meish dot org: life, unfolding

[I recently upgraded to a new phone. In the process of scrubbing things off the old handset, I found this word sketch of a tube journey home from an evening out a while back.]

Men on the northern line coming from the awards dinner I’ve just come from. I’m sober(ish), but they’re drooling on each other, discussing the best satellite porn channels and the acts they’re going to perform on their wives when they get home. It’s charming, in a ridiculous, pissed, shouty, colleaguey machismo bullshit obnoxious kind of way.

The bald northern one calls everything and everyone a cunt. The fat one apologises for him repeatedly, explaining “he’s from Leeds”, before leering at girls on adjacent seats and trying to persuade the other to stop off for a final pint at Charing Cross.

This, I feel, would be a bad move.

It seems that several pints, absinthe and champagne in (their words) “less time than it takes to have a wank” are a recipe for lurching, leering and idiocy.

“Have you got a mirror?” Baldy asks every female on the train. No-one has.

“Have I got bloodshot eyes?” he demands. He does, but no-one will tell him, because no-one wants to get involved. Wisely, it seems.

“You’re an ugly, fat cunt,” drools baldy.

“Yeah,” says fatty, “but at least I’ve still got hair”

Thank heaven for small mercies. And my stop.

On the bus earlier today, I overheard a woman on the phone telling someone “I’ll missed-call you when I’m near your place, so you can come and meet me”

I mentioned this on Twitter, and various people responded, sharing their own versions of this little trick.

“My mum says ‘I’ll give you 3 rings’” (@a_williams)

“Brings back familiar sound of a trimphone ringing three times after grandparents got home safely” (@crouchingbadger)

“Even better, in italian, they have a proper word for it: ’squillino’ which means ‘miss call’ or ‘buzz’” (@dvydra)

“V standard in Italy…they call it giving someone ‘uno squillo’” (@ron_n)

“In Australia, we say ‘I’ll prank you’ referring to a prank call you’re not supposed to pick up” (@lukely78)

“Known as the ‘one-ring’ round my parts” (@genzaichi)

“When I was little, my mum would get ‘three rings’ when I was heading home from a neighbour’s house” (@philgyford)

I’ve known for a while that people in (especially) sub-saharan Africa have used the missed-call functionality - calling someone, letting it ring once, then hanging up before they answer, so they see a missed call from the original caller, and use their mobile credit or account to call back. They call this “Beeping” and there are established social rules for doing it.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, I’ve heard (but can’t find a reference for, sorry) about pirate radio stations using hangups as a way of collecting votes on a particular track (”If you like this track, beep me now….that last song got 87 beeps”)

Twenty years ago or so, when I was living abroad and travelling around a lot, I used a nifty way of checking in with my family periodically, without costing anyone anything.

The ruse was simple, and played out as follows:

1. Place a collect (reverse charges) call to your family back home via the operator
2. When the operator asks for a name, you tell them you’re called “Alice Oakey”
3. When someone answers the phone, the operator says “I’ve got a collect call for you from Alice Oakey. Will you accept the charges?”
4. The hapless family member says no.
5. The operator disconnects the call, but by this point - for free - your family knows Alice Oakey…or to put it another way, “All is OK” (A friend subsequently invented another version which involved the name “Amy Fine” and a male friend later created an alter ego of “Noel Probbs”)

This means that if you ever had to place a call that needed a response, or you were in trouble or anything, you could give your real name and your family would know to accept the charges. But at all other times, the message would get through, without cost.

I’ve no idea whether this still works, or if they’ve changed the way that collect calls are placed. But at the time, it was rather handy for periodic messageless checking in.

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.

For as long as I’ve lived in London, I’ve lived under the flight path.

That’s not saying much, of course - most of central, west and south-west London is affected by plane noise, as they circle over the suburbs, make a languid turn over Tower bridge and then approach to Heathrow along the Thames.

I remember standing on the school playing fields (when I should undoubtedly have been chasing a hockey ball or hustling to class) and looking up at planes not so far overhead, trying to identify the airline from the tail fin design. Alitalia. BA. Pan Am. SAS. Lufthansa. Countries in the sky.

For most of the last decade, I’ve lived directly under the flight path, in Mortlake by the river, which is the point where the wheels come down on the landing approach.

When we first moved here, I was hyper-aware of the planes. I’d wake up as the first flight droned overhead around 04.30, before dropping off again. And then, throughout the day and evening, every thirty seconds, they’d rumble over on their way to landing: loud enough that you’d miss a few seconds of important dialogue in the film you were watching, or have to pause your conversation for a spell. Before Concorde stopped flying, the air would be thunderous for nearly a minute as it slid overhead.

Yet most of the time, I didn’t mind the planes. They reminded me that up above, people were about three minutes from landing - homecomings, holidays, greetings and meetings. Three minutes before landing, everything is put away and switched off. There’s nothing to do but look out of the window at the huge expanse of London below and anticipate the moment when you’ll touch down. It’s nice to sit in my study, or in the back garden, or lie in bed and think of people in a suspended, anticipatory, excited state above, just moments from an arrival.

And I’ve been in those planes, too. I purposefully sit by the window when returning to London, usually on the right of the plane, so I can drink in the sparkling city. And what a welcome home.

Greenwich. Tower bridge. Cannon Street. Waterloo. Green Park. Hyde Park and the Royal Albert Hall. The Empress building. Queen’s Club. Hammersmith bridge. Leg o’mutton nature reserve at Barnes. My house, by the bend in the river. Dukes Meadows driving range. Brentford. Hounslow. Heathrow. Home.

In the months after September 11, 2001, the sound of planes took on a different edge. More menacing. Despite the fact that they were still just tootling along toward the landing runway, sometimes the noise sounded surprisingly loud - Too loud? Too low?

And there were other concerns, too - we can’t shop in our local Sainsbury’s without thinking of the tragic tale of the man who fell to earth - a story that sounds apocryphal, but horrifyingly, happened. More than once. Knowing that certainly lends an edge to doing your weekly shop. We glance nervously at the passing planes sometimes, too.

I woke yesterday morning to the sound of birds in the trees outside the window, and wondered what was missing. It took a while to realise the absence of planes made this place feel different.

It’s been a strange combination of eerie and delightful these last few days having no plane noise at all.

No contrails. No regular rumble overhead. Because there are no planes.

The atmosphere over most of Europe, they tell us, is full of dangerous ash. And yet the skies seem so beautifully, strangely empty.

I missed the actual tenth birthday of this blog/me blogging but I can’t let a milestone like that go unmarked, can I?

Originally started as a place to store and share links, this blog gradually became a place to playfully interact with the world, and over time that turned from introspection to exploration of the world, media, experiences and ideas. I don’t think I’m alone in that kind of journey with blogs.

I am immensely (unreasonably, perhaps even pathetically) proud of having been blogging for so long. I can say confidently that I was in at the beginning, when all this were fields. I was here before many of you young whippersnappers who have gone on to eclipse me, and blogging, and the web entirely in their success and influence. I don’t put my early involvement down to canny prescience about the way the web was turning so much as an inevitability given my proclivity for tinkering with web things, my early academic and personal interest in communicating online and my inability to shut up. Blogging and me; it was only a matter of time and technology before we found each other.

I was there. I remember the start, and the hype, popularisation, commercialisation and ubiquitisation which followed. I couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but my blogging was to introduce me to dozens of interesting people, influence others to start doing it too, cause interesting opportunities (and worrying situations) to develop. Blogging has become part of what I am, what I do. I blog now for the same reasons I did in early 2000: because I can’t not tinker with and publish to the web.

Ten years ago, I was embarrassed to mention having a blog in polite company, because it was so difficult to understand - not just what but why. These days, even both my parents have blogs. It’s not a weird niche oddball geek thing anymore. It’s so normal it’s almost passé. Good.

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Stumbled across this earlier tonight when sorting through photos for my new MOO cards.

Still one of my favourite shots from my visit a couple of years ago. I’d love to go back.

You know, of course, that hotel rooms have multiple occupants. Multiple sequential occupants, that is - unless you’re staying in a supercheap eastern European hostel like I did in Budapest in 1993, where the number of occupants definitely outnumbered the number of bunk beds, and where you had to pick your way down corridors lined with coccoon-like sleeping bagged sleepers in the middle of the night if you needed the loo.

So you know, logically, that the hotel room you occupy for a night or longer was stayed in by someone else before you, and will be the resting place for someone else again after you. That’s the point of hotel rooms. That’s how they make their money.

But part of the deal of staying in a hotel is that while you’re there, you get to ignore the fact that you’re sharing a sleeping area with the microbes of hundreds, thousands of strangers.

If it’s a good hotel, they clean it properly before you arrive. They change the bedlinen (apart from the decorative pillows and the patterned comforter which you must NEVER TOUCH for this precise reason).
Vaccuum the floor to get rid of the crusty bits that come off other people’s feet when they’re padding around barefoot.
Wipe the bathroom down to get rid of odd smears and puddles, and mop the floor to remove stray pubes and dandruff.
Straighten the curtains, desk furniture, chairs.
Put the remote back next to the TV.
Whisk away old glasses and mugs and restock the minibar.

And when you’re gone, they’ll do the same all over again, to remove any evidence that you were ever there.

If it’s a good hotel, you need never become aware that someone else had been there before you. But sometimes, even in the nicest hotels, with the mist diligent cleaning staff, they miss stuff.

If you’re lucky, it’s slight greasy smear on the window at nose-height from someone twitching aside the net curtain and pressing their face up against the glass to gaze out at the view. Or a small-denomination coin that’s rolled under the chair. Or a conference namebadge that lingers at the bottom of a drawer.

If you’re unlucky, it’s something worse. Something biological or otherwise unspeakable.

The other day, I stayed in a nice hotel in Oxford. It was clean and (mostly) quiet, with a decent internet connection and walkable to everywhere I needed to be - which means it fulfills my basic criteria for a business trip, though the lack of Marmite at breakfast the next morning was troubling. I had no complaints about the hotel at all. The room was big enough. The bathroom was spotless. I slept well on comfy, soft sheets. No problems.

There was nothing to suggest that anyone else had ever been there. Just as it should be. For one night, we all (me, the hotel owners and staff) pretended that it was, in fact, my room.

In the morning, I had a shower, and when I emerged I was suddenly struck with the realisation that someone - two someones, in fact - had been there before me.

In my room.

In my bathroom.

Sleeping (and not) in my bed.

Scrawled in large handwriting on the steamed-up mirror, a love note, to someone else. Only visible when the mirror was fully fogged, it read “I LOVE YOU.” How long had it been there? A night? A weekend? A month? All year?

And who were these people? Young lovers? Rekindling an old flame? An illicit tryst? And was the love returned? Or consumated? Or spurned? Did the lovee even see the message, blindly groping from a hot shower in search of glasses and a towel?

Strange to suddenly realise you’re not as alone in a space as you might have originally thought.

Not to underplay the serious inconvenience caused by inclement meteorological conditions to some parts of the UK, but I’d just like to take a moment to reflect on this typically calm and understated headline from yesterday’s London Evening Standard:

A few points.

If you’re still measuring the snow in inches rather than feet or yards, it’s not an “extreme” weather event, it’s a “bothersome” one. The words “extreme weather” should apply to total snowmageddon, not tobogganing & a bit of a whinge about slippery pavements.

“Extreme weather” seems like a rather odd overstatement by the Met Office. It brings to mind scenes from The Day After Tomorrow. Epic, unbelievable, unusual weather with catastrophic effects.

Hurricane Katrina was extreme. The 1988 ice storm in Quebec was extreme. The heatwave + drought + bushfires in SE Australia in early 2009 were extreme.

In this photo, taken during last night’s snow, you can still see the cars.

This is a good indication that it’s not an extreme weather event. Yet. Whatever the hysteria from media and transport providers may otherwise indicate.

OK, it doesn’t snow often in London, but it does snow in southern England in winter sometimes, and in northern England and Scotland more often. So it’s not that weird.

We can be forgiven for being underprepared for a long stint of cold or inclement weather (hot, cold…) because most of the time, this country is just a bit middling, weather-wise. But we have no excuse for over-reacting and creating blanket hype and pointless coverage about extreme hardship and crisis caused by some seasonally-expected wet white stuff. Breaking news: snow happens in winter.

Snowpocalypse by antimega

(My favourite example of this was yesterday, when my local train service provider, SouthWest Trains, cancelled a number of services for today in advance because of the weather, which I thought was particularly brilliant considering it hadn’t even snowed yet. It was almost like they were saying “we know that however much it snows, we’re not going to be able to cope”)

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Because I’ve been asking people to sum up their year in just a few words via The Mayfly Project since December 2000, I’ve been able to look back at the last decade of Mayfly entries (via the Internet archive as well as prodding old sql tables until they regurgitate their goodies) to see how things have changed, and what’s been notable or characteristic in each year.

Some observations:

I talk a lot about love. That’s good. You can tell when I met the lovely P, because everything changed.

I talk a lot about work. That’s partly because whatever I do for a job ends up being somewhat all-consuming. That’s both good and bad (in a stressy unhealthy way).

I travel more than I thought. Or rather, the moments of travel are significant when remembering a year. You can see the unfolding of years on a map.

I used to worry more than I do these days. That can only be good.

My 2000:

Started blogging. Found a groove. Found friends. Much laughter with flatmate. Secret squirrel at work. Living a London life. Good.

My 2001:

working, moving, flirting, lightning, loving, loving, windows painted shut, frustration, illness, love, islands, work, worry, enormous stress, but love throughout.

My 2002:

New beginnings - excited yet anxious. Irrational worries. Learning about control. Usual work stress: need something more. Changing, growing. Home = Love.

My 2003:

Stress, moving, noise, mistake, moving again, hotness, swimming in a warm sea (twice), confronting illness, lifestyle revolution, promotion, onwards, together.

My 2004:

Chilly walks, wedding, work, sea swimming, view of Africa, anxiety, old/new job, driving lessons, cat, more love than ever.

My 2005:

Adopted cat. Passed. Conquered London, England, Scotland, Wales. Took many pictures. Drew on many whiteboards. Became increasingly creative/neurotic. These attributes not necessarily connected.

My 2006:

Frustration, uncertainty, idiots, “just a bit longer…” Meanwhile, focused on photography, windswept places, friends, cat, love, decluttering. Resolved not to wait. Bollocks to them.

My 2007:

Goodbye old, hello new job. Commuting underground, overground, mind wandering free. California dreaming. A series of hospital waiting rooms. Profile building. Camera shutter clicks.

My 2008:

Lots of killing time in hotel rooms in interesting places, as well as meeting nice people. Had operation. Worked hard. Created things. Pondering move.

My 2009:

Didn’t buy a house, but tried (repeatedly). Still trying. Travelled a lot (mainly for work). Embarked on a significant journey. Enjoying it.

This blog, as I’ve always said, is a record of life, unfolding. And nowhere more-so than in the flight of each year’s mayfly.

Sorry for the recent silence: I’ve been on the road a bit - or rather, on the rails. First, a dash around the country, taking in Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh in the space of 4 days, and then a week later, I took the Caledonian sleeper to Fort William, which was a first for me, and highly recommended.

Oh it’s very pleasant when you have found your little den
With your name written up on the door.

And the berth is very neat with a newly folded sheet
And there’s not a speck of dust on the floor.

There is every sort of light - you can make it dark or bright;
There’s a button that you turn to make a breeze.

There’s a funny little basin you’re supposed to wash your face in
And a crank to shut the window if you sneeze.

Then the guard looks in politely and will ask you very brightly
`do you like your morning tea weak or strong?’…

[Poem: TS Eliot's Skimbleshanks, of course]

And this is what you wake up to the next morning:

[The following is from a mail I wrote to someone who asked how I'd booked it and what it was like]

There are four sleeper services to Scotland that I know of, between London and:

– Glasgow
– Inverness
– Aberdeen
– Fort William

The Glasgow service leaves London very late - 11.15pm or so, I think - and arrives into Glasgow around 6.40am. This is a bit of a problem because then you’re stuck in Glasgow before breakfast, so if that’s where you’re going, I’d recommend taking a daytime train. London - Edinburgh is about 4 hours, and Lon-Gla is about 5 during the day.

But if you’re going further north, then the sleeper is a good option, in at least one direction (I took the sleeper up and then a daytime train back down - it’s possible to do the journey from Oban - London in a day, but it’s a lot of sitting on trains!)

The sleeper I took left London at 9.15pm, and arrived in Ft William about 9.45am. Clearly it didn’t take that long to do the journey, but the train was moving (slowly) for most of the time, stopping a few times in sidings for 30 mins or so. It’s one big long train until Edinburgh when it splits into the three sections - Aberdeen, Inverness, Fort William. I was asleep for most of it, though I was vaguely aware of waking up at one point, peering out of the window and finding myself at Edinburgh Waverley station.

I think the route is something like: London Euston - Watford - Crewe - Birmingham - Preston - Carlisle - Edinburgh - Crianlarich - Rannoch - Fort William.

I woke up about 8am with breakfast being delivered to my cabin, which I ate looking out over Rannoch Moor - a stunning bit of the world.

In terms of photos, I took most of the pics through the (rather grubby) window of the carriage, either in my berth or in the seating car a little further down the train. The secret is to take lots and lots and lots of shots, and one is bound to come out well eventually.

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