Sunday 6 December 2009
I think the most exciting thing I did today was to make marshmallow Rice Krispie cakes. I don’t think I’ve ever done it before, and now that I’m stuck with a Tupperware box full of them, I couldn’t be happier. I think I should try and make them with my nephews over Christmas, although I get images of Rice Krispies strewn all over the floor and two kids high as kites, having finished off the bag of marshmallows.
Had a brief chat with John, inspired – as ever – by our different experiences of university. Also brought on by hearing of other friends trying to get coursework written up and hoping it will be of a high enough standard. I think I’m probably quite naive in that I hope my lecturers and support staff are behind me all the way. That when I get feedback and grades, they aptly represent the work I’ve done, and that if I need more feedback I can ask for it. But I’m well aware that this needn’t necessarily be the case, and that it’s actually rather a perfect, fantasy sort of image to have of university.
But I’m not too concerned at this stage. I’m still new to it all, and I think this thinking has only been brought about by that awkward period between handing in coursework and waiting to hear back about it. With the two essays I submitted a month ago, I’m as interested in the grade I achieve as I am the feedback, whether negative or positive. But at the same time I do realise that I am 1 of 150 or so students being assessed, and to expect much more than a grade and a cursory ‘Good’ or ‘See me’ is pushing my luck. Fingers crossed though.
Been thinking quite a lot lately about diary-keeping. Why we do it. How we do it. That sort of thing. It’s been inspired by my own bizarre recent habit of keeping an almost-daily journal – which I don’t actually have an explanation for, by the way – and fuelled by reading diaries of the likes of Mansfield, Pepys and Palin. This evening I sat down with a pot of camomile tea and an itch that needed scratching, so I went on a bit of an Internet rampage for more on diary-keeping through the ages. Who, why and how, mostly.
Found some origins, some histories, and some interesting-looking recent theses reporting on and comparing online diaries with the more private, traditional kind.* Recent research from the likes of the British Library on the responsibilities and legal implications of the preservation of such data, along with the proliferation of social networking have also had me considering those wider implications.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say I could feel my dissertation subject coming on. But that’s years away yet. Right?
Finally, in the course of this rabid search, I had a word I couldn’t think of. I knew what it meant, but for the life of me I couldn’t find it. Nor could I Google for it – and I don’t want to blow my own trumpet but, as a bit of a nerd and someone with 3 years’ library and information experience, if I can’t find something, it must be pretty hard to find. As such, I fired off a text to AQA. I did this with some reluctance actually – having worked for them myself for a few months in 2005. But most of all I just thought, they’re the ones for the job. And if they can’t answer, or answer me incorrectly, it’ll just prove my point.
Well, to their credit, they did answer me and it led to the right answer, so I won’t write them off completely. £1 for an answer is a bit rich, but for a one-off question now and then, it’s a good service. Next time I think I’ll try using one of several online ask-a-librarian services…
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* When I think of this, I can’t help but think of a remark made a couple of years ago by a friend in another friend’s lounge in Dundee, about her writing in her “offline LiveJournal.”
Saturday 5 December 2009
Every now and then I cast my eyes over a map or satellite images on Google Maps of my immediate surroundings, trying to identify places that I’d like to visit. I did this today, identifying somewhere that used to be an airfield just after the First World War. I’d spent the morning hoovering and laundrying and by 3pm I was still feeling restless, like I needed to leave the house. So I set out for this park.
The walk there was unremarkable, aside from one particularly grotty-looking scally offering me some drugs as he turned out of a residential lane. Charming. To be fair, what else could someone want as they wend their way around a residential area south of Manchester on a grey Saturday afternoon…?
By the time I arrived at the park – Hough* End Playing Fields – I had endured busy roads, including the most horrible junction I’ve ever had to cross at Mauldeth Road and Princess Lane. The day’s sun was drying up, and the sky was overcast anyway. I arrived into this vast space, with three rugby pitches and (so I’m told) 24 football pitches. I’m not entirely sure what I expected to find, but amidst the grey sky, the monotonous hum of the busy roads, and the lack of feeling like I’d arrived anywhere just made me turn on my heels and head home.
I suppose what I did find was to be expected – a damp playing field, a few people walking their dogs, and a whole lot o’ nothing else. The one saving grace (if you can even call it that), was hearing and seeing an aircraft swooping low over the area – a remote controlled plane from the Hough End Model Aircraft Club, apparently keeping Alexandra Park Aerodrome’s history alive, albeit scaled down.
I need to keep my wanderlust in check somewhat; I don’t know why I expect to suddenly find some kind of Eden within walking distance of my present location. But I think the key to keeping that part of me alive is the prospect that I might, and if I don’t try, I won’t know.
And I think that’s quite a good attitude to have in life.
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* I couldn’t ascertain whether this is pronounced ‘huff’, ‘hoe’ or ‘how’ – does anyone know? The surname of the same spelling is apparently pronounced different ways depending on the family.
Friday 4 December 2009
Quite a productive day, all told. I was up and out by 9am, on the way to uni to catch up on some work I missed this week. The weather was crisp and cold, but everything was touched by golden wintry sunshine. Just lovely.
I got to the library and set about trying to do some database work before finding that the application I needed wasn’t on my shared drive. Arses. It’s got something to do with my account still being linked to the Foundation year server I think – will get it sorted on Tuesday. Having gone all the way to the library to do just that, I was a bit miffed but I was able to get on with a load of reading that needed doing – on MARC records, markup languages and the like. All a bit wordy, but I could grasp it as I’ve had to deal with bits of it all in the past, whether through library work or coding HTML. I also arranged to meet my personal tutor, having not done so already.
My flask of tea had run out and I headed to meet John. We bumped into Gary and had a bit of a catch-up – the kind where it sort of keeps going because neither party wants to go and do what they should be doing instead; John and I were off to the Arndale Centre, whereas Gary had a huge amount of study and work to do in the library.
At the Arndale Centre, John and I went to two polar opposite retail experiences: he to the Card Factory, replete with hordes of shoppers; I to an immaculate, empty Clas Ohlson to get some cheap headphones – and the stereo was playing Panic At The Disco’s Nine In The Afternoon. How pleasant.
Since we were in town already we had a good wander round Deansgate and surrounding areas. The weather was great for taking photos so I snapped a few – John commented how he’d not been on a photowalk with me for a while. The walk home was pretty tiring, although we were in no hurry, and all I wanted to do when I got home was listen to Danish electronica, drink tea, eat digestives, and read. Nice afternoon.
We came home to a couple of surprises – one being the first piece of unwanted junk through the letterbox since adding a note kindly asking for “no takeaway menus or other circulars”. To be fair (and only because this is the first we’ve had in nearly three weeks), it was for an unwanted clothing drive. But still – a circular which we’d not requested. So in the bin it went. But having gone from a good 4-5 items a day to 1 in three weeks is a pretty nice result. Hopefully it’ll stay that way.
I also had some post – the latest Esquire, and a £1 voucher from Tesco. Thanks Tesco. I’ll be sure to spend it wisely. On something like 90% of a loaf of bread.
The evening was rounded off by catching a couple of minutes of the live media scrum outside a courthouse in Italy where an American and her Italian partner have been sentenced to 25 and 26 years respectively for murdering a British student. It’s been a bizarre case, mostly due to the media’s obsession with the accused. The fact that I know far more about her than I do the victim Meredith Kercher is just baffling – especially given how it’s a British student. Still, international murder trials are always spectacles, I don’t know why I’d have expected this one to be any different.
Wednesday 2 December 2009
A long day. But a very satisfying one. Woke early to the strange knowledge that I live somewhere that no longer has analogue TV signals. Pondered the end-of-an-era-ness of it all, before snapping out of it and realising it counts for naught.
A brisk walk to uni on a cool but dry morning. I got there in enough time to print off the reams of stuff I needed. Turns out that missing lectures the previous Wednesday wasn’t so bad as two of the three units weren’t on anyway. Was very pleased to see Ben and Andrew as they had both kindly got their acts together for the beginnings of a group project which they’ve asked me to join them on. Ben even had a spare assignment sheet for me! Very thankful for his forethought. Casting my eyes onto the sheet was alarming – 12,000 words?! However, 10,000 of them are made up of the practical element of building a database and a website and I have to admit somewhat geekily that I am looking forward to the new topic (and getting my hands on some code). Turns out I missed a fairly crucial session on Tuesday, but since that was the unit I was definitely going to be missing had the meeting gone ahead, I can’t feel too badly. I just need to get caught up.
At lunchtime was very pleased to discover that the BBC Manchester feature on Manchester Daily Photo had been put online – I’m really pleased with it and you can read it here. Mum, bless her, has said she’s already made a print-out to show people.
The afternoon’s seminars were useful prep for one of my unit’s end of term exams, and also included an attempt to watch a Noam Chomsky documentary from the mid-90s. I say attempt; the DVD just gave up halfway through. Not before we got to see the Channel 4 ads and intros that came with it – most strange seeing ads that are so familiar as to be known word-for-word that you just haven’t seen for 15 years or so, and were last seen when you were ten.
Somewhere along these lines I got talking to Ben about early gigging days, although more about the trials and tribulations of living a bit of a trek outside the city. This continued in the evening while John was playing one of the Tony Hawk skating games, with its requisite soundtrack of early-2000s punk/ska/metal. Somehow I got to thinking about New Found Glory and how when I had seen them on September 11, 2002, they held a minute’s silence in the vast Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Very odd.
A few million neuron connections later, and remembering Jessie’s rabid love for Songkick and her saying she’s been retroactively adding concerts she has attended, I was trawling through it trying to do the same. Friends of mine have pretty extensive lists of their gig-going lives and whilst I’m bordering on obsessively nostalgic, my live music past is scattered hither and thither in diaries, ticket stubs, photographs and half-remembered nights. However, I’m fortunate in that the vast majority of the gigs I have attended are relatively easy to corroborate with a swift Google search. Indeed, Songkick attempts to automatically add gig histories for bands by trawling the web in a slightly more efficient manner than you or I. But there are still holes.
Nevertheless, last night I started out with around 80 Songkick gigs, automatically-sync’d from my Last.fm events history. After a night of questionably-sane trawling through old diary entries and scanned-in ticket stubs, I have managed to bring the total to something like 140. Much of the ones I added are very formative: bands I saw by accident that I fell in love with, or the catalyst for still-lucid memories. Fortunately as I have discovered, many of the diary mentions of gigs also contain handy little write-ups, making the whole thing far easier to remember.
With so much of this data now imported into Songick, I rather hope there will be some sort of export function soon. A simple Excel list of gigs I’ve attended would be handy, not least because if Songkick were to lose the data it would be a tad annoying. I suppose I could/should start my own manual list of gigs attended now that I have a reasonable collection, but that might be a project for Christmas. Ah yes, Christmas: that special time for getting drunk and reminiscing about your misspent youth.
Finally, and for no other reason than that it makes me smile, a brief portion of a diary entry relating to one such formative gig in the summer of 2003 (I’ve tidied up the formatting etc but the language is still that of a just-18-year-old me – proceed with caution):
So I headed to the 100 Club. Luckily my credit card booking was all sorted and entry was fine. The club is very cool. It is long and wide as opposed to the usual gigular long and thin. It is very cool thanks to mucho air-conditioning, and it generally looks good, and stylishly cool. I felt a little bit out of place, thanks to the crowds of stylish and cool indie types.
First band on was Jarcrew from Wales. Fuckin’ ‘ell! Good stuff!! They’re sorta weird/eclectic rock with a smattering of samples and synth shit. The lead singer is a psycho – he screams everything and runs out into the crowd and dances with people whilst singing! Quote of the night has to be the lead singer: ‘I smell of blancmange, I may taste of blancmange, but that in no way makesme blancmange’. Brilliant.
Incidentally, the stage is about one foot off the ground – nice and intimate. My favourite :o)
So after a cracking first band, I was expecting a lacklustre support act, but what I actually got was Irish five-piece Corrigan. Quite a bit tighter, and more melodic and tuneful, with a lead singer who has a great stage presence. He simply looked really pissed off with everyone and everything, but luckily it just seemed like this was just his ‘thing’. This attitude was put to best use, however, in their song, comically entitled You Stole My Horse. Apparently a traditional country song, this surging sing-along really got everyone together. For the final song, the singer left the stage and then returned five minutes later wearing a green suit jacket which he had sewn Christmas lights into, with a handheld on-off switch, muttering, ‘This better fucking work after all that!’. It did indeed. Hilarious stuff. I got a setlist at the end.
So by the time Mclusky took the stage, I was a bit more than tipsy and pretty upbeat. They played very well and with lots of vitriol so I responded by hurling myself headlong into the moshpit, which was pretty fucking hectic, I can tell you! I think I elbowed someone in the head and I also got headbutted. All good fun! I sang myself hoarse too, I was really loving it! Some woman let me have some of her pint because I sort of staggered out of the pit between songs and she saw me and offered hehe. So I took a swig, wiped my mouth and jumped back into the thick of it.
So that was fun!
Ah, the folly of youth. The idea that that version of myself could have gone to uni at that age is, frankly, absolutely mortifying. But it’s reassuring to know there was a small window in which I could get drunk and dance like a tit.
Tuesday 1 December 2009
Should’ve been at uni today. Wasn’t. Oops. I had little desire to attend my first-thing lectures, and this wasn’t helped by the bitterly cold weather (December has arrived gracefully but abruptly). I was also due to be meeting a chap from a radio station with John with a view to furthering our media dabblings (ho ho), but this was sadly postponed at quite short notice. It’ll still go ahead, next week I believe, but its cancellation meant that I really ought to have been at uni. Ho hum.
One piece of lovely email cheered me up though: BBC Manchester’s website wants to do a little feature on Manchester Daily Photo, which pleases me greatly. They asked me a few basic questions and I seem to have rambled on and on in reply. I’ll post a link when I can.
Almost out of guilt rather than anything else, I gave myself marching orders and headed out to Fallowfield to visit our usual pet shop where I found the bits we needed. It was quite a nice walk – just the right distance (something like 4 miles), and the weather – crisp, cold and dry – made it very pleasant.
This afternoon I frantically sought the lecture slides for things I missed last week, and then today, but could only find some of them. It would be the week I miss two days’ worth of lectures that the slides seem to be missing. Still, I can’t beat myself up about missing two days too much. When I find myself struggling with coursework or exams I’ll worry, but at the moment I feel relatively comfortable. I know I’ve a couple of tests in the last week of this term, so I’ll make sure I’m on top of those.
And it seems as though I’ll have a little extra time to make sure I’m prepared, as the Glasgow trip has been put off till an unknown date. Unfortunate circumstances, end-of-term tests and a lack of cash so close to Christmas mean that the trip probably wasn’t such a great idea anyway. When we booked the buses it seemed ideal but I guess we just didn’t really think it through properly. Ho hum. However, this did lead to me working out my budget for the time between now and the next loan payment and finding to my immense pleasure that I can just about make it through. This will be markedly better than this time last year, although that was to be expected; my first term at uni – no such thing as budgeting and no concept of handling money that came every term instead of every month.
Brief news from the mothership – Grandmama is out of hospital and safely moved back home. Family have rallied around, with visits from sister and nephews. Cousin Anthony is staying with her for the next few weeks before he heads back to NZ for the summer (a rather popular idea of late, it seems), at which point it sounds like Aunty Clare may be doing the reverse and coming here to help out. Good work all round, and just fantastic to know that Grandmama is back in her own home three weeks after her stroke.
Anyway. I must be up and into uni bright and early tomorrow to print off two weeks’ worth of lecture slides to get caught up. And so to bed with a good book.
