gilest.org

Changes afoot

2007-02-09T11:10:00.000Z

This is mainly for the benefit of anyone who reads this site in a feed reader ... in the next few days, I'll be switching from Blogger to Wordpress. I'm going to *try* to do this without breaking all my old links and whatnot. Anyway, you'll need to update your RSS machines to a new feed location, which I think will be http://gilest.org/feed/.

Needless to say, you have my apologies in advance if I ending up breaking everything.

Cultural conditioning

2007-02-08T15:58:00.000Z

Barney woke up first, as he usually does, and wandered into our room in search of a mummy or a daddy who might be willing to get up and make him some breakfast.

Mummy got up, as she usually does, and through the landing window saw the snow covering everything outside, and still falling softly from above.

“Look Barney!” she cried. “Look at the snow!”

Barney couldn’t really see, because he’s not tall enough to see out of that window yet. Kate had to bend down and pick him up.

“Look at that Barney! Everything’s covered in snow. Wow, isn’t that exciting?”

Barney’s face lit up with a huge grin. His eyes shone.

“Snow!” he said. “It must be Christmas!”

Chilli Quorn chunks

2007-02-06T10:30:00.000Z

Here’s a recipe I made up last night, one which turned out rather tasty. So I thought I’d share.

Ingredients

One onion, finely chopped
Two or three sticks of celery, finely chopped
Half a fresh chilli, chopped
One carrot, chopped small
(A red pepper would probably be nice too, but I didn’t have any peppers.)
One box (350g) Quorn chunks (aka “Chicken style pieces”)
Two large teaspoons Bart red Thai curry paste
A small sliver of creamed coconut
Cheapo tin of chopped tomatoes

Howto

Fry up the onion, celery, chilli and carrot until soft. Throw in the Quorn chunks and get them nicely browned (this will need fairly constant stirring). Add the chopped tomatoes, then the curry paste and creamed coconut and anything else you’ve forgotten. Leave to simmer for a good 20 minutes (at least), during which time you can cook up some rice or some noodles to go with it. Yummy.

Lego iPhone

2007-01-31T21:30:00.000Z

Current reading

2007-01-29T17:10:00.000Z

Eggs on bed

2006-10-18T20:09:00.000Z

There was a storm late on the Saturday night, one of those endless storms that floats low over the town and broods for hours. The thunder woke everyone up, including Barney.

Most of us managed to get back to sleep again, but he couldn’t. He was wide awake and hungry and just wanted to get on with the day, even though it was still the early hours.

He came into our room several times:

“Can I have some breakfast now?”

We sleepily muttered that it was far too early, and that he should go back to bed.

After a few attempts at persuading us an early breakfast was a good idea, Barney must have decided that if the parents were too sleepy or too grumpy to provide it, he might as well go and get breakfast by himself.

So he quietly padded downstairs. Mummy and Daddy snoozed on, oblivious.

Barney knows his way around the kitchen very well now, so he did the sensible thing and aimed for the fridge. This meant dragging a stool across the room to stand on, and balancing precariously on it while opening the fridge door.

Having opened it and got himself positioned, he gazed inside. Hmmm … what to eat?

Ah! Eggs!

Impressively for a four-year-old, he somehow managed to extract the egg box, open it, remove two eggs without breaking them, put them down somewhere, close the box, put it back in the fridge, and shut the door.

Now armed with his eggs, he faced a problem. He doesn’t know how to make eggs into breakfast. Thankfully, he didn’t try operating the cooker, but instead wandered back up to his bedroom.

What to do with two eggs?

Put them in the bed of course!

Now what?

Hmmm.

Fancy a bit of jumping.

Boing. Boing boing boing.

A little while later, Kate woke up enough to wander into B’s room and ask him if he wanted to go downstairs for breakfast with her.

“Yes please,” he said.

Kate spied something suspicious.

“What’s that wet patch on your bed?”

Barney looked at her as though she was an idiot.

“The eggs,” he explained.

And there they were, mashed into a shelly, eggy, soggy mess all over the duvet and the sheets.

A Freecycle webapp

2006-09-01T12:43:00.000Z

Freecycle is a great idea; giving away stuff you don't want to people happy to come and take it from you.

The problem is that Freecycle operates via mailing list, and isn't very well suited to it, especially when subscriber numbers increase beyond a hundred or so. Suddenly you're being swamped with messages and it's very hard to keep track of the status of any particular offer. People end up sending many unnecessary messages finding out if something's gone, is still available, and so on.

What Freecycle could benefit from is a neat little webapp to make the process simpler.

Let's say we start with a home page at freecycle.org - something nice and easy to remember, much better than the Yahoo! Groups URLs that members currently have to deal with.

Local Freecycle groups could all have a subdirectory of that, perhaps also subbed within a country dir, such as freecycle.org/uk/bradfordonavon.

On this page, logged-in members would see a list of current offers, colour-coded with the status. Pale green background means on offer to all; yellow background means reserved and awaiting collection. Red background means taken; these items will drop off the bottom of the list fairly soon after being snapped up.

Each item is controlled by its owner. When you log in, you have access to another page called "My items" which shows everything you are offering or have claimed.

Making a claim would work a bit like comments on a web page, but only the item owner would see all the claims. Other members would see only their own claim, along with the total number of claims made by others. Such as: "You have made a claim for this item. There are 5 other claims."

A successful claimant will be chosen by the item owner simply by ticking a checkbox next to their name; a message will appear in their "My items" page informing them that they've been successful, and perhaps they could optionally have an email sent to an address of their choosing with the same information.

Freecycle's ingenious concept is constrained inside mailing lists. I think that a well-designed webapp along these lines - almost an eBay without the payment involved - would go a long way to freeing it up and getting more people taking part.

Here come the Limbersnigs marching along

2006-09-27T20:36:00.000Z

I can't remember where my copy of The Limbersnigs came from, but it's been on my bookshelves since I was a very little boy.

Beautifully illustrated, it tells the story of the eponymous island race and their plucky hero, Prince Kebole, born a tiny baby and only saved from certain death by the dodgy-sounding dietary remedies of mysterious apothecary Gogo.

Having saved the Prince's life, Gogo promptly decides that the young Prince is nothing but trouble and needs to be bumped off. The rest of the story is all about Gogo's various plots and the cunning ways Kebole avoids them.

I loved this story when I was little. I spent hours pouring over the incredibly detailed drawings, themselves packed with slapstick humour and gags. At the front there's a cross-section of the Limbersnig king's castle; at the back, a fantastic map of Limbersnig island and its capital city, Sigficil.

The map is filled with amusing notes and captions: "The vasty ocean"; "No gold or gems found here"; "No fishing here, nothing but nasty octopus". It's just a joy to read. I'll be reading it to my son very soon.

I found out this evening that this is a very rare book indeed, and if mine is a first edition (I think it is), it could be worth as much as £120. Blimey.

Not that I'm thinking of selling it. Barney deserves to enjoy it; and I'm looking forward to enjoying it with him.

Equation

2006-08-23T20:52:00.000Z

Equation, originally uploaded by gilest.

Yay and yay and humbug

2006-08-26T20:31:00.000Z

X-ray: "Normal."

MRI brain scan: "Normal."

EEG electric activity scan: "The brain waves on the right side of your brain look slightly different to those on the left; the significance of this is uncertain."

Riiight.

When the doctors told me that I really shouldn't drive for a while, at least until the cause of my mysterious fainting episode had been established, I arrogantly and naively thought I'd be able to manage just fine without access to a car.

"I'm a relatively fit, active young man living in a small town that has easy access to everything essential for day-to-day life," I thought to myself. "I can get by."

And I did, for a while. But after a few weeks the frustration started to grow. The recycling piled up in the utility room, because I didn't do my monthly trip to the recycling centre to get rid of it. My newly-constructed office remained half-decorated because I couldn't, on a whim, drive to appropriate stores to get the paint, shelving and other bits and bobs I wanted to use. Our season ticket to Longleat sat unused on the microwave, because I wasn't able to take Barney there for day trips as I'd planned. And while the hot weather wilted everyone in sight, I failed to be organised enough to get on the train to the seaside for a day.

It turns out that I'm not nearly as radical as I thought I was, and every bit as lazy as I wanted to think I was not. Living without a car turned out to be time-consuming (endless hours waiting for buses), expensive (I pay about £5 for a return to Bath, nine miles away), and annoying. Sure, I could get to most shops for most things, I could get to a pub and a post office and visit most of my friends, but I couldn't transport any objects, I couldn't carry heavy bag loads of stuff. Despite my fondness for thinking myself environmentally friendly, I'm still a car-dependant consumer like everyone else, and found it very hard to change my ways.

Now I've been given the all-clear, and things are looking brighter. I have a long list of things I want to do in the car, and an enhanced admiration for people who really have taken the radical step of ditching cars completely.

That said, I've re-kindled my fondness for cycling, and the constant treks up and down the hill into town on the bike have, I'm sure, helped me get a little fitter than I might otherwise have been. I've no intention of using the car for short around-town journeys; indeed, I'm determined to make an effort to think harder than ever before about getting in the car in the first place - "Do I have to drive, or am I just being lazy?"

As for my funny episode back in April, no-one really knows what it was. I've been prodded and x-rayed and scanned and tested many times since, and everything has come back saying I am as normal and as healthy as a 35-year-old part-time freelance writer can be expected to be. So yay for me, yay for the NHS, yay for cycling, and yay for coming to terms with just how easy it is to be a lazy so-and-so when you've got a car key in your hand and a tank full of petrol. Brummmmm.

Stupid Animated Characters; or, Your web page might not be the only one I have open right now

2006-08-26T21:08:00.000Z

Web pages with stupid animated characters in them are annoying enough in their own right, but they get me all the more annoyed when the stupid animated characters start talking the moment the page is loaded.

Nokia's Park WiFi page, for example. (WARNING: Stupid Animated Characters.)

What bugs me so much is the assumption on the part of the site developers that just because the page has been loaded in my browser, I am looking at it immediately.

Tabs are not new in web browsers, no matter how new they might appear to IE users. A lot of us have been using tabs, and what's more, opening pages in background tabs for years now. That's how I do the vast majority of my browsing.

It follows that I'm rarely looking at a page while it loads; I'll open it in the background and devote my attention to it when it suits me, ta. To open a bunch of links in background tabs and then have to guess which bastard one is talking at me is hugely irritating.

Please, developers who insist on using Stupid Animated Characters: can you not at least give us web users the opportunity to load the Stupidness and play it when we like, perhaps with a large "Play" or "Talk" button? Please?

Grumph.

We all went on a summer holiday

2006-07-30T23:39:00.000Z

We spent a lovely week on the coast, at Highcliffe where Dorset and Hampshire kiss. Every day was incredibly hot, so midweek we took breakfast down to the beach with us - bowls, milk, cereal and all - and trudged back to our chalet at 11ish, when it was getting uncomfortably hot. I swam in the sea every day; Barney and I made dozens of sandcastles. The days were hot but easy.

Later in the week we enjoyed days out in Bournemouth (where B and I went up in the Bournemouth Eye and doh! I forgot my camera) and the Isle of Wight, which surprised me with its beautiful and dramatic landscape. I'd like to explore it more one day; a walk around its coast sounds rather appealing.

My special son

2006-07-10T23:32:00.000Z

My special son, originally uploaded by gilest.

Notes on "Isambard Kingdom Brunel: A graphic biography" by Simon Gurr and Eugene Byrne

2006-06-08T10:51:00.000Z

It's Brunel's 200th birthday this year, and Bristol is celebrating. The city owes much to the short little engineer, whose masterpieces still dominate much of the local architecture and transport infrastructure.

As part of the celebrations, and to teach the young 'uns about the great man, a graphic biography of his life was commissioned. Someone thought it would be a great idea to print off 130,000 copies of it and distribute them for free in libraries across the south west. I picked one up.

What a great book. Yes, it's aimed at 11-year-olds but I learned a great deal from it, and enjoyed the read as I went along. Everyone knows that Brunel built great things like bridges and ships and tunnels and railway lines, but I didn't previously know about his acts of almost insane bravery (rescuing trapped workers from the flooded tunnel under the Thames, for example), or any detail about his family life.

This is not your average freebie from the local library; it's professionally written and drawn, professionally printed. They could have flogged it for six or seven quid, and it would still have been a bargain. Chances are that unless you're passing a library in or around the south west-ish sort of part of the UK, you might find it hard to get your hands on a copy of this. You should try, though.

At the Sunflower cafe

2006-06-19T10:07:00.000Z

Helen sat outside the Sunflower cafe, on one of those pavement chairs made of chrome steel. On the chrome steel table in front of her was a strong coffee and a small chocolate stick, half-eaten. It was too chilly to be sitting outside, if she was honest with herself, but the temptation to be a posing note-writer was too strong.

In her hands she held one of the small black notesbooks, purchased just ten minutes previously in the expensive stationers' shop a little further down the road; and a good quality ballpoint pen.

She held the pen over the blank first page of the notebook, and wondered what on earth she should write.

The reason those posing people looked so cool, she realised, was that their black notebooks were roughened after months of posing on outdoor pavement cafe chairs. Each page in their notebooks was a mess of tightly kerned black characters with a very rare doodled illustration; the pages were slightly curled with use and the notebooks capable of being laid flat without closing themselves shut like insect wings.

Helen recalls:

"I must have looked like a bit of an idiot, rather than some arty farty poseur. I say with my pen over than notebook for 20 minutes or more and couldn't think of anything to write. In the end I had to give up so I could drink the coffee before it went cold."

Helen looked out at the business people rushing past. The rush hour had not officially begun, but there are always a a few people who leave early and walk hurridly down to the mainline stations to catch the earlier, less packed, commuter trains to suburbia.

It felt odd to be sitting outside the Sunflower cafe at this time of day. For years, Helen had popped in two or three mornings a week to buy coffee and a filled roll for her breakfast. She knew the staff very well in the mornings, but when she'd turned up this afternoon their faces had not registered hers for a while; it was almost a minute before they realised she was one of their morning regulars, then switched on their smiles. Helen felt uncomfortable.

Not as uncomfortable as she'd felt the morning she'd come in here, already late for work, ordered a coffee and bacon butty, and endured an uncomfortable 10 minutes talking to Big Alan. He was just as embarrassed as her, but neither of them were brave enough to say aloud: "I don't want to have to talk to you; please go away."

If she'd been able to pretend she'd not seen him, she would have. But it had been a busy morning, wet outside, and the cafe was humming with people and chat. As Helen turned away from the counter, one of the smiley staff, trying to help, had said, loud enough for the whole cafe to hear: "There's one last seat left over there, love."

And as Helen had turned towards it, and seen it, she'd locked eyes with Big Alan, who'd been sitting opposite, forking sausage and eggs into his mouth. For just a second their eyes held a conversation:

"Please, don't sit here."

"I don't want to sit there."

"Let's pretend we've not seen eachother."

"Let's."

But that's not how you behave, even in a city like London where people care little for anyone but their closest friends, and work relationships are the delicate string that holds fabric together; no, even in London, when you make eye contact your boss in a cafe, you fake a smile and go and sit with him.

Neither of them bothered to mention the time, since they were both late. But Big Alan waved his fork at her in greeting, then started eating faster.

Helen slid into the gap between the wooden bench and the formica tabletop, wincing as her knees brushed past Big Alan's knees. She tried to angle her legs sideways to avoid any further physical contact. Consequently she sat twisted and uncomfortable for the length of their talk.

Big Alan asked her about progress on some major projects he thought she was working on. She opened her mouth to correct him on some things; such-and-such project was completed two weeks ago, and she'd emailed him telling him so; so-and-so client had complained about the materials supplied and threatened to go elsewhere; income was down because there'd been a rash of resignations, which left fewer people to do the actual work; but closed it again because there was no point telling him this stuff just for the sake of having something to say. Instead, she remarked on the rainy weather, then asked him how his work was progressing.

He gave her a brief, curious look, then the words flooded from him.

"No-one understands what my job is all about, Helen," he said. A mouthful of sausage, and he continued: "Most of the time, it's just about making people happy. I have the management in New York and Tokyo to keep happy, and you wouldn't believe how mad they get when we" -- he waved his fork, seemingly indicating the whole of London -- "don't live up to the financials."

Chew, swallow, eat.

"Financials which have been set by those same bastards. People. People in New York and Tokyo. Numbers on spreadsheets that we have to meet.

"So then I come back here and try to make the staff here happy too. Try to make them feel like they can live up to those numbers."

Helen wondered if simply deleting the offending spreadsheets would solve the problem, removing the insistent numbers and therefore the pressure.

Big Alan slurped tea from a mug. He shifted in his seat and Helen was forced to angle her legs further away to avoid being touched again. She shivered, and bit into her butty.

(Look down on this scene from above, and you can see Helen's body almost at right angles to the table. She looks withdrawn, almost nervous. A balding patch can be seen on Big Alan's crown, something most of his staff haven't seen because he towers over them.)

His breakfast finished, Big Alan got up quickly and slid out from his seat. He didn't look at Helen's face.

"See you at the office," he muttered and waddled out.

Prologue

2006-05-01T22:04:00.000Z

It began, for me, on the platform of London Bridge Tube station. Northbound, approximately twenty past eight in the morning. I can't remember if it was a Monday or not, and I suspect the cliche about Mondays being so awful was just created by employers to make you feel good about the rest of the week. Whatever day it was, the platform was packed. A mass of black-coated backs.

That's something you don't notice about commuting in London until you've been doing it long enough to raise your eyes from your trashy free newspaper and actually look at your hapless fellow commuters. Everyone wears dark colours. Even in summer, when their officewear might even be bright and gay, over the top they wear a dark jacket. In winter, it's even more pronounced. The platform in this case was entirely covered in black and grey coats. I could see hundreds, possibly thousands, of backs turned towards me. As though each of them was a desperately miserable message from its owner, saying: "See. See me, an intelligent, loved person. I am reduced to this. I am reduced to my animal instincts. I am so sad."

I wore a bright yellow hiking jacket.

It was that morning, standing behind the queues of sad commuters waiting for a train - no, waiting for dozens of trains, for that was how many would be needed to empty the platform of people - that I suddenly realised I was the sole speck of colour in the whole place. I almost blushed. Looking right and left, I could see more computers (commuters are, after all, just following a daily routine just as a computer does) rushing down the stairs and escalators into the hallway, as though those hurried steps would get them anywhere any faster, and they too were all in black and grey.

I was a bright spark of sunshine yellow, alone in my underground world of misery and despair, and I was afraid, probably without reason, that I was standing out. That, of course, is the fear of any London commuter. No-one wishes to stand out, to be the object of any kind of attention. Every single one of the millions who come into London every morning, and leave it every evening, wants to do it as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, as if perhaps doing so will make them feel like they are completely both journeys alone. Being noticed means you must acknowledge your own presence on the train to hell, and doing that forces you to acknowledge the presence of the 100 other people on the carriage around you.

It forces you to apologise to the woman whose bust you brushed past as you squeezed aboard, but there was no way around it because you had to duck under the be-newspapered arm of the City worker, pristine in his pin-stripe and obstinately standing in the doorway, arm aloft to hold on to one of the straps dangling from the ceiling. He couldn't move either, because the group of schoolchildren to his side were standing in a tight circle, quietly gossiping and breaking out into occasional cackles of delight. Theirs was the only human noise on the whole carriage, and you were glad of it because at least it disguised the deathly silence of all these people, all these human beings who were determined to stay quiet on a commuter train, because that's what everyone does. These same folk who would cheerfully become human again in a pub or even a McDonalds, could sit together, a hundred of them, and have not a single word to say.

It forces you to acknowledge that you are part of it, and that you hate yourself for being one of them.

That thought bounced around my brain as I waited near the platform. I couldn't get on the platform, because there were queues. London Bridge's Northern Line platforms are either side of a central hall, but instead of opening up the entire structure in the manner of modern station design on the Jubilee Line extension, the designers here had decided to make the place a homage to its past. They wanted the Underground to be more like ground. So they linked the central hallway to the platforms with a series of tiny, thin tunnels. Each one barely wide enough for two people to stand side-by-side.

With the platform completely full, and nowhere for anyone to go until the next train pulled in, queues had formed in these little tunnels. People stood there, silent, staring at the back of the person in front, possibly unaware of the millions of tonnes of soil and concrete curving over their heads above the tunnel roof. Behind them, in the hallway, the queues continued, losing their structural and moral integrity and becoming vague wanderings of newcomers, the pathetic finalists in this race for work. I considered the lucky ones at the front, the ones who must have arrived at London Bridge on overland trains from the south 10 minutes - 20? even 30? - before me. They must have stood at the very edge, their faces within centimetres of the side of the alleged train. One good push from here, at the back, could send them toppling, domino-style, onto the tracks.

In my bright yellow coat I shivered. A train pulled in, announcers told the crowd how to behave, and the queues shortened slightly. The train left, and the brief minute of activity gave way to the same endless, screaming silence there'd been before. Another train arrived soon afterward, and the cycle was repeated. Again, everyone moved forward. I found myself in the mouth of one of the little tunnels, and I gazed upward at its curved tiles. I looked around me, behind me, trying to see through the coat-covered forest with its shrubs of newspapers and paperbacks, its insect life of tsk-tsking personal stereos.

Something in my head clicked, turned, moved from one form to another.

I said, aloud, I think, but there was not enough surprised reaction from any of my fellow travellers for me to be sure: "That's it. I've had enough of this."

I turned, abandoned my place in the queue, walked past the living dead waiting for their trains, up the stairs to the exit.

This is the story of what happened next.

Notes on "Vote for ... who?" by Jonathan Maitland

2006-05-15T15:07:00.000Z

It's not often that I throw a book down in disgust - in fact, I can't remember the last time it happened - but this is one of those books.

I picked it up in our local library in the hope that it might indeed be what was promised in the blurb on the back cover; an informal romp through modern British politics. But it's not that. It's the adolescent ramblings of a middle-aged man trying to sound like he's "one of the boys".

Honestly, I tried really hard to get into this book but Maitland's constant - and I really mean to use that word - efforts to sound like a bloke's bloke just drove me crazy. He goes to great lengths to make sure that every page has a handful of gags, even though most of them are simply not funny.

I can see what he was trying to do; he wants to make politics more interesting to more people. And in itself, that's an admirable thing to attempt. But the manner in which he does it just makes me gag, I couldn't get though most of his paragraphs without a grimace or a shudder; not because of some horrific fact I'd learned, but because the writing style and the language simply jarred.

Maitland wants to be mates with every bloke in every pub in the land. He tries so hard to sound like everyman, making bad jokes and awful non-funny asides as he goes along. There might even be a handful of people in most pubs who might appreciate what he's trying to do, might even find it funny; but I suspect that everyone else will find this as unreadable as I did.

Current interests

2006-05-18T21:10:00.000Z

I'm very keen to broaden my professional horizons, and challenge myself to write about new things.

I still enjoy writing about computers and the internet, but other subjects appeal to me; writing about something is often a good way to learn about it. I'm keen to expand my education.

With that in mind, here are some of the themes I'd like to explore in future writing:

England the obscure: I've long been fascinated by the wonderful detail hidden within Britain's countryside; the geological and cultural landscapes that define our small towns and villages. There's so much to explore and discover within this country; I'd love to discover and write about some of it.

Practical environmentalism: It's easy to buy unleaded petrol and take your tins to the recycling bins at the supermarket, but the urgency to be green is growing ever stronger as our environment becomes more fragile. What practical steps can ordinary people take to be greener than before? Given the dreadful state and high cost of public transport in the UK, what are the best options for getting around? How realistic is it to develop local food production schemes, and what are the challenges involved?

Space of mind: How do people make mental maps of their surroundings and experiences? If asked to draw those maps, what kind of thing are they likely to produce? Can the results be useful for others?

Parenting: I have opinions about everything from CBeebies to frisbees, and I'd like to share them with other parents.

New architecture in the UK: Years ago, as a junior reporter in Cambridge, I took it upon myself to write about new architecture in the city. Visiting new buildings, some of them very traditional and others incredibly adventurous (the Judge Institute of Management was one of my favourites) was a joy, an experience I'd like to rediscover.

Early morning runaround

2006-05-31T15:12:00.000Z

Three-year-olds tend to have lots of energy first thing in the morning.

Notes on "The blue-eyed salaryman" by Niall Murtagh

2006-04-19T22:30:00.000Z

Niall Murtagh spent most of his 20s travelling round the world and enjoying himself. He worked when he needed to, earning a little extra money to pay for further adventures. Sounds like a wonderful time. He's one of life's free spirits who deliberately shuns the norms, the things society expects you to do like get a career, get married, buy property, and so on.

This book is about what happened when, rather to his own surprise, he finally embraced all those things. But not in his native Ireland; in Japan.

If you've ever had any interest in Japanese culture and lifestyle, you'll find something interesting in this account by an outsider. But you have to keep in mind that, as a salaryman in a huge Japanese corporation, much of Murtagh's account is about life in an office. A bit of a weird office by UK standards, but an office nonetheless.

Given that he makes a pretty good job of keeping office life interesting; making the odd rituals and all-to-familiar office politics the centre of the story. His account of marrying and moving in with a Japanese woman, and later having children with her, is reduced to a sub-plot.

If there'd been too much detail, or too many chapters, this would have ended up something of a struggle to read. But Murtagh keeps it short and his writing style is relaxed and easy. You can get through this book in a couple of evenings with no problem.

Still, it's not a book for everyone, simply because not very much happens. An Irishman goes to work in Japan, spends a lot of time in an office, gets promoted a few times, and starts a family; that's it. He confidently speaks Japanese and understands much of the culture, so this is not a fish-out-of-water story; it's observation from the inside, and all the more enjoyable as a result.

The Biscuit Tree (a story for small children)

2006-03-11T23:27:00.000Z

The biscuit tree grows at the end of our garden, just next to the compost heap.

When we moved in it was only this high, and I could jump right over it if I wanted to, though mummy kept telling me that if I did I'd bang my head on the fence. So I didn't. But I could've.

But look at the biscuit tree now! It's higher than the fence, it's higher than daddy! It's higher than Paul-next-door's big toy dumper truck!

In a few years, I'll be able to climb up the biscuit tree to play pirates, and I'll be able to look over the fence into Paul-next-door's garden.

None of my friends at school believe me when I tell them I've got a biscuit tree. They say things like

"Don't be so stupid!"

and

"Durr! You can't get biscuit trees!"

and once, Sarah Sarah said

"So? I've got a biscuit tree too, and it's bigger than yours."

But she must be telling fibs, because our biscuit tree is the Only Biscuit Tree in the whole wide world.

Some of my friends from school came round for tea. Tommy, Nicky, Sarah Bean and So-so Jo.

Mum made scrambled eggs, baked beans, and potato waffles. We had pink milk as a special treat.

It was warm and sunny so we all sat outside round the garden table.

My friends didn't talk about the biscuit tree, but they kept looking round the garden trying to find it. I knew they wanted to see it up close.

After tea we played hide-and-seek round the house, and it was great fun because So-so Jo hid behind the pipes in the cleaning cupboard, and no-one could find her for ages and ages. Tommy started to get a bit cross so mummy called her to come out.

Nicky said: "Let's hide in the garden this time! So-so's on it!"

So-so Jo started counting and we all ran off to hide.

I ran straight to the biscuit tree, but that was a silly thing to do. It's big now, but not big enough to hide behind.

I didn't know where to hide next.

Just then Paul-next-door poked his head over the fence.

"Need a hiding place?" he said. I said yes. "Climb up then!" he said.

I tried to climb over the fence but there was nothing to put my feet on. My trainers scraped on the wood. Paul-next-door was leaning over as far as he could, trying to grab my arms, but he couldn't quite reach me.

"Coming, ready or not!" So-so Jo had finished counting. Where could I hide?

She came running out the house and saw me straight away, but instead of shouting my name she slowed down and stopped next to me.

"Is this it? The biscuit tree?" she asked. She was looking at the branches.

Tommy and Sarah Bean came out from behind the holly tree. Nicky's head appeared behind the compost bin. Paul-next-door was still hanging over the fence.

They were all looking at the biscuit tree.

I didn't want to tell them. I wanted it to be my secret, forever.

But I did want to tell them at the same time. I wanted all my friends to know about the biscuit tree.

I couldn't decide what to say. I went all red.

Now everyone was looking at me.

I opened my mouth:

"It's -"

"It's time for a biscuit," said my mum's voice, right behind me.

She made everyone jump.

Then everyone spoke at once:

"Is this the biscuit tree?"

"Can we have a biscuit? Please?"

"Where are the biscuits? I can't see any."

"Can someone help me get down from this fence?"

Mum was smiling.

She told us all to help Paul-next-door to get down. So-so Jo and Tommy made a base, and Nicky and Sarah Bean climbed on top of them, and Paul-next-door reached down and grabbed their hands and -

WALLOP!

everyone fell down in a big pile at the foot of the biscuit tree. We all laughed. Even though Paul-next-door had some bruises and a cut on his knee, he was laughing too.

And when we stopped laughing, Sarah Bean pointed up and said

"Look!"

Hanging from the biscuit tree was a biscuit, attached to a tiny twig that twinkled like a piece of ribbon.

"Biscuits!"

There were 12 little biscuits dangling from a branch, all of them on shiny ribbon-twigs.

And before their mummies and daddies came to take them home, Tommy, Nicky, Sarah Bean, So-so Jo, Paul-next-door, and me all sat down and crunched the fresh biscuits from the biscuit tree.

Mum was there too, but she didn't have one.

She just watched us. She was smiling.

Finding Floyd

2006-03-13T10:40:00.000Z

Ian and Steve were a couple of musical misfits, fixated on Pink Floyd, Hendrix, and oddly, Chris de Burgh.

They took me under their wing (I'm not sure why I needed to be taken under anyone's wing, nor why they thought it should be theirs) and we hung out at break times, talking music. There was a Pink Floyd lyrics game they played:

Q: "Fourth album, side 1, track 2, line 12, word 3."

A: "Rabbit" (or whatever the answer was)

They were surprisingly good at it. Whole lunch hours would pass by playing this, just hanging about and talking rubbish. The other two knew a lot more about music than I - they'd started exploring at an earlier age - and passed on their recommendations to me.

The two of them introduced me to progressive rock, power ballads, heavy metal and the concept of a "band practice", which involved driving out to a house on the edge of a village, wolfing down sandwiches made by someone's mum (we were only about 13 or 14 at this point), and mucking about in the garden for hours before spending the final hour randomly playing chords and bashing the drum kit about.

"You should play bass," they said. They needed a bassist. "It's piss easy, you'll pick it up in no time." I should've tried, but fear kept me back. They probably didn't mean it, anyway.

Thanks to Ian and Steve, I ventured away from the the first records I'd listened to, a bizarre combination of my brother's taste (Billy Bragg, David Bowie) and my mother's (Niel Diamond, ELO, folk and jazz). I began exploring other ideas and broadening my tastes.

I lost touch with both of them after leaving school. I've no idea what happened to Steve. Ian Betts is now a world class trance DJ, so I hope I'm not embarrassing him in public by mentioning his early interest in Pink Floyd. And I'm pretty sure the Chris de Burgh LPs were Steve's, not Ian's.

The why phase

2005-12-20T18:12:00.000Z

Don't touch the sharp knives, Barney.

Why?

Because they've got sharp blades on them.

Why?

So they can cut things.

Why?

To make them smaller.

Why?

That makes things easier to cook.

Why?

Because small pieces of food cook faster.

Why?

It's something to do with conductivity, I think, but I can't remember all the details.

Why?

Because I'm getting old.

Why?

Everyone gets old.

Why?

That's what happens to people.

Why?

Something to do with entropy. And chemistry, I suspect.

Why?

Because bananas.

I want a sandwich.

Signs of Clue in the UK media

2005-12-22T19:15:00.000Z

I'm interested to see some of the UK media establishment diving into weblogging, and evidently with some gusto. Some of them are starting to understand the concept.

Following The Guardian's lead, The Times has a list of weblogs by op-ed writers and columnists (well suited to the blog format), but what's more interesting is that they've allowed the blogs to live off the main Times site.

All the Times weblogs live off timesonline.typepad.com, and the newspaper's webmonkeys have made no effort to incorporate the Typepad service under their own domains. To me, is shows signs of a more relaxed attitude and I think that's a good thing. Back in the 1990s, the corporate image would have counted more and someone high up would have insisted that everything be carried under thetimes.co.uk. Now, they're just more relaxed about this sort of thing.

This is a sign of Clue at the Times. Yay.

Now the Beeb has finally started 'proper' weblogging for reporters. (I say proper because they've had content they called 'weblogs' before, but it was just pages buried in the rest of the site and loosely linked together under the 'weblog' title. They didn't have an easy-to-find front page, or a particularly 'webloggy' feel to them.) Starting with a weblog by political editor Nick Robinson, they're now using MT (or Typepad, I dunno) and they're doing things the way you'd expect; a front page, archives, comments, all the shazzam.

Assuming other media jump the wagon as they do in the past, I forsee that within a year, The Sun will have blogs; The Mirror's 3am will have been spun off as a separate bloggy site; the Telegraph will have limped into line behind The Times; even the Daily Mail will have a House Prices blog. The Express will continue to be publishing shite about Princess Diana and not have a fucking Clue about anything.

Let's have a cup of tea

2005-11-02T11:38:00.000Z

cuppa.mp3 (345kB, about 15 seconds)