meish dot org: life, unfolding

My new commute involves taking the train and transferring at a big, busy urban interchange. I’m learning a lot about my commute – and the fine art of commuting – of which more in time, I’m sure.

But a little glimpse for now: last night, waiting at St Pancras, I noticed that the people on the opposite platform (waiting for the northbound train) were huddled in particular formations relating to where the doors open when the train eventually arrives.

This tells us three things.

1. The train’s obviously going to be busy when it arrives, so proximity to the door is everything
2. You’ve got to do a lot of commuting before you know not just which zone to stand in so you’re near the exit when you get off, but where the doors open
3. If you’re not standing in prime position (by the doors when they open), you’re going to get left behind

A couple of years ago, P and I went to a wedding on the North York Moors. We stayed in a rather faded (but decently-reviewed on Tripadvisor) hotel near the prom in Scarborough, and aside from a wobbly start when we arrived and discovered that the room had been cleaned but not the bathroom (eugh!) we had a perfectly pleasant stay for a couple of nights.

We barely spent any time there, just dashing in to shower and change outfits in between the social engagements which cluster around a wedding for old friends. But we made a point of having a decent breakfast both mornings, because you never know when you’re going to be fed at someone else’s nuptials, do you?

On the first morning, we showed up at the high-ceilinged breakfast room at eight, and were shown to a table in the window. Unsurprisingly for a hotel at the seaside on the first weekend in August, there were plenty of guests in residence, most of whom were already seated, in even-numbered clumps at tables adorned with white cloths and posies of plastic flowers in unnatural colours.

As we perused the menu, a man with a slightly Fawlty-esque moustache walked in carrying a pot of coffee. He approached the table to the left of us, which held two slightly rotund and red-faced couples wearing floral blouses (shes) and pastel polo shirts (hes).

“Right then, who’s for coffee?” the man with the pot bellowed

“Me please,” said one of the men.

“And me, Frank,” said his floral other half.

“Tea for me, thanks,” said the other man.

“Oh aye, I might’ve known there’d be trouble,” said the proprietor, “there’s always one awkward one.”

“If it’s not too much bother, Frank…” said the man who’d asked for tea,

“Bother? Oh no. It’s no bother to go all the way back to the kitchen for the other pot. Not with my bad knee; don’t you worry about it, Geoff. I’ll be right.”

“Well, while you’re there, how about some more toast?” asked the second floral woman.

“Easy there Margaret,” said Frank, “you’ll never fit into your bikini down at the beach if you keep eating at this rate!”

The table guffawed, as Margaret patted her stomach in a contented way. Frank, the coffee wielding owner, limped off in an exaggerated way, to retrieve a teapot from the distant kitchen.

P and I nervously perused the breakfast menu and wondered if we were brave enough to ask for a hot beverage if asked.

It was a warm day; we settled for orange juice from the buffet, somewhat relieved.

Last year, we visited Wensleydale for a few days and stayed a couple of nights in a converted barn B&B in the western dale. It was a lovely place and the owners were considerate and gracious hosts during our stay.

On the first night we were there, we were the only guests, and breakfast the next morning was calm and quiet. On the second night of our visit, two other couples were in residence, and the breakfast that followed was somewhat different.

“Hello there,” said the owner to the one of the other couples at their table, as he brought them toast, “sorry to miss you last night when you got here. Did you have a good meal? Find somewhere good? Marvellous.”

He turned to us and topped up the coffee in our cups, “more toast for you, too? Righty-ho.”

He disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with a toastrack, his wife behind him bearing warm croissants and pastries.

Just at that moment, the other couple entered the breakfast room.

“Oh no,” said Mrs Owner, “Not these two again.”

Mr Owner joined in “Can’t get rid of you, can we?”

As they took their seats, smiling, he turned to our table and said in a loud stage whisper, “We keep telling them we’ve moved in the hope that they’ll get the hint, but they keep coming back, the daft twats.”

This weekend, I had the good fortune to spend a night in a small village not far from Harrogate. When I arrived, the B&B hostess opened the door, looked me up and down, sniffed slightly and ushered me in. I went upstairs to the room she led me to, and she reeled off a list of rules and details which I didn’t really need to know given that I was only going to be there for less than twelve hours.

Aside from when I popped downstairs to return my what-I-want-for-breakfast form (really) and ask for the WiFi password (a request which, despite the generous gushings about its free and ample provision in the bound guest information folder upstairs, the proprietress greeted with the sort of face that implied I’d just asked if I could please poo on the bedspread) that was the limit of my conversation with her for the extend of my stay.

The next morning at breakfast, her husband brought me tea and toast monosyllabically as I sat alone in silence at a giant table set for three in the cavernous, beamed dining hall.

I sipped my tea and munched on toast and thought about the day I had ahead and the bossy little comic sans signs which peppered my guest bedroom urging me not to spill red wine on the bedspread (I don’t have any), not to smoke out of the window (I don’t), allow my children to make noise after 10pm (see my first point, above) or move the television from its position (move the table instead).

A couple of minutes later, the other guests came down the sweeping staircase and took their seats.

Mrs Owner came out of the kitchen as she heard their chairs scraping across the tiled floor.

“Oh good morning!” she gushed to the new arrivals, “how did you sleep?”

She fussed over to the welsh dresser and pressed play on a CD player, so a little light chamber music drifted out over the table.

“Now, for breakfast this morning we’ve got porridge if you like, and did you want a cooked breakfast? Don’t worry if you didn’t put it on the form last night. What’ll it be? Full Yorkshire? Or I could rustle you up some poached eggs if you’d prefer?”

I silently chewed my toast, and wondered what I had done wrong, to be treated with such disdain.

And on the train home, I realised that there’s a sort of universal northern theory of interpersonal relationships, which dictate the level of civility you can expect in line with the closeness of your relationship to someone.

It looks something like this:

If someone doesn’t know you or like you, you can expect them to be brusque (at best) and openly hostile (at worst). Once you become more familiar, this mellows into a studied indifference, and as soon as they get to know you and/or like you a bit, this turns into the genial chit-chat that you might expect to be the normal point of entry for social relationships.

And then, as your relationship deepens, there’s an uncomfortable bit of indifference again before it becomes open season on personal insults and the camaraderie of mutual abuse which indicates that you’re really good friends, in fact.

I’m sure this is true in various other bits of the country, but nowhere have I experienced it more than in Yorkshire and the environs, and specifically in B&Bs and hotels.

I suppose that the special relationships which come about from regular visits to a particular establishment must lead to a particular kind of bond, based on teasing, affront and mockery. But it’s bloody perplexing to figure out where you sit in the continuum and how to navigate its perilous course.

Part of my tenth blogiversary series.

1. Never parted on the tube
2. Things you don’t see every day on the way to work
3. H&C line, morning
4. Bus sketch
5. At the arrivals gate
6. Three tube sketches
7. Sketches of France
8. Putting on
9. Honk
10. Three shirts

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Seth Godin poses the question “Am I the only one distracted by apostrophes and weird quoting?”

When I get a manuscript or see a sign that misuses its and it’s and quotes, I immediately assume that the person who created it is stupid.

I understand that this is a mistake on my part. They’re not necessarily totally stupid, they’re just stupid about apostrophes.

No, it’s not just you Seth. We are judging them.

Longtime readers of this site may be aware that this is a particular bugbear of mine, and one that I have ranted about previously in these pages – with specific reference to marketing and other professional communications – and devised a classification system or malapostrophication offences, to boot.

1. Permissible Error
This usually means that the sign is handwritten, chalked or otherwise home-produced, and is generally an indication that the writer was in a hurry, or without English as a mother tongue, or both, and can therefore be permitted to make a small, apostrophe-sized slip once in a while. Classic greengrocer’s apostrophe territory.

2. Should Know Better
These are usually printed items which are created for a one-off, limited audience purpose. It tends to be that this usage is seen in charity shops, local church/school/community organisation newsletters and on the stand-up A-frame boards for independent delicatessens and sandwich shops. Most of these will have either been created by the proprietor or, occasionally, created by a signwriter acting under direct comission commission (oops!) from the owner. 99% of the time, it’s a plural error.

3. Utterly unforgivable
These are the real clangers. High distribution (vast print run – adverts, merchandise and the like), very visible channels (like billboards and television), otherwise high production values (design, or materials used) and – most importantly of all – very likely to have passed (in copy, design and approval stages) through the hands of several people, at least one of whom should have spotted the mistake. This is a quality issue, and is something that creative or marketing agencies (especially) are particularly bad at managing.

That post from March last year contains a number of photographic examples, too.

As an additional example, here’s a photo of our local chippy, captured for posterity by one of my neighbours:

All the right bits, just not necessarily in the right place.

It’s been like that for at least the six years I’ve lived here, and I’ve come to think of it as one would a slightly batty aunt – well meaning, a little scatty, beyond redemption but utterly forgiveable because she knows how to make a mean saveloy & chips.

On the tube, they cannot let go of each other. There must always be something touching – thighs; fingers; shoulders; lips.

When a single seat becomes available, he urges her to take it and then hovers in front of her. She reaches out; they touch.

Father is reading a battered HP Lovecraft. His hems hitch up to mid calf when he sits down, exposing an inch of pallid flesh between black sock and trouserleg. He forages in his hand luggage and extracts a pair of expensive sound-cancelling headphones from the depths. Snapping them over his ears so the soft pads flatten the white whiskers of his beard, he announces to his travelling companions: “excuse me while I disappear into sonic isolation.”

They roll their eyes at each other, as if this is the kind of thing he does all the time.

Daughter is dressed for work, and reading the inflight magazine for Andromeda Spaceways. Her neat work bag and casual shoes contrast with her parents, who are kitted out for a journey. She is in commute mode: unmoveable, unflappable, undisturbable.

Mother is a rummager. She ferrets in the big blue bag for a while, then (having retrieved a pen), hands it to father across the aisle. He grumps from within his cone of silence and bundles it on his knee, balancing the rear weight of it on his leather bumbag. She continues fossicking deep within the black bag with the corporate travel luggage tag. Whatever she’s looking for, it’s in there somewhere.

For two stops she roots about in the overstuffed knapsack, feeling her way for the prize.

Glancing around the carriage distractedly, father’s eyes light on her quizzical rummaging and offer an eyebrow of help. She shakes her head and switches hand.

Just….maybe…..aha! From the bowels of the bag, she draws a tatty lime green exercise book, complete with a printed table of mathematical and computing functions on the back cover. Then she has a micro-rummage for the pen again, before using it to make a note in the book. Then book is slid back into the coccoon of the black bag, and she taps father on the knee and beckons for the blue bag again. Pen is returned to the depths of the blue, and all is calm.

Distracted from HP Lovecraft, father glances to check the safety of the suitcases, then fingers flit to breast pocket of his crisp white shirt to feel for the tickets, check that they are where they should be.

They are safe. Their journey is under way. The train rumbles them towards departures.

Sometimes, there’s more beauty (or at least aesthetic interest) in removed or partially removed things than in what was there before.

This seems especially true with advertising.

They’re doing lots of restoration work in the bowels of King’s Cross tube station at the moment. These former advertising posters can be found in the entry/egress tunnels from the Victoria line platforms.

More after the jump…
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So, Google Streetview launched the other day to much interested noodling (webby people), amazed searching (not-so-webby people), cautious concern about privacy (non-fans of Google and surveillance society watchers) and uninformed/deranged The-Day-Today-like hyperbole (Daily Mail, et al).*

I have nothing to add to this, except to say that I’m chuffed it’s arrived in the UK for three reasons.

One: I’ve been using streetview in the US, Australia/NZ and Europe to check out whether hotels I’m likely to stay at are next door to student nightclubs advertising perpetual happy hours and free entry for laydeez. This is a remarkably effective way of sussing out a neighbourhood before you arrive – where’s the nearest coffee place? What’s the walk to the subway like? Now I’m going to be able to do it for the UK, too.

Two: We’re thinking about maybe buying a house. streetview is one more tool in the arsenal of the curious homebuyer in determining what the neighbourhood is like.

Three: Last summer, at 6.06pm on July 22nd in fact, (flying ant day – most auspicious!), I was sitting on the top deck of a 243 bus going around the roundabout at Waterloo, towards the station, when I saw a strange car with a weird thing mounted to the roof. I immediately clocked it as a Google Streetview contraption, and twittered:

Just spotted the google streetview car going round the imax at Waterloo. Wonder how they’ll deal with doubledecker buses obscuring stuff?

And if you look at that very spot on google maps, you can see the very bus I was on, and a fuzzy figure on the top desk, caught mid-wave.

You (OK, I) can tell it’s me because
a) that’s where I was sitting and
b) you can see my watch, which I wear on my right wrist, like a lefty (which I’m not).

So there you have it.

I’m not outraged.

I’M INTERNET FAMOUS!

Finally.

* UPDATE, 27/03/09: I’ve revised this opening paragraph to better reflect the breadth of the debate. It’s not as black-and-white as I originally portrayed (albeit jokingly). Apologies to anyone who felt misrepresented.

From the waist up, he’s on his way to work. Jacket, shirt in fashionable shade, tie an electrifying green. Hair three weeks past time for a cut and a shave which hasn’t yet happened, but we all have bad days.

From the waist down, however, it’s a different story.

Navy blue Adidas track training trousers, worn bobbly and thin at the thigh and with ragged threads hanging down where they have been chopped off above the ankle, revealing greyed towelling socks stuffed into paint-flecked black brogues, shabby at the back, but carefully shined at the toe.

It’s like his torso and his feet made an appointment, but forgot to tell his legs.

He chews his thumbnail, inspects, chews again, before rummaging in the suit pockets. Drawing out a matchbox, he studies it intently from both sides – there’s something written on the end in tiny blue scrawl – before sliding it open to reveal a metal cap from a bottle of Guinness and a tightly folded wad of paper, pinkish. He unfurls it carefully, smoothing out the creases, and it becomes clear that it’s a fifty pound note. He slides it into a leather wallet, produced from an inner pocket, and pats it back into its hiding place when he’s done.

The bottlecap stays out, tumbled magically and silently for two stops through rough fingers. He makes it casade, and vanish, then reappear, while his face gives nothing away.

As the train slows into the station, he mounts the cap onto the middle button of his suit with a deft twist, straightens his tie, smooths his tracky bottoms, and steps out into the day.

Fantastic article (via kottke) about noticing things, and the way noticing can be helpful in design and innovation.

“But once I’d noticed something and photographed it, chances were good that I’d notice it again—as if that click of opening the shutter coincided with the creation of a new info-capture zone in my brain.

This process of noticing once and then noticing again is how you start finding patterns and uncovering themes…”

This is similar to what I was getting at a couple of months back when I wrote about being receptive while on a commute (especially, but elsewhere too), and finding patterns, similarities, in the seeming chaos. It’s a key skill in anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork, and one which yields rewards in other areas, too.

The article takes the form of a conversation between two men working in the field of design, customer insight and research. It’s a great interaction, and a lovely way of exploring the theme:

Soltzberg: Which really supports what we were talking about earlier, that it all begins with noticing. There’s another classic Zen concept that everything you need to know and experience is already happening and present, but you need to get your old ways of thinking out of the way so you can experience it.Doing contextual research is like using “super-noticing power” to peel back those layers of preconception, culture and habit. When you do that you get to something fundamental and then you’ve got a really solid platform for developing new concepts.

Portigal: Super-noticing power really is a strong cultural idea. The enhanced human with awesome noticing and synthesizing powers crops up regularly in science fiction (e.g., the Mentats in the Dune series or the neurachem from Richard Morgan’s books).

Soltzberg: Right, sort of like a super-charged version of William Gibson’s Cayce Pollard character in Pattern Recognition.

Noticing definitely draws on a set of skills that these kinds of characters embody and amplify, but at the heart of it you have to genuinely be interested in the world around you and in other people.

Super-noticing is something which happens a lot if you’re trained to be receptive and observant, but also if you’re thinking about a particular thing.

Years ago, in 1990, I won a scholarship to go and study for two years at an international college in western Canada. Having never been to Canada before, I became hyper-aware of the mention of anything Canadian, so all of a sudden there seemed to be holiday offers to Canada and visits by minor royals to Canada and singers from Canada releasing new albums and documentaries about wildlife in northern Canada and books set in Canada and Canada Canada Canada Canada Canada everywhere I looked.

Was there really a sudden surge in True North (strong & free)-related promotions and media in the spring and summer of 1990, or had that stuff been there all along, only now I was more attuned to it and therefore noticed it more than previously?
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