The South London Food club had another meeting on Saturday. Each time, we choose a different nation, and everyone who comes along has to research and cook something from the chosen country. This time, the venue was Cuba – everyone made traditional Cuban food. Most of it was meat and most of which was quite spicy – so not my favourite, but we seem to have (by random selection) come up with the Philippines for the next destination
George has again seen fit to grow out of all his clothes, so Sunday saw another session of archiving his old clothes ready for the next nuclear device we plan to detonate in our lives - which we’re charmingly calling “baby 2”. We then spent the afternoon in Bromley buying cute little shirts.
Monday was a bank holiday – which I’d completely failed to take into account in my work plans. When you’re freelance, nobody tells you about things like bank holidays. They just tend to appear at random in your schedules.
Not that they’re a bad thing – I just never seem to see them coming.
This one was filled with the terribly traditional pursuit of DIY. Or rather what passes for DIY in an age when everything that doesn’t come with foolproof instructions is a job for a contracted in expert who earns £100 per hour…
My DIY was putting together the ikea cupboard that’s been blocking the bottom of our stairs for the last month or so. And I have to give credit where it’s due to the master cabinet-makers at Ikea because even though the process took the whole day, and even though I had several screws and (worryingly) two large pieces of wood left over at the end, I was able to put the cupboard together without problems.
Now this is impressive not because I’m rubbish at assembling cupboards (actually this is my 7th similar wardrobe – and two of them I’ve done twice), but because I had George helping me throughout by crawling on whatever I was trying to assemble, re-sorting all the various lengths of screws and eating the instructions.
It’s clear to me that Ikea instructions are written to be followed while a 10 month old baby is learning to walk on the same piece of floor.
I’m not that keen on DIY – even the very limited kind involved in putting cupboards together, and part of me wants to put that down to the fact that when I was young, my Dad could do anything practical very well indeed and his perfectionist approach meant that I was never really allowed to help – or at least anything I did had to be gone over again by him to make it right.
However, that’s not quite the whole story. In fact, I’m not scared of DIY – and I’ve painted my fair share of houses. I just, like the rest of my generation, can always find something else to do. I tend to think my free time is worth something, and if it’s worth more than it costs to get someone else to do my hoovering, painting or car maintenance then I’ll do it.
Is that being lazy? I’m not sure. I do still end up doing a fair bit of that kind of stuff, but not all the time, not every weekend.
Lisa managed to get home early enough to take George swimming on Tuesday. It was the last of the current session of swimming lessons and George spent most of the time underwater – which he seems to love.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Met up with Raoul on Wednesday. We had dinner in the Palmeston ( a great pub restaurant) in Lordship Lane while Lisa sat at home and had to do some work. He was in London doing some pointless paperwork for the Natural History Museum before jetting off to his next bone-digging assignment in South Africa – on a quest for Permian fossil fish. He arrived in a leather fedora hat, but claims never to have seen an Indiana Jones movie.
Personally, I don’t believe him.
This Saturday was Jane and Dan’s birthday – featuring their annual Hastings barbecue – which basically means lots of cava, Dan acting as DJ with all the latest gismos and Jane and I ending up cooking most of the food in the oven before bunging it on the BBQ for five minutes. This is generally because neither of us eat meat, so we don’t have a clue how to cook it – and with Dan making music and Lisa introducing George to all the guests, we’re trying not to kill anyone…
An hour or so after George was put to bed and with the baby alarm safely in the DJ room, we hadn’t heard anything from him. I went upstairs just to check and found him crying his head off. Unfortunately I’d put the alarms the wrong way round so instead of us being able to hear him crying, he was listening to a well mixed selection of 80’s classics.
I met Jane’s Dad for the first time and he spent much of the night telling Gareth and I about the preceding 40 years…. Apparently, when Jane was a baby, he was working full time, but in his spare time, he was building a house for his family. No kidding – building it from scratch without help (he got a plumber and an electrician in, but that was it). It took him 18 months. Oh- I forgot to mention his other job – working nights as a DJ on the pier as a warm up act to bands. In fact all the well known bands of the early 70’s – from the Stones onwards. Jane tells me that his main hobby (like you need a hobby when you’re doing all that) is reading – but he’s got a bit bored with his local library having read everything in it.
Lisa and I went to bed tired – but knowing that the following morning George would wake us up at the normal 7:30am… You can’t ever sleep in with a baby, but for some reason that never occurs to you the previous night….
In preparation for the BBQ, we spent Friday night in Worthing (Lisa went in the morning, and I met them from the train after work – I had a late evening conference call with someone in California who wanted to talk about fairies – specifically animated ones). We took Lisa’s parents out to dinner – mainly because we know they’re about to have their house taken over by Sally and the kids and because Lisa’s mum has offered to help Lisa out with organising the refurbishment of her new house. The restaurant was full, but half way through the evening when we were waiting for our starters, I suddenly looked round and noticed that absolutely nobody in the place had any food… Eventually, it did all appear.
George is starting to make a real effort to communicate – he now waves and makes faces and claps in direct response to you. He obviously now know that communicating with people is important and he’s trying his best to crack the speech code.
At swimming, he also managed to hold onto the side of the pool on his own – which I guess is useful if he wants to avoid drowning. However, he’s a little too eager to let go and dive off for another length
Coke is it
I think there’s a shift going on…. It used to be – in the 60’s and 70’s that new was good. Everything new and scientific was heralded as great – so if your car was built by robots, it was a better car and if your food had chemicals in, then it must necessarily be better for you. This obsession with everything new pervaded the whole of society.
Then things changed – I don’t know how, or when, but suddenly, traditional was best and natural was wholesome. Nowadays, bread and cheese has to be “artisan” before it’s considered good. A hand made car is thought to be better made than one assembled on a production line and if your food has anything in it that can’t be called natural then it’s considered poisonous.
This obsession with the natural is as absurd in its own way as the obsession with futuristic man made rubbish in the 60’s. Deadly nightshade is just as natural as potatoes – and it’s sustainably “native” to the UK (no air-miles there) – but that doesn’t make it good for you. Likewise many E numbers are natural components of home grown food.
It’s as if we can’t handle the idea of things being a bit more complicated than simply science bad, nature good…I’d wondered how we made that switch of obsessions, but I think I can see it happening again.
Advertisers of things that are plainly not natural or wholesome have started leaping on the bandwagon – and the most recent one is Coke who’s new adverts are claiming that it’s made from only natural ingredients.
This is plainly a load of old pants and you wonder why they’ve spent millions on an advertising campaign that’s so transparently unbelievable.
However, what the advert really does is to devalue that whole “natural is great” claim – with everyone now claiming their stuff is wholesome and un-messed-with, the natural claim becomes so diluted it’s no longer worth making, and advertisers can – with a little time gap start claiming their products are “improvements on nature” again.
Personally, I don’t believe him.
This Saturday was Jane and Dan’s birthday – featuring their annual Hastings barbecue – which basically means lots of cava, Dan acting as DJ with all the latest gismos and Jane and I ending up cooking most of the food in the oven before bunging it on the BBQ for five minutes. This is generally because neither of us eat meat, so we don’t have a clue how to cook it – and with Dan making music and Lisa introducing George to all the guests, we’re trying not to kill anyone…
An hour or so after George was put to bed and with the baby alarm safely in the DJ room, we hadn’t heard anything from him. I went upstairs just to check and found him crying his head off. Unfortunately I’d put the alarms the wrong way round so instead of us being able to hear him crying, he was listening to a well mixed selection of 80’s classics.
I met Jane’s Dad for the first time and he spent much of the night telling Gareth and I about the preceding 40 years…. Apparently, when Jane was a baby, he was working full time, but in his spare time, he was building a house for his family. No kidding – building it from scratch without help (he got a plumber and an electrician in, but that was it). It took him 18 months. Oh- I forgot to mention his other job – working nights as a DJ on the pier as a warm up act to bands. In fact all the well known bands of the early 70’s – from the Stones onwards. Jane tells me that his main hobby (like you need a hobby when you’re doing all that) is reading – but he’s got a bit bored with his local library having read everything in it.
Lisa and I went to bed tired – but knowing that the following morning George would wake us up at the normal 7:30am… You can’t ever sleep in with a baby, but for some reason that never occurs to you the previous night….
In preparation for the BBQ, we spent Friday night in Worthing (Lisa went in the morning, and I met them from the train after work – I had a late evening conference call with someone in California who wanted to talk about fairies – specifically animated ones). We took Lisa’s parents out to dinner – mainly because we know they’re about to have their house taken over by Sally and the kids and because Lisa’s mum has offered to help Lisa out with organising the refurbishment of her new house. The restaurant was full, but half way through the evening when we were waiting for our starters, I suddenly looked round and noticed that absolutely nobody in the place had any food… Eventually, it did all appear.
George is starting to make a real effort to communicate – he now waves and makes faces and claps in direct response to you. He obviously now know that communicating with people is important and he’s trying his best to crack the speech code.
At swimming, he also managed to hold onto the side of the pool on his own – which I guess is useful if he wants to avoid drowning. However, he’s a little too eager to let go and dive off for another length
Coke is it
I think there’s a shift going on…. It used to be – in the 60’s and 70’s that new was good. Everything new and scientific was heralded as great – so if your car was built by robots, it was a better car and if your food had chemicals in, then it must necessarily be better for you. This obsession with everything new pervaded the whole of society.
Then things changed – I don’t know how, or when, but suddenly, traditional was best and natural was wholesome. Nowadays, bread and cheese has to be “artisan” before it’s considered good. A hand made car is thought to be better made than one assembled on a production line and if your food has anything in it that can’t be called natural then it’s considered poisonous.
This obsession with the natural is as absurd in its own way as the obsession with futuristic man made rubbish in the 60’s. Deadly nightshade is just as natural as potatoes – and it’s sustainably “native” to the UK (no air-miles there) – but that doesn’t make it good for you. Likewise many E numbers are natural components of home grown food.
It’s as if we can’t handle the idea of things being a bit more complicated than simply science bad, nature good…I’d wondered how we made that switch of obsessions, but I think I can see it happening again.
Advertisers of things that are plainly not natural or wholesome have started leaping on the bandwagon – and the most recent one is Coke who’s new adverts are claiming that it’s made from only natural ingredients.
This is plainly a load of old pants and you wonder why they’ve spent millions on an advertising campaign that’s so transparently unbelievable.
However, what the advert really does is to devalue that whole “natural is great” claim – with everyone now claiming their stuff is wholesome and un-messed-with, the natural claim becomes so diluted it’s no longer worth making, and advertisers can – with a little time gap start claiming their products are “improvements on nature” again.
Met up with Raoul on Wednesday. We had dinner in the Palmeston ( a great pub restaurant) in Lordship Lane while Lisa sat at home and had to do some work. He was in London doing some pointless paperwork for the Natural History Museum before jetting off to his next bone-digging assignment in South Africa – on a quest for Permian fossil fish. He arrived in a leather fedora hat, but claims never to have seen an Indiana Jones movie.
Personally, I don’t believe him.
This Saturday was Jane and Dan’s birthday – featuring their annual Hastings barbecue – which basically means lots of cava, Dan acting as DJ with all the latest gismos and Jane and I ending up cooking most of the food in the oven before bunging it on the BBQ for five minutes. This is generally because neither of us eat meat, so we don’t have a clue how to cook it – and with Dan making music and Lisa introducing George to all the guests, we’re trying not to kill anyone…
An hour or so after George was put to bed and with the baby alarm safely in the DJ room, we hadn’t heard anything from him. I went upstairs just to check and found him crying his head off. Unfortunately I’d put the alarms the wrong way round so instead of us being able to hear him crying, he was listening to a well mixed selection of 80’s classics.
I met Jane’s Dad for the first time and he spent much of the night telling Gareth and I about the preceding 40 years…. Apparently, when Jane was a baby, he was working full time, but in his spare time, he was building a house for his family. No kidding – building it from scratch without help (he got a plumber and an electrician in, but that was it). It took him 18 months. Oh- I forgot to mention his other job – working nights as a DJ on the pier as a warm up act to bands. In fact all the well known bands of the early 70’s – from the Stones onwards. Jane tells me that his main hobby (like you need a hobby when you’re doing all that) is reading – but he’s got a bit bored with his local library having read everything in it.
Lisa and I went to bed tired – but knowing that the following morning George would wake us up at the normal 7:30am… You can’t ever sleep in with a baby, but for some reason that never occurs to you the previous night….
In preparation for the BBQ, we spent Friday night in Worthing (Lisa went in the morning, and I met them from the train after work – I had a late evening conference call with someone in California who wanted to talk about fairies – specifically animated ones). We took Lisa’s parents out to dinner – mainly because we know they’re about to have their house taken over by Sally and the kids and because Lisa’s mum has offered to help Lisa out with organising the refurbishment of her new house. The restaurant was full, but half way through the evening when we were waiting for our starters, I suddenly looked round and noticed that absolutely nobody in the place had any food… Eventually, it did all appear.
George is starting to make a real effort to communicate – he now waves and makes faces and claps in direct response to you. He obviously now know that communicating with people is important and he’s trying his best to crack the speech code.
At swimming, he also managed to hold onto the side of the pool on his own – which I guess is useful if he wants to avoid drowning. However, he’s a little too eager to let go and dive off for another length
Coke is it
I think there’s a shift going on…. It used to be – in the 60’s and 70’s that new was good. Everything new and scientific was heralded as great – so if your car was built by robots, it was a better car and if your food had chemicals in, then it must necessarily be better for you. This obsession with everything new pervaded the whole of society.
Then things changed – I don’t know how, or when, but suddenly, traditional was best and natural was wholesome. Nowadays, bread and cheese has to be “artisan” before it’s considered good. A hand made car is thought to be better made than one assembled on a production line and if your food has anything in it that can’t be called natural then it’s considered poisonous.
This obsession with the natural is as absurd in its own way as the obsession with futuristic man made rubbish in the 60’s. Deadly nightshade is just as natural as potatoes – and it’s sustainably “native” to the UK (no air-miles there) – but that doesn’t make it good for you. Likewise many E numbers are natural components of home grown food.
It’s as if we can’t handle the idea of things being a bit more complicated than simply science bad, nature good…I’d wondered how we made that switch of obsessions, but I think I can see it happening again.
Advertisers of things that are plainly not natural or wholesome have started leaping on the bandwagon – and the most recent one is Coke who’s new adverts are claiming that it’s made from only natural ingredients.
This is plainly a load of old pants and you wonder why they’ve spent millions on an advertising campaign that’s so transparently unbelievable.
However, what the advert really does is to devalue that whole “natural is great” claim – with everyone now claiming their stuff is wholesome and un-messed-with, the natural claim becomes so diluted it’s no longer worth making, and advertisers can – with a little time gap start claiming their products are “improvements on nature” again.
Personally, I don’t believe him.
This Saturday was Jane and Dan’s birthday – featuring their annual Hastings barbecue – which basically means lots of cava, Dan acting as DJ with all the latest gismos and Jane and I ending up cooking most of the food in the oven before bunging it on the BBQ for five minutes. This is generally because neither of us eat meat, so we don’t have a clue how to cook it – and with Dan making music and Lisa introducing George to all the guests, we’re trying not to kill anyone…
An hour or so after George was put to bed and with the baby alarm safely in the DJ room, we hadn’t heard anything from him. I went upstairs just to check and found him crying his head off. Unfortunately I’d put the alarms the wrong way round so instead of us being able to hear him crying, he was listening to a well mixed selection of 80’s classics.
I met Jane’s Dad for the first time and he spent much of the night telling Gareth and I about the preceding 40 years…. Apparently, when Jane was a baby, he was working full time, but in his spare time, he was building a house for his family. No kidding – building it from scratch without help (he got a plumber and an electrician in, but that was it). It took him 18 months. Oh- I forgot to mention his other job – working nights as a DJ on the pier as a warm up act to bands. In fact all the well known bands of the early 70’s – from the Stones onwards. Jane tells me that his main hobby (like you need a hobby when you’re doing all that) is reading – but he’s got a bit bored with his local library having read everything in it.
Lisa and I went to bed tired – but knowing that the following morning George would wake us up at the normal 7:30am… You can’t ever sleep in with a baby, but for some reason that never occurs to you the previous night….
In preparation for the BBQ, we spent Friday night in Worthing (Lisa went in the morning, and I met them from the train after work – I had a late evening conference call with someone in California who wanted to talk about fairies – specifically animated ones). We took Lisa’s parents out to dinner – mainly because we know they’re about to have their house taken over by Sally and the kids and because Lisa’s mum has offered to help Lisa out with organising the refurbishment of her new house. The restaurant was full, but half way through the evening when we were waiting for our starters, I suddenly looked round and noticed that absolutely nobody in the place had any food… Eventually, it did all appear.
George is starting to make a real effort to communicate – he now waves and makes faces and claps in direct response to you. He obviously now know that communicating with people is important and he’s trying his best to crack the speech code.
At swimming, he also managed to hold onto the side of the pool on his own – which I guess is useful if he wants to avoid drowning. However, he’s a little too eager to let go and dive off for another length
Coke is it
I think there’s a shift going on…. It used to be – in the 60’s and 70’s that new was good. Everything new and scientific was heralded as great – so if your car was built by robots, it was a better car and if your food had chemicals in, then it must necessarily be better for you. This obsession with everything new pervaded the whole of society.
Then things changed – I don’t know how, or when, but suddenly, traditional was best and natural was wholesome. Nowadays, bread and cheese has to be “artisan” before it’s considered good. A hand made car is thought to be better made than one assembled on a production line and if your food has anything in it that can’t be called natural then it’s considered poisonous.
This obsession with the natural is as absurd in its own way as the obsession with futuristic man made rubbish in the 60’s. Deadly nightshade is just as natural as potatoes – and it’s sustainably “native” to the UK (no air-miles there) – but that doesn’t make it good for you. Likewise many E numbers are natural components of home grown food.
It’s as if we can’t handle the idea of things being a bit more complicated than simply science bad, nature good…I’d wondered how we made that switch of obsessions, but I think I can see it happening again.
Advertisers of things that are plainly not natural or wholesome have started leaping on the bandwagon – and the most recent one is Coke who’s new adverts are claiming that it’s made from only natural ingredients.
This is plainly a load of old pants and you wonder why they’ve spent millions on an advertising campaign that’s so transparently unbelievable.
However, what the advert really does is to devalue that whole “natural is great” claim – with everyone now claiming their stuff is wholesome and un-messed-with, the natural claim becomes so diluted it’s no longer worth making, and advertisers can – with a little time gap start claiming their products are “improvements on nature” again.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
The olympics
The Olympics opened at the end of last week with what everyone seems to have called the greatest show ever staged – a massive emerging superpower throwing a hundred million pounds at stating its intent for the next hundred years to the world… which is fine, except London’s up next and has to match it.
Personally I’ve never really been a fan of massive spectacles – they tend to leave me thinking “so what?”. I mean, you can have 14,000 people holding up placards to form the shape of a logo, but all it really proves is that you can. 100,000 fireworks really just makes each firework less impressive. More is less.
They climaxed the whole thing with a bloke hanging from a piece of string pretending to run around an animated screen surrounding the entire stadium to finally light a huge torch. I mean, it’s clever – but the more cash you spend on being clever, the cleverer you have to be to stop it seeming pointless. It gets to a point where you just can’t be clever enough to avoid looking ridiculous.
Or maybe it’s just me.
In any case, it’s London’s turn in 4 years, and we can’t compete with that level of spectacle. Then again, maybe we don’t have to. To me (and I’m not a massive sports fan) the thing that makes British sport great – and actually one of the things the nation in general is most proud of is almost the opposite of the amazing exercise in formation organisation that China displayed.
It’s a more chaotic sort of mass action – where people spontaneously en-masse decide to join forces each for their own reasons and each bringing their own unique ideas and skills to the event. London’s great events aren’t formations of troops marching in step to somebody else’s beat– they’re a hundred thousand people all doing their own thing. Like the London Marathon or the naked cyclists that ride through London every year.
There’s something chaotically creative about this country at it’s best – something that inspires people to do something extraordinary not because they’ve been told to but because they just want to.
Maybe what our Olympic ceremony needs is more like a Flash-mob than a military parade…
I heard on the radio the other day that the last London Olympics just after the war were a little more low key – the cycling went on just down the road from us in Herne Hill – and apparently the British team stayed with the editor of the cycling magazine rather than in an Olympic village. Catering was provided by one of the competitor’s mothers.
Full House
Lisa completed on her house last week – so now all that has to be done is a total refurbishment on it…. It’s a sweet little house, but hasn’t been done up properly for 63 years. That means there’s probably a fair amount of problem lurking in the walls. Still, we’ve planned for re-plastering, new electrics and some work on the roof, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock.
Hopefully it’ll be done in a couple of months – or at least nearly done. However, I’m not sure if Lisa will want to rent it out immediately. With Sally, Colin and the four children moving into Lisa’s parents’ house while they look for a place of their own, visiting them will probably be quite difficult and the idea of a “guest house” a couple of streets away will probably be quite attractive for visitors. Even if it doesn’t have a bathroom, a kitchen, walls or any electricity….
House prices are still falling – with the average estate agent selling about one property a week. And we all feel very sorry for them I’m sure….
People are trying to predict the end of the crash – and wondering if removing stamp duty would kick start the market.
Well, it wouldn’t.
Of course it wouldn’t.
Prices aren’t falling because of some mysterious magic curse – or even because of American Sub prime lending. They’re falling because they’re too high. They’re too high because people can’t afford to buy houses.
The only reason they didn’t fall before was that investors were buying instead. Investors will only buy if they think it’s a good investment – and that means only when prices are going up. The moment prices started dropping, all the investors stopped buying.
It’s not rocket science.
So where will it all end?
Well, surely the bottom line is that someone on a reasonable wage (say £35,000 per year) in London is going to think of a one bedroom flat as a first step on the housing ladder. At lending of 3 times earnings plus a reasonable deposit, that’s about £120,000.
In other words, I’d stick my neck out and say when you can get a one bedroom flat for £120,000 in the cheaper parts of London, the market will stop falling.
We’re not there yet.
Saturday we decided to take George to the London Aquarium – but it turned out that on a rainy school holiday, other people had the same idea. We abandoned the idea and went to the Natural History museum instead – which although we knew it would be crowded, we thought it was at least big enough to hold the numbers.
It was so busy we had to seek out one of the less popular halls to find a little room. George was completely rapt by the size and noise of the place (somewhere I’ve been fascinated by since I was only a few years older). He was especially intrigued by the giant stag beetle above the door of the bug room – and I’ve been told since that lots of other children have the same reaction to it… Not sure why – he’s never seen a real stag beetle…
Anyway, we came out with a bathtime book of dinosaurs (which George liked the first time he read it, but now seems to cry whenever it appears) and a “babyTV” DVD - a montage of shapes and colours from the natural world which he seems to love.
TV is very attractive to George and he watches (especially children’s programmes) with great attention. It’s so tempting to put the TV on to keep him amused, but we try not to do it too much. Even so, he’s already identified that corner of the room as a site of entertainment and loves to pull things off the TV table, wrench wires out of things, and stick his fingers in the DVD player.
He’s also developed a fascination with phones – having realised that we spend a lot of time talking to them. I’m not sure if he knows that remote controls are different devices, but he goes for them with equal vigour.
Sunday, we aimed to take George swimming, but failed to get up in time, so we pottered around drilling holes in the house to put up pictures with hooks we realised we hadn’t got.
It wasn’t a good day for going out, so he played in the living room most of the day. He’s started using the rocking horse my parents got him for Christmas to balance on – pushing it along as he learns to walk. At one point, he suddenly let go of it, and stood there in the middle of the floor swaying slightly for several seconds before collapsing.
Lisa and I just looked at him in amazement.
Work
Work is distracting me. I’ve got these two big projects on right now – the safety video for the yacht and a trilobite display for a museum in Mexico. Both are big, complex jobs and both have deadlines in September.
The problem with having these long term projects is you’re never quite sure where you ought to be on them at any point and you need to set (and keep to) goals throughout the project.
There are so many different aspects to these animations (both are really like mini films – involving narration, music, characters and editing as well as animation) that are all both exciting and difficult – so I sometimes end up getting preoccupied by them.
Although, obviously I want interesting and challenging work, it’s hard to turn that off when it comes to the end of the day.
I end up getting distracted – as though the real world is happening somewhere else with me – or my mind not connecting fully with it, and I don’t like that about myself. It must be obvious to people around me sometimes that I’m not all there…
The only real solution is to be as organised as I can – to plan out what I’m doing on what days. For some reason when I know I’ve got a difficult problem to tackle, knowing WHEN I’m going to tackle what portions of it frees me up somehow – it allows me to forget the problem for the most part – knowing that even if I don’t have the answers, I’ve at least dedicated a time-slot to dealing with them.
On Saturday I scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper, planning out the next couple of weeks. It helped a lot – and even if some of those plans don’t work out, I at least know I’ve got time for most of what I’ve got to do.
Hopefully that made me a little better company for the weekend….
Aniversary
Tuesday was our 2nd wedding anniversary. Sam came over to look after George and we went out to a lovely restaurant in Crystal Palace…
The Olympics opened at the end of last week with what everyone seems to have called the greatest show ever staged – a massive emerging superpower throwing a hundred million pounds at stating its intent for the next hundred years to the world… which is fine, except London’s up next and has to match it.
Personally I’ve never really been a fan of massive spectacles – they tend to leave me thinking “so what?”. I mean, you can have 14,000 people holding up placards to form the shape of a logo, but all it really proves is that you can. 100,000 fireworks really just makes each firework less impressive. More is less.
They climaxed the whole thing with a bloke hanging from a piece of string pretending to run around an animated screen surrounding the entire stadium to finally light a huge torch. I mean, it’s clever – but the more cash you spend on being clever, the cleverer you have to be to stop it seeming pointless. It gets to a point where you just can’t be clever enough to avoid looking ridiculous.
Or maybe it’s just me.
In any case, it’s London’s turn in 4 years, and we can’t compete with that level of spectacle. Then again, maybe we don’t have to. To me (and I’m not a massive sports fan) the thing that makes British sport great – and actually one of the things the nation in general is most proud of is almost the opposite of the amazing exercise in formation organisation that China displayed.
It’s a more chaotic sort of mass action – where people spontaneously en-masse decide to join forces each for their own reasons and each bringing their own unique ideas and skills to the event. London’s great events aren’t formations of troops marching in step to somebody else’s beat– they’re a hundred thousand people all doing their own thing. Like the London Marathon or the naked cyclists that ride through London every year.
There’s something chaotically creative about this country at it’s best – something that inspires people to do something extraordinary not because they’ve been told to but because they just want to.
Maybe what our Olympic ceremony needs is more like a Flash-mob than a military parade…
I heard on the radio the other day that the last London Olympics just after the war were a little more low key – the cycling went on just down the road from us in Herne Hill – and apparently the British team stayed with the editor of the cycling magazine rather than in an Olympic village. Catering was provided by one of the competitor’s mothers.
Full House
Lisa completed on her house last week – so now all that has to be done is a total refurbishment on it…. It’s a sweet little house, but hasn’t been done up properly for 63 years. That means there’s probably a fair amount of problem lurking in the walls. Still, we’ve planned for re-plastering, new electrics and some work on the roof, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock.
Hopefully it’ll be done in a couple of months – or at least nearly done. However, I’m not sure if Lisa will want to rent it out immediately. With Sally, Colin and the four children moving into Lisa’s parents’ house while they look for a place of their own, visiting them will probably be quite difficult and the idea of a “guest house” a couple of streets away will probably be quite attractive for visitors. Even if it doesn’t have a bathroom, a kitchen, walls or any electricity….
House prices are still falling – with the average estate agent selling about one property a week. And we all feel very sorry for them I’m sure….
People are trying to predict the end of the crash – and wondering if removing stamp duty would kick start the market.
Well, it wouldn’t.
Of course it wouldn’t.
Prices aren’t falling because of some mysterious magic curse – or even because of American Sub prime lending. They’re falling because they’re too high. They’re too high because people can’t afford to buy houses.
The only reason they didn’t fall before was that investors were buying instead. Investors will only buy if they think it’s a good investment – and that means only when prices are going up. The moment prices started dropping, all the investors stopped buying.
It’s not rocket science.
So where will it all end?
Well, surely the bottom line is that someone on a reasonable wage (say £35,000 per year) in London is going to think of a one bedroom flat as a first step on the housing ladder. At lending of 3 times earnings plus a reasonable deposit, that’s about £120,000.
In other words, I’d stick my neck out and say when you can get a one bedroom flat for £120,000 in the cheaper parts of London, the market will stop falling.
We’re not there yet.
Saturday we decided to take George to the London Aquarium – but it turned out that on a rainy school holiday, other people had the same idea. We abandoned the idea and went to the Natural History museum instead – which although we knew it would be crowded, we thought it was at least big enough to hold the numbers.
It was so busy we had to seek out one of the less popular halls to find a little room. George was completely rapt by the size and noise of the place (somewhere I’ve been fascinated by since I was only a few years older). He was especially intrigued by the giant stag beetle above the door of the bug room – and I’ve been told since that lots of other children have the same reaction to it… Not sure why – he’s never seen a real stag beetle…
Anyway, we came out with a bathtime book of dinosaurs (which George liked the first time he read it, but now seems to cry whenever it appears) and a “babyTV” DVD - a montage of shapes and colours from the natural world which he seems to love.
TV is very attractive to George and he watches (especially children’s programmes) with great attention. It’s so tempting to put the TV on to keep him amused, but we try not to do it too much. Even so, he’s already identified that corner of the room as a site of entertainment and loves to pull things off the TV table, wrench wires out of things, and stick his fingers in the DVD player.
He’s also developed a fascination with phones – having realised that we spend a lot of time talking to them. I’m not sure if he knows that remote controls are different devices, but he goes for them with equal vigour.
Sunday, we aimed to take George swimming, but failed to get up in time, so we pottered around drilling holes in the house to put up pictures with hooks we realised we hadn’t got.
It wasn’t a good day for going out, so he played in the living room most of the day. He’s started using the rocking horse my parents got him for Christmas to balance on – pushing it along as he learns to walk. At one point, he suddenly let go of it, and stood there in the middle of the floor swaying slightly for several seconds before collapsing.
Lisa and I just looked at him in amazement.
Work
Work is distracting me. I’ve got these two big projects on right now – the safety video for the yacht and a trilobite display for a museum in Mexico. Both are big, complex jobs and both have deadlines in September.
The problem with having these long term projects is you’re never quite sure where you ought to be on them at any point and you need to set (and keep to) goals throughout the project.
There are so many different aspects to these animations (both are really like mini films – involving narration, music, characters and editing as well as animation) that are all both exciting and difficult – so I sometimes end up getting preoccupied by them.
Although, obviously I want interesting and challenging work, it’s hard to turn that off when it comes to the end of the day.
I end up getting distracted – as though the real world is happening somewhere else with me – or my mind not connecting fully with it, and I don’t like that about myself. It must be obvious to people around me sometimes that I’m not all there…
The only real solution is to be as organised as I can – to plan out what I’m doing on what days. For some reason when I know I’ve got a difficult problem to tackle, knowing WHEN I’m going to tackle what portions of it frees me up somehow – it allows me to forget the problem for the most part – knowing that even if I don’t have the answers, I’ve at least dedicated a time-slot to dealing with them.
On Saturday I scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper, planning out the next couple of weeks. It helped a lot – and even if some of those plans don’t work out, I at least know I’ve got time for most of what I’ve got to do.
Hopefully that made me a little better company for the weekend….
Aniversary
Tuesday was our 2nd wedding anniversary. Sam came over to look after George and we went out to a lovely restaurant in Crystal Palace…
Friday, August 8, 2008
On Wednesday we had a night out – we went to the Globe to see Timon of Athens – which, as it turns out is a Shakespeare play which most people agree was only partly written by Shakespeare. Apparently the editors of the first publication of Shakespeare’s plays in the 1600’s wanted to leave it out entirely, and there’s no record of anyone performing it in Shakespeare’s time.
Ok – it wasn’t up to the standard of Macbeth – it was a bit simplistic – but nowhere near as dull as Midsummer Night’s Dream which gets performed all the time because it’s got fairies in it.
No time to write more now – I can hear George crying because it’s his bath time….
Ok – it wasn’t up to the standard of Macbeth – it was a bit simplistic – but nowhere near as dull as Midsummer Night’s Dream which gets performed all the time because it’s got fairies in it.
No time to write more now – I can hear George crying because it’s his bath time….
Monday, August 4, 2008
Lisa went swanning off to have champagne on a yacht on Saturday, leaving me at home with George… Claudia’s company had some kind of wine tasting jolly going on and she invited Lisa to go along with her.
George is well and truly on the move now, and although he requires more supervision than he did before, he doesn’t actually want as much attention. He’s happier to play on his own, practicing getting around and banging things together, so he doesn’t want you to follow him about. However, he’s never more than 10 seconds from destruction of property or fatal injury, so you have to keep an eye on him (he nearly fell down the stairs a few days ago – so we’re busy leafing through catalogues trying to find stairgates that will fit onto curved banisters….)
Anyway, in his new role as resident safety inspector, he was happy to spend the morning checking the house for sharp, electrical and unstable objects.
In the afternoon, I thought I’d take him out for a short walk, so I put him in the pram and set off round the block… just as I was on my way home, I met Mons and Abi and their children on the way to Dulwich park. I decided to join them, and it only occurred to me once we were there, and it started to rain that I had come prepared only for a walk around the block.
We try to be as minimal as possible with George and don’t carry round the trailer loads of baby stuff most parents seem to require, but being caught out made me suddenly aware of how useful a change of nappy and clothes, a rain cover, some milk, a couple of rice-cakes (fair trade, additive free, organic rice cakes –obviously), a muslin, a raincoat, some toys, a book, some baby suntan lotion, a rubbish bag and a box of wipes would have been…
At the park, we met up with a few of their friends. One guy turned up with a double push chair, and a confident air. A couple of weeks earlier, his wife had given birth and he had delivered the child himself…. In the world of the modern father, it’s no longer enough to be there at the birth – if you want real kudos, you have to be the midwife too.
That said, I don’t think even East Dulwich Dad Etiquette would have required me to perform a DIY caesarean…
When Lisa returned, just after her parents arrived (Lisa’s Dad was going to a couple of Proms with Sam this weekend and her Mum was working) we left her mum looking after him and went off to Soho – where we found the best Thai restaurant I’ve ever been to (http://www.pataralondon.com/) There’s only one other that comes close and that’s in Australia (and run by a chef to the King of Thailand).
I think Sam and Lisa’s Dad had a less successful evening – they went to a concert of classical music by a composer who described himself as the greatest composer in history – but who didn’t find many other people to agree with him.
Sunday was a little more relaxed and basically revolved around Toad in the Hole cooked by Sam – toad in the hole is such a good meal – and I wonder why I never make it.
Recipe
Toad in the hole
6oz/150g plain flour 2 large eggs 6fl oz/150ml milk salt pepper
6 sausages (I use Quorn sausages)
Make a pancake batter from eggs, milk and flower whisked together – it’s best to leave the batter to sit for a couple of hours before cooking it.
Meanwhile, brown the sausages and put a little oil in a baking dish. Heat the dish up in the oven until it’s very hot, then pour in a little of the batter (it should sizzle and start to rise). Put the dish back in the oven for a few minutes before adding the sausages and the rest of the batter.
When the batter is cooked through and brown on top, serve – with onion gravy, and some steamed greens….
Great comfort food.
We intended to spend the afternoon at a Malaysian market which was apparently taking place at Tower Bridge, but we just didn’t feel like it…
George is well and truly on the move now, and although he requires more supervision than he did before, he doesn’t actually want as much attention. He’s happier to play on his own, practicing getting around and banging things together, so he doesn’t want you to follow him about. However, he’s never more than 10 seconds from destruction of property or fatal injury, so you have to keep an eye on him (he nearly fell down the stairs a few days ago – so we’re busy leafing through catalogues trying to find stairgates that will fit onto curved banisters….)
Anyway, in his new role as resident safety inspector, he was happy to spend the morning checking the house for sharp, electrical and unstable objects.
In the afternoon, I thought I’d take him out for a short walk, so I put him in the pram and set off round the block… just as I was on my way home, I met Mons and Abi and their children on the way to Dulwich park. I decided to join them, and it only occurred to me once we were there, and it started to rain that I had come prepared only for a walk around the block.
We try to be as minimal as possible with George and don’t carry round the trailer loads of baby stuff most parents seem to require, but being caught out made me suddenly aware of how useful a change of nappy and clothes, a rain cover, some milk, a couple of rice-cakes (fair trade, additive free, organic rice cakes –obviously), a muslin, a raincoat, some toys, a book, some baby suntan lotion, a rubbish bag and a box of wipes would have been…
At the park, we met up with a few of their friends. One guy turned up with a double push chair, and a confident air. A couple of weeks earlier, his wife had given birth and he had delivered the child himself…. In the world of the modern father, it’s no longer enough to be there at the birth – if you want real kudos, you have to be the midwife too.
That said, I don’t think even East Dulwich Dad Etiquette would have required me to perform a DIY caesarean…
When Lisa returned, just after her parents arrived (Lisa’s Dad was going to a couple of Proms with Sam this weekend and her Mum was working) we left her mum looking after him and went off to Soho – where we found the best Thai restaurant I’ve ever been to (http://www.pataralondon.com/) There’s only one other that comes close and that’s in Australia (and run by a chef to the King of Thailand).
I think Sam and Lisa’s Dad had a less successful evening – they went to a concert of classical music by a composer who described himself as the greatest composer in history – but who didn’t find many other people to agree with him.
Sunday was a little more relaxed and basically revolved around Toad in the Hole cooked by Sam – toad in the hole is such a good meal – and I wonder why I never make it.
Recipe
Toad in the hole
6oz/150g plain flour 2 large eggs 6fl oz/150ml milk salt pepper
6 sausages (I use Quorn sausages)
Make a pancake batter from eggs, milk and flower whisked together – it’s best to leave the batter to sit for a couple of hours before cooking it.
Meanwhile, brown the sausages and put a little oil in a baking dish. Heat the dish up in the oven until it’s very hot, then pour in a little of the batter (it should sizzle and start to rise). Put the dish back in the oven for a few minutes before adding the sausages and the rest of the batter.
When the batter is cooked through and brown on top, serve – with onion gravy, and some steamed greens….
Great comfort food.
We intended to spend the afternoon at a Malaysian market which was apparently taking place at Tower Bridge, but we just didn’t feel like it…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)