The Bedside Table

There were many reasons I was dissatisfied with my bedside table.  First, its colour: orange.

 

Not even a subtle orange.  Second, it has no drawer.  I must either leave my book on the top (which would be fine if I could constrain myself to two books) or I must reach down awkwardly while on the edge of sleep and open the door and throw the book onto the half-shelf within (or as you can see in the photo, simply throw them on the floor).  Third, with a square base and a monolithic stature it has a utilitarian oomph which is not to my liking.

Fortunately, my taste in furniture tends towards peasant rather than palace. When I last persuaded K-man to visit the local junk emporium, we came across this:

 

This is the most poorly-made piece of furniture  I have ever encountered, and that includes Swedish flat-pack specials I incompetently put together myself. It seems to be made predominantly from waste wood by a person who hated their job. In places where surely – surely – a nail would have been better, glue has been used and did not stick properly.  Someone made a bad decision to try polishing this turd, and attached a piece of spare dowelling rod to the outside.

 

This little cupboard was very cheap, and I have vision. And my vision couldn’t withstand more morning orange.

Yesterday the sun shone, and in our house that means embarking on a stupid project outside using power tools.  Hurrah!

K-man had to shore up the flimsy construction, and wrench off the stupid dowelling. Then I got busy with the power-sander. A short time later, I looked up from my cup of tea and realised this might not turn out too badly after all.

When all the black shit – I know not what it was – came off, the little cupboard grew a personality.  There was an interlude when I got a bit too busy with the power-sander and the bottom piece of wood holding the door up broke off, but what’s a husband for if not to clean up after his wife’s manic sanding experiments?

Then it was time to paint.  As we know, paint is a shit piece of furniture’s best friend. It covers a multitude of sins and can turn something horrible into something you can stand to look at without crying.  I do believe, however, that the trend should be reserved for crap pieces otherwise beyond rescue.  All those people painting over beautiful woodgrain because of fashion are nuts.  Especially if they do stupid shit like two-tone blue and pink and then sand down one layer of paint to display the nonsense.  I have seen more overpriced ruined chests of drawers than I can bear because people think that shit adds value.  Hell no, you just ruined a decent piece of furniture.  What is it with these people?

Sorry – that rant has been inside me for a long time and it needed to come out.  Obviously, I would never paint something pink and blue two-tone. I would simply use whatever left-overs I had available in the garage. Which turned out to be Farrow and Ball New White.

Of course, every insect for miles around stuck itself in the paint. But progress was made and soon it was time to wax the top.

I was very surprised and pleased with how well this turned out.  You would never guess the top was plywood, or that it cost only around £20 and a few hours of my time.  Check out the sanded and waxed top:

 

Here it is in situ:

A full year after K-man accidentally sold our bedside tables on ebay for a song, I finally have a book-drawer and no orange.

That’s our new carpet you can see in the photo.  What a revelation!  More about that another time.

 

 

 

Forever Behind the Curve

After months of absence, I logged in to two internet entities: google reader, and wordpress.

Apparently, google reader will cease to exist shortly, and I must expend valuable energy locating an alternative and transporting all my feeds (all, oh, twenty of them) over to the alternative. This will take ten minutes, which is a disaster.

WordPress has changed its welcome page and bits of its user interface, again.  Can’t they leave well enough alone? Perhaps it has been a gradual evolution, but I’ve been away for long enough that the changes have hit me all at once.

Oh, and it is still snowing in London. It’s April. I am in an incredibly bad mood as a result.  It is time for horticultural therapy,  but NO the ground is frozen, the wind blasts needles up noses, and our heating is broken. The weather has been like this since November. Thank lard I escaped to tropical climes last month, or I might have been driven half mad by dismay.

Hello, internet. How are you?

Hibernation

 

It snowed last week, which is no longer a rare event in this country.  Every year for the last four there has been one decent dump of gentle-sounding white stuff, followed by squeals of indignation as transportation melts down, and an already hellacious one-hour commute becomes a gamble where the prize is three hours trapped in a dark train carriage.  I worked at home for two of the days, which, because I work with highly sensitive information necessitated two senior management approvals, one form-completion, one risk assessment, one secure laptop, a five-meter cable (no WiFi, because that would be a risk) and a bundle of system crashes.

The snow has melted now, and with it Snow Dog.  We created Snow Dog because K-man is desperate for a four-legged friend, but we’re out of the house 50 hours a week at work and it’s just not feasible or fair.  So, we briefly created our own. He doesn’t talk back, or fetch slippers, but he also doesn’t crap on the lawn.  I did consider getting a pile of mud and making an accompanying turd, but this is a Nice Neighbourhood so I restrained myself.

In New Zealand, we built my favourite ever snow-man:

 

 

I have been hibernating from blogging, because life is busy and shit-storms a-brew constantly.  It’s disappointing because there is plenty of source material, but I just can’t find the words.  I would (apparently) rather waste countless hours playing Candy Crush and then accidentally deleting my progress.  What with everything that’s been going on around here lately, that was a disaster blown out of all proportion in my tiny mind.

Snow sculpture – or perhaps art in general – is remarkably therapeutic.  Without even really knowing how, I’m reaching some conclusions about myself, and none of them are very comfortable because all of them seem to necessitate radical amendments to my choices about how I spend my time in this merry-go-round.  I can’t get a particular quotation out of my head.

Instead of wondering where your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.

- Seth Godin

Extreme

I was at a party a few weeks ago, which for me means like-minded souls and I get together and become irate at the world’s apparently intractable problems, corporate behemoth uber-un-accountability, slavery, feminism v classism and is it a competitive or complementary relationship, intersectional discrimination, environmental hell, and other light-hearted subjects.  Obviously, we blame everybody but ourselves.

During one of these wine-fuelled if I ran the world people would all just love each other and be happy sessions, in a moment of fairly ironic hypocrisy someone pulled out their iPhone and tuned me in to a quiz with some particularly insightful results.  I pulled out my iPhone – for I am nothing if not a  champagne socialist – to give the quiz a whirl.

The quiz lives at Political Compass and here is a quote from the website:

The old one-dimensional categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’ [...] are overly simplistic for today’s complex political landscape. For example, who are the ‘conservatives’ in today’s Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher ?

On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It’s not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can’t explain. Similarly, we generally describe social reactionaries as ‘right-wingers’, yet that leaves left-wing reactionaries like Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot off the hook.

The test plots your politics not on one linear ‘left/right’ line, but in a quadrant that accounts for the distinctions between social and economic political liberalism or authoritarianism.  Or something.  So:

If we recognise that [the left-right line] is essentially an economic line it’s fine, as far as it goes. We can show, for example, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, with their commitment to a totally controlled economy, on the hard left. Socialists like Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Mugabe would occupy a less extreme leftist position. Margaret Thatcher would be well over to the right, but further right still would be someone like that ultimate free marketeer, General Pinochet.

That deals with economics, but the social dimension is also important in politics. That’s the one that the mere left-right scale doesn’t adequately address. So we’ve added one, ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian.

That line goes vertically from top to bottom, resulting in a diagram divided into four quadrants:

The thought occurs that you readers probably came across this test years ago, but it’s new to me and I’m soldiering on.

There is far more information on the website, but as we know, when attention spans wane it is time to introduce FAMOUS PEOPLE.  That’s right. Here’s where they plot on the graph:

At this point I’m thinking that it’s no wonder I firmly believe the world is royally screwed up – it seems that many of our leaders reside in the upper right hand part of the upper right hand quadrant. In common with lots of world leaders, I have studied both law and political science (specifically, human rights) and I continue to be amazed that folks who must have read the same weighty tomes of convincing left-wing libertarian thoughts of a bundle of eminent thinkers can consistently spew such right-wing ill-thought-through downright-mean old clap-trap.

Ed Milliband is the son of a full-blown Marxist and known as Red Ed in the UK for his astonishingly left-wing position on many policy areas. Yet there he is, in the upper right quadrant.  I’m not even going to comment on the inclusion of Mitt Romney, because it hurts me to think about him for the length of time required to formulate the violent expletives warranted.

So I took the quiz and wondered where I would come out.  And the answer is:

 

That was a surprise even to me.  It’s no wonder I spend such a hefty dollop of time getting righteously pissed off at The State of Things.

Am I such an outlier? Not based on the self-selecting sample of folk at the party – I found one person whose dot was so far over to the left the graph wasn’t big enough to accommodate his views, and someone else who was just slightly more to the right and up.  Even K-man (and I say this with fondness) sits in the lower left quadrant.

If you are inclined to spend the five minutes to take the test and tell me the results, I would be interested to find out where your dot lands on this chart.  No judgment, no authoritarianism, nothing but curiosity.  I think left is best, but that’s because that’s what I am.

How Not to Be A Photographer

K-man got me a new toy for Christmas.  This is a Nikon J1. It is, apparently, an old model. The only thing I care about is that it was half price, down from eye-wateringly expensive to heart-racingly expensive, which means I could legitimately put it on my gift list. And make no mistake, it is a hell of a gift. I’ll be on best behaviour for a while.

Obviously a camera like this instantly transforms you into a professional-quality photographer who can take well-composed photographs with just the right exposure. I’m half-way through the manual, but hey! Who needs instructions, right?

 

This is what happened when I took the camera off the Do Everything For Me setting.  Really.

I availed myself of the instruction manual, the power of the internet, and several hours.  After a time, I was able to achieve a focused background and a blurred foreground.  And then, something clicked.  No, they’re not perfect, but there is progress:

It’s still slightly blurred in the foreground.  The rest of that blurring was intentional.  Seriously! Confusingly, the camera kit I got came with two lenses. I’m still learning their relative limitations. Also, I’d had wine, thought ‘art is great!‘  and it was late.  I imagined I was the Shakespeare of the photography world and for a brief moment, when I viewed this image on the camera’s LCD screen, my dream became reality. Once uploaded and viewed closer to full size on the Mac’s display, truth kicked beauty’s butt.

You can’t tell this from my advanced ability in selecting portrait backgrounds, but I am playing with the aperture size.  This background is blurred, I tell you.  Alfie looks furious; the power of his anger has evidently created an odd halo of light around him.  It couldn’t be anything I did.

The weather has been especially shitty lately, and today was no exception. But it was dry. I toddled out to the garden to see if I could use the many fast-moving creatures who live there to test my shutter-speed selection strategy.

The answer, folks, was not really.  In England, of course, daylight doesn’t always mean daylight.  Sometimes it means the sky looks like wet newspaper.  Since photography is all about light, woman, that means a fast shutter-speed doesn’t let enough light in. Aperture adjustments just weren’t cutting it. Or at least that’s what I think the problem was. I took about one hundred photographs, and what you see below is the best of the best, after they’ve been through image manipulation software.

This is an artichoke leaf at the back of the garden, in the shitty patch. See how the background is all blurred?  That, for me, is a major achievement.  I was taking this close-up with the telephoto lens, because I was too lazy to go back inside the house and get the smaller lens with other numbers written on it.

One of the evil sunflower-head-eating forces at work in our garden.  Here he is, in his domain high in the tree-tops. Normally he is leaping between the trees or stealing food from someone.  Just when I actually wanted him to be moving about so I could test the shutter-speed settings, he was stock still.

 Bastard.

This is my favourite.  Quite obliging when it came to sitting for telephoto portraits, but still wouldn’t move so I could test my shutter-speed ideas.

I can see it is going to take some time for me to get the hang of this.  I must squash my lazy attitude, pony up the hours of manual-reading required, and spend serious time experimenting.

You know what really blows my mind about this?

This is the best I could manage after hours with a really good camera, plus computer aided image manipulation. The camera does 95% of the work for me. I set either shutter-speed or aperture size (I am scared of the fully manual setting at the moment), and it does the rest. I don’t have to worry about putting the wrong type of film in the camera, and I can fix small screw-ups using my computer.  I have to remember about four things. Next time, I will think about light metering and exposure compensation and other parts of the manual I haven’t read yet.

But actual real photographers (people like my friend Lane, who has inspired my new hobby to no small extent), they create images far far far better on their worst days than I could ever dream of on my best day.  And they do it with film cameras.  I find that simply mind-boggling for the sheer quantity of talent and dedication and outright skill it requires.

Twenty What Now?

Happy new year to you!

This blog has been a flabby and floundering fillet for too long.  My excuses range from the fact that there is a permanent dull ache in my buttocks from the kicking my full time job regularly administers, right through to the outlandish amount of time I spend procrastinating through the medium of the internet.  There’s also the fact that every time I have logged in to WordPress in the last few months I have been confronted with changes that I would need to learn about before I could compose a new post.  It’s like clawing through fog.

The last year has been my best year in a while, mostly.  The one elephant in the room holds a sign in his trunk which reads ‘Oh Holy Fuck’, but the sign does not belong to me.  Once I figure out my own place in the giant familial shit-storm I will write about it from that angle.

Tradition dictates that I must arrive at some New Year Recommendations.  The important thing about recommendations rather than resolutions is that they are just that: recommendations.  I would like to change my life in the following ways, but I give myself no guarantees as to the quality of the outcomes I can achieve, though I will give it my best shot.  This low-fi approach to life means less beating myself up.  So:

1. No more bloody smoking. I am serious this time. Too many are the occasions where I have been whammed upside the head by self-hatred the morning after a night out, because my mouth feels like it’s been coated in the contents of the hoover bag.  Too many health-giving running sessions end in my wheezing.  I’ll have to re-read that Allen Carr book (the big thick one with too many pages and too small a font) and this time I am not giving it away thinking I’ve cured myself. I will try not to remember that Allen Carr died of lung cancer.  It is not too late for me. 
2. [Insert Art Here].  For the last year, it has struck me how little art there is in my life.  I’m quite musical. I love to read.  I like writing.  The internet vortex sucketh hard, and now I barely manage to do anything but surf the web or watch TV in my spare time (far be it from me to suggest that TV cannot be art, but recall that I am partial to the KarKrashians and the only creativity involved in those women is plastic surgery). I believe my life would be more fulfilling if I got up off my backside occasionally and challenged myself.  I will read more, and log my thoughts on what I’ve read on this blog. I will write more, which will also appear on this blog. I will try to tighten up my writing and prevent egregious bouts of fingertip-diarhhea. I will learn how to take decent photographs (aided by my brand new Christmas present of a Nikon J1; long have I hankered after a Nikon camera, for which I blame Simon and Garfunkel).
3. More running.  My  mileage these days is woeful. I have new socks, new full-length running tights, a borrowed buff for cold weather ear-protection, and an expanding arse. Each month I will increase my total mileage, and I will enter one local distance race and train for it.  If I am feeling under-motivated, I will watch Mo Farah win gold in the 10,000m in London. And if I’m still feeling too old and tired, I’ll watch him take the 5,000m too.

I think that’s quite enough for one year. I hope 2013 brings you your heart’s desires.

Understudied

Well, Mildreds!  Life as a full time employee trying to impress is certainly harshing my mellow.  I spend approximately 38 hours a week working, and twelve hours travelling.  In between that and sleep I somehow have to squash in two social lives, several hours of catching up on The Voice, and pursuit of my advanced certificate in Lounging.  I’m expected to assist with tedious minutiae like food shopping, meal preparation, gardening, and laundry, but at least I finally cracked and hired a cleaner.  Most days I count myself lucky I’m not responsible for anyone else’s wellbeing. 

And of course there are the many hours I spend patiently tolerating my home being ripped apart around me.  

I hope you’re all well. 

When last we spoke, I had promised photographs of the finished spare room.  I regret to inform you that I am unable to do so at this time.  There are several reasons for this.  

Chief among these is the fact that for reasons I can’t quite fathom, a benevolent spirit hasn’t flown down from the ether and given me an SLR camera.  Instead, I continue to use my iPhone camera to take crappy pictures. 

Another reason is that I have apparently misunderstood something about how and where my iPhone stores pictures, or suffered a memory relapse, or both.  I swear I took some photos of the spare bedroom  several weeks ago when it was freshly finished.  My technological idiocy ate them and belched up a big cloud of zeros.  

Why don’t you just toddle into the spare bedroom and take some more?  I hear you ask.  Well.  WELL.  

I hardly know where to begin.  I think K-man fears a 2013 moratorium on home improvement and so he sprang so swiftly into action that before I could draw breath, the contents of the study had been emptied into the spare room and I was being pressured into choosing paint colours and replacement furniture.  

The content of the study includes no less than 14 years worth of pointless paper that we hadn’t got around to filing or shredding.  There’s no point moving shit back in that you really should throw away, right?  So, the spare room is full of an assortment of paperwork loosely categorised into piles, a superfluous computer table, a deconstructed refectory table, a bin-bag full of shredded paper, and seven million tools K-man insists he can’t put back in the garage yet. 

But the study is done and ready for its close-up.  It’s a crying shame I don’t have an SLR or know how to use it, but I thought I’d bring you pictures of the study while I still have my sanity. 

As ever, let’s remind ourselves of the journey so far.  

 

This mural from hell is where we began.  

 

The seascape isn’t easy to live with, so we made a temporary fix using what we could forage from the locality. 

 

To the distant eye, this looks OK.  What you can’t see is the cracked ceiling, and the bits of yellow smudge on the woodwork, left-over from the seascape.  We were too lazy to paint the woodwork, and just slapped on paint to cover the worst, knowing that later we would do the job properly.  It was an eyeball-saving emergency situation which required urgent energy.  We lived with this for two years.  

After one weekend and a few evenings of K-man’s effort, we have ended up with this: 

 

I don’t know about you, but I live for grainy images of someone else’s house.  Anyway, the walls are smoothed, the ceiling is re-papered, and the woodwork is painted.  The only shit thing that remains is the cheap laminate floor.  Re-carpeting the house is the next phase.  We bought new furniture from some gent on Ebay.  The filing cabinet takes up much less floor space, and is a 1930s antique tambour-fronted gem.

 

 The desk is an old library desk (we think) and it’s perfect for my child, Mac.

The colour on the walls is Farrow & Ball’s Mizzle.  To the naked eye it looks exactly like Light Blue, which we painted the lounge and dining room in.  I’m sure the people at Farrow & Ball could tell the difference, but I can’t.    

 

Now that the giant refectory table is given over to Christmas Family Entertaining Duty (I’ll tell you another time how I came to agree to having everyone here for festive fun), there is enough floor space to open the sofa bed and remain in the room at the same time.  I know!  Revolutionary. 

Of course, it looks quite good now, because there’s still a sizeable mountain of crap in the spare room that needs to be reintroduced into its natural habitat.  I’d like a lamp for the top of the filing cabinet; K-man wants an in-tray to stop us piling all the paperwork that arrives on the kitchen worktop until its centre of gravity becomes too high and it falls over.  I’ve lost count of the important documents and bank cards I’ve called Whatever Company to ask why the hell they haven’t sent, only to discover them months later when we finally deal with the paperwork. 

Newly-decorated studies are like new stationery – a thing of inspiration.  I honestly believe I will now file things instantly, and never lose important paperwork again.