Warhorses of Letters

Remember when I got all millitant about Warhorse? I'm about to get more millitant.  And slightly more millitary.

Ages ago I raved about a literary night I'd been to in Kilburn, called Tall Tales.  Among the things I said about it were this:

We were privy to the early stages of an ill-fated equine love affair, conducted entirely by letters. Hints came which suggested there could be a sequel to this at some point; I really really hope there is. 

Various circumstances mean I haven't been to Tall Tales forever, but from all accounts it is going from strength to strength.  They now have a podcast and a website and Toby Davies is still writing brilliant stories which sometimes feature excellently named cats. 

Which is all very exciting for everyone involved, I'm sure.  But the very very exciting news is that wishes sometimes do come true. Warhorses of Letters - the story of the love affair between Napolean's horse Marengo, and Wellington's horse Copenhagen, is going to be broadcast on Radio 4; starting from next week and running for four weeks. 

And that's not even the most exciting part.  The most exciting part is the casting. 
Daniel Rigby is playing Copenhagen, and the part of Marengo is being played by Stephen Fry. Stephen actual Fry.

That's right.  Stephen actual Fry will be on the radio next week, playing a love-struck French horse.  What's not to love? Having heard early versions of the first two installments, let me add the following rider: this would be worth a listen even if it didn't feature Stephen actual Fry.* But since it does, you'd be mad not to tune in.

By now you must be wondering how. If you are in the UK you can hear the first installment of Warhorses of Letters next Tuesday (October 25th) at 11pm.  Also if you are in the UK- more specifically London, more specifically north-west-ish London - you can see the next Tall Tales at the Good Ship in Kilburn on November 24th.  (Unless, annoyingly, you are me.  I can't make this one either.  Don't let that put you off.)   In the meantime, if you live ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD** you can listen to Warhorses of Letters on the iPlayer, from October 25th onwards.

If all that still hasn't convinced you, I should probably mention that co-writer Robbie Hudson  currently appears to be suffering from a very manky-looking, tea-related foot injury.  Surely that deserves a sympathy vote.

*HA! Rider! I didn't even mean to make a joke.


** Also if you are in London.

I've always felt that August is over-rated

See also: September.  I mean, who wants to read anything in those stupid months?

October is where it's at.  I mean, October is where I'm at - as are the rest of you, presumably - and it's sort of caught me by surprise.  Once again I'm caught in the trap of knowing it's not really the done thing to apologise for lack of posts but desperately wanting to acknowledge that I've been, well, a bit crap.

For what it's worth,  I do have some genuine excuses this time.  Especially if you are willing to overlook the fact that I was on holidays for most of August.


First, I have moved house.  Now, instead of living on my own in a shoebox in the middle of nowhere, I am renting out said shoebox and sharing a place near Waterloo with a friend.   If I had been blogging in August, chances are that anything you read would have been a variation on the theme of OH MY GOD!! LIVING IN CENTRAL LONDON IS SO AMAZING!! I CAN SEE THE LONDON EYE FROM MY LIVING ROOM!!!  I LOVE MY NEW FLAT!!! OH MY GOD LOOK, YOU CAN STILL SEE THE LONDON EYE FROM MY LIVING ROOM!! And etcetera.   This is pretty much all that the people I know in real life have managed to get out of me for the last few months.

(I quite like my new flat.  The people who know me in real life are all now VERY aware of this. You're quite lucky if you're not one of them.*)

Excuse number two is this:  my new blog.  Because that's exactly what someone without enough time, will-power or inclination to update their blog should do: start another one. Seriously though: if you like wine or books or, even better, wine AND books, please do stop by. Despite appearances, it's an 'as well as', not an 'instead of' project, in theory at least.

Excuse numbers three four and five are the usual: other writing, part-time day-job, trying to figure out exactly what I plan to do with the rest of my life. You know the drill. Oh, and my Mum was in town for a while.  That counts, yes?

Anyway.  None of this, interesting as it may be, is the reason I stopped by.  That is still to come in a different post. I bet the suspense is killing you.


*Although you might already be as sick as they all are of hearing about how amazing my new flat is.  But since you're here already and we're on the subject, I may as well tell you:  I can also see the London Eye from my bedroom.  Also,  if you stand in exactly the right spot in our two-windowed living room, you can see the London Eye from one of them and The Shard out of the other.  In the first week that I lived here, I was so excited by the fact that we had views of the London Eye that I completely failed to notice we could even see The Shard.

Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way

was this year's winner of the Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year.

Previous winners include: Living with Crazy Buttocks, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships, and Highlights in the History of Concrete.

The prize was established in 1978 and the innaugural winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.  More recently, a book called Cheese Problems Solved made the 2007 shortlist but lost out to eventual winner If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs.

This Day in History

"1932: Rockabilly singer Sleepy LaBeef born."

I expect I’m not the only one who read that and immediately needed to know more about Mr LaBeef.

Sleepy is 6’7’’ tall, comes from a place called Smackover (it’s in Arkansas) and grew up on a melon farm. After a brief stint as a gospel singer he started recording rockabilly and country songs; his biggest hits were Every Day and Blackland Farmer which reached #73 and #67 in the charts respectively.  In between records he found time to star in a horror movie called The Exotic Ones.*

Live performances are what Sleepy is really all about.  He began recording in 1957 and has been on the road more or less ever since, except for in 1977 when his bus caught fire. From his website: “he still performs two hundred shows a year and plays with such energy that people a third of his age are annihilated when they attempt to keep up with him.”


People seem to like him. The Detroit Metro Times says “He possesses one of the most distinctive and compelling baritone voices ever to be heard in rock”.  Someone else ( I forget who, and don't have time to check) described it as a voice which can rattle windows.  And from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner: “Some music cooks, LaBeef roasts."



*Also called The Monster and The Stripper. Sleepy played a swamp monster.

The Russian Fairytale Wars

When Russia and Ukraine argue, which is basically all of the time,  it usually has something to do with gas supplies.  But now they've found something much more fun to squabble about. 

The Russians have produced a national fairytale map which features thirty-odd characters from popular folklore and traces their origins to various parts of Russia. Which would be fine, except that the Ukranians already had their own map and it features some of the same characters. 

At the centre of the controversy is Kolobok, a plucky currant bun who skips through the forest to avoid being eaten greeedy monsters.  The Russians say he comes from the Ulyanovsk region (also the home of Vladimir Lenin who the BBC describe as
"less cute, though more revolutionary" than Kolobok.  And to think people worry that the BBC is dumbing down.)  Meanwhile the Ukranians say Kolobok is one of their own, and are quick to point out that 'kolo' is a Ukranian word meaing 'round'.  Then again, apparently 'kolob' is a Russian word meaning 'round dough', so who knows which side to believe.  No one seems to be laying claim to Vladimir Lenin.

I sort of like the fact that they're arguing about this.   Partly because it's funny to imagine a currant bun running through a forest, but mainly because people only argue over things they consider valuable.  It's easy to measure the value of gas pipe-lines and their contents; much harder to put a dollar amount on stories and mythologies.  It's easy to forget that this doesn't make them any less important.  Or valuable.  

Of course we'll probably never know who had the story first, and it may well have orginated somewhere else entirely - there's a gingerbread man version as well, remember, as well as endless other variations - but that's not really the point.

Been a while.......

I had dinner with a friend and old work colleauge a few weeks ago.  He told me that he had - and this is a direct quote -  "checked the blog first, so we'd have something to talk about".  I'm not sure what he found more disappointing - the fact that I'd written nothing new since April, or the prospect of an entire evening spent discussing mackerel.

There's no particular reason why it's been so long since my last post.  Except maybe that the longer I took to get around to writing something, the harder it became.  Sort of like one of those friendships which dies a natural death because you both leave it too long to get in touch, until it's been so long since you were in touch that it would feels awkward if you did, so you don't. 
 
Now of course I'm faced with the scary propsect of having to write what is essentially a "come-back" post,  which by definition ought to be significant, or brilliant, or at the very least worth the wait.

This one is none of those things.  Essentially it's just me checking in to make sure that I don't leave it for so long that I stop all together.   Life is busy, and good - very good.  I don't have Olympic tickets but I am going to Wimbeldon next week, and last week I learned to make a bloody mary out of absinthe, veal jus and wasabi flying fish roe, and in twenty-something sleeps it's time for Latitude again, and I'm juggling several writing projects I'm quite excited about, and I'm moving house soon, and I've become involved with a fantastic charity doing really fun things, and......well, you get the picture.  Lots of good things going on.   Plus my little brother - who will always be my little brother - became a dad about a month ago.  So I'll have a new niece to meet next time I'm in Australia. She's very cute.  And we share a name (my first name is her middle name), which still makes my insides melt whenever I remember.

So, as I said, life is good.  I'm pretty lucky.  No - very lucky. REALLY very lucky.

 I'm not promising to be back with any sense of regularity, at least not for the next month or so, but I'm still around.  Let's stay friends, shall we?

What's with all the mackerel?

I am a bit obsessed with Tube station facts.  One of my favourites is that more of the London Underground is above ground than under ground. 

The other day someone told me that Ohio is the only American state which doesn't contain any of the letters in the word mackerel.  It made me sit up, because I'm sure I've head a similar fact about Tube stations; namely that there is only one tube station which doesn't have any letters in common with the word mackerel.  *

I find this interesting, mildly, but the question which I find much more interesting and which has been burning a massive hole in my brain ever since  is WHAT'S WITH ALL THE MACKEREL?

Google isn't helping.  It's telling me a lot of other things about mackerel, like that the French word for mackerel (maquereau) is slang for a pimp, and all sorts of recipes for cooking them (mackerel stuffed ravioli, anyone?), but not why or how it became a linguistic yardstick of sorts.  It's driving me nuts.

*Or at least there used to be.  It was St John's Wood; but now there's Hoxton on the new East London line and that doesn't have any of them either.  Or any letters from the word badger, for what it's worth.

Sunday Night Music Club

I'm writing this with the echoes of not just one, but TWO live gigs I saw this week still ringing in my ears.  I am so rock and roll.

On Tuesday it was Elbow at the 02 - a proper stadium gig with tens of thousands of other people.  Then on Friday I went to Koko in Camden, to see Paul Heaton (ex-Belle and Sebastian).  I hadn't been to Koko before, but it might just be my new favourite music venue.  Both nights were ace - no time to do either one of them justice at the moment - and made me think what I always think when I see live music, which is "I really ought to get out and see more live music."

I've played Elbow on a Sunday night before, but these are Villagers, who were the support act:



And here's some Paul Heaton (there's an interview first, but he does eventually sing):



I genuinely thought, until about two minutes ago, that this song was called "life of a cow", which is what I was singing along to all of the choruses on Friday night. See? I'm TOTALLY rock and roll.

Duck!

The New York Times book review podcast from a few weeks ago featured a book called Moby Duck. Or, to use its correct name: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. 

I think we can all agree that the full title, which is too long for even Amazon.com to handle, is a bit of a mouthful.  The short version, on the other hand, is one of my favourite ever book titles. 

Author Donovan Hohn is quick to point out that "it wasn't just ducks."  There were green frogs, blue turtles and red beavers too.  The  toys were in transit between China, where they were manufactured, to the US to be sold when the container ship they were on ran into a storm.  The crate they were in fell overboard and broke open, essentially turning the North Pacific ocean into a giant bath tub.

Eleven years and 7000 nautical miles later, one of the ducks turned up, sitting on top of a pile of seaweed in Maine.  Word spread among the international beachcombing community, after Eben Punderson (inspired by some ocenographers who, several years earlier had tracked the drift patterns of a container-load of Nike sneakers* which had met a similar watery fate) placed a classified ad in a local paper looking for people who had found them.  Dozens of people replied, and ever since then the ducks, and the turtles, and the beavers and frogs have been showing up all over the place.

Hohn is a high school English teacher by trade and first heard of the ducks when one of his students wrote about them for a homework assignment; he was so captured by the story, and curious about the people interested in them, that he left behind his job and his pregant wife, and set off to join the search and find out more.  His book (reviewed here) sounds fascinating; there's this Harper's article as well, which gives a taster. 

(As an aside, and because Google insists on correcting search terms, I am now desperate to see Moby Dick: The Opera .)

*insert "S.O.S - save our soles" related joke here.

Sunday Night (on Monday Morning) Music Club

Forgot all about this last night. Enjoy.

Professor Splash

According to Ch4 news just now, a man called Professor Splash has just broken his own world record for shallow diving, leaping from a height of 34 feet into 12 inches of water.  Two thoughts:

1.  I genuinely thought people only did this in cartoons. (He was using a plastic paddling pool; in the cartoons it's usually a wooden tub.  Watching the footage, I was properly surprised (for the split-second before logic kicked in) by the paddling pool.)

2.  Tonight?  Really?   I know news programs broadcast novelty items like this all the time, but, well.....it's hardly been a slow news week, has it?

Sunday Night Music Club

I went out and bought an album on the day it was released last week.  The last time I did that, I was sixteen and it was a cassette tape.*

This one, which was on a boring old CD, was Build a Rocket Boys! - the new Elbow album.  I can't stop listening to it and when I'm not literally listening to it there are bits of it going round and round my head.  It's properly, properly good.

This is one of the tracks:



And this is another one, with a few words from lead singer Guy Garvey at the start.



As if having THAT voice wasn't enough, Guy Garvey writes the most beautiful lyrics; his songs are full of lines and fragments which are perfect in their simplicity and stop me in my tracks every single time I hear them. I know it's a terrible cliche to describe song lyrics as poetry, but....well, this really is poetry. Pure and simple.


*The Other Side by a group called 1927,since you ask.  They're a band you're likely to never have heard of unless you are female, you fall into a very specific (and quite narrow) age group and you spent your teenage years in Australia.  This was their difficult second album, released after their debut.....Ish which sold by the bucketload. ; My friends and I were obsessed with 1927, or more to the point with lead singer Eric Weideman.  He's on the comeback trail, apparently; but is now Erik-with-a-k not Eric-with-a-c and a completely different band, who are still called 1927. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

In which I let the side down, but find an excellent elephant picture. So everybody wins, really.

I feel like I ought to have something interesting or meaningful to say about International Women's Day, what with being one (an international woman) and all*.  But..........I'm afriad I've got nothing.   Absolutely nothing. 

Would you like  to see a photo of Batman riding an elephant instead?  Yes, I thought so.

This picture comes from the unfortunately named (you probably won't want to open it at work) website http://www.thisisnotporn.net/, which is full of photos like this.  If you've ever wanted to see Albert Einstein chilling out in a deckchair, or R2D2 dressed as Darth Vader, or Winston Churchill in his swimming costume, or Clint Eastwood peeling a potato or Robert Plant eating ice-cream, this is the website for you.  It's magic.

Here's another one - Frank Sinatra dancing with his son, Frank Sinatra Jr. :

See? Absolutely magic.


*Despite what this website might think.  I've given up trying to convince it otherwise.

Sunday Night Music Club

You know those times when you really, really really want Wikipedia to be true?  This is one of those times.

John Phillip Sousa is best known for composing marches and if you've ever heard a marching band, or seen practically any film ever set in an American high school or watched the opening credits of Monty Python's Flying Circus then you've heard a Sousa march. 

(You might think if you've watched Bridge on the River Kwai then you've heard a Sousa march, but the march you are thinking of, which is called the Colonel Bogey March (or occasionally, 'that one about Hitler's balls') isn't actually one of his. That was written by a different King of Marches, Kenneth J. Alford (real name Kenneth J. Rickets; it doesn't take a genius to work out why he changed it).   Since we're talking about the Colonel Bogey March I may as well mention it's the only march I know of which was a) composed during a golf game and b) named after an imaginary person.

But both of those things are by the by, because Sousa looks like this

which is exactly what I expected to him to look like.  The moustache, particularly.

His father sent him off to the marines at thirteen to stop him from joining the circus, then he left the marines and joined the pit orchestra at a theatre (definitely the most fun kind of orchestra to play in), where he learned to conduct, and then he went back to the Marines to lead their band.

After that he started his own marching band which ran for forty years and marched in a total of eight parades.  One of the parades was in Paris and the band also toured Australia.  (This was a much better story until I realised that, while reading about the band I missed the line about them playing 15,632 sitting down concerts also.  For a while I genuinely thought they'd performed once every five years, and managed to turn two of those performances into overseas jollies.)

He wrote a ton of marches (what's a better collective noun - a stampede maybe?) and also a bunch of operettas, most of which had propera opera sounding names like El Capitan or The Smugglers, and one which was called Chris and the Wonderful Lamp, which sounds more like a children's story.  Also several novels, and a memoir called  (rather pleasingly) Marching Along. 

He was around when commercial sound recording was starting to develop, and wasn't a fan of the newfangled technology.  "These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country" he said, and I suppose there are a few people around today who'd agree with him about the state of the recording industry.  Fewer, I imagine, who'd agree with his prediciton that recorded music would lead to the eventual elimination of vocal chords via the process of evolution.  Although maybe that's all part of Simon Cowell's grand plan.

He was also a keen trap-shooter.  A line from his Trapshooting Hall of Fame biography:

"Let me say that just about the sweetest music to me is when I call, ‘pull,’ the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect key announces, ‘dead’."

This clip is The Liberty Bell, one of his most well-known marches, but performed  in a way you've probably not heard it played before: on an accoustic guitar. It's Sunday night, after all. Let's not go too crazy.

World Book Day

Was yesterday, and in a lovely moment of serendipity I finally managed to catch an episode of My Life in Books last night .  For weeks now, Anne Robinson has been interviewing celebrities about their favourite books, and for the exact same number of weeks (spooky!) I've been forgetting to watch her do it. 

Each week she asks two celebrities (Sarah Millican and Larry Lamb in this case) to talk about five books which are important to them for one reason or another. There is some sort of  category system in place but having missed most of the programs and only having seen bits of some others I'm not entirely sure what this involves.  Based on what I've seen the first book they pick is a  childhood read, the next three broadly cover the teenage years / university / adulthood in that order, but not necessarily one of each, and then finally they choose a 'guilty pleasure'.  Dan Snow, who I saw on the iPlayer, picked Love In The Time Of Cholera as his guilty pleasure which makes me think Dan Snow and I have very different definitions of the  concept 'guilt'.  At the end the celebrities pick one of the five as their absolute favourite (a-la Desert Island Discs) and then finally they are asked to contemplate what their choices say about them.

I've been trying to work out what my answers would be.  First thoughts:

Childhood Read: So, so many to choose from. As a kid I harboured ambitions to be either a detective or a spy when I grew up (these vocations were more or less interchangeable in my mind, which seems a little odd in hindsight given they're essentially on opposite sides of the law).  So if I was actually invited on to the program I'd almost definitely pick a book called The Spy and The Mission of Staggering Importance; a little known story about a bumbling, inept spy.  Mainly because it's out of print now, and when I tried to track down a copy recently the only one I could find was on eBay and cost about sixty pounds.  I'm  assuming that if I was to appear on the program someone in the BBC production department might have to fork out for one.  

Back in the real world, my answer to this question would probably have to be a series: Trixie Beldon, possibly, or maybe Nancy Drew. Perhaps even the Mallory Towers books by Enid Blyton.  Anything with a tomboy-ish, independent female as one of the main characters, and preferably one who did some detective work on the side. These books weren't necessarily the best written, or the most influential or the ones which touched my heart the most, but I consumed books in ridiculously huge quantities all the way through my childhood, so books which there were more than one of held a certain appeal.

The Next Three:   Here's where it gets tricky. As a teenager I still loved reading but I didn't particularly enjoy English lessons; mainly because by the time we'd spent wringing every last piece of analysis out of a text I was sick to the back teeth of it. The exception was To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read at school when I was about 14 and which I still adore. Just yesterday someone on Facebook posed the question "who is your hero?" and I didn't even have to think twice - mine is definitely Atticus Finch.  I have always had a low tolerance for injustice and value compassion over just about anything else;  it's only just occurred to me  that this book is almost definitely one of the reasons why.
The next book on my list is Memoirs of a Geisha, because it's one which truly astonished me.  Twice.  When I started to read it I knew next to nothing about Japanese culture or the Geisha world, and could barely believe what I was reading.  Not because it seemed unrealistic, simply because it was so far removed from my own experience and knowledge of the world.  I was, as mentioned, astonished.  Once I'd finished it, I turned to the acknowledgements and discovered  the main character was completely fictional. This was my second moment of astonishment, and that second moment is the reason this book makes my list.  I should point out, for those who haven't read it, that it's written by a Western man (his name  all over the cover), so the fact that he isn't really a Geisha is hardly the sort of realisation which requires an enormous cognitive leap.  Even so, it was a cognitive leap I found incredibly hard to make.  (It also reminds me  of the horses on stage in Warhorse (have you still not seen Warhorse yet? Go and see Warhorse) and how it was still a bit hard to believe they weren't real horses even though the puppeteers who operate them were right there on the stage.)    This book makes the list because it made me properly, properly appreciate one of the fundamental things I admire in writers; their ability to conjure up believable people and places with nothing but words.  I always knew they did this, but this was the first book which really made me understand it's what writers do.
 
The last book in this section feels like I'm cheating a bit because it's also one Larry Lamb chose and I'm not sure I would have remembered to consider it if he hadn't.  So I'm glad he did.  Although I've always had a strong sense of right and wrong, and a propensity to get a bit cross when people cross that line, the goalposts have changed somewhat over the years. When I was younger, it was simple.  Taking drugs and committing crimes was wrong.  Lying and stealing and cheating was wrong.  Now, of course, I know it's a little more complicated than that, and A Million Little Pieces by James Frey is a book which makes me remember just how complicated.  It's also a book which reminds me how much I've changed over the years.  It's a memoir, of sorts;  James Frey is someone who, once upon a time, I would have been very cross with indeed.  He's an alcoholic drug addict, who commits crimes and is horrible to people and if you listen to what Oprah Winfrey has to say about him you'll probably want to add 'cheater' and 'liar' to that list as well.  (For what it's worth, I don't think you should pay too much heed to what Oprah Winfrey has to say about him.)  This account of his battle with addiction, his journey through rehab and his attempts at rehabilitation is graphic and uncomfortable in parts, but also incredibly moving.   Whether you view it as a memoir or a work of fiction (and debate has been raging ever since it was published), it's a powerful piece of storytelling, and one which completely altered the way I think.  Atticus Finch might have taught me the importance of compassion, but James Frey is someone who challenged me to practice it.

Guilty Pleasure:  The book I read for pure enjoyment, and which I have returned to time and again over the years, is Gone With the Wind. I'm not madly in love with the characters and it doesn't say enormous things, but it was the first big, sprawling epic I properly got my teeth into, and I've read it so often now that I can slip into the story almost effortlessly.  It's a pure comfort read; going back to Tara is like visiting old friends.

You're not *really* going to make me pick just one of these books as a favourite, are you? If I was really pushed (and it would have to be quite a shove) I'd probably say To Kill a Mockingbird because it does a little bit of what each of the other ones does.   As for what my choices say about me?  Mainly, I think, that books are part of my identity.  Maybe even the most important part.They've helped to shape the way I think, and how I feel and who I've become. Although I would like to  make it clear, at this point, that I am not actually a spy.  (As far as you know.)

So now you've see my list, it's your turn.  Which books would make yours?  The rules are simple: one childhood favourite, one guilty pleasure, and three which come in between.

I'm whichever fruit means "it's really none of your business, actually". A lime, maybe?

I'm all for raising breast cancer awareness.  But this is driving me insane:

We are playing a game. Someone proposed that we (GIRLS!) do something special  to help with Breast Cancer Awareness. Its easy, and I'd like you to join us to help it spread. Last year it was about writing the color of the bra that you were wearing in your status and it left men wondering for days why the girls had random colors as their status. This year it has to do with your relationship status. You will state where you are, by posting one of the codes below. Remember - don't reply to this message just type your one word response in your status box on your profile. Then cut and paste this whole message into a new message and send it along to your female friends....



Blueberry: Im single
Pineapple its complicated
Raspberry: Im a touch and go woman
Apple: Engaged
Cherry: In a relationship
Banana: Im married
Avocado: Im the "other one"
Strawberry: Cant find the right one
Lemon: Wish i was single
Grape: wants to get married.


The bra game reached TV, lets get this one to do the same, and show everyone how powerful women are.

I was sent the above message via facebook a few days ago.  About a month ago I received almost the exact same message but to do with drinks instead of fruit - beer if you were married, tequilla if single, etc.

The bra-colour game actually happened in October 2009.  October is breast cancer awareness month so the timing made sense.  I've heard recently that the original messages included the suggestion that, since they'd already be in the area, as it were, women might want to do a quick breast self-examination while they were checking to see what colour bra they had on. Hence bra colour specificially, not underwear in general.  This also makes sense.  And as an awareness-raising strategy it worked. The random colours popping up all over facebook certainly got men scratching their heads. In fact for the first week or so, until the email chain had made its way to my circle of friends, it got me scratching my head too.

Which raises the first issue; the whole "let's keep it a big secret from those silly MEN" business.  I just don't get this. Some of my best friends are male.  Come to think of it, most of my best friends are male.  Don't get me wrong, I like my female friends too; I've just never bought into this whole "them vs us" mentality and have never been a fan of 'girls nights out' or 'girly nights in' or girly things in general.  I happily accept that this puts me in a minority; there are plenty of women who worship the sisterhood like some kind of religion, and I can see why the 'no-boys-allowed' element might appeal to those women.  And if appealing to that particular instinct is a way of getting more people on board then fair play, I suppose.

 Last October there was a similar 'game' where women posted comments like "I like it in the hallway" or "I like it wherever there's room" which were meant to sound like places they liked to have sex but were actually where they put their handbag when they got home.  All a bit juvenille, maybe, and not quite as relevant as the bra colour campaign, but with the same whiff of 'let's leave the silly men out'.   Still, it raised a few eyebrows, and got people talking, and at least it happened during Breast Cancer Awareness month.

But..... using a secret code to tell people about your love life? In the middle of January?  And then again, using a slightly different code, a month later?
 
I absolutely think breast cancer awareness is important.  I just don't think this is the best way to draw attention to the issue.  I don't like being defined by my relationship status at the best of times, and deliberately don't include this information in my facebook profile.  It's not really anyone else's business.   If we're going to talk about general demographic information, what's next after relationships -  choose the animal which best describes your current employment status?  Rabbit - unemployed, bear - I'm working illegally, giraffe - I have a job but I really hate my boss?

And how on earth does announcing to the world at large that you are having an affair, or just can't find the right man yet, or are unhappy in your relationship, make you more powerful as a woman, just because you've done it using the secret language of fruit?
I know that breast cancer is an issue which affects many people personally, and a lot of people will have forwarded the fruit / drink messages with the best of intentions.  My worry is that in doing so, all they will succeed in doing is trivialising the cause.  After all, if we start being bombarded with these sorts of emails all year round, pretty soon they'll get irritating. And the bra-color campain will be remembered not as the clever, awareness-raising stunt that it was, but rather as the game which started off the whole annoying business.
 
There are plenty of other ways to raise awareness.  If people want to use social networking as a tool,  Breast Cancer Awareness have a  really informative facebook page .  Why not post a link to that?  Or how about using status updates to share personal experiences with cancer, make us think about the issue and why it's such an important one? 

Sunday Night Music Club - an experiment.....

In an exciting development, I've worked out how to set up automated blog-posts. So even though I'm writing this post on Sunday morning, you won't get to read it until later on tonight, which is when it would make more sense to read it but is also when I'm much more likely to forget to publish it.

Isn't technology marvellous?

(Oh yes, the song. It's a cover version. It's great, and I say that as someone who loved the orginal.)

Exciting technological developments (maybe)

Come back at about 7pm tonight, is all I'm saying.

The Poetry of Wine

Lots of half-written but not quite finished blog posts kicking around my drafts folder at the moment.  This is (was) one of them.

I bought some wine this last week. I'm on a self-imposed wine buying hiatus at the moment, after an unfortunate episode involving a wine fair and my credit card and some very drunken maths, the details of which are too painful to recount.  But after trying this particular wine  last week  a few weekends ago, I had to make an exception.  It's lovely.  All smoky and earthy and full of depth; the kind of wine which wraps itself around you like a warm cardigan and makes everything right with the world.  I spent ages yesterday some indeterminate number of days after I bought the stuff (I'm really starting to wish I hadn't started this business with the temporal corrections now) trying to work out what it reminded me of, and then I realised.

It tastes like a Robert Frost poem.

I adore Robert Frost.  One of the first of his poems I ever read was this:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening


Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

It is still one of my favourites.  There are others.

Sunday Night Music Club

I was spoiled for choice tonight.  So spoiled for choice, I very nearly picked something else.  But like the jackdaws, that something else will just have to wait.

This band are, in my opinion, criminally underrated.  Yes, they are "modern".  Yes, they are slightly mass-produced and yes, they are (or at least they were when they recorded this) barely post-adolescent, testosterone fuelled, pimply faced boys; making them - let's face it - just about the most undesirable creatures on the planet. *  But you know what?  They sing a darn good pop-song.  I'm not afraid to admit it - I love them.  Even though I'm probably not supposed to, what with being old enough to be their mother and all.

If jangly guitars, catchy vocals and sunny, innocent lyrics are your thing, then you will love this.  If not, then more fool you.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present for your enjoyment: McFly.



If you ever wanted to woo me with music (I know you've been wondering), this song would probably do it.  They also do an excellent cover version, as per here (Town Called Malice) and here (Queen's "Don't stop Me Now")  and here (beatles)
* Unless of course you're a barely post-adolescent, testosterone loving pimply faced (or otherwise) girl. 

Wildlife corner - part two (contains sad news)

This wasn't going to be what part two was about, but then a chance sighting of a story about race-horse breeding reminded me I hadn't dropped by the Alpaca Station website for a while, so I did, and discovered some bad news.  The jackdaws (who were supposed to be part two) will just have to wait.

Regular readers might remember Ivano, that pillar of the alpaca community:

Very sadly, he passed away over the winter.  There's a nice tribute to him here.  I'm genuinely quite moved by this. 

 

Wildlife corner - part one

A few days ago, over a long, boozy Sunday lunch I found myself (as you do) debating the existence of purple squirrels.  As it turns out, they do exist.  Well at least one does.  I mean, did.  There's a good chance his fur has fallen out by now according to the wildlife experts.

You can read all about Pete the used-to-be-purple squirrel here ; he was first spotted outside a school and various theories have been proposed about how he turned purple.  I've been swayed by the suggestion that he'd been chewing on some abandoned printer cartridges, but one of my lunch companions was convinced that "too much beetroot" was to blame.  I guess we'll never know.

Sunday Night Music Club

Sunday Night Music Club

In the summer of 2002 I spent a month driving from New York to Los Angeles, through the (mainly) southern states of the USA

It's a trip I'd highly recommend. We saw, among other things, the Blue Ridge mountains (which made this John Denver fan-girl particularly happy) and cowboys and the White House and cave paintings and Graceland and sea-lions and deserts and beaches and the Mississippi river, and no bears. (Plenty of warning signs about bears, though.) We line danced in Nashville and sang karaoke in New Orleans and sky dived in Las Vegas, and almost drowned in a place I can't remember when our tents got blown away in a massive thunderstorm. Oh, and our van broke down in Death Valley. Twice.

From Nashville to Memphis to New Orleans, to others,  this song was playing EVERYWHERE. Irritatingly, it was never released on an album which means it's virtually impossible to get hold of. Which is a shame, because I think it's pretty ace. And after two seconds of listening to it, I'm back in that white van, trundling along an American highway, wondering what adventure will come next.

Bit Cross

Yesterday in tweets:

@73caroline: DLR delayed. Jubilee line closed. Blackwall tunnel stationary and full of police. #willIevergettowork?

As a lot of Londoners will know by now, there was carnage on the Jubilee line yesterday morning. Now peak hour tube travel is never pretty - crowded trains, minor delays and someone else snatching the last copy of the Metro are all quite the norm for most London commuters – but this was bad even by those standards. For about two hours, from 7.30am until half past nine, there were no trains running in either direction between London Bridge and Stratford. None at all.

By the time I tweeted the above, I had been trying to get to work for about an hour and a quarter. Normally I catch a bus from my house to the DLR station at Woolwich. The same bus goes on to North Greenwich tube station, but I’ve worked out it’s slightly quicker to get off at Woolwich, catch the DLR to Canning Town and pick up the Jubilee line there. More changes, but it shaves about ten minutes off the journey and, as an added bonus, there’s a bus from Canning Town station to my office. As any Jubilee line user will tell you; it’s always good to have a backup plan.

Just before I left home  I caught a news bulletin on the radio which said there were minor delays on the DLR. No problem, I thought. I’ll just stay on the bus all the way to North Greenwich. A change is as good as an arm which is fore-warned, and all that. (I may be mixing my metaphors slightly.) The news about the Jubilee line came to us, via the bus driver, just long enough after we’d passed the DLR station to make it not worth going back. But that was fine. As a seasoned Jubilee line user, I had a Plan C up my sleeve. Plan C involved getting on another bus at North Greenwich which would take me, via the Blackwall Tunnel, to Bromley by Bow. Which it did ,eventually, but not before it spent several life-times sitting in the Blackwall tunnel.

I did get to work finally; about two hours after I first left home, and half an hour late. I wasn’t the only one.

@LDN: TfL to refund passengers affected by Canary Wharf disruption this morning http://LDN.in/i9C2NW (via @anniemole)

I was mildly irritated by this headline; the ‘disruption’ I experienced this morning wasn’t anything to do with Canary Wharf. Stupid lazy journalism (I thought). I clicked the link which took me to a news story on the Transport for London website, and then my blood began to boil.

@73caroline: FUMING about this: http://LDN.in/i9C2NW Jubilee line runs through the most deprived areas of London. Why only Canary Wharf users refunded?

Turns out it wasn’t lazy journalism. Turns out that TfL are going to refund tube users who suffered yesterday morning, and give them a free trip home. But only if they get on or off at Canary Wharf or its neighbouring DLR stations.

This seems fundamentally unfair to me.  Particularly since, as noted in my tweet, the very eastern end of the Jubilee line runs through the borough of Newham, which regularly pops up on ‘most-deprived-areas-of-the-country’ lists.

Within minutes, I had a reply:

@Cbp76: @73caroline dont think u read that properly mate, try again


I don’t know @Cbp76 at all, so the ‘mate’ rankled me slightly, while the ‘try again’ tacked on the end seemed needlessly patronising. Still, I re-read the article carefully.

It said exactly what I thought it said.

@73caroline:  @Cbp76 Er, think I did, actually! Canning Town passengers, say, would be refunded if they were fined for incomplete journey ->

@73caroline: @Cbp76 <-- but someone who commutes from/to Canary wharf would have had their fare waived completely. Doesn't seem fair....

I still think I'm right about this.  Here, word for word, is the information as it appears on the TfL website:

Customers who exited Canary Wharf Tube, or Heron Quays, West India Quay or Canary Wharf DLR between 07:15 and 10:30 this morning will have their journey fare refunded.


Any passenger who incurred incomplete journey charges during this period at these stations, or while travelling through any station on the Jubilee line between London Bridge and Stratford, will have these automatically waived.


In addition, anyone travelling from Canary Wharf (Jubilee line or DLR), Heron Quays or West India Quay between 16:00 and 20:00 this evening will have their journey fare automatically refunded.


The refunds, which apply to Oyster pay as you go users, will be applied automatically when passengers travel through the gate line as usual at their regular station.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Transport for London are offering passengers some kind of compensation, even if they’re only doing it because Boris Johnson shouted at them for making him look like a bit of an idiot.

What I’m not happy about is the inequity.  Especially since as a whole, the people getting on or off the tube at Canning Town or Stratford are going to be a)less financially solvent and b)less able to navigate their way through the complicated process of applying for a refund  than the ones using the stations at and around Canary Wharf.  Who, let's face it, will mostly be bankers. 

Now I know that I'm generalising slightly.  And yes, I know that bankers are easy targets.  But  why give the automatic refund and a free journey home to them, but not to the other commuters who were affected? The ones to whom the extra money might make a real difference?  It seems fundamentally unfair to me.

More connections

More quiz type shenanigans, Only Connect styleee: 

1. What do these things have have in common?

gemstone
hair
5 pips
blaze

2. And these?

     **There was a fourth image, but Blogger
                                            won't display it. Picture, if you will,
                                            someone being murdered.  (Sort of hard to
                                            argue with them on that one.)



3. What comes next?


  

4: What would be fourth in this sequence:

A =101
B = One billion
C = One octillion

Answers in the comments please.  If anyone gets number three right I will be more impressed than you can possibly imagine, and not just with their ability to see connections.

Sunday Night Music Club

I am excited about this.  Properly properly excited.

I turned on the telly when I got in this evening, and guess what I found?  Flight of the Conchords.  Some of the Glee cast.  In THE SAME EPISODE of The Simpsons.  I am pretty sure that I have died and gone to TV heaven.

For the un-initiated, Flight of the Conchords are a musical comedy double act who come from New Zealand, make a TV show set in New York and are just about the best thing sinced sliced bananas.  In fact, I'm astounded that I haven't done a FOTC themed SNMC club before now. *

In The Simpsons they play two camp counsellors who work at a Performing Arts summer camp attended by Lisa.  You know what the weird thing is?  I spent today with a friend who I first met when we were both working as counsellors in an American summer camp.  And you know what's even weirder? I was wearing (and am still wearing*) my favourite t-shirt, which looks like this:

Do you know who those people are? Do you? DO YOU?  Only FLIGHT OF THE BLIMMING CONCHORDS, that's who!!!

Any-hoo, here they are:



Also exciting: according to the credits, that is Stephen actual Hawking singing.  I really really hope the credits aren't lying. 

* So astounded, in fact, that I'm almost starting to think that perhaps I have, and I've just forgotten that I did it. If anyone has a better memory for these things than me, or just more of an inclination to trawl through old posts and check, then knock yourself out.  And please let me know.)


**Possibly not any more, by the time you are reading this.  I do take it off to wash it, sometimes.

I am not dead

I am ill, though.  And just when I had reached the point this week where I thought I'd actually have some time to catch up on things, too.   I'm sure it's some kind of  conspiracy.  (I'm sure it's not.)

Back soon, hopefully.

No Longer Sunday Night but Let's Just Listen To Some Nice Music Anyway Music Club

So here's the thing. 

Yesterday was my friend's birthday.   His birthday lunch was in Soho and on the way to the restaurant I vaguely thought about songs I might use for Sunday night Music Club when I got home.

Three courses, several bottles of wine, one pub, two gay bars , one and  a half cigarettes  (I don't even smoke) and a failed attempt at signing up for karaoke later, I realised two things: 1) I couldn't remember which songs I'd thought of and 2) it didn't really matter anyway because it was was already half past midnight.


If I'd been able to karaoke, what I almost definitely would have sung is this

Hotel

Ah, January.  Bit grim, isn't it?  No wonder so many people are starting to plan their summer holidays, even though we are about as far away from summer as it is humanly possible to be.

If you are one of them, and this year you're looking to stay somewhere a little bit different, then boy do I have the answer for you.

Why, yes, Virginia - that IS a hamster wheel.

Welcome to Villa Hamster; a gite in Nantes, France where, for the mere price of 99 Euros* a night, you and a friend or partner can have the full hamster experience. You can run in a hamster wheel, eat seeds, drink from a squeezy plastic water bottle attached the wall and, if you want to, you can get dressed up.  As a hamster.    Apparently modern hamsters need espresso machines and free wifi, so those things are provided too.

At only 18 square metres, the room doesn't sound very comfortable (you can read a review here or here or here) but my guess is, if you're the kind of person who would go all the way to France just so you can pretend you're a hamster, you are not the kind of person to get bogged down in details like that.

The gite is the brainchild of businessman Yuan Fulquero, who owns more hotels than just this one and says he wants to cater for tourists who are after something  "a little bit strange." One of the articles I've been reading about him contains a sentence  I had to read seventeen times before it made any kind of sense:

He is also looking for investors to fund France's first tourist uterus

I think Yuan has the "little bit strange" angle more or less covered.

*The price was tipped to rise to 150 Euros a night in 2010; no word on whether this has happened.

Quiz Time!

In making a passing reference to Only Connect the other day, I completely forgot to take into account the fact that it's tucked away on BBC4 and hardly anyone I ask, if I ask, has ever seen it.  The most recent series has just finished, but if you're quick and you live in the UK you might catch some episodes on the iPlayer.  If you're slow or you live somehere else, you lose.  Sorry.

It's a quiz show where the aim is to spot the links between four fairly obscure items. In the first round the teams get points for picking the connection, while in the second the objects are presented in order and the teams have to guess what will be fourth in the sequence. Next comes a 'connecting wall'  where they have to unjumble four mixed up groups, as per the walls you can play online here, and then finally there's this weird round where all of the vowels are taken out of a word or phrase, the remaining letters are randomly grouped together and they have to work out the phrase. So if the category was "names of blogs" the clue might be WHD STHT and the answer would be..... well, you've probably worked it out by now.    I do quite like this round but I never quite understand what it's doing in the show, because it has nothing to do with making connections.  Annoyingly, it's nearly always where the game is won or lost, too.

Coming up with questions is, as pointed out in this interview with one of the question-setters, harder than you might think.  Here's my attempt: can you spot the connection between these four picture clues? 

DVD Club

Tonight's the first meeting of my new DVD club.  I'd tell you more about DVD club, but the first rule of DVD club is....... no, wait.  I've done that joke already. In which case:

DVD club is a bit like a book club, but with films instead of books.  It was my friend Dan's idea, and it's a pretty good one, I think. Which wouldn't surprise you if you knew my friend Dan.   Every month we're going to watch two DVDs which are connected in some way, and then get together to talk about them.  Think Only Connect meets Film 2011, with less eye-liner.  And some dinner thrown in.

Films for tonight are both to do with obsession: one is the brilliantly named I Think We're Alone Now which is a documentary about two men who are obsessed with 80s pop-sensation Tiffany (see what they did there?).  And by obsessed, I don't just mean knows-every-single-lyric-and-has-a-tendency-to-jump-up-and-down-screaming-"omygodILOVEthissong"-far-too-loudly-in-a-public-place. We all know those people.  Let's face it: some of us ARE those people.  These guys are properly obsessed - it's jaw-dropping stuff. Very well handled; it's the kind of story which could easily stray into "let's all have a good laugh at the freaky people" territory, but manages not to.

The other is a film I'd seen before - in One Hour Photo Robin Williams plays a photo-kiosk employee who becomes obsessed with one of his customers.  I was slightly reluctant to watch this again, to be honest - I remembered being very underwhelmed when I saw it a few years ago.  As it turns out I couldn't have been more wrong.   It was brilliant.  Robin Williams is also briliant, and strangely sympathetic. 

 On a different note, I went on a historical treasure hunt around London at the weekend.  We didn't win, but we did pick up a prize for having the best team name:  Raiders of the Lost Plaques. 

Sunday Night Music Club

This is one of those sunny, cheery songs which it's impossible to listen to without smiling a bit.  Just try it and see:

Breaking (and making) ducks

Do you know who the biggest tyre manufacturer in the world is? I bet you don't.  No really, I bet you don't, unless of course you already know the incredible fact I learnt today.

It's not Goodyear.  Or Dunlop.  Or, er....... any of those other tyre companies you might be thinking of if you know more about cars or monster trucks or Formula One than I do, which really wouldn't be very hard.

It's Lego.

They make more of them than anyone else.  I learnt a load of stuff about Lego today:

The first toy every manufactured by the Lego company was a wooden duck.  Before toys, the company made ironing boards. 

There are 62 Lego bricks for every person in the world.   If you have six standard 8-stud Lego bricks, there are 915 million ways to combine them.  Apparently it took a computer to work this out; who knows how many ways there would be to combine your allocated 62 bricks.

There are more Lego people in the world than there are actual people in the world.  The reason Lego people have little holes in their heads is so that, if a small child accidentally swallows one and it gets stuck in their throat, they will still be able to breathe.

In 2003, the NBA offered fans the chance to buy life-sized Lego models of their most popular players.  You could also buy and build your own mini versions of some of the players; this was the first time Lego included a range of skin-colours in their sets.  The first characters to have expressions other than smiles were the Lego pirates.  (This makes sense.  Everybody knows, you can't trust a smiling pirate.)

The biggest Lego set on sale is the Taj Mahal set (5922 bricks).

Until today I had never made a proper Lego model . But this afternoon, I broke my Lego duck.  By making this:  

Friday? What....already? Really?

Hmmm.   It's now Friday, and that last post was written on Monday. This business of trying to fit a blog in around a proper job is going swimmingly, don't you think?

You lot are all far too polite to complain, thankfully, so I say this by way of explanation, rather than apology; at the moment I'm squeezing my three day a week job into whichever days aren't already taken up with existing freelance commitments so time is a bit tight.  Writing deadlines are whizzing past me (un-met) at the speed of frightening.


Things should ease off in a month or so and hopefully by then I will have managed to get into more of a routine.  Hopefully.

I knew there was something......

Today was the first day of my new job.  I think I've forgotten to mention - what with Christmas and temporarily becoming a vampire and the Santa Wars and Disney War and all of the other wars*; not to mention trying to figure out why the internet keeps sending people who want things like vampire hippo porn my way (latest bizarre search term: Ivana Trump garter belt)  and such - that I accepted a part-time, permanent post towards the end of last year.

This feels like a fairly massive oversight, especially when you consider that this blog was, in its early days, largely about work, or more accurately the absence of work - my decision to leave a perfectly good job without really being sure what I might do next, the highs and lows of freelancing, and so on.  It seems a little odd, in hindsight, that I didn't think to mention the phone call asking me if I'd consider the position, or the day I spent filling in the application form.  Ditto the half-day interview, the negotiations about how many days a week I'd work, and the endless paperwork I had to fill in once we'd reached an agreement.  

But I didn't talk about any of those things here. To be honest, it never even crossed my mind that I might.

I suppose what that really reflects is the changing nature of this blog.  What used to be a platform for my jumbled thoughts about scary things like work and life choices and Making Decisions about The Future somehow turned into a place to write about animal smugglers and dead French people and directionally-challenged snails and largely-unknown German pop songs;  basically whatever I felt like writing about at the time.

This flies in the face of pretty much every single piece of advice about blogging I've ever read (know your audience! Choose a focus! Stay on topic!) and that worries me a bit.  It's been a while now since I first realised just how much my focus had shifted (and by shifted I mean vanished).  At first I wondered if I should find something else to concentrate on - books and writing seemed like a logical choice, given how much I've blogged about those things in the last year or so - but then I realised there were too many other things I'd miss being able to write about.   I considered starting a separate blog for the book-ish and leaving this one for everything else,  but then I worried about finding enough everything-else to talk about.  Tomato bazookas don't grow on trees you know.

The more I think about it, the more I realise I don't want to be one of those niche bloggers.  I'd rather write a little bit about lots of different things than concentrate on just the one.   It's the same way I approach most things in life - give me a menu and there's a good chance I'll go for the tapas plate.

So for now, at least, it's business as usual.  Working for three days a week might mean it's business a little less often than usual, but when I do manage to post it will be the same old eclectic mix of music and books and random news stories, with the occasional rant thrown in.  It probably isn't the best strategy for increasing readership or improving my professional reputation, but then again, those aren't the reasons I blog in the first place.

That's not to say I don't appreciate having readers. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth; I am still  surprised and thrilled to bits whenever I discover someone is actually reading the words I occasionally cobble together and send out into the void.  It's an absolutely lovely feeling. So thank you, by the way.  I probably don't say that enough.


 *There were no other wars.

Sunday Night Music Club

Things that might have been....

This will be brief because I've got an early start tomorrow, but did you know:

1. Danny DeVito's role in Who Framed Roger Rabbit nearly went to Harrison Ford.

2. In the scene in Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts goes to the bathroom to floss her teeth, she was originally supposed to be going to the bathroom to take drugs.  Disney execs decided, quite sensibly, that dental hygenie was a better fit for the studio's family-friendly image than shooting up.

3. There was a third thing.  There was definitely a third thing. I'll update when I remember what it was.

As you may have guessed, I am still reading Disney War.  It's still ace.

**UPDATE**
The third thing: Disneyland Paris was nearly Disneyland Barcelona.

Lazy Marketing

What is wrong with this picture (from an email which arrived today)?

Let me tell you. This is the email in full: there's no other text, no images of products, nothing. Aside from the fact that it's the type of email which drives me crazy because I receive about nine billion of them from Amazon every week, it's plain lazy.

If Amazon are going to jump on the new year resolutions / fresh start / everyone wants to make their life so much better so let's use it as an excuse to flog stuff bandwagon,  then the least they could do is ACTUALLY SUGGEST SOME THINGS I MIGHT LIKE TO CONSIDER BUYING.  Self-help books. Step machines. Vegetable steamers.  That kind of stuff.  I won't actually buy any of these things, but that's not the point. 

Basically, the message here seems to be "Kickstart your new life, and make a fresh start by buying something.  Anything. We don't really care what you buy, as long as you buy it."

I already buy stuff from Amazon.  I expect I'm not alone.  So I don't see how I'm going to become the "new me" by buying some more stuff from them.  In fact, I'm willing to bet that EVERY SINGLE PERSON who received this email has, at some point, bought something from Amazon. It's most likely how we ended up on their mailing list in the first place.  So by definition, *none* of us will be making a fresh start by buying more of their stuff. Will we, Amazon.  WILL WE?

Where I've been

I've mentioned that I work for Crisis over the festive period, but haven’t really said anything about what I do there.   You may be interested;  I won't mind if you're not.

Crisis works year round to provide services for homeless people, but most of their work happens at Christmas. Temporary centres are set up in London (and for the first time this year, Newcastle) staying open for a week. Some of them are day centres, which homeless people who do have a bed for the night (a place in a shelter, or staying with friends) can visit to access services and entertainment. Some, like the one I work in, are residential centres which stay open 24 hours a day and provide accommodation as well.

The centres are staffed entirely by volunteers. Just stop and think about that for a minute. For an entire week chefs, medical professionals, lawyers, housing advisors, hairdressers, dentists and opticians provide professional services. Musicians, performers and artists run workshops and provide entertainment. Drivers ferry guests from day centres to residential centres, take them to doctors and pick them up from hospitals, while more drivers deliver food and equipment to the centres. These people all give their time and services for free. Meals are served, clothes are altered and mended, bedding is washed, and the centres need to be kept clean. Those things are done by volunteers too. All of this needs to be co-ordinated – an operations centre keeps track of who is where and which services are used, how many beds are still available and how many staff are on-site.  More volunteers.

On top of this, each centre - there were seven across London this year - is staffed by a team of general volunteers, who provide companionship for guests and make sure that they know about the services and activities available. General volunteers work one of two shifts at the day centres, or one of three shifts at the residential ones. Each shift has a shift leader and one or more assistant shift leaders - known as ‘green badges’ because that’s what they wear – who are responsible for the smooth running of the centre.  The green badges aren't paid anything either; they're experienced volunteers who have agreed to take on the extra responsibility.

People volunteer for all sorts of reasons. Some because they can't spend Christmas with family; some because they've seen far too much of their family and want an escape; others just because they feel, at this time of year, they want to give something back. Some volunteers have experienced homelessness themselves; this year two of our volunteers (including one of the assistant shift leaders) had previously been guests at a Crisis centre, while another told me she hadn’t been sure how she would cope when she signed up as she’d only moved into sheltered accommodation a few months earlier. Before that she’d been sleeping in an airport terminal.

For the past few years I’ve worked the night shift (10.15pm to 8.30am) at a women-only centre. I’m a Key Volunteer which means managing the work done by the general volunteers on shift, and acting as a link between them and the green-badges, who know what needs to be done. There are a set number of duties, called “gaps”, which need to be rotated every hour; front door duties, manning a tea bar, supervising the shower area. We need drivers on standby in case items need to be picked up or guests transported ; kitchen helpers to help the volunteer chefs prepare meals, and during the night we clean the entire centre. It’s my job to make sure that all of these things get done, so I spend most of the evening racing around with lists of names and rotas, trying to make sure everyone is where they are supposed to be, and knows what they are doing. And, at three in the morning, that they're managing to stay awake.  When there are plenty of volunteers it's managable; on the nights we were short it was more like trying to pin jelly to a wall.

The centres have all closed down now -  Crisis at Christmas is over for another year.  As the week drew to an end, I kept being asked the same question: "What will happen to the guests now?".  The truth is, I don't know.  We had around fifty women staying with us over the week we were open.  Some of them accessed the advice services on offer and will now be in some sort of accomodation.  Others will be back on the streets, or to whichever situation they left behind.  It's not a comfortable thought, and a particularly difficult one for the general volunteers, who have often spent hours getting to know these women, to digest.  It's easy to wonder how much of a difference the week has made. 

But of course, it does make a difference.  I try and hold onto the thought that, thanks to Crisis, these fifty women had a Christmas.  For a week they had a warm bed, hot showers, good meals, and the company of people who cared about them.  They didn't have to worry quite so much.  It's not a solution, but it helps.

So that's where I've been.  It was hard work, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world.