advantages and disadvantages to both forms: with a doser you can leave the grinder running for a while unattended, which is particularly useful if you also use it to grind coffee for something other than espresso, and the vanes of the doser help to prevent the coffee clumping. On the other hand, you get stale coffee sitting in the doser, and it’s harder to clean. In the end I went for the doser version. I confess that this was — in part — because I have always thought that flipping the lever on the doser to dump the coffee in the portafilter looked like fun when I saw people using them in cafés. I was right, it is fun. When I was a kid, I thought being a librarian must be brilliant, purely because they got to use the date stamp on the library cards. I loved the ritual of clunking it down on the ink pad and then on the card. When I told Mr. Bsag this recently, he said he’d always wanted to be a librarian as a kid for exactly the same reason, which goes to show that I picked the right man to marry. But I digress…

At the same time, I had ordered an espresso starter pack from Has Bean Coffee, which was wonderful but made me acutely aware of how quickly we were romping through the 250g bags with our Aeropress. When I was doing on research on grinders (and having found out about Rancilio through the Rocky), I came across the Rancilio Silvia (or “Miss Silvia” as many call her³).

Miss Silvia

The Rancilio Silvia espresso machine is a very sturdy unit, made of stainless steel with a brass boiler and other components. It’s a single boiler unit (that is, one boiler provides water for the group head to brew coffee and also the steaming wand), so it isn’t ideal if you mostly drink cappuccinos or lattes (I don’t). However, what you get is a machine with almost commercial-level components in a small, easy to maintain package which is ideal for home use. They have been making the Silvia (with only minor changes to the design) for many years, and as it is a popular model, there is an enormous amount of information available about how to use it, care for it, and how to modify it to improve performance.

Most of the reviews and articles agree that the Silvia can be very exacting. You can make excellent espresso, but your technique needs to be good and consistent. While it is bound to lead to a little frustration, I think that’s a great quality in a machine to learn on, because it forces you to understand all the variables involved in making espresso, and how to control them. The articles also agree that one of the most difficult aspects of the Silvia is the rather broad ‘deadband’ in the boiler heating cycle. Rancilio used a fairly cheap thermostat, and in consequence, the water temperature can vary by as much as 10°C while brewing, which makes it difficult to get consistent results. As a consequence, many Silvia owners end up fitting a PID controller, which greatly reduces temperature fluctuations. It also allows you to read the temperature of the top of the boiler continuously, so you have a good idea what the water temperature is at every stage. I was pretty sure that I would want to fit a PID at some point, so I decided to look for a second-hand machine which might already have one fitted. I would be getting the machine at a bargain price (and since the longevity of the machine is good, buying a used one isn’t a problem if it has been well cared for), and I would save the money and hassle of fitting a PID myself.

By chance, I saw an advert for just such a machine on one of the coffee forums. It had been posted a while ago, but when I enquired it was still available. After seeing it working (and more importantly, drinking a coffee made with it), I bought the machine last weekend, and have been having an enormous amount of fun with it ever since.

Experimentation and over-caffeination

On the first day, I drank too much coffee. Far too much coffee. I was engrossed in trying out the machine, tweaking the grind and the dosing and tamping and before I knew it, I had gone a bit over the top. At some point, I wondered why the world was jiggling around, and then realised that it was actually me. Perhaps I had drunk enough coffee for the day.

It is addictive though: not just the coffee itself, but also the experimentation and the pursuit of the perfect espresso. I know that some people think making espresso is too much of a hassle, but I’m really enjoying it. Even on the days when I’m rushing to get to work, I like the meditative aspects to the routine of turning on and warming the machine, grinding the coffee and evening the dose, then tamping and pulling the shot. I’m a geek and a scientist and I love measuring and tweaking and trying different things out. The Silvia is a pleasure to use in this respect. It’s solid and heavy, and you get that indefinable satisfaction to be found in using well-made things.

Amazingly, I’ve made very few shots fit only for the sink. Some have been really lovely, and I’m gradually improving all the time. I’ve got the grind right now, so that a 1oz shot takes about 25 sec to pour. I’m working on getting a more even distribution now, because I’m getting ‘blonding’ a bit early. That usually happens when fissures or holes open up in the puck of coffee, allowing water to rush through without extracting properly. I could do with developing a slightly thicker crema too, but I’m sure it will come. Sorry, but I’ve been boring Mr. Bsag to tears with all these geeky technical details all week, so now it’s your turn…

Anyway, I’m really pleased with Miss Silvia and her partner Rocky. I’m learning all the time, and enjoying some really great coffee, which is the ultimate point of the exercise. In time I hope to be on first name terms with Miss Silvia, but I’m not quite there yet.

It doesn’t claim to make real espresso, to be fair. It makes its own unique kind of coffee which is very enjoyable, but it’s not espresso.↩
I’ve made it a personal policy recently to try to buy very well-made, long-lasting things. They cost more to start with, but in the long run you (and the environment) benefit by not having to throw them away and buy a new item.↩
Yes, she is a ‘she’.↩

Flying deckchairs

2012-01-26T19:05:00+00:00

On Monday, I watched a really wonderful documentary: The Real Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. There’s still time to watch it on iPlayer, and I heartily recommend doing so, even if you have no interest in microlights. It was the kind of documentary I love, in which you let people with a passion for something tell their own story.

In this case, the cameras followed several participants in the ‘Round Britain Rally’, a gloriously Wacky Races event, in which the aim is to rack up the most points over three days by flying over designated waypoints dotted around the UK in a microlight aircraft. Some of the microlights looked quite fancy with semi-rigid wings and enclosed cabins, but all of the aircraft piloted by the three teams mentioned were rather more basic in design. Indeed, the vintage model flown by Antony Woodward and his team-mate appeared to feature rather alarming quantities of gaffer tape and string. Antony described a microlight as “essentially a chainsaw attached to a deckchair”. Or in their case, a chainsaw attached to a deckchair with string.

Anthony had suffered a dreadful crash in a microlight some years before while participating in the same race when his machine hit a powerline. I can’t help thinking that he was a bit crazy to want to get back into a microlight and compete in the same rally, but that’s what he did. Anthony and his team mate (whose name I can’t remember) were simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. Anthony cheerfully admitted that he has absolutely no aptitude for flying, and demonstrated that rather ably with a series of ‘interesting’ landings and haphazard map-reading skills, much to his team mate’s fury. In the end, they decided not to take the competitive aspects so seriously, and had a wonderful time. Antony even managed a good landing to end the race.

Paul flew his microlight with his teenage son Mikey from their home in Ireland across the Irish Sea to the start point. Mikey was determined to go with his Dad, but was visibly (and quite understandably) terrified by the prospect. Their relationship and the way they bonded during the rally was such a touching thing. Paul tried to take Mikey’s mind off the possibility of plunging to a fiery death by singing some rather excellent bawdy songs at top volume or playing ‘I Spy’, and Mikey was determined not to let his Dad down.

The final competitor was Richard Meredith-Hardy, for whom the rally must have seemed like a stroll in the park. He has flown a microlight from London to Sydney, and even flown over Mount Everest. Richard is brilliant. He’s a quiet, smiling man with an extraordinary pair of eyebrows, who does absolutely insane things in a microlight. At one point, he demonstrated his mid-air refuelling technique. When Air Force pilots do this kind of thing, they have millions of pounds worth of military hardware to help them. Richard had a few jerry cans full of fuel where his co-pilot would have been, and a bit of tubing. In a scene that I watched through my fingers, he undid his seatbelt so that he could twist around and fiddle with the cans and tubing, all while trying to hold the craft steady. Microlights — it hardly needs saying — don’t have autopilot, just a wibbly bar that you have to try to keep steady while the open cockpit in which you sit hangs and sways from the wings. Terrifying.

The views from the microlights were stunning but the pilots seemed so vulnerable. I can see the appeal, though — you really experience flying in a way that’s just not possible in any other kind of powered aircraft, but I don’t think I’m brave enough to actually try it.

On not following fashion

2012-01-08T16:27:00+00:00

It’s not news to regular readers of this blog that I dislike buying clothes. I have no interest in following fashion, and tend to wear clothes until they literally fall apart. Sometimes I continue to wear them after they have fallen apart, if the structural integrity of the garment is sufficient to keep the weather out or to avoid showing too much flesh. My rules for buying clothes are as follows:

Do not buy clothes unless it is absolutely necessary.
Never buy clothes from a bricks-and-mortar shop unless it is strictly unavoidable (see previous debacles here).
When buying clothes from online retailers, try to stick to companies you have bought from before and buy the same items in the same sizes as your current (now worn-out) items. That way you know they will fit.
If feeling daredevil, buy the same items in the same sizes, but in different colours.

My jeans are on the verge of falling apart, so I had to think about buying some new ones. Of all the clothes to buy, jeans are some of the worst because the current fashion dictates the shape of them so strongly, making it difficult to get what you want, or to judge what size you need. Still, I thought, fear not! I bought my last couple of pairs online, and it seemed as if the company still stocked the same style. So all I needed to do was order another couple of pairs in the same style and size (see Rule 3) and everything would be fine.

The package duly arrived, and I tried the jeans on. Horror. They had changed the style and the way it fitted, without making it at all clear on the site. The waist was lower¹, and the fit was much tighter on the seat and thighs. I know that the old pairs had shrunk (because the inside leg was 1 inch shorter than when I bought them), but even so, they were a looser fit than the new pair which were ostensibly the same size and style. Grrr.

I’ve returned them and tried another company that I’ve bought jeans from before: another style/size that is apparently the same as a previously purchased pair. I hope that they really are this time, but I have a bit more confidence in this company, which stocks other items they have been making for years. My point is that I wish there were clothing companies that realised there is a market out there for basic, well-made clothes in reliable sizes, which don’t change with the fashions. If a company made exactly the same, classic clothes, year-in, year-out, I would happily keep buying them. The only other alternative is to do a Steve Jobs: when you find an item of clothing that suits you and fits you, buy a supply that will last you a lifetime. However, it’s not easy to justify the expense or the storage space unless you are very rich and have a huge house.

The idea of a company continuing to make the same styles from year to year only sounds crazy because the clothing world is so driven by fashion. Other companies make a good living out of this strategy (and have it as a key selling point). For example, the shelving company Vitsoe (designed by the iconic Dieter Rams), has been making the same modular shelving units since 1960. They are proud of the fact that people who bought the very first units still have those pieces and mix them with their current stock. They add a few new items now and again, but they all work perfectly with the units made since the beginning. This solves the ‘having to stock up’ problem. If you are confident that they will still be making the same shelves in 20 years time, you just buy the bits you want now and add to it as and when you need to expand your shelving (a practice which Vitsoe actively encourages). They are not cheap, but I would happily pay a premium for having this kind of confidence, and would do the same for classic, well-made clothes if I knew I could buy exactly the same pair of jeans in 5 years time.

I just want the waist to sit on my waist. Is that so crazy?↩

Moving Comments From ExpressionEngine to Disqus

2012-01-04T18:38:00+00:00

This may be of some use to anyone else who is thinking of moving comments from ExpressionEngine to Disqus (or to me, if I ever have to do it again!). Over the past few days, I have been moving comments from the Tracks site (which used ExpressionEngine) to Disqus. I had some difficulty trying to get a format exported from ExpressionEngine which I could use to import comments into Disqus, and eventually settled on the code above after looking at Disqus’ own import format and trawling the ExpressionEngine forums to adapt other solutions which exported to Movable Type format.

You need to start off by creating a new template group called ‘export’. Inside that, you make a template called ‘index’ and paste in the following, making sure that you replace the channel name and template group name to those appropriate for your setup. This needs to be the index for the template group.

Next, create another template called ‘comments’ and paste the text below, again, replacing the channel name as appropriate.

Now visit http://yoururl.com/export and you should see the exported entries. Wait for the whole page to load, which may take some time with a lot of entries. Then use your browser’s ‘View source’ command to view the source of the page, copy all the text and paste into a text file with the extension ‘.xml’. Now you should be able to upload to Disqus using their ‘Generic (WXR)’ importer.

You may find that you encounter errors and have to try uploading several times. For example, you need to make sure that the xml declaration is the very first line of the file (the template will insert some whitespace).

Three Christmas Albums

2012-01-04T17:30:00+00:00

I can’t believe that it’s already 4th January — time seems to have flown since Christmas! I was so exhausted when I was finally on holiday that we’ve had a fairly quiet (but wonderful) Christmas. Mr. Bsag and I spent Christmas Day and Boxing Day together (eating and drinking too much, as is pretty much the law at Christmas), then I travelled to my parents for a couple of days while Mr. Bsag took care of the cats. We’ve had some lazy times and some great walks, and I’ve also been listening to the great albums I got among my Christmas presents.

June Tabor and Oysterband - Ragged Kingdom

This was a present from Mr. Bsag, and I love it more each time I listen to it. It’s a mixture of covers of modern songs and versions of old folk ballads, but they all sit alongside one another very comfortably. I like all the tracks, but I think my favourites have to be an incredibly powerful version of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, and ‘The Leaves of Life’, as well as the mournful ‘The Hills of Shiloh’. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is such an iconic song that it must have taken a bit of courage to cover it, but they bring forward the lyrics by making it into a slow and deceptively simple duet between June Tabor and John Jones. There are some superb musicians on this album, and June Tabor’s voice is as pure and deep as ever.

Gillian Welch - The Harrow and the The Harvest

Perhaps it’s a personal failing, but I really like sad, mournful songs. I’m generally a very cheerful optimistic person, so I think I need to season it with a bit of melancholy in musical form just to balance things out and to make life taste sweeter. Maybe that’s why I love Gillian Welch so much. The song ‘Revelator’ (from the album Time (The Revelator)) ranks as one of my all time favourite songs (rubbing shoulders with many of Kate Bush’s), and I think this album is also destined to be a classic.

There is hardly an upbeat, optimistic track on the album, but I find the whole thing completely beautiful. David Rawlings’ guitar playing, and the way that Welch and Rawlings’ voices mingle and harmonise so thrillingly makes this an incredible album. Again, it’s hard to pick out just one or two tracks, but I could listen all day to ‘The Way It Will Be’, ‘Tennessee’ and ‘Hard Times’. This album is really worth a listen, particularly if the current financial and political situation makes you feel like listening to music evoking The Great Depression¹.

Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow (vinyl)

Yes, I know, I already bought this album when it came out as a download. However, I was so bowled over by it that asked my brother if he could get me the vinyl version for Christmas. I’m glad I did, as it gets even more delicate, layered and spacious when you hear it on vinyl. I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised than an MP3 file (even the relatively high bitrate files you get from the iTunes Store) sounds rather compressed when compared to the analogue version, but I was slightly startled. I was also rather pleased that I can still tell the difference so easily.

I’ve already sung the praises (at great length) of the album in my previous review, so I’ll just add that the attention that a double vinyl album forces you to pay to the music (by making you get up three times to turn the disc over) adds even more to the experience. However, Bella dislikes vinyl. You see, when I sit on the sofa downstairs, she almost immediately settles down on my lap, and she was not amused at me turfing her off every 20 minutes or so to attend to the disc.

And finally…

Before I finish, I’ll mention one more thing (which has nothing to do with music). Mr. Bsag and I had a lovely walk in the sunshine on Monday, out to a country pub that we both enjoy. As we walked down a lane, I could see something flapping in a tree by the side of the road.

It made me smile and really piqued my curiosity. There just has to be an interesting story behind the deposition of an item of lingerie in a tree by a quiet country lane, doesn’t there?

Though to avoid any confusion, I should point out that these are all new songs, not adaptations of old Country or Bluegrass tunes. It’s just their sound which makes you think of the Dust Bowl.↩

Synapse Strikes Again

2011-12-23T19:04:00+00:00

I’ve written about how much I love my Tom Bihn Synapse rucksack a couple of times before. I’m probably boring everyone stupid with my adulation, but I really can’t say enough good things about this bag. I’ve had it now for nearly two years, I use it every day, and it still surprises and delights me.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to take two bottles of champagne¹ to work. In case you’re thinking that the life of a biologist is a great deal more glamorous than you had previously suspected, this is certainly not an everyday occurrence. One of the PhD students who I co-supervise with a colleague was having her viva, so I wanted to get some bubbly for a bit of a celebration when she emerged, blinking, after several hours of grilling by the examiners.

Bottles are pretty heavy and I was travelling by train that day, so I wondered if I could carry them in my Synapse on my back, rather than in a bag held in my hand. Given that my Synapse was already filled² with a considerable quantity of stuff that I take to work every day, I seriously doubted that there would be room. I already had my MacBook Air in a neoprene case, an A5 notebook in a leather case, a pencil case, camera, glasses in a hard case, a couple of pouches stuffed with random odds and ends, a packable shopping bag, wallet, keys, a large pair of headphones, and various other bits and pieces in there. Two bottles of wine would be at least another 1.5 L of volume to fit in somehow. However, in the spirit of giving it a go, I unzipped the bag and shifted the contents of the main compartment a bit before trying to slip in one of the bottles. After a bit of jiggling, it slipped in comfortably. I tried the other bottle, wondering if I could pull off this magic trick again. The second bottle was swallowed by the bag. I zipped the bag up, not really believing that it had worked. As usual, the Synapse sat there insouciantly, looking as if it just contained a couple of notebooks and thin jumper. It was pretty heavy as I was hauling it on to my back (as you would expect), but once there, it felt very comfortable.

When I removed the bottles from my bag later on in front of an audience, it was with the smugly mysterious air of a conjurer pulling a brace of rabbits from a hat. I’m pretty sure this bag breaks all sorts of laws of physics, but it’s remarkably handy.

Well, sparking wine — I’m not made of money.↩
Which is to say that when you open the bag, it seems very full. When it is closed, it never appears over-stuffed. It actually looks the same from the outside, no matter how much you have in it.↩

Spitting Image

2011-12-18T18:32:00+00:00

I look very like my my mother, and have done since I was a girl. Whenever people who knew me met my mother for the first time, or met me having only known my mother, they would invariably exclaim (to me), “Don’t you look like your mother! You’re the spitting image of her.” I would then traditionally roll my eyes in exasperation and disbelief. I couldn’t see it at all. I thought people who said we looked alike were loopy. I suppose that I knew both our faces so well that I couldn’t see the resemblance among the small details I knew to be different. Since then, I’ve seen a few photos of Mum in her teens and early twenties, and I have to admit that I can see the likeness, but it didn’t seem that extraordinary.

A few weeks ago, Mum mentioned that Dad had come across an old photo of my Granny (my Mum’s mother) when she was a girl, looking uncannily like me, and she said that Dad would email me a copy. I thought it would be like looking at photos of Mum: somewhat like me, but nothing to write home about. I was wrong. When Mum said it was uncanny, she wasn’t kidding.

I should tell you a bit about Granny. All my other grandparents died before I was born or when I was very young, so she is the only grandparent I actually remember. She also died when I was in my teens, but I really loved her, and have very fond memories of staying at her house overnight on occasion. By today’s standards, she wasn’t that old when she died, but from my perspective as a kid, she was an old lady, and that’s how I remember her.

Opening the photo was a genuine shock. It was as if someone had wrestled me out of my jeans and into a period dress, put a pair of round, wire-framed glasses on me and then taken a photo which they had processed to look like a scratchy black and white period print, all without me having any memory of it happening. Or as if I’m some kind of inadvertent time traveller, and have visited other time periods without knowing about it.

The photo shows a girl (perhaps in her early teens, but it’s hard to tell) sitting in a leather armchair with her legs tucked underneath her. She has a hardback book open in her hands (I wish I could see the title on the spine), and is reading with some concentration. Mum and Dad have a photo of me as a girl in a similar pose (not difficult, since I had my nose in a book most of the time). If you ignore the style of the glasses, her face is my face. The eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth and even the damned chubby cheeks are mine. I’ve even taken to wearing my hair longer in a bob in the past few years, a style very like hers in the photo. I also note that her hair has the same ungovernable waves as mine (thanks for that, genetics!). It’s a perfectly normal photo, but the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.

I think that I’m going to frame a print of my ‘time travel photo’ (as I’m now thinking of it) and hang it somewhere in the house to discombobulate visitors, though I’ll have to stop it freaking me out first.