Where the bodies are

I love predictive text. I know a lot of people don't get on with it, but it's like any other technology - once you get used to trusting it, it's great. And not only quicker, easier, and - on my phone at least - intelligent (it learns my patterns), but it also occasionally and unintentionally comes up with some real howlers.

Like recently when I was sending a text about 'Andy', the first suggestion the phone came up with was 'Body'. Hardy har har.

Soapy fish

Part of a conversation we were having the other day triggered a childhood memory illustrating an almost-forgotten art in modern households. Thrift. For your own amusement, try explaining this to one or more young people between the ages of 10 and 25, and watch their faces as the disbelief and incredulity mounts at the realisation that anyone could have gone to so much trouble to save such small sums of money.

When I was a kid, soap was - relatively - expensive. Or at least, that's what my Mum told me (hence the tag). So it was important to make it last as long as possible. Naturally, that didn't involve NOT washing - being thought dirty was a crime (or even, a SIN!) even worse than being thought a spendthrift - but it did mean hanging on to each bar of soap until it was totally used up, and we had an ingenious method of using those last tricky little slivers that could slip out of your hand and hide on bathroom floor, behind the pedestal. A soap fish. Made of synthetic sponge in the shape of a fish - it had eyes, and fins, and everything - you could shove your soapy remains up its jacksie and use it to wash in the bath. And I did. Pretty much until I started big school. I clearly remember the frustration of not being able to actually play with the damn thing in the bath - it was a fish, after all - on account of that dissolving its soapy guts too quickly for True Thrift(*). No, it was for washing, not for playing. That was made abundantly clear.

The soapy sponge fish (or was it a spongy soap fish?) fell apart eventually, and my Mum was gutted to discover she couldn't find a replacement anywhere. It was OK though, because by then I was old enough to learn the trick of "gluing" the old sliver of soap to a new bar, carefully sticking down the edges all round so you didn't accidentally knock the parasitic little piece off its bigger, younger brother. Waste not, want not, as was constantly drummed into me as soon as I was old enough to hear.

Incidentally the "importance" of not wasting soap - engraved deeply as it was on my psyche as a child - stayed with me long after it should have done. I think I was in my early forties, stood at the bathroom sink gluing some soap together when I suddenly thought "what the FUCK am I doing?"

(*) Could be a good title for a movie. What do you think?

The Z Factor

I haven't written much about this year's X Factor. In fact, on checking, I haven't written anything at all about X Factor on this blog, ever. Which is strange for someone who used to write between 1 and 5 "TV critic" posts a day on TV Scoop. Why is that, I wonder? Well the title of this post might give you a clue. I honestly don't think I've seen such an array of total bollocks claiming to be singers in my life, and last night reached the absolute nadir of the dregs of the pit of Hades.

"Rock Night" it claimed to be, so you'll pardon me for expressing some surprise at the collection of bland ballads we were subjected to, all (naturally) greeted with effervescent enthusiasm by the four judges who are, apparently, increasingly losing the plot when it comes to having any discernable clue what they're listening to. Take, for example, Rebecca. One of the best of the bad bunch, I'd have to agree, but what's with Dannii's comments? The acts performed two songs last night, as we're getting down to smaller numbers now and they need to pad the show out a bit to maximise the ad revenues. So for her first song, Rebecca, as is her wont, stood rigidly behind the microphone and sang sweetly. "That was nice," Dannii enthused, "but I'd like to see a little more performance. You know, move about a bit." (I'm paraphrasing). So here's Rebecca's second number, where she stood rigidly behind the microphone and sang sweetly. And a couple of times, still standing on the spot, swayed her hips a bit. "Now THAT's the kind of performance I was looking for!" gushed Dannii. HUH?

But it would be wrong to single out Dannii in the stupid comments stakes. They're all just as bad as each other, trotting out the same old (and I mean... OLD) clichés time after time, making it their own, believable, relevant, true recording artist, with a liberal smattering of the usual "do you know what"s and "let me tell you"s added in to make absolutely sure that we all fall asleep.

If I didn't believe this show had jumped the shark before, I certainly reached that conclusion very early on in this series. The "vote for the worst" campaign has literally its worst contestant this year in Wagner, and while the thought of "sticking it to the man" is mildly amusing and diverting it doesn't make up for the pain of having to sit - sorry "fast forward" - through his performances week after week. The predictable stories of judges' in-fighting, vote rigging, and production hoopla to keep the most controversial contestants in the show as long as possible have verged on the disgusting this year, but above all the media hype towers the dark truth of an almost incredible lack of serious talent in the line-up.

Of all last night's dross only Matt Cardle's Nights in White Satin (or "Knights..." as the ITV X Factor home page has it this morning. LOL) came anywhere close to being what I would call a half-decent performance by a new artist and even that started off weak and ended up edging towards a shout. And yet after every screeching, out of tune, boring repetition of songs we've heard a million times before, we're treated to the spectacle of four "experts" telling us we're listening to pure gold, when it's clear to anyone who can be bothered to open up their eyes and ears that they're watching, at best, glorified karaoke without a shred of originality and only the merest hint of musicality every so often.

Come on, Cowell. Haven't you made enough money yet? Piss off to America with this worn out formulaic crap, and give us our Saturday nights and our traditional Christmas No. 1s back again.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!

A long day yesterday, as I rose at 4.15am and left the house a little more than half-an-hour later to make the drive to Slough. When I think back to the time - not that long gone - when I used to regularly do this twice (and on rare occasions, three times) a week it gives me shivers.

I've been fortunate this year. The last time I made the trek South, back in April and with a different destination (Bracknell), was the only other time I've had to drive anywhere. A welcome change from the financial year 2003/4 when I did 22,000 business miles. If I had to do that now I don't think I'd ever be awake outside of the working day!

Anyway, enough waffle. The point of this post is the number of surprises that pop up when you haven't taken a once-familiar journey for more than six months. For a start, Cherwell Valley services - where I habitually take my breakfast - has disappeared. Well, not disappeared exactly, but when you enter the car park in the darkness of a late autumn morning before 7am, and the building is not where it once was, the first impression is definitely one of it having been spirited away.

Its replacement, on the other side of the car park, has a prefabricated temporary feel to it, which was explained when I returned to the car. Dawn having broken a bit, I could see the beginnings of a new steel skeleton where the old building used to be, along with a couple of cranes, so the owners clearly intend eventually to put it back where it was. Bit of a drastic and expensive solution to a leaking roof (the only problem  I recall being visible with the old place), but it shows there's still lots of money in the motorway services game.

Slough too held some surprises. The company is vacating the building but it's a slow process, made even slower when they realised how hard it was going to be to move the test rigs. Finding space for them in the new building, levering them out of their current position (where they've been for at least ten years to my knowledge), moving them without "dropping" any, discovering there's a percentage of them that won't turn on again when they arrive at their new home (always a risk when moving equipment of any age) and all this at a time when we're in the middle of a critical test phase. It didn't take long for the buttock clenching to kick in and delay the move.

But the building is half decommissioned. So the first thing to greet me was a sign on the door saying reception was no longer manned and I should telephone whoever I was visiting to gain access. Only he was late. Thankfully a passing pedestrian happened to know the door code so I made it inside and headed up to the floor I used to hot desk on. Stepping out of the lift I noticed the door of the gents had been adorned with a sign saying "this facility is no longer in use" and on entering the office I discovered serried ranks of empty desks devoid of phones, power, or LAN.

I headed down the stairs (which weren't lit) towards a friendly, but dim light below. It was coming from the 4th floor. The top half of the building is effectively moth balled, and that includes the restaurant. So no hot food, no decent coffee, no snack bar, half as many toilets as there should be, and desk spaces at an all time low. Betjeman was right all along!

Book Review: The Wasp Factory

I'm familiar with Iain Banks' work, but until now only in his guise as Iain M. Banks, science fiction author. This is the first non-SF work of his that I've read, and probably, since it was his first novel, the best place to start.

I have a long-standing ambivalence to reviewing very well-known works. What, after all, can I say that hasn't already been said a hundred times (or to be entirely accurate, in the case of the reviews on Amazon, one hundred and thirty-five times)? But in terms of being well known, The Wasp Factory is in a league of its own. According to Wikipedia: "A 1997 poll of over 25,000 readers listed The Wasp Factory as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century."

If I hadn't already learned this was a debut novel, I think I would have worked it out for myself. It has distinct echoes of another debut novel - much less famous (at least, outside his immediate circle of friends) - by an acquaintance of mine. It is however, much more accomplished in its characterisation, use of language, and plotting. Only the smallest hints of apprenticeship remain in odd little corners of the narrative. In the main, it's an impressive piece, even though the subject matter is not something I'd normally choose. Geographically, emotionally and physically, the overarching impression of the story for me was one of claustrophobia. Frank inhabits a small Scottish island - reached from the mainland only via a bridge - which he rarely leaves, since his birth was unregistered and he doesn't attend school. His rituals are rigid, many of the places he spends his time are small and inaccessible - the attic room, the dugout - and he is alone for most of the time.

His story is surprising, unpredictable, and told with total candour. A compelling clarity and absence of sentiment that is immediately recognisable as the innermost thoughts of an adolescent boy in all their brutality and horror. Unlike many of the book club books of recent months, while easily as weird as the weirdest of them, this held my interest right up to the last page. And on attaining that page there was a welcome lack of "so what?" in the ending. Not a book I would expect to read again, but definitely enjoyable as a one-off if you're looking for something different.

Saddle sore

Well I suppose I should get back to this blogging lark. Trouble is, over the past couple of weeks, there's been a decided shortage of blog fodder and, perhaps more important, enthusiasm. My urge to commit thoughts to the ether tends to come in waves, with an amplitude of about - well - two weeks. I can tune to a different frequency if there's a lot of material about, or if something spurs me to a rant, but otherwise I'll just let it drift.

My main sources of inspiration haven't been of much help during the most recent hiatus. The Large Decorating Project is at the preparation stage, and as it is... Large... this stage is taking a long time. And, being preparation, it doesn't lend itself to much in the way of excitement, visible progress, or anything much worth writing about. My small (but dedicated!) audience wouldn't thank me, I'm sure, for endless posts about sanding, filling, more sanding, priming, and the long and tedious task (which occupied several hours this last weekend) of cleaning the plaster, PVA, and primer splashes off the floor. A task which, with the current state of my knees, I can only attack in sessions of about two hours at a time.

The Main Writing Project is still stalled, waiting for one of my many queries to bear fruit. It's probably about time to send out a fresh crop, and also long past time to pick up another project, but distractions and displacement activities have had the upper hand for months and the notional "garret studio" is starting to look rather cobwebby and abandoned.

Such distractions as there have been, have proved very entertaining. With my birthday imminent, Nikki presented me with the Collector's Edition BluRay disk of Avatar yesterday, which we sat down all together to watch during the afternoon - all 170 extended minutes of it. Fabulous. Saturday night saw us in town (an extremely rare occurrence) to celebrate a friend's birthday in the beautifully salubrious setting of The English Lounge. A perfect choice for a relaxing few pints in the company of friends, some of whom we haven't seen for way too long, and catch up with news.

It's a slight overstatement to say that the past two weeks have been entirely devoid of bloggable stuff, and indeed notes have been taken for future posts which might be coming your way over the next few days, but in the main it is all sanding, filling and painting for the foreseeable, so if you were waiting for nuggets you'll have to wait a while longer I'm afraid. And what's more my enthusiasm for anything in particular is likely to take a hard knock tomorrow, when for the first time in I don't know how long I'll be taking the early road to Slough (a 5am start is traditional, to be sure of getting into the office by about 9) to help out with testing on our current project. I've been lucky this last year or so, to avoid travel. After several years of making the Slough journey up to 3 times a week, followed by a couple of years taking the train to Croydon, I've somehow managed to wangle an entire year of working at home. But as there's no remote access to the test rigs, and there are small pockets of the current system that only I know anything about, my presence has been demanded and I must answer the call. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

The Alcove

The impending massive decorating job that is now hanging over me, following the completion of a significant construction project, is causing some serious displacement activity. Case in point: this weekend, which saw me finally lining out the display alcove in Nikki's half of the study. This is one of those "finishing off" jobs that tends to get left (in my world) ad infinitum. Well, not quite infinitum, but approaching three years, which is long enough to feel infinitumish.

That alcove - in what was a fireplace - has been hiding behind a bird bedecked parasol and falling firmly in the "out of sight; out of mind" category since the study was replastered. Such is the quantity of painting now facing me (easily several hectares) that it seemed sensible to put myself in the position of being able to finish all the outstanding painting at the same time. I mean, if there's priming and undercoating to be done, why leave out the priming and undercoating that'll be required on any of the other parts of the house? It feels slightly uncomfortable, exposing quite so much of the way my mind works, but there it is.

Armed with a few sheets of 9mm MDF, some ogee architrave and a couple of lengths of 1x1 battening, I set to yesterday morning and by lunchtime today the alcove looked like this.

Ready to receive a coat of primer as soon as I've punched and filled all the nail heads and gaps in The Room Above, and can do all the priming in one go.

The woodwork will eventually be traditional satin white, but the shelves and lining - at Nikki's suggestion - will be tricked out in the accent colour that matches the walls. This used to be called Raspberry Something, but in the intervening three years the Dulux marketing department has renamed it and it's now Redcurrant Glory. I'll be painting round the wood-burning stove on my side to match too. Glorious.

Vinyl: Waterloo Lily

Artist: Caravan
Owned on digital media: Yes
Want to replace: n/a

Finally we reach the last Caravan album in my previously-extensive collection: Waterloo Lily. As any fule kno (read: Google will tell you), this release followed Land of Grey and Pink in 1972, but after keyboardist Dave Sinclair had left and been replaced with the jazzier Steve Miller. This was to be Miller's only album with the band and the result is something that is simultaneously less than, and in many ways also more than, any of their other works.

I've always had mixed feelings about this album. Bits of it are always enjoyable, but other bits I need to be in the right mood for. The traditional "ensemble" track this time round is The Love In Your Eye/To Catch Me A Brother/Subsultus/etc and it's pure Caravan genius. Some of the other stuff, as I said, I can skip or not depending on my mood. And on the digitally remastered CD, in common with all the others I've acquired so far, the "bonus" tracks are a complete waste of time. It's very obvious why they never found their way onto any of the original albums and if they are truly examples of more recent work then either they've lost their way altogether or I am now too old and inflexible to appreciate it (which I doubt, given my recent admission of appreciating, say, Scissor Sisters ^_^).

LOL

Who'd have ever thought - more than ten years ago when we were all chatting - that there would come a time when it was acceptable to put "LOL" in a professional email?

Or that there'd be a chat client available to everyone in the office, regularly used for ad-hoc enquiries (which we used to do by phone) and that we'd be happily LOLling away in there too, not to mention adding smilies and whatnot.

Funny  how things change. OK, we're not yet at the level of doing a ROFLMAOPMPTIME during the working day (thank God!), but surely it can only be a matter of time. Retirement beckons, I think, before all dignity is lost.

Kerreh!

After a month's absence from Curry Club on account of our unexpected trip to Toronto, I was determined not to influence the choice of restaurant this time round but we ended up at my favourite Ayo Gurkhali anyway.

I say favourite, but apparently there's a new kid on the block - a fourth curry house has opened in the centre of Wilmslow - which hopefully I'll get the chance to suss out next month. Sounds like an interesting place: it's open all day and serves Indian-themed food that varies to suit the mood, be it breakfast, lunch or evening dinner. It'll have to go some to beat the Gurkhali, but I'll give it a fair hearing. Er, tasting.

Starting the evening off in our traditional haunt - the Bollin Fee - was a revelation too. Not only is their refurbishment complete, providing an altogether plusher experience with its tasteful deep pile carpets, upholstered bar stools (replacing the previous bum-numbers) and subdued mood lighting, but their first-week-of-the-month beer festival continues to go from strength to strength. This month there were seven guest ales to choose from. Almost enough to make me wish I lived in walking distance!

Not sure whether my enjoyment of tonight's main - a return to the well-loved Himalayan Cham-Cham - was blunted by the exotic flavour of my Chicken Sukuti starter (which I had as a main on my previous visit), or whether their standards are slipping. I hope it's not the latter as this has firmly established itself in my top five favourite curry restaurants. Whatever the reason, the Cham-Cham didn't have as much flavour tonight. I'll have to revisit the menu the next time we "try the Gurkhas". There remain at least half-a-dozen appealing dishes on the Specials menu I've not yet tried.

Finding amusement in simple things

I wouldn't dare to claim that I never feel grumpy (at least, not on a post with open comments), but I have always been able to find amusement in small things. I think it's a gift, being able to find something to smile or laugh about in even the darkest times, and it helps to lift a humdrum day out of the ordinary and into the sublime, even if only just into. It's a small glimmer of the kind of spirit that kept the Chilean miners going, and helps most of us get through the boring work day. Without it, we would be that other kind of people. The kind who growl and scowl their way through life, determined to look on the black side and make everyone else endure that black side too. The kind you find on, say, the London Underground.

With one massive decorating project ahead of me, and about a dozen smaller "finishing off" jobs still hanging over from earlier projects, we've been to B&Q for the last two Saturdays on the run. Exactly the kind of mundane trip that provides the opportunity to exercise a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous.

First visit we were amused to notice that someone had been at the sticky letters (those you might use, for instance, to spell out your house name if you were pretentious enough to have a named house - although obviously not that pretentious if you were considering naming it with sticky letters) and had rearranged the first row of letters to spell C O C K.

On our second visit - last Saturday - one of the things on the list was a black bucket to replace the one I'd "lent" to the builders and never got back. It's the kind of thing that - being not electrical, or illuminatory, or woody, or decorative, or (particularly) gardeny - doesn't have a natural home among the labyrinthine shelves, so we scoured the aisles for several minutes looking for them... in vain. We then repeated our aisle-scouring activities in the hope of finding a B&Q operative of whom we could enquire the location of the buckets. Rounding a corner into the very last aisle, we spotted a group of three operatives enjoying a cosy chat. They were standing next to a large pile of black plastic buckets.

One Thing

I think I've discovered a natural law. One of those like Sod's Law, or Gunnersen's Law, or Sattinger's Law. I hesitate to name it Digger's Law, because I'm not certain it has remained undiscovered until now. But I could perhaps call it the Law of Single Omission.

It goes something like this. If there are a number of things to be done, where "things" can be any list of objects or tasks and "to be done" is the action you are performing on them, then if your concentration lapses at any point there will always be one thing left over at the end.

Thus there is always one thing left to wash up after you've let the water out of the sink. Probably sitting on the cooker behind you rather than on the draining board.

And after you've put that shopping list back in your pocket, assuming there are so few items left on it you'll be able to remember them all, you'll get home to find there's one thing left you didn't buy.

What is it with scaffolders?

We've had scaffolding up twice since we've lived here. The first time, when we had the roof replaced, it stayed up for several weeks after the work was finished, and wasn't taken down until we'd prompted and poked and urged and pleaded several times.

As I mentioned at the time, I find it hard to relax properly when the house is surrounded by scaffolding. First floor windows in older properties, inevitably, are not as secure as ground floor ones. They don't have to be. Opportunist burglars don't carry ladders, and even planned burglaries don't usually involve clambering in through an upper-storey window. So I prefer to get it down as soon as practicable once the work is completed.

Our second experience of scaffolding has, so far, been if anything even worse than the first. Admittedly it's not all round the house this time - we've had the gable end repointed - but it is full height and it has been here since the middle of August.

The work was completed before our recent visit to Toronto, so as we were gone for 12 days we fully expected to find it gone on our return. No such luck. A phone call to the builder revealed he was just as surprised as we were, since he'd spoken to the scaffold guy before we went away. After chasing him, we were promised it would be gone by the end of that week. Then by the following Tuesday. No, Friday.

By now the excuses were coming thick and fast. He'd been on holiday, and his men had let the jobs pile up while he was away. He didn't know why it hadn't been done but he'd chase them up. They'd been onto our road and taken down the wrong set of scaffolding from someone else's house (!).

Finally with dark talk of "repercussions" and penalty payments, we were finally promised - no, really - that it would come down on Friday last. And did it? Well when the clock had ticked around to half past two in the afternoon I did begin to lose hope. They eventually arrived just before 3pm. It was gone by 5.

See, as far as I can make out, the thing with scaffold is, you pay for it up front and they come and erect it when you say you need it. But from that point on, there is absolutely no incentive for them to remove it, until the scaffold firm themselves need it for another job. It's like your house is their storage yard, often with built-in advertising. Removing the scaffold takes time and effort, and they've already had their money, so it's time and effort they feel they're not getting paid for.

If we need any more scaffold in the future I think I'll be making sure the penalty clauses are written in from the start, or hold back some money until they take their gear away. Tch.