meish dot org: life, unfolding

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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Years ago, this city was completely familiar to me.

Nearly twenty years ago, young(ish) and stupid(ish) with emotion, I visited a lot, staying in a top floor flat just off Lothian Rd, from which you could watch the fireworks spilling over the castle roof on Hogmanay, while lying on the sofa. There were wooden shutters on the windows, and I’d bet that now it’s lived in by an insufferable yuppie or two.

We ate at Mama’s on Grassmarket, drank creamy pints of 80/- at the Malt Shovel and Bannermans, browsed endlessly in Fopp and wandered up to Tollcross to buy ingredients in Lupe Pintos to make homemade burritos. Idyllic. Naive. Fleeting.

A year later, I moved up here, rather rashly, leaving behind a decent job in Leeds because I wanted to be closer to that someone, who turned out to be an utter swine.

Suddenly, I wasn’t allowed to stay in the flat handily in the centre of town, so found a place in a dubious flatshare out in Muirhouse, in a terrible block that has long since been demolished. There was blood on the walls of the stair, and the agitated barking of big dogs behind closed doors was a constant soundtrack.

I got a job as a waitress in a cafe in town which paid - I’m not exaggerating here - £2 an hour, before tax, which left me worse off than being unemployed. It came as some sort of relief when they had to let me go because of budget cuts. I signed on (at Torphichen Street) and spent the days looking for work, doing whatever came my way (I once dressed as a penguin at Edinburgh Zoo) and mooching around town, forlornly waiting for The Swine to fit me into his schedule. I took advantage of the UB40 discount to watch films in the afternoon in the plush velvet seats of the Cameo and Filmhouse, and walked the cobbled streets until my soles wore thin.

Soon after, I moved to Aberdeen, and Edinburgh became a place of transition - somewhere I didn’t feel comfortable anymore, wasn’t welcome. It belonged to those who stayed behind, and I’d given up. Given in. Moved on.

And now I’m back, for less than 24 hours, for work.

I’ve been back a few times in the last twenty years, but always somehow very fleetingly, or staying in unfamiliar parts of the city. This time, I’m near Tolcross, in an unexpectedly decent hotel (it’s one of those without many stars but with a lot of class and - mercifully - no stag parties), just metres down the road from where I used to come and stay, live, belong, bimble.

I’m tempted to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow, just to have an old-time’s-sake saunter down amnesia lane.

But some things are best left in the past. And besides, I have a full day ahead.

Looking forward, not back.

When you try to connect to the free guest wifi in the lounge, a login screen appears, which says - and I quote:

“The username and password to access this free Wi-Fi service is available from the front desk of the lounge.”

So when a “valued guest” goes up to the front desk to enquire what the username and password for the wifi is, it’d be really awesome if you could prevent yourself from getting a big lip on, barking “the information is posted on at least three cards on the coffee tables,” then marching into the lounge, signalling for the traveller to follow, in order to point to one and say “like this one, for example.”

Because:

a) your own site says the username and password is available from the front desk
b) there are only three of those cards in the lounge, and none of them, by the way, are in the second (quiet zone) lounge, so travellers can hardly be blamed for missing them and
c) your attitude stinks: being passive aggressive, rude and mardy with paying loyal British Airways customers seems like a particularly idiotic and short-sighted way to run a hospitality service.

Also, your cheese is warm and rubbery.

So it’s something after 4 in the morning, and I’m sitting in the business centre of a supposedly 4* hotel in the middle of Amsterdam, trying to figure out how much time I need to kill before the sun comes up so I can go for a walk, to kill some more time before I can head to the airport for my noon flight.

I’m here on business, so the hotel is not my choice, but the reviews on Tripadvisor seemed to indicate that it was OK at least, and the photos on the hotel’s own glossy site gave the impression (of course) of a spacious, luxurious space. Of course, it’s possible that my experience has just been unlucky, and that the rest of the hotel is fine.

When I checked in, they gave me a room on the first floor, except when I get to it I realise it’s up to the first floor then down a couple of flights of stairs and so actually in the basement, more or less. It’s stuffy as hell and completely overheated, and the windows are nailed shut. Not so 4*.

So I call reception and they transfer me to another room, this time on the second floor, at the front of the hotel, overlooking one of Amsterdam’s main streets and all the trams, traffic and hubbub that comes with it. The room is small - miniscule, in fact - but once the balcony doors are shut it seems quiet enough and it’s only for a night so I get ready to do my talk and then leave for the evening.

When I get back, it’s late. I have a shower and crash out on the bed to watch Nick Griffin making an arse of himself on Question Time, and then drop off.

A couple of hours later, I wake up. My skin is itchy and red, especially in places where my allergies usually show - cheeks, thighs, chest, upper arms. I figure that they must use some particularly strong detergent on the sheets, so I get (partially) dressed, throw a t-shirt over the pillow and roll over.

A little while later, I wake up again, with the unmistakable feeling of something crawling over me.

I sit bolt upright and turn on the light, and there it is, on the sheet next to my pillow: a little ovalish reddy brown beetle, scurrying away. I scoop it up with a tissue and look at it closer.

My first thought (borne of too many dodgy hotels on my travels in South America) is teeny cockroach, but I look again and it doesn’t have the wee feelers and the wing structure. Plus this is really small - like ladybird size, maybe half a centimetre.

I flush it down the loo, but I can’t go back to sleep, because I’m wondering what it was. I get out my iPhone, connect to the wifi and search for small, red brown oval bug.

What I read, strewn across the first page of results, makes me leap out of bed, brushing myself down. Bed bug.

Wah.

I shake out everything I’ve brought with me, resolving to wash it all the instant I get home. I stand against the wall of the room, eyeing the bed suspiciously.

Eventually, I gather my things together and head for reception.

The night receptionist is polite and offers to get me another room. He says it’s an executive room, much bigger, and imprints me another keycard as I stand there, wild eyed and hair dishevelled, at the desk, with luggage in hand.

This room is on the third floor, so I take the lift up there, navigate the labyrinthine corridors and then unlock the room door….only to discover that the bed looks unmade, the room smells like it needs cleaning and…what’s that on the table? SHIT! An open suitcase!

The unmade sheets on the bed rustle and move, and I back out as quietly as I can, then leg it down the corridor. When I get back to reception, on the verge of overtired stressy tears, they look puzzled and apologetic, and then say the only other room they have is a smoking room.

I opt instead to sit in reception - or here, in the business centre - for the next few hours before I can head to the airport and home, to boilwash everything I brought with me.

So here I am. It’s nearly 5am in Amsterdam, as Michelle Shocked once said. And I’m crazy tired, itchy all over, grumpy and killing time.

Plus, of course, mentally composing my Tripadvisor review.

I was interested to learn (via Mashable) that Hipster social location game Foursquare is launching in London at the end of the week. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s not in fact the primary school playground game we used to call “Champ”, but a location based social networking game played mainly via mobile apps, which involves players “checking in” whenever they visit a bar, restaurant, event or hangout to receive points based on frequency, pattern of activity, who else checks in at the same time as them and so on (there’s a full breakdown of points awarded in their Wikipedia entry). With enough points, a player becomes the “Mayor” of a particular venue, until someone else overtakes them.

Friends (and family) in the US tell me that it is hopelessly addictive and that it’s increasingly the first thing people do when arriving at an event these days.

I’m not sure that London has enough social butterflies and hipsters to make this take off in much the same way (who am I trying to kid? Of course it does!) but it reminded me a bit of two other things I’ve been engaged with in recent time.

The first is recently-acquired by Nokia social travel tracker Dopplr, which contains strong elements of synchronicity and coincidence built in to the user experience - while no points are awarded, the service tells you when your friends will be visiting your city, or when your scheduled trip will coincide with that of another traveller you’re linked to. In theory, that could mean that you’d be able to drop people a line saying “Hey, Dopplr tells me you’re going to be in Madrid at the same time I’m going to be there - let’s do lunch!” though in practice my experience has been that I tend to know when friends are going to be in the same place as me because we’re going there for the same conference or wedding or whatever.

But another game I’ve been playing recently (and really getting into) is the rather marvellous noticin.gs which is wonderfully simple yet very addictive. The game involves taking photos of things you’ve spotted and then geotagging them on Flickr.

You get points for noticing things
and points for being geographically near someone else’s noticing
and points for being the first noticing in a new area
and points for being noticed within a few minutes of another player’s noticings
and so on.

All you need to do to play is take a photo and upload it to Flickr, tag it “noticings” and make sure it has location data - some mobile phone apps include this on upload, but if not, you can always do it manually later, bearing in mind that points are only calculated on the previous 24 hours of noticings.

It appeals to me partly because it’s a habit I have anyway (spotting interesting things on my daily routine or extraordinary explorations and migrations across town) combined with a delicious frisson of pointy reward but for things which are not to do with effort but to do with coincidence and synchronicity and chance.

In other words, playing the game is rewarding in itself because it encourages you to open your eyes and capture interesting stuff in the everyday; getting points for doing so in a time/place which coincides (or not) with another player’s actions which you couldn’t know about is a delightful, random cherry on top.