planet impiazzi

Another crisp Yorkshire morning.

Went into town yesterday and braved the sales. I had to go and buy dog food (essential), and also planned to buy my boy new trainers. But when we got there he cast a cursory eye over the footwear on offer, shrugged, and said he didn't like or want any of them. The fact that his current pair are dropping to bits seems not to matter. What can you do? He is so difficult to spend money on.
Anyway, as it turned out I had left my wallet at home, so couldn't buy anything much. We got back on the bus (no dog food). Fortunately we live fairly close to the city centre, so within half an hour I was back in town - alone. I managed to get everything I wanted, including Damien Rice's CD "O". You can listen to bits of it at his website. Lovely. I also bought Prince of Persia for the PS2. I haven't had a go yet though. Seems I found something to interest my lad after all.

My friend Cath gave me Boff Whalley's Footnote. Whalley is the guitarist for Chumbawamba who some people might remember for Tubthumpin about 5 years ago, and for chucking a bucket of icy water over John Prescott at the Brit Awards a few years back. The Chumbas are a Leeds band (although the members are from all over the place). They've been kicking around my part of the city for 20 years or so (ooh, makes me feel old!). Although I don't know them myself, there's usually a Chumba or two around whenever there is a bit of protesting to be done. "Footnote" kept me interested over Christmas, relieving the suffering of such awaful tv. Boff grew up through punk as I did, and has been involved in much the same politics, so it is a book full of familiar things (even some of the pubs and people). Its actually quite inspiring too, because here you have a bloke from a working-class family, with the usual lack-lustre 1970s education who has stuck to his beliefs and made the best out of his opportunities without compromising himself too much. The Chumbas did get mightily slagged off round here whem they signed for EMI but Boff puts an intelligent argument for that move and I don't begrudge them their success - they did give a lot of money to a lot of different groups and causes.

Its all very well having a camera and the will to click, but for the past couple of days I've had a horribly painful stiff neck (don't know why) and have barely been able to drag myself off the sofa. So this is the best I could do. But I thought it a suitable symbol to wish all a peaceful New Year since the cat will rarely allow such familiarity from the dog.

# posted by Gael @ 8:39 PM

Over the next few days I intend to try and get my head around posting photos here, now that I'm sorted with FTP and camera. In the meantime, a happy midwinter to one and all!

Well, no more work for a week. I started off my holiday by bathing the dog - she was getting rather ripe. She's been quite naughty this week. My son caught her sleeping on my bed yesterday. He tried to shift her but she just looked at him then went back to sleep. And on Monday morning I got up to find a chewed up Rolo wrapper scattered over the floor. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, given that she's rather fond of rummaging in the bin. But later my son announced, "That bloody dog has eaten my Rolos - AGAIN!". Turns out that was the third packet she's helped herself to. She also had a Crunchie a couple of weeks ago. I had no sympathy for my son - he shouldn't have left chocolate on the coffee table. But I made sure my Christmas chocolate was on a high shelf.

During a quiet few moments at work today, I had a look at the Leodis Photographic Archive. It holds a huge collection of photos of Leeds, going back to the early days of photography and Leeds' Victorian past, right through to today. I had a look at the long gone Clay Pit Street where my sister was born and I lived between the ages of 6 months old and about 3 1/2. Would you believe I actually found a photo with me and my sister on? We lived at number 2, while my maternal grandparents lived at number 7. I was quite amazed to find these!

When you're out doing your grocery shopping for the festive season bear these stories in mind:
Is your christmas capuccino ripping off coffe growers?
Do you really need that coca-cola?
Check out this Ethical Product Guide.

Ten Tales Tall and True by Alasdair Gray

To give you an idea of Alasdair Gray’s mischievous style, there are not 10 tales in this book but 13. Or 14 if you include the Prologue.

Gray excels at presenting the oddities of ordinary lives, and writes from a tantalisingly oblique angle leaving the reader wondering which side is up. If he disorientates when detailing ordinary events he leaves your head spinning when he ventures into the surreal. As a complement to his fascinating prose Gray also designs and illustrates his books, producing a multi-faceted creation that is far more than the sum of its parts.

My particular favourites from this volume are “Fictional Exits” and “Time Travel”, although all the tales would bear repeat readings and I’m confident that each re-reading will reveal even greater depths. Although playful, Gray’s thought-provoking writing shows social consciousness and an acute awareness of the darker (and lighter) side of human nature. As he explains in the “Notes, thanks and critic fuel” at the end of the book, “Fictional Exits” uses a real incident, which to me serves to demonstrate the precariousness of truth and the unreliability of reality. That is probably what Gray is best at.

I’ve read others of Gray’s books. “Something Leather” is somthing of a cross between a novel and a collection of stories. “Lanark” is an amazingly bizarre novel. “Ten Tales Tall and True” easily lived up to my expectations and I’m sure I’ll be reading it again and again.

Found this at Green Fairy - Things you swore you'd never do, but now are.... Go on, do the quiz. It says I'm 52% an ageing hypocrite. Who, me?

BBC Radio 4 are running a competition for listeners to write their own law. Its a serious competition - they will weed out anything silly, and choose one that has a chance of making it onto the statute book. Frivolity is very tempting, and of course nothing really useful is likely to win. Nevertheless, I had a think and my top 5 ideas are as follows:
1) Compulsory speed limit of 20mph in all residential areas. At present local authorities can impose such a limit on selected areas, but these are few and far between.
2) Restrict the use of those big 4 wheel drive gas guzzlers. Those things are much more likely to kill you if they hit you and a mere status symbols for most people. They should be sold only to those who really need one for their job (thats just vets in the countryside then) and people should have to have a special licence to drive one.
3) Ban excess packaging.
4) Ban plastic carrier bags. Use paper ones or buy those lovely cotton ones that you can wash when they get mucky and they last for ages. But make sure the cotton is GM free, unbleached and organic.
5) Ban private use of fireworks. Licensed displays only. Sparklers would be allowed though.

Don't know which one to submit to the BBC!

So England is going to have lots of new airport runways. Crazy. Can the government not understand that it is unsustainable, extremely damaging to the environment and a blight on the lives of people who live near to airports? No. The economy comes first. Short-term gain, long-term pain. There are many arguments against the expansion of the airline industry, none of which seem to have made the slightest impression on our glorious leaders, even though they know the dangers.

We had a power cut yesterday - the whole area, not just my house. Too many fairylights I reckon. I was just logging off, my son pacing up and down behind me impatient to get his internet time. As I clicked my mouse, the screen went black. I wondered what I'd done until I realised the lights had gone off too. Peering out of the window revealed we weren't the only ones in darkness. I stumbled around seeking candles and a torch and rang the electricity company who informed me the power should be back on within a couple of hours. Two hours without a cup of tea? Fortunately I had a camping stove tucked away in the cellar so the situation wasn't too serious. As it turned out light was restored after about an hour, though it took ntl another half an hour to get the digtal service back for the telly and broadband. However did we manage in the old terrestrial days?

Been a bit busy and a bit distracted over the last few days, hence no blogging. But I have been reading:

Bilgewater by Jane Gardam

“Bilgewater” tells of Marigold Green, aka Bilgewater, during her final year of childhood before she leaves home to go to university.

It is a gentle, genteel novel narrated by Marigold who lives with her school-master father at a boys’ boarding school on the Yorkshire coast. Marigold’s world is both cosseted and closeted and her narration is self-effacing and gently funny. I found it difficult to locate the story in time – it could be anytime between 1960 and 1980. The novel reminded me of some of my childhood reading – Enid Blyton, Malcolm Savile, Arthur Ransome. There are no brushes with danger, no criminals to track down, but a similar cosiness of middle-class security. Marigold has a small dose of teenage angst, but not too much. She is strong enough to carry herself through images crises and bounces back from boy trouble.

“Bilgewater” is really quite different to my usual choice of book, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Marigold and the people around her are likeable and there’s nothing to challenge or threaten. It’s just well written, easy to read escapism (and we all need a bit of that occasionally)

Tonight was my work christmas meal at the Ferret Hall Bistro. Some of my regular readers will remember that I voted for a different restaurant, but being outvoted I went with the rest. Well, I hope we don't go there again. The company was good - I like my workmates, but as the bistro is quite small we were split into two groups, so I didn't get to socialise with eveybody.
The vegetarian choice was very limited. There were 2 veggie starters and only one veggie main course. I chose deep fried mushrooms stuffed with cream cheese as a starter - the other option was parsnip and pear soup, but as I have soup for lunch most days I thought I'd have a change. The mushrooms weren't so much deep fried as armour-plated. It was the kind of dish you find in the chiller cabitnet at the supermarket, only worse. The main course - pave of goats cheese with vegetables was actually very nice, although the potatoes were slightly undercooked (I wasn't the only one to leave them on my plate) and the sprouts were so hard you couldn't get your fork into them. Now I know overcooked sprouts are disgusting but raw ones are even worse.
For dessert I chose the cheesecake. Mousse would have been a more accurate description. Half way through I swapped with Janet, to try the Belgian chocolate and crystallised ginger tart. It was very hard and chewy. Not very pleasant.
The bill arrived and surprised us all with the 10% service charge. Quite often the service chage is included in the cost of the meal, or if it is not then the menu makes it clear that a service charge will either be added or you will be expected to pay one. As we hadn't been warned we all though it would be left to our discretion. Not so.
So I wouldn't recommend the Ferret Hall, unless you plan on just popping in for a goat cheese pave.

Some excellent videos & animations at Bushflash, via Greenfairy.

I went to a community meeting this evening to discuss methods of ridding the area of anti-social behaviour. There is an extended family living in 2 houses on our street that causes no end of trouble for the rest of us. And one boy living over the street who is a pain in the wotsit. The lone boy's family live in a Housing Association property, so they are on borrowed time already. If he doesn't sort himself out they will be evicted. But the other two houses are owned by a member of the problem family which makes them harder to get rid of. Since one of them - a teenage girl - attacked a neighbour with a bottle a couple of months ago, the community has started to pull together to try and do something about the situation. We are all fed up of having things thrown at us and our houses, and being verbally abused or worse. Fortunately, the government have begun spending money and introducing new legislation to combat this kind of thing and hence the local authority and police are willing to help. We all have little books now in which to record any incidents and have been encouraged to report everything to the police. Let's hope it works.
Anyway, it was good getting to meet some of the neighbours I didn't already know (most of them), and one of them pointed out that a 'For Sale' had gone up in the back yard of one of the problem houses today - so maybe part of our problem will be solved without too much input from us.

Lying in bed yesterday listening to the ice cream man doing the rounds to his James Bond theme, I got to thinking what 007 would buy if he needed cooling down (it couldn't have been much above freezing yesterday anyway!). I suppose it would have to be a Magnum, wouldn't it? And a 99 for Moneypenny.

Had a good weekend, again. I could get used to this! On Saturday night I joined a bunch of friends to celebrate 1) Gav's 30th, and 2) wish Kerry & Sophie bon voyage. There were enough of us there to take over the front room of the pub (eventually, after the dozen or so interlopers - so what if they were there before us? - went off for a curry). Saw a few folks I hadn't seen for a while, including Dave who knows about computers and gave me some good advice about networking my 2 pcs, ie get the right type of cable to connect them (oops!). Kerry & Sophie will now be in the sky somewhere between England and Hong Kong.
On Sunday Gav & I once again completed the Guardian xword. We'll win that dictionary one of these days. Then I'll have A-M and Gav can have N-Z.

I changed bus stops for coming home from work, having got really fed up of joining a queue that disappears round the corner then having to squeeze onto a very full bus where getting a seat is a miracle. Now I walk a few hundred yards further and get on one stop earlier. Easy really. Anyway, today I joined the queue behind a quite respectable-looking woman who managed to make me feel very sick and dizzy very quickly. She just would not stand still. She was wearing a big stripey shawl thing over her coat, and she stood there swinging her body round - not moving her feet but turning first 180 degrees to the left, then 180 degrees to the right very fast, continually for 10 minutes. I had to turn around and look the other way. I was getting travel sick. Maybe she was a bit bonkers, or maybe she was just cold (it was reeeelly cold today). Fortunately, as she was ahead of me in the queue she got in the bus first and I made sure I didn't sit anywhere near her.

Nowt like a bit of homegrown hypocrisy in the run up to christmas is there?
"The government is selling arms and security equipment to countries whose human rights record it has strongly criticised, according to lists of weapons cleared for export that have been seen by the Guardian.
The countries include Indonesia, where the Foreign Office has reported allegations of extrajudicial killings, Nepal, where it has reported summary executions, and Saudi Arabia, where torture is just one abuse of basic human rights attacked by the FO.

Licences have been approved this year for the export to Saudi Arabia of "security and paramilitary goods", hitherto unpublished figures show.

The list of items under this category is: "Acoustic devices... suitable for riot control purposes, anti-riot shields... leg irons, gangchains, electric shock belts, shackles... individual cuffs... portable anti-riot devices... water cannon... riot control vehicles... portable devices for riot control or self-protection by the administration of an electric shock".

The government's arms export guidelines state that licences will be refused if there is a "clear risk [they] might be used for internal repression".

Read all about it.

A-spire is happening again in Leeds from tomorrow for a couple of weeks. A-spire is a squatted social/activist space where people can go to be creative, share ideas, hide from christmas shopping madness. It happens once a year or so, when the wonderful A-spire collective can find a suitable space.

My template is still playing up. Somehow it gets a bit mashed in the process of saving changes, so its not quite right at the moment, but I can't be bothered faffing with it any more tonight - I know that if I go back into it I could be here for hours just trying to save my changes. Bah grrr!!!

Having sock trouble at all? Nic from Planarchy mentioned that they have been going through a lot of them in his house. Check out The Bureau of Missing Socks.

I finished reading Property at lunchtime which meant, horror of horrors, I had nothing to read on the bus on the way home from work. I had to make do with looking out of the window at the traffic. Why oh why do people insist on driving into the city centre? Because of the traffic it takes as long to get home on the bus as it does to walk, and if it wasn't winter and I wasn't looking after my poor phlegm-raddled body, I would walk. Roll on summer (then I can inhale exhaust fumes again).

Anyway, like I said I finished my book. Review below:

Property by Valerie Martin

“Property” won this year’s Orange Fiction Prize. The novel is set in America’s Deep South in the early 19th century. It is written from the perspective of Manon, married to a sugar plantation owner. Manon is arrogant, self-obsessed and full of self-pity, and I could find nothing to like about her or the husband she despises. And that made the book very hard to enjoy.
The subject matter was interesting – Manon tells of her slave Sarah, and her relationship with Sarah. Martin is trying to realistically portray the attitudes and experiences of a slave-owner, and succeeds – but it makes uncomfortable reading for a ‘politically correct’ 21st century feminist. Martin has based her characters and her narrative on journals and reports from the early 19th century and writes plainly and succinctly. The reader can be confident that the slave-owning Deep South has not been romanticised. So if it’s dark realism that you’re after, then “Property” should push your buttons.

Tee-hee! Have a look & listen to some Bushims at toostupidtobepresident.com

Then watch George dance.

Familiar with Winnie the Pooh? Check out George Double-yooh and the Oil Tree.

Oh, just go to toostupidtobepresident.com and have a good look round for yourself.

We rose to the Bunthorne challenge in Saturday's Guardian and completed the cryptic crossword. Well, Gav did anyway. I wouldn't have got very far on my own, but I did get a few.

My boy tried on the schoolitis thing this morning, but I wasn't fooled. I don't know whether it was a "haven't done my homework" stomach ache, or a " don't want to play football" stomach ache. But he went anyway. He managed to get a day off a few weeks ago with a headache and feeling sick, although I later found out that he hadn't got any clean socks - he's very good about putting on a clean pair every day, but also very good at storing the dirty ones up in the corner of his bedroom.