On the 8 o’clock news this morning, talking about the memorial service for the 7 July London bomb victims…
… to a self-employed person, at least.
Now, should I be sensible and leave this overpayment on account so that my 31 January bill will be reduced by over 50%, or should I grab it all now and earn some interest on it, with the risk that I might accidentally spend it…?
I like to keep my Flickr pages up to date with a selection of my latest photographs (yeah, apart from the Australia ones… I’m horribly lazy, I know) and almost all of those photos were taken with the same camera, a Canon A70. It’s a little outdated now (Canon have updated that subsection of the Powershot range a couple of times) but its 3.2 megapixels and range of features are still perfectly adequate for me. I crave much more than point-and-shoot snapshot capability, but I’m not keen on investigating the arcane world of SLRs. Or, for that matter, any additional features/settings that could unduly interrupt the process of capturing a single moment in time. Of course, if you’re taking a photograph of a well-positioned Renaissance church, time isn’t so important (unless the weather is an issue) but most situations involve some sort of movement.
However, that was just a brief aside about why I like my camera. I’ll get to the point.
Browsing the files on my mobile phone the other day, I realised that there were 130 pictures on the memory card. Apart from a couple of isolated examples, I’d never exported any of them from the phone. So, partly as a backup precaution and partly to see what they’d look like on a big screen, I shifted them all into iPhoto and then uploaded the highlights into Flickr.
Go and have a look… they’re all collected in the “Phonecam” photoset.
No blog action for the next couple of weeks; I’ll explain why on my return.
While you’re waiting, go to the MHP site for more information about the various test cards that filled our TV screens in those enlightened days before Reality TV…
I’m always wary of discussions about the rights and wrongs of “multiculturalism” in the UK. I mean, what exactly is it? There seems to be an assumption among many conservative commentators that multiculturalism involves an oil-and-water attempt, in every British street, to mix Muslim fundamentalism with a cosy 1930s English home counties lifestyle. In reality, though, if any explosive situations do develop, they do so not because those caricatures are true but because each side believes them to be true of the *other* side only.
Most of us occupy the many shades of grey in between these two (and other) extremes, especially as notions of “culture” don’t always apply on a mass scale. I imagine my cultural view of the world differs no more from that of an earnest Muslim cleric in Leeds than it does from that of Richard Littlejohn. Any attempt to identify a unified “British” culture is going to be futile.
So imagine how I groaned when I heard that Norman Tebbit was criticising the supposedly adverse effect of Islamic culture upon the UK. Some of what he says is reasonable… divisive attitudes within a community are, like, really uncool, and we all should try to get along… m’kayyy? However, in Tebbit terms, “getting along” means submitting to a narrow set of conservative values, which many of us would find restrictive.
In the ePolitix.com interview, he goes on to say this…
Well, think about it… haven’t most of the major recent advances in science, art, literature and technology been in *secular* societies anyway? The dominance of the church upon these disciplines in the West effectively came to an end with the Renaissance (which, some would suggest, was itself inspired by the rediscovery of Aristotle by medieval Muslim scholars).
And, taking us back to my original point, Tebbit also says…
Yes. But not the culture of a former Conservative politician, nor the culture of a Muslim cleric. Culture is not absolute; it’s not even constant. It’s not something you acquire or create within yourself to suit the requirements of a community; it develops gradually, and differently for every person. Criticising multiculturalism is like criticising freedom of speech. One of the great things about living in a secular, democratic society where we have freedom of speech and enough money to enjoy leisure pursuits is that each of us can carve out our own little cultural niche. As soon as one person in a community begins to exercise these freedoms, you have a multicultural society, whether you like it or not.
Bob Geldof’s favourite heart-tugging BBC correspondent Michael Buerk reckons the balance of power in broadcasting has shifted too far. According to the former newsreader, “almost all the big jobs in broadcasting are held by women”. Really?
BBC Director General – Mark Thompson
BBC Chairman – Michael Grade
ITV Chairman – Sir Peter Burt
ITV Chief Executive – Charles Allen
Channel 4 Chief Executive – Andy Duncan
Sky TV Chief Executive – James Murdoch
BBC1 Controller – Peter Fincham
BBC2 Controller – Roly Keating
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport – Tessa Jowell (YESSSS!)
Broadcasting Minister – Lord McIntosh
Ofcom Chairman – Lord Currie
And so on…
Even if Buerk’s statement (part of a new Channel Five programme) was made before the departure of former BBC1 Controller Lorraine Heggessey, he’s still way off the mark, and the choice of Tim Henman and David Beckham as examples of how “men are becoming more like women” is just bizarre. A doctor’s son from Oxford with an ability to keep a stiff upper lip in even the most emotionally fraught situations and a “working class lad made good” from Essex with a taste for lavishly expensive kitsch… see if you can find a common thread of acquired femininity there!
As far as I can see, our (frequently TV-driven) popular culture is currently going through a phase of being even more gender-divided than before. Next time you watch a sports programme on a commercial channel, make note of the advertising during the breaks… men driving cars, men drinking beer, men not wanting to go shopping, men eating pizza, men being protective towards women. Then do the same during the breaks in a soap opera… women cooking, women showering, women having fun and laughs (rather than telling bawdy jokes) in bars, women raising children. THERE IS NO CROSS-OVER! YOU HAVE YOUR ALLOTTED ROLE! STICK TO IT!
If men are becoming more like women because of how our TV is controlled from above, there is absolutely *no* evidence of this, as far as I can see, in the output of those TV channels. If anything, we’re seeing more and more instances of infantilism among both genders. Earn money, buy toys, have fun, buy more toys… if it all goes wrong and you can’t pay off your debts, find someone in the government to blame.
But anyway, on the subject of consumer goods, Michael Buerk goes on to add…
“Some people might argue that this is a case of the pendulum swinging over the woman’s side for a change, and eventually it will find a happy medium.”
Well, there are certainly far too many reality and self/home-improvement shows on TV, which may or may not be aimed primarily at women. But “products” or “cars”? Is he clumsily referring to the recent explosion in of consumer technology products, such as Apple’s iPod/iMac range, where form is allowed to coexist with function? Or the fact that there just aren’t so many gas-guzzling dependable old saloons on the roads any more? Is visual appearance solely a concern for women? Or is this something a lot deeper and personal; something Michael needs to work out by himself? Have a look at this comment…
Oh dear. Too much information, Michael. Don’t you think you should be sorting this out with Mrs Buerk?
I’m still alive, just in case anyone was wondering.
Having some sort of ADSL problem at the moment, though, so my internet use during the past few days has mostly been via my mobile phone. Fine for email and basic web browsing, but GPRS isn’t really viable for full net use.
It’s all in the hands of my ISP (and BT) so I’ll just have to wait and hope they don’t take too long…
So… I decided it was high time I made a proper serious grown-up work-related site, saying what I do and how you can pay me to do it for you. At the moment, there’s only a brief mention in one of the pages on this site, and that’s not exactly earning me money.
So, anyway… I opened up a text editor and typed all the usual HTML structural bits… head, title, body and various divs for the main bits of the page. And then I opened another file for the CSS. And then it occurred to me that it must be about three years since I did any of this stuff properly. Whenever I’ve rewritten this site, I’ve always just recycled old code; apart from replacing all the tables with proper CSS and installing the Greymatter blogging software a couple of years ago, most of this basic template has remained the same since early 2001. And the upshot of that is that I’ve forgotten all those routine coding tricks I used to use automatically. Nothing like professional web design stuff, but little details I’d found which enabled me to create okay-looking sites with the minimum of code.
I looked through the CSS for this site, I looked at a few of the excellent tutorial sites linked from Jeffrey Zeldman’s ‘externals’ page and I glanced up at the big ‘DHTML and CSS’ book on the shelf.
And then I decided I’d just nick a load of code from other people’s sites. I’ll let you know when it’s done…
This won’t mean much to people who weren’t at the University of East Anglia, but never mind. We’ve all got bits of nostalgia floating around in our brains.
When I arrived at UEA back in October 1987, there were five options for living on campus. Norfolk Terrace and Suffolk Terrace were the award-winning Ziggurat-shaped constructions dominating the area around the UEA broad. Orwell Close and Wolfson Close were much smaller and more exclusive, probably best suited to mature students. Finally, there was Waveney Terrace, a snaking four-storey building constructed mostly from unpainted breezeblocks.
I lived in Waveney Terrace for two years, and while I was sad to hear of its imminent demolition, I can’t really say I’m surprised. Students expect more luxury from their halls nowadays, so the en suite rooms of Nelson Court and Colman House (which would dominate the foreground of the picture below if you saw that view today) are going to be a much more pleasant prospect. Even at the time, the news that you’d been given a room in Waveney would produce looks of shocked sympathy on the faces of your friends. Little breezeblock boxes, arranged in long corridors of around twelve rooms, with the shared kitchen and bathroom at one end. Even when they painted the walls in time for my second stint, they got it horribly wrong… industrial grade semi-gloss paint in a fetching shade of “gents toilet off-white”.
But you know what? I loved the place.
During my first year, I was allotted a room in Waveney before I’d really seen the campus properly, but when I came back after my year abroad, I actually *requested* a room there. I’d done my homework. I knew that, beneath the bold modernistic architectural veneer, the Suffolk/Norfolk terrace rooms were a good few inches smaller and the furniture was bolted to the floor. Pah! To think those laughing-faced fools dared to call Waveney a prison… I rearranged my functional Waveney furniture with the gleeful abandon of a FREE MAN! Maybe it’s all to do with the “creativity born of restriction” thing I’m always banging on about (in relation to music, anyway) but the forbidding appearance of the Waveney rooms seemed to inspire people to make more effort with their rooms.
But of course the main thing was that we didn’t know any different. Even the properly plastered walls of the other residences didn’t represent a particularly huge leap in the luxury stakes, especially not by modern standards, but that didn’t matter. It was all about personalising your little space, listening to your favourite albums and making new friends over a two-litre plastic bottle of cheap lager. I suspect that sort of student life has now vanished for good, along with the notion of higher education for its own sake, but that’s market economics, I guess…
Just a follow-up to the previous entry, really. A collection of links relating to the aftermath of the London terrorist attacks…
Good comprehensive sources of information can now be found on the BBC’s dedicated mini-site and the Wikipedia entry.
The group (supposedly) responsible for the attacks claims that “Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters.”. Yeah, right. One way of showing your defiance is to post a picture to We’re not Afraid!
For people who want to make a more public show of their fearlessness, there’s a pledge over on Pledgebank to organise a public demonstration. They need 2500 people in total… an hour or so milling about in London isn’t much to ask, is it?
Above all, we’re British… when stuff goes wrong, our main worry is how long we should keep a respectful silence before we can start emailing jokes to each other. Some sincere and well-meaning Americans started a LiveJournal community to show their sympathy for London. And it’s so sweet of them. It’s just that… well, they kind of misjudged just how unsentimental we can be. Read London Hurts for yourself, starting at the bottom of the page.
