meish dot org: life, unfolding

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.

Just a quick note to say that the Mayfly Project has buzzed in for another year.

Can you sum up your 2009 in 24 words?

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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At a (media) event in the Netherlands a couple of weeks ago, the organisers were giving out these badges:

Tell me: is this wry self-mocking? Or cold statement of fact?

I genuinely can’t figure out which it should be.

And the temptation to sharpie in the word “only” somewhere is almost overwhelming.

I find myself thinking that if I can’t find someone on the Internet, it’s like they’re not real somehow.

Or I get suspicious that they’re hiding for some reason. Why? What have they got to hide?

Further to this point, I can’t believe how many people I once knew are internet-invisible. What’s wrong with them?

(Note: I’m on a somewhat delayed train travelling from Edinburgh - London, I’ve finished my book, my headphones have died, and there’s free WiFi, so I’m obviously doing the next-best thing: googling people who used to feature somehow in my life. What do you mean this isn’t normal? Don’t lie. You do it too.)

—

(For those with a sense of humour failure - there are several who have taken the time to find an IP anonymiser and send me hatemail related to the above: thanks! - I’m not suggesting that everyone on the planet should be online and findable via the internet, nor that I choose not to befriend anyone who isn’t visible online. That’s a gross oversimplification and deliberate misunderstanding of my post, above. I was merely musing in a late Friday night kind of way about my disappointment on googling old friends, contacts and colleagues that some seemed to have disappeared from view, which makes re-establishing contact with them tough. Clearly, that’s my problem, not theirs. PS: calm down, it’s only a blogpost)

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 forcing someone to set security questions/answers in order to log in to a Y!Group, don’t ask them a name-based question (last name of first boss/first name of oldest cousin etc), allow them to provide an answer (sue, kim, ian, bob, tom, sam, jim, ann, etc) and then throw a strop that the answer needs to be at least 4 letters long.

With respect, if that was the case, you should have informed the parents a while ago, because you asked me for their name and THAT’S THEIR NAME.

Alternatively, you could always specify the minimum length requirement at the time of providing security Question/Answer couplets, instead of telling users they’ve done something wrong.

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.

I realised the other day that I hadn’t even thought about FriendsReunited for at least a year.

I clocked this only when mucking out untended folders within my gmail account, where I’d long ago set up a rule to filter newsletters from sites which I barely ever visited. I suddenly discovered that FriendsReunited had been emailing me regularly, with increasing desperation. The emails hinted at the potential to rediscover lost connections; spy on former classmates, announce things to the world; pimp one’s profile; add photos, reunion notes, avatars.

This was enough to spur me into action. Without hesitation I headed over to the site with the intention of removing myself from it altogether - committing social networking suicide. Long overdue and undoubtedly not the only one to have done so in recent time.

Before I went, though, I noticed this alert box, which sort of sums up the problem with FriendsReunited for me:

Why don’t I add myself to those contexts? Because they’re completely bloody irrelevant, that’s why.

I’ve never attended those institutions or lived or worked in those places, so why would I add myself to them? Just to be more present and “out there” on the Internet? To meet more people? Who I don’t know (yet)? Or in the hope that lurking somewhere in one of those places there may be someone I once knew, waiting to be discovered? Er, no.

FR was a turn-of-the-century novelty: one of the first ways that you could easily, legitimately and contextually hunt down your old schoolmates and peer nosily into their current lives without the need for (or fear of) reciprocation. Socially-acceptable stalking, dressed up as old-friendship-inspired curiosity.

The personal, public, externalising internet made that easier over the years, and experiences with global traction like Facebook soon eclipsed the relevance of FR, even if they came with their own array of pitfalls and social etiquette dilemmas.

Now the internet’s social spaces overlap, with people having multiple accounts across a range of social services, reproducing their social graphs wherever they create an identity. Increasingly, folk are feeding identical information into multiple outlets, to the extent that I’m overdosing on some people’s news, photos, statuses and updates. Twitter updates are fed into Facebook status updates. Notes saved on delicious are fed into Facebook notes. Pics posted on Flickr are rechannelled into Facebook galleries.

This means I sometimes see things twice, three times, from the same person but in different spaces. It has the effect of overwhelming and drowning out the updates of others - the less prolific, less connected, less socialwebbed, less loud.

So in light of that and the increasing noise from all corners, I’ve started a tactical withdrawal from social spaces - or rather, I’ve started to prune the social spaces I occupy to better tune into the signal that is there.

The immediate upshot of this is that I’m unfollowing/unfriending (as if that’s even a word, or at least as if that doesn’t come with all sorts of loaded connotations) a bunch of people on FB, not because I don’t like them but because I already hear them more loudly, frequently and appropriately in other places - like Twitter, or at work, or on mailing lists.

If this happens to you, it’s not about you: it’s about me, and my ability to give you proper attention, in devoted contextual space. I want to keep hearing from you; I just want to hear you - and others - better.

Hot on the heels of the fortieth birthday of the information superhighway, it’s time for another birthday: an actual highway, this time: the M1, which today celebrates 50 years since opening by, presumably, having some sort of jam session, or maybe wearing one of those traffic cones on its head.

Motorway, by Darius Kay. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution/Noncommercial license

I can’t say I feel quite the same levels of personal enthusiasm and excitement about the potential of the motorway as I do about the internet….

(Incidentally, I’d link to the interesting BBC Four series about the cultural and engineering history of motorways, except of course you can’t watch it now. Ah well. Here’s a review instead)