I won't bang on about my delayed delivery again.* But I've just read this, which reminded me of this, and made me impatient to find out what else Jules Renard has to say. I am becoming obsessed with this man.
In the absence of his journal, I'm having to settle for quote hunting. Here's the elusive Mr Renard on life, love, laziness, and, er, carpentry:
Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others
We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties
The horse is the only animal into which one can bang nails
That last one was on Wikipedia and I can't find it anywhere else so far, but haven't had time for a proper look. Truth be told, I'm a little nervous about googling "banging nails into horses" too closely.
Usually I love Amazon, and to be fair this is the first time I've every had a problem. But the generic, error-filled, largely irrelevant email I've just had from their customer service team would suggest that they have a long way to go in their quest for world (sorry, EARTH) customer service domination.
I am trying to be patient. After all, Jules also said:
Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time.
*If you're new here, there has been quite a lot of banging on going on. Basically, I've been waiting for an Amazon delivery which is very late and it is driving me nuts.
I have been glued to BBC news for most of the afternoon and evening. Still can't quite believe what I've been watching, but I guess it was inevitable really. For those who missed it (really?), David Cameron is the new Prime Minister.
An hour or so ago I turned over to watch Heston's 80s themed feast, and thank God it was on tonight. Featuring, among other things: microwave recipes, rubiks cube pepper mills (I SO want one), boil in the bag meals, space dust, the A-Team, a Delorean, soda streams, slush puppies and food which hovered, it gave me a false sense of security which I desperately needed. For the second time today, I found myself thinking: sometimes I wish I was still a 10 year old.
Simon Blackwell posted a link to this video earlier today on Twitter, and it totally sums up how I feel. Iconically English, yet oddly childlike. Enjoy.
Sorry for my extended leave of absence. I have some great excuses if you want to hear them. No? Well, fair enough. Basically I've been pretty busy. Not to mention a bit distracted by all of the politics that, er, hasn't been going on. Anyway, I've just realised that last time I was round these parts it was Thursday, and now it's Tuesday. I've really got no idea how that happened. (I mean, it's not as if I was locked down at Westminster in high stakes negotations all weekend or anything). I will try to do better.
Brief highlights of the last few days:
1. I spent Friday afternoon at the BBC, taking part in a workshop to test out ideas for the new series of Dave Gorman's Genius. (As a slight aside, and by way of explanation of what's coming in the next paragraph, there are some people who get quite pernickety about words like 'genius' being used as adjectives. Properly, properly pernickety. They have facebook groups and everything. Personally I think they're idiots (language is constantly evolving, and that's what makes it fun, and who cares if you want to adjectivise the odd noun, or nounify the odd adjective? (I'm also quite a fan of verbifying, as you may have noticed.)) But I figure it's not going to cost me anything to keep the pernickets (who will no doubt be irritated by that name, too) happy. So I will try.)
Back to Genius [noun: proper]. If you don't know the show, which started on radio and then moved to telly last year, the basic concept is that members of the public pitch an idea which they think is genius [adj] to a guest judge, who is, in the eyes of the programme's producers at least, a genius [noun]. The judge-who-is-a-genius [noun] then gets to decide whether each idea is, in fact, genius [adj] or not. The guest judges I remember from the last series are Catherine Tate, Johnny Vegas and Germaine Greer, so the definition of genius [noun] which the producers are working from seems to be "someone who is funny. Or, is Germaine Greer."
They are tweaking the format for the next series and wanted to try some ideas out with a group of people, so I went along. It was a great afternoon. Dave Gorman was very funny, and he gave us all a copy of his book, which was an added bonus. (Haven't started reading it yet, but loved some of his other ones, so my hopes are high.) We were asked not to say too much about the possible changes, but what I can do is tell you some of the genius [adj] ideas some people brought to the table. There were some crackers:
A bird feeder which electrocutes seagulls. Only seagulls. Which raised the obvious
question: what exactly did the inventor have against seagulls? I suspect a traumatic
fish-and-chips-related incident during her childhood, but I'm no psychologist.
To solve gun crime, make it legal to own any gun, but only if it is pink (removes their
machismo image and makes them less desirable. Except, presumably to Paris
Hilton. And only, as Dave Gorman pointed out, to people who are unfamilar with the
concept of paint.)
Magnetic socks, which won't get seperated in the wash. This one went down quite
well until someone pointed out that washing machines are made out of, er, quite a lot
of metal. Which the socks will probably get stuck to, instead of to each other.
A few people brought along prototypes of their ideas: the girl who brought along a
dream recorder (strap it to your head, attach probes and play back your dreams the
following morning so you remember them) pointed out that it was just a
representation of what her invention might look like, not an actual working model.
I'm glad she warned us, if not a little disappointed. There was also a guy who used a
toilet roll holder to make a dispensing system for artificial cheese (as an alternative to
those individually wrapped cheese slices you can get) which he thought would a) help
the environment and b) reduce waste by letting you choose exactly how much cheese
you needed to fit your sandwich, or roll, or whatever. He gave us a demonstration
and this is a direct quote: "Yes, that is real cheese. I spent most of last night
sellotaping it together".
It should be a good series. This is the bit of the last series which everyone
remembers the most, but no one can remember whether the idea was genius[adj] or
not.
2. I saw Abandoman on Saturday night. What do you mean you've never heard of Abandoman? They're Ireland's seventh biggest hip hop act for goodness sake! Apparently Ireland only has nine hip hop acts, so not enough for a top 10, and of the two acts they beat to the coveted 7th spot, one was Jedward. But don't hold that against then. Also, I should probably say that this is all stuff which Rapping Rob, head Abando-man, told us on stage, so he could have been making it up. I say that not because I'm calling Rapping Rob a liar, but because Rapping Rob made up lots of great stuff on stage, including an impressive improvised musical about two of the audience members. It's not everyone who can spin a romantic tale in three acts about a turtle-loving environementalist and a carpenter who meet in McDonalds completely off the top of their head. Let alone make it rhyme. For that reason alone, if you ever have a chance to see Abandoman live (Edinburgh festival would be a good bet, I'm guessing, and they are definitely on the bill at Lattitude) I would grab it with both hands. Abandoman ROCK.
3. Watching the Sopranos - it took me a couple of episodes to get into, but I get what all the fuss was about now. I'm half way through the first series and the thought that there are so many more still to come fills me with great excitement. Tony Soprano's therapist is my new hero.
4. I'm STILL waiting for Jules Renard. You can follow labels for previous posts on this if you don't know who he is and if you want to know more. (This one not so much a higlight, more a moan. Why am I moaning to you , and not to Amazon, who were meant to bring me Jules over a week ago? No reason, except that I've already tried moaning to Amazon and they've told me to wait a few more days).
5. Working. Actual, being paid for it, having to turn up somewhere on time, working. I spent yesterday back in my old office, and am there again for a couple of days later this week. I expect the novelty will wear off eventually, but so far I'm loving it. Was great to be back, and to be doing something useful, and to see everyone again.
6. Sunday lunch. One of my favourite places in the world is Artisan and Vine wine bar in Clapham, which is nowhere near where I live, but which I will happily trek half way across London, even on a Sunday when the tubes are all up the creek, to get to. I got home from lunch at 9pm - it's that kind of place. They have some amazing wines; my current favourite is this Carmenere: one sip and in my head I'm curled up in a leather armchair in front of a roaring fire, with a blanket and a good book. It's magic stuff.
7. My creative writing class: it was poetry this week, and we ended up writing two poems during the lesson, which was quite hard but good fun. The first one had to be about an emotion; choices were depression, anger, frustration, resentment, grief or sadness so everyone was thoroughly down in the dumps by the time we'd all read them out. I toyed with posting mine here but it feels a bit naff, at this stage, to be posting 'a pome what I wrote' on my blog. Maybe one day.
Too tired to go into details now, but the short version of events is that I had an interview this morning which went really well, and they said lots of nice things and offered me twice the amount of potential freeelance work than I had hoped they would.
I've been more or less equally terrified and excited by the prospect of going freelance ever since I left my job in January; today my swing-ometer is firmly in the excited zone. It's a nice place to be.
Politics, a bit like my pension fund and other people's babies, is one of those things that I am a bit less interested in than I should be. Like most people, I expect, I've been a little more interested than normal lately: the election has definitely been on my radar and I even managed to watch two out of three of the debates, but if I'm honest, by the end of it all I realised I had been more concerned with the colour of David Cameron's face (slightly orange, which clashed horribly with the pink background) than several of the topics up for discussion. Several days later, the biggest debate-related question weighing on my mind was how I completely failed to notice this:
(I know that photo has been doing the rounds for a while now so apologies if you've already seen it).
I think you can safely assume from this that I am no Jeremy Paxman. You are quite right. Even so, for the first time ever I am genuinely quite excited about voting. Not sure why. Maybe it's just an age thing. Or perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, given that I spent the first half of my adult life in Australia, where voting is compulsory, this is the first time I'll be doing it by choice. It's certainly not because of what's on the menu, that much I do know. I desperately want to vote. I don't particularly want to vote for anyone.
Which is probably just as well, given I've just been looking at the voterpower index (http://www.voterpower.org.uk/). It's a clever, if not slightly demoralising, idea: use the size of a constituency and the probability of the seat changing hands to calculate your voting power, compared to the relative power of voters in different parts of the country.
I live and will be voting in Erith & Thamesmead, where according to the site's calculations "one person does not really have one vote, they have the equivalent of 0.058 votes". That's one depressingly small number. Interestingly, it's not quite as bad as it sounds, given that this is only 4.35 times less than the average voter.
That's right, according to the website, the average, full-bodied-or-otherwise voter only has the power of 0.253 votes.** This seems absurdly low to me. (I'm assuming it's something which the proposed electoral reforms, which I haven't been paying much attention to and am starting to wish I had, would change? I hope so.)
Still, 0.058 doesn't seem much. If I was the result of a psychology experiment, I'd only barely make the cut-off to be considered anything other than a coincidence. So what deems me so insignificant? The size of my patch for one thing. I'm one of 70,427 voters, a number that makes us slightly larger than the average bear (and by bear I mean constituency) which weighs in at 68 433 voters. The more voters, the less each one counts. I get this. If you throw a salmon into a big enough pond (yes, we're fish now, not bears) it looks like a minnow.
Nick Marks, who came up with the index, says the other deciding factor is the probability of the seat changing hands, and has used data from "as many elections as possible" to determine this. Since I'm in an ultra-safe seat which hasn't changed in 20 years, my vote is less likely to have an impact. By these rules, the most powerful constituency in the country is Arfon. That's in North Wales, in case you (like me) were wondering. If Mr Marks has his maths right, it would take twenty-two and a half of me for my (our?) vote(s?) to carry the same weight as that of a single voter from Bangor or Caernarfon.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it bothers me. On the other hand, I feel an odd sense of relief that my vote, which is basically just a vote for the best of a bad bunch, and as such will never be a decision I am entirely happy with, will have minimal impact.
I'll still be voting tomorrow, because I'm glad that I can, and because I want to use that privilege no matter how insignificant my decision will turn out to be. To me, the piece of paper itself is worth a lot more than the names written on it.
I've written more on this than I meant to. Maybe I'm more of a political animal (bear, fish, minnow, whatever) than I thought I was. Anyway, there's a good chance that your vote will be worth a lot more than mine tomorrow. I don't mind who you decide to vote for. But please use it wisely.
* Also, it's not really all that fragile.
**Interestingly, or not, the man on the Clapham autobus, assuming he lives in Clapham, has even less than that at 0.143 votes. Still more clout than me though.
I was going to launch into a long explanation about why I'm posting this video, and then I remembered it's a song about a night light shaped liked a bird. Frankly, that's good enough for me.
So simply because it's a cold and grey Tuesday-which-feels-like-a-Monday (and *maybe* a little bit because I've just realised you can put funky coloured borders around embedded Youtube clips) here's a little ray of sunshine for your ears:
I've just been watching Kirsten Cheneworth in last night's Glee, and she covered this once, on a short-lived but fantastically quirky TV show called Pushing Dasies which I loved, and which is what made me think of it. I like the original version better though.
