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I do like living in a village.

About 10 days ago the postie delivered what was obviously a birthday card, but it wasn’t for me.  Post has to be delivered to the address rather than the name, and it certainly had my address on it.  The reason that post has to be delivered to the address and not the name goes back to a rather lurid test case a century or so ago when the lover of an adulterous woman sent his letters to her neighbour poste restante. I cannot remember the details, but I said it was lurid, so you know it ended badly.  And ever since the whole thing came out in court post has been delivered to the address and not the person.  Though I could be wrong, not being a postie or a lawyer.

When I finally saw the postie this morning I was able to show it to him and he looked at it and thought for a bit.  ‘Richardson…. ‘ he said.  ‘There’s three of them in the village…. K…. that’ll be number 33′.

A pleasing way to start the weekend.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have two books from Amazon which have just arrived.

Religion, women and politics

My Dad said that he and his fellow army officers were not allowed to discuss religion, women or politics, because those topics were the most likely to spark real antagonism between colleagues.  It’s advice I’ve always followed at work.  From god, sex and politics, good lord deliver us.

This rattled to the top of my mind today because once again I was aware that there is stuff here I’d like to share with colleagues, in particular the Fantasy CEO posts and the Questions series, but that I don’t want to invite colleagues in to read the rest of my blog.

As the tag cloud at the start of this post shows, this site includes a lot of obsessing about politics, and is better not shared with colleagues on that count alone.  (Incidentally, I’m amused to observe that my dislike of Patricia Hewitt is so great that I cannot bring myself to spell her name correctly. Who’d have thought.)

Some influential bloggers such as Scoble impugn the integrity of those who blog and post anonymously.  I can understand his contempt for those who aren’t willing to own the words they insult him with, but anonymity is not just a matter of deceit or shame.  I am not ashamed of anything I’ve written here.  The word cloud on the right is built up naturally out of the words I’ve used here, not artificially by the tags or categories I choose to promote.  It shows a mind that’s interested in people, questions, words and thinking.  And not a swearie word among them which is rather surprising since,the cussometer tells me that 35%  of the pages in this blog ‘include cussing’.  You have been warned.

It’s a matter of what’s appropriate where, and of nuance and complexity, not of shame and duplicity.  I obey my employer’s dress code and don’t drink or swear on my employer’s time.  On the other hand, I don’t waste the time of the one I spend my weekends with by working through the puzzles and problems I encounter at work.  Call it  professionalism, call it compartmentalisation, call it good manners, it’s part and parcel of how grown-ups behave.  But there’s no shame there.

The category cloud on the left shows how I categorise the posts here.  It seems fair enough to me.  I am certainly interested in Society, I take a lot of photographs, I have written a lot about MMC and MTAS.  But lurking in there is also  stuff which I don’t take to work.  Some of the topics aren’t mine to take to work with me and others, like religion, sex and politics, may cause entirely unnecessary rifts with colleagues.  Quite apart from anything else, I don’t want my respect for people I work with undermined by my dislike of their religion or politics.  The sex I couldn’t really give a damn about.

I started this blog as an experiment to see where it would take me.  Now I know.  I could of course simply strip out the posts on the subjects that aren’t appropriate and welcome colleagues here but I dislike revisionists, I cannot be bothered to run several blogs on several subjects, and I’d miss the eclectic mix of visitors my free-range subject-matter brings.

So I’ll bide by my lack of forward planning, blog here on subjects that interest or affect me and not promote my blog at work.

Things, and when to Get Rid of them

William Morris claimed that you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.  I know he was rebelling against the suffocating sentimentality of the Victorians, but even so I think that you should also have things which remind you of people or places that you’ve loved, otherwise you might as well live in a show-home.  But Morris’s point is a good one, well made. You certainly should not have things made in Chinese sweat-shops out of metallised plastic which are hideous and pointless and which you keep for a month, but that is a different subject for a different day.  This post is about Getting Rid of Things.

Three years ago I was living in temporary accommodation with everything I owned in storage except my laptop, some clothes, books and kitchen knives.  (Why are other peoples’ kitchen knives impossible to use?  It’s not even as if mine are sharp.  But they can tell who’s using them, you know).  I was tempted to get the storage company to send the lot to auction and to take myself off to Ikea with the profits and start again from minimalist scratch.  I missed none of it.  Not a jot, not a tittle.  But of course when it arrived I unpacked it all and couldn’t bring myself to throw any of it away.  Ho no.

In part it’s brainwashing by two generations of frugal and determined women who convinced me that waste is wicked.  But you have to worry about the sanity of someone who thinks that keeping the salad drawer from a long gone fridge is a way of avoiding waste.  Behold that lunatic.  These days of course disposing of anything in landfill is irresponsibly feckless, so I still tend to store rubbish rather than throwing it away.

It was also drummed in to my head that it was rude to dispose of a gift.  For years I had a badly made clock about 9″ high, shaped like a long-case (grandfather) clock.  It was red and painted with white flowers.  I loathed it from the day my godmother gave it to me, but I kept it for decades because it would be rude to throw it away. It still affects me.  The women I bought my house from gave me a picture of the valley taken in the 19th century which their deceased brother had acquired at some time.  Can I get rid of it?  Can I heck.  I’m thinking of framing the wretched thing.

Then there’s the Great Book Debate.  Iris Murdoch, I think, kept every book she had ever owned.  On the one hand I can see that would become a fascinating record of one’s intellectual journey, but on the other hand it strikes me as self-indulgent narcissism.  I’m simply not interested in the same things now as I was 20 years ago.   And then there’s the matter of space.  Where would I keep them all?

The internet continues to change my attitude to books. A couple of days ago picked over the books I keep in the kitchen which tend to be about food and sex (on the basis that they are both appetites of the flesh).   I had assumed, in Morris’s terms, that they were useful, so I was surprised to find that I only intend to keep about half a dozen cookery books.  These are the ones which were given to me by women who loved me who are now long dead and a few which are more social documents than cookery books, for example Mrs Beeton and a book of recipes and anecdotes from post-War rural France.  If I want your actual recipes, then the internet is nearer and quicker than a recipe book.

But still there’s this terrible tyranny of Things. ‘Keep it’, my Grandmother used to say, ‘you’ll never know when you’ll need it’.  Indeed.  But if you have too many Things then that strategy backfires: today I discovered that I’ve got a whizzy spinning bowl which gets the water off washed lettuce leaves.  Only the other day I was thinking ‘I need a whizzy spinning bowl to get the water off these lettuce leaves, but where would I keep it?’.  I’d kept the one I’d already got for so long and buried it so deep, that I’d no idea I’d got the bloody thing.

Right.  That’s me blogged.  I need to load up the car and then I’m off to the charity shop  and the tip.

Every now and again…

Every now and again something on the internet delights one in to a full blown laughter-based endorphin rush.

These, from the splendid blog What Not To Crochet, sent me giggling off to bed last night.  The shameful, shameful thing is that I rather like them.

I Aten’t Dead

Please imagine an hourglass turning with zenlike calm in the middle of this blog.

I’m not entirely sure why I’ve not felt like blogging recently.  My wretched assignment was obsessing every waking thought for ages and, as I’ve noted before , when I finish an assignment I’m done with thinking for a while.  Then the newspapers were full of the horrors of the Fritzl case in Amstetten in Austria and I spent huge amounts of time thinking about them but not wanting to add to the world’s collective impertinence by blogging about them.  Now, mercifully, they are out of the papers.  (Did the Austrians impose some sort of restriction or strike some sort of deal with the press, I wonder).

So summer is here and rather than dancing on the streets I am spending two or three hours every evening listening to podcasts and painting.  You don’t realise how intricate a house is until you try edging its walls (or how filthy you have let it become until you paint its skirting boards) and this particular house is spectacularly intricate.  My kitchen, for example, has twice as much fiddly edging as you’d expect because the walls are crenelated where they meet the beams.  It’s cute and cottagey and cosy in the winter and a bastard to paint.  I do like it.

I find the whole ritual of polyfillering, sanding, edging with a brush and filling with a roller immensely soothing, though I was rather taken with paint pads when a friend of mine used them to cover up a multitude of sins in her previous house.  Though we imposed a multitude more as I recall.  I was shocked that we just got stuck in and painted without making the walls as good as possible first.  Astonishingly, the world didn’t stop spinning on its axis and you didn’t notice the dents and scars once the furniture was in. The only painting I don’t like is glossing because it is such a bitch to get a good surface, but I even enjoy painting the woodwork now that I am using a satin finish.  And priming.  Is there any greater domestic joy than transforming an improbable surface like metal or tile by using a good primer?

So I am blissfully happy and imposing three different varieties of Crown Ivory Cream on just about every hard surface in the house, though it’s two types of Tile Red for the steps down to the kitchen (smooth at the edges where the dust gathers and non slip in the middle where the tread has worn down), a cheery proprietary yellow from B&Q in the kitchen itself, and pure brilliant white for the bathroom.  I’m still not sure what colour to paint the floors.

But no blogging.

Podcast Reviews – 3 – History podcasts for your delight

More Podcast recommendations for those who like podding while you do other things.  Me, I listen to podcasts when I drive, when I cook, when I clean, when I draw diagrams and, as of this weekend, when I’m painting the house.

I’m ambling slowly through the History of Rome in the company of Mike Duncan.  (Website including earlier episodes / the later ones are on on iTunes). This is a polite and courteous podcast, with the occasional flash of sly humour.  Duncan’s telling the entire story from the She-wolf to the Goths (there’s got to be some sort of Death Metal reference there, surely?).  He’s got as far as the late Republic.  I get rapidly bored by most narrative history and prefer analysis and commentary and there’s just enough of both to keep me interested.  In fact, I think I’ll re-run the lot when I’m painting the house, because I listened to a lot of these while mildly distracted, and they and I deserve better than that.

12 Byzantine Rulers.  (Website / iTunes). Another ancient history podcast.  The downside of this one is that it’s not a complete history of Byzantium and it’s a little hard to keep track.  The upside is that it’s Extreme History, and it’s rather fun.  Full of beautiful heterai who become empresses, fathers hurling their sons from city walls and emperors as satisfyingly mad as any you’d find in third rate science fiction.  It’s not science fiction though, it’s history and it’s true.  Lars Brownworth tells these sensational stories without too much sensationalism.  I could have done with more about Byzantine culture and I’d have preferred fewer gaps in the record, but that’s a compliment really.

Binge-Thinking History.  (Website / iTunes) Tony Cocks starts with the premise that the American Constitution didn’t spring out of thin air and looks for its intellectual antecedents in medieval and renaissance England.  I like his gentle and discursive style and I enjoyed his take on the history of the king, power and the people.  Enough analysis to keep the attention and enough information to tell me stuff I didn’t know already.  He then goes rather geekily on to the Battle of Britain, which I didn’t enjoy quite as much, but I’ll happily listen to whatever he does next.

Shakespeare-upon-ipod.  (Website / iTunes) A conspiracy theory in doublet and hose.  Please don’t assume that this podcast successfully puts the case that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays of Shakespeare.  Mark Anderson doesn’t put up any of the arguments against, which are considerable, and the case is most definitely ‘not proven’. However, I found these podcasts dirtily compelling, like pot-noodles, and they certainly contributed to my understanding of the 16th and 17th C context of the plays.  But I like my arguments balanced not biased.

History Center.  (Website / iTunes) These seem to have stopped, which is a shame.  These deliberately set out to compare the present and the past, and discuss topics like Iran, war journalism and spying as well as more anodyne stuff like food or Abraham Lincoln.  They caught my attention, even the ones which were clearly the soundtrack for tv shows about photographs.  They are insightful, analytical and subversive and, to my delight, they come as close to criticising the Bush regime and the war in Iraq as, I suspect, public broadcasting ever does in the USA.  Unexpected and informative.  Highly recommended.

The BBC History Magazine Podcast. (Website / iTunes) I rather like this.  It is designed to up the circulation of the printed copy of the BBC History Magazine, but the subjects are varied, the interviewees are grown-up academics, the interviewees are intelligent, and the thing holds together well.  It’s the only multi-topic podcast I listen to, because most of the others irritate me but this one I enjoy.

The National Archives Podcast.  (Website / iTunes) I’ve mentioned these before.  There are three main categories here, ones about how to track down records in the archives, ones about the archival records for specific people, and ones about particular historical documents.  The latter two groups in particular are fascinating.  Eclectic is the only possible word, you are never entirely sure what you’re going to get or who the speaker will be.  The one on Orton and the one on Jermyn stand out, but the standard’s high throughout.  I do recommend them.

Hard Core History.  (Website / iTunes) The marmite of history podcasting: you either love Dan Carlin or hate him.  His approach is almost entirely analytical with just enough narrative to hold things together.  I can appreciate that not everyone would like Carlin’s opinionated and partial view of the historical world, but I love his energy and passion.

School’s out

Woo Hoo!

School’s Out for Summer!

It isn’t of course, I still have my day job to go to,  but I have just finished an assignment from hell: 4000 words on a subject so vague that they served waffles in the coffee-breaks.  It is one of those topics which should be impossible to fail (ha!) and at which it is certainly impossible to excel.  “This is as long as it’s broad” I said between waffle-breaks; “do you want us to consider the subject in width or in depth, because we can’t do both.”  In depth, he said, and so I’ll be criticised for not mentioning this, considering that or discussing the other.  Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  No high marks possible here.

But enough.  It’s done.  Just proof-reading and proof-reading and proof-reading to do between now and Monday when I post the bastard; “fly-fucking” as my Danish friend described the tedious process of moving a comma from, one side to, the other.

It’s May.

It’s magical marvellous May. The leaves are fresh, the lambs are running races, the cherry blossom is out, there is more green everywhere, every day.

If I could be whoever and whatever I could, I would be 35 and weigh 10 stone in May forever.  Today the temperature was perfect, warm in the sun and fresh on the skin.  I have a garden to weed, a house to paint, curtains to sew, books to read, scarves to knit, weddings to dance at, pots to plant, parties to go to, wine to drink, laughter to share, friends to delight in, and a whole blissful summer to do it all.

I’ve not felt this giddy when sober for years.

X marks the spot

I do like voting, and today I made a point of going into the village hall and putting my X on the spot.  I have a clear memory of accompanying my Ma to another village hall several decades ago and watching her vote in a general election when I was knee-high to an opinion.  And then, four years ago, I was able to take someone to vote for the first time ever and see his excitement in taking part in the democratic process.  He expected queues, in a local election, bless him.  But in fact he had the right of it.

Voting matters.

It is the one thing that really frightens politicians.  For that reason alone, it matters.  But it matters for other reasons too.

People don’t believe there’s any point.  The anarchists used to say that if voting changed anything, it would be abolished.  The truth of that was brought home in London in the mid 1980s when Thatcher abolished the GLC and knocked out the only effective opposition, “Red” Ken in the glory days of County Hall.   The only act in recent western history that was worse than the abolition of the GLC was Bush’s theft of the Florida votes in 2000, and for the same reason.  It was politicians pissing on the electoral process.  It was politicians pissing on us.

Voting matters.

If it didn’t, Thatcher would never have abolished the GLC.  If it didn’t, Bush wouldn’t have needed to frig the results in Florida in 2000.

Voting matters.

This year, of all years, all over the world.  Most of the time, I will freely admit, it makes bugger-all difference to anything, but even so it matters because it’s the only way we have of reminding the bastards that it’s us they work for.

Surely this is the most interesting year for elections in decades, with the Obama / Clinton stand-off in the USA, Mugabe rigging the election in Zimbabwe and still failing to win, and our two most bizzarely characterful politicians arm-wrestling for London.

So today I voted, in an empty village hall with the spring sun shining benignly down on an idyllic view.

I voted because women died so that I can vote.

I voted because so many Kenyans were killed because they voted.

I voted because Mugabe so clearly lost, even though he’s claimed a victory.

I voted because that’s how we got rid of Portillo and Kinnock.

I voted because politicians hate elections.

I voted because I can.