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Back at the Pottery

I spent today back at Eastnor Pottery, trying to bury the stresses of the ongoing Bidding Season in the clay. One of the things I particularly enjoy about throwing pots is that you have to focus very much on the here and now, and lose yourself in concentrating on hand-eye coordination. If you try to think about anything else, such a work, the lack of concentration immediately shows up in wobbly pots.

Jon the Potter had a full workshop today with six complete beginners, two arts students who had done some ceramics as part of their course and wanted to improve, and me. That’s quite a diverse group, and he had his work cut out making sure that the course participants all got appropriate one-on-one tuition, as well as keeping everyone supplied with clay. I sat in one corner with two 5kg bags of clay, and just got on with throwing one pot after another. By 2pm I’d thrown 17 pots, and was feeling exhausted. Although none of the pots was particularly big, throwing is quite a physical activity, and my back and shoulders were aching. Plus I find the levels of concentration needed are tiring in themselves, especially at the moment. So I decided to call it a day and come home early.

There’s meant to be a huge storm tonight, and already the wind is picking up. I think it’s going to be a wild night. The participants at the workshop came from all over the country, including Cambridge and Falmouth. They’re going to have an interesting journey home this evening…….

27 10 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments (2) Permalink

Bridget Jones’s Diary

I remember when Bridget Jones’s Diary first started running as a column in The Independent newspaper; it was done very straight at first, and it only gradually became apparent that it was a spoof. It was loosely based on the story of Pride and Prejudice, and came out at about the same time that the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle production was a big hit on the BBC. I remember reading a column in the paper which was purportedly a particularly disastrous interview between Bridget and Colin Firth, where she was completely star-struck, and he was struggling not to laugh at how ridiculous the interview was.

I really enjoyed that first run of columns, and also the first book, which was pretty much a straight adaptation of the newspaper articles. The first film was fun too, and I thought that Renee Zellweger did a remarkably good job of being Bridget. They obviously couldn’t have her interviewing Colin Firth in the film itself, since he was playing the hero, Mark Darcy. But in the extras on the DVD, there is a scene shot on-set, where Renee, still in character as Bridget, interviews Colin as himself. That was pretty funny.

I thought that the second book, and the second film, were less successful, though still quite fun. Bridget was even more cringe-making than before, but the tensions and fisticuffs between Mark Darcy and the cad Daniel Cleaver were quite amusing. The film and book ended with her finally getting together with Mark Darcy and apparently living Happily Ever After.

But now there is a third book out, and it’s been widely reviewed in the newspapers and leaked all over the Internet. Happily Ever After only lasted a few years – Bridget is now a widow after the author killed off Mark Darcy. There was quite a long excerpt from the book in the Sunday Times, which my mother put in the post to me. Reading that was quite enough for me. I really don’t need to read a whole book about what appeared from the extract to be quite a realistic description of bereavement and widowhood. Ok, unlike Bridget, I don’t have two small children, and am not hankering after a toy-boy. But there were enough similarities in our situation of premature widowhood to put me off the book entirely.

I shan’t be buying the book. And, if they do a film version of it, I don’t intend to watch it. It wouldn’t be the same without Colin Firth anyway…..

23 10 2013 icyjumbo book Comments Off on Bridget Jones’s Diary Permalink

The Mice are Back – Again…..

The weather has changed – the mornings are cold and foggy, and I only just got the outside of the house painted before a series of rainy days. It’s clearly autumn now, and the mice have noticed that too, and moved back indoors into my loft after a summer spent living outdoors somewhere in the garden or surrounding woods. For the past week or so, I’ve heard suspicious scrabblings in the evenings, emanating from above the living room. It was clearly time to call the pest controller again, and to be thankful that I’m on an annual rolling contract, so that I don’t pay anything for a visit.

Martin, the brother-in-law of my usual chap Tim, phoned me back first thing this morning to ask if it was convenient for him to pop around to deal with the mice. It wasn’t particularly, as I’d only just got up, was still in my dressing gown and hadn’t had my breakfast! But I’m keen not to let the mice get a good foothold in my loft, so I agreed that he should come straight around, and dashed to throw some clothes on quick! He’s put down a load of poison, which should finish them off in a week or so. I’ll have to put up with the scrabbling noises until then. At least they are currently confined to the part of the loft above my living room, and I haven’t heard them partying above my bed at 3am, as that really does wind me up!

19 10 2013 icyjumbo house Comments Off on The Mice are Back – Again….. Permalink

Potato Lorries

The Potato Harvest has come round again. It’s that time of year when a succession of tractors with trailers overloaded with potatoes crawls past my house. They start at dawn, and go past about every ten minutes or so until well after sunset. They don’t seem able to do more than 20mph down the hill, so generally have quite a queue of traffic behind them. There is also a returning procession of tractors with empty trailers going back up the hill past my house in the other direction. I think they must be coming from lots of local farms, as its been going on for a few weeks now, and surely no one farm could produce that many lorry-loads of potatoes. I haven’t managed to work out where they are all heading. There is a Tyrell’s potato crisp factory near Leominster, but I wouldn’t have thought I was on the obvious route to there. However, someone, somewhere, is processing a huge amount of potatoes!

14 10 2013 icyjumbo Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Division of Labour

Like many couples, Christopher and I divided the household chores up between us. There were jobs that he did, and ones that I did. Some of those were explicitly discussed and agreed upon – e.g. he did the cooking, and I did the laundry. Others just sort of happened without either of us really thinking about it.

Obviously, everything is down to me know. When he was first made redundant, Chris started to set up a Google calendar of all the regular jobs he was in charge of, and I’ve been getting a steady stream of emails from him over the past two weeks, telling me to sort out the car insurance, empty the septic tank, and get the boiler serviced. It’s a bit of a shock when I see an email from him in my inbox, but it’s quite nice getting a prompt to sort things out. The car insurance is sorted for another year, the septic tank was emptied last week, and I’m writing this while the heating maintenance engineer is servicing my boiler.

The problem really comes with those jobs that were Christopher’s responsibility, but which only needed to be done infrequently, not on a set time table. I haven’t necessarily registered that a) they need doing, and b) they haven’t been done. A case in point is defrosting the freezer. The kitchen was Christopher’s domain; I had very little to do with it, and had to learn to cook in a hurry when he fell ill. So, if the freezer needed defrosting, he just got on and did it – though I suspect he didn’t do it very often. I certainly had nothing to do with it.

This week I finally faced up to the fact that the freezer was badly in need of defrosting, and it wasn’t going to magically happen on its own. It was a huge job. The ice cube tray was frozen completely shut with a mini-glacier an inch thick, and I could barely open one of the drawers for build-up of ice. There were unlabelled tubs of leftovers that I didn’t recognise at all, and of the food that had use by dates, some of them dated back to 2010, so had been put there by Chris…….

I threw out everything that was unlabelled, unrecognisable, or out of date, leaving pretty much only some mince, oven chips and peas that I know I bought myself, use regularly, and are well within date. Everything else had to go. Then it came to defrosting it. That took five hours and the use of an 8″ kitchen knife, a wooden spatula (which snapped), all my tea towels, a hairdryer, and a succession of hot water bottles. I emptied out two overflowing washing-up bowls worth of ice! Then I had to go shopping to restock it. But now I have a clean and ice-free freezer, stocked with labelled, in-date food. And, perhaps more importantly, it’s now firmly on my radar as a job that needs to be done, so I won’t let it get so bad again.

11 10 2013 icyjumbo house Comments (1) Permalink

More painting and decorating

I’m really hoping that the weather stays dry this week, because I’ve got Rob, my trusty decorator, here all week doing an emergency paint job on my soffit boards and barge boards.

A few months ago, I asked the gardener to hack back at the ivy that was covering the wall outside my bedroom window. I don’t mind ivy in general, and it’s pretty much in keeping with a cottage this old. But I don’t like letting it grow right up to the roof – it plays expensive havoc with the tiles, blocks the gutters, and the mice use it as scaffolding to find a way into the loft under the eaves. So the gardener duly cut it back to well below the top of the wall, at which point I noticed that it had done quite a lot of damage to the paintwork where it had been clinging on. There was bare wood exposed, which clearly needed repainting.

I called up Rob, my regular decorator, and he agreed that it would be unwise to leave the bare wood exposed over the winter. I’d quite possibly get rot set in, and that would be expensive. However, he was pretty much fully booked all summer, and the earliest he could fit me in was this week, which is getting right towards the end of his outdoor painting season. Leave it much longer, and the damp mornings set in, and up here on the hills I can be in fog for days at a time from November onwards – hardly conducive to external decorating!

I could really do with getting most, if not all, of the external woodwork repainted, as it’s been a good few years now since it was last done. But there’s simply not time before the weather window closes. So I’ve agreed with Rob that he’ll spend this week here doing the most urgent bits, in particular repainting the damage done by the ivy and painting the big bow window in my living room which was getting rather badly weathered. I think I’ll have to get him back here in the spring to do the rest of the job.

07 10 2013 icyjumbo house Comments (1) Permalink

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show – Live

I’ve still got a stinking cold, and I’m finding the current Bidding Season at work very tiring, so I could really do with a run of early nights. But there was a show on at Malvern Theatre last night that I was determined to get to see, totally regardless of how grotty I was feeling.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy since the very first radio broadcasts in 1978, when we had to manually tape each episode off the radio. Naturally, I have all five books in the canonical trilogy (though I haven’t bothered with the cash-in written after Douglas Adam’s death), and I played the computer game back in 1984 when the language engine and text-only game-playing were really leading-edge. I loved the TV show, and when it was repeated in the mid-80s when I was at University, I remember that all the scientists and engineers in my college used to crowd into the TV room in the Junior Common Room to watch it together. One evening, we were all reciting the dialogue along with the actors, as usual, when a very harassed 3rd year English student stuck her head round the door to say that she was trying to produce a play in the drama studio in the basement below the TV room, and would we please keep the noise down!

So when I found out that Malvern Theatres was staging, for one night only, an official touring production starring many of the original cast from the radio series, I just had to be there.  Simon Jones reprised his role as Arthur Dent, whom he played in both the radio and TV series, and was joined by the original actors playing Ford Prefect and Trillian, and Stephen Moore as the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android. It was quite odd – they didn’t look anything like I thought Arthur, Ford and Trillian should, as the actors are all 35 years older than they were the first time I heard them. But if I shut my eyes, their voices were just right.

The performance was cleverly done. Because it was billed as a recreation of/homage to the original radio series, there was a minimum of staging or props, and all the actors had scripts which they read from into microphones at the front of the stage. They all wore costumes though, so naturally Arthur was in his trusty checked dressing gown. There was a special effects sound desk to one side of the stage, at which the producer and a sidekick generated all the sound effects. Behind them was a live band, who played the theme tune and the backing music for several songs.  Zaphod Beeblebrox’s second head and third arm were provided by a stage manager who walked behind him holding a head-on-a-stick over his right shoulder, and used her left arm as one of his on occasion.

Despite the fact that everyone had scripts, there were still lots of occasions when things went wrong; many of the actors fluffed their lines every now and then, props fell over, and the audio-visual effects were somewhat temperamental. I don’t think that I’ve seen a professional performance at which so many things went wrong, but watching the actors ad lib frantically as they tried to make a regain was all part of the charm.

Many of my favourite scenes and characters from the books were involved, though obviously in order to squeeze five books worth into under 3 hours a great deal was cut, and the rest rearranged to fit a highly condensed narrative. I found that I knew the dialogue so well that I could tell if a word had been cut from the script, or if an actor chose to pause in a different place or alter the inflection of his/her delivery.

The only bit I didn’t like was the rip-off prices. The ticket alone was over £30, which is right at the top end of the price-range for Malvern. But worse was the fact that they were charging £10 for a programme! That was really cashing in on the enthusiasm of the fan-base, and I declined to buy one, telling the seller that it was way too expensive.

All in all, it was a really good, thoroughly enjoyable, and intensely silly evening out. I laughed more than I have for ages.

04 10 2013 Gillian Day out Comments (3) Permalink

Teutonic Germs

One unanticipated side-effect from my trip to Germany is that I’ve come down with an absolutely stinking cold. It started on Saturday evening, and bearing in mind the standard incubation period for such things, I’m convinced that I picked it up either at the conference or on the plane home. I was meant to be giving blood this afternoon, but had to phone the Vampires and cancel, as there is no way I’m fit to donate. It’s extremely inconvenient timing at work too – it’s Bidding Season again, that time of the year when I am generally up to my neck in writing bids for new projects, and I really can’t afford the time to be off sick. But then again, I certainly won’t be popular if I spread these highly efficient Teutonic germs around the office. So I’m trying to find a compromise, working long days when I have to, in order to produce a draft of the bid, but taking it easier when it’s other people’s turn to read, review, and comment on my work-in-progress.

At least the end is in sight. The bid is due in early next week, and I hope my cold will be over by then too.

02 10 2013 icyjumbo status Comments (1) Permalink

Dresden Then and Now

The conference was in Dresden, and as it happens I’ve been to a conference there before, way back in 1997. Last time, the conference delegates were taken on a walking tour of the Old Town by some of the graduate students from Dresden University, so we got a good introduction to the city. This time, I managed to squeeze in a quick hour of high-speed sightseeing in between conference sessions, so I was able to compare and contrast. There was a huge difference in the city between then and now.

Back in 1997, it was only eight years since the Wall had come down, and Eastern Germany was still emerging from the shadow of communism. The conference hotel was a large Communist-era towerblock, hastily refurbished into a 2* Ibis hotel – not up to usual conference hotel standards! The conference itself was held in the university Engineering Department lecture theatre, which was the only suitable meeting space. Trabants were ubiquitous on the roads, and only the students appeared to speak good English – most people’s second language was Russian. And I distinctly remember the food as being grey – grey meatballs, in a grey sauce with grey potatoes and sauerkraut.

This time it was completely different, and a real tribute to the German economy over the past 16 years. The conference was held in a purpose-built congress centre just outside the Old Town, adjacent to a very comfortable hotel that was converted from a rebuilt warehouse on the banks of the Elbe (rebuilt that is after the Brits flattened it, and most of the rest of the city, in 1945). The roads were full of VWs, Audis and Mercedes, and I passed a large Porsche dealership on my way in from the airport. I only saw two Trabants this visit – one had been turned into a stretch-limo for taking tourists on a guided tour of the Old Town, and the second was parked outside the hotel, advertising a DDR Museum. Almost everyone I met spoke fluent English, and spoke to me in English even when I made an effort and addressed them in German – I must have an extremely strong English accent! And the food was completely different – I was in the world of international hotel buffets: beautifully presented and very colourful, but somehow rather lacking in flavour.

I had been very impressed last time with the Old Town. It had largely been razed to the ground during the bombing in 1945, and the DDR government had diligently rebuilt many of the old buildings stone for stone. They had made a good job of much of the city centre, and restored the view from the bridges across the Elbe to something very close to that painted by Canelletto. One significant building the Communists had left unreconstructed was the Frauenkirche, a once-beautiful church that had been blown to smithereens. When I was there in 1997 it was being lovingly rebuilt, and I remember climbing up into the partially-finished dome to see a very affecting exhibition about the effects of the bomb raids. It was definitely not a good place to have a strong English accent! This time, the Frauenkirche was completely finished – I think it was reconsecrated in about 2005. It had been rebuilt to exactly match early photographs of its interior, and was (to my eyes at least) completely Over The Top with marble and gilding. I have to say that I much preferred it as a semi-rebuilt ruin – it had much more atmosphere! And the Old Town as a whole wasn’t as atmospheric as I remembered – huge amounts of money had clearly been invested in it, with shiny new shopping malls and extremely up-market shops. But I felt that much of the charm of the city had been lost in the process. A shame, but perhaps that’s the price you have to pay for economic progress. Certainly, there was far, far more money around than there was sixteen years ago.

27 09 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on Dresden Then and Now Permalink

Conference trip

As a research scientist, technical conferences have been part of my work life for the last twenty-something years. To start with, as a very junior researcher, I was really keen and eager to attend conferences, and it was always something of a surprise when my supervisor encouraged me to attend to present the research papers “for the experience, and to build a network” (except of course when the conference was somewhere really desirable, like Hawaii, when the students don’t get a look in!)

After a number of years, when I was a more senior researcher, my enthusiasm for foreign conferences began to wane. I find foreign travel on business really hard work, the conferences always try to cram too many sessions into too few days, so the hours are really long and you get little time to see the sights of whatever city you happen to be in. I remember one conference in East Berlin a few years after the Wall came down, when all that I got to see of the city was by asking the taxi driver to take a detour down Unter Den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate on my way back to the airport. And I realised that, if all you get to see is the inside of the conference hotel, then a Marriott in LA is indistinguishable from a Sheraton in Denver or a Hilton in Lausanne. I found that I started encouraging my junior authors to attend the conferences and present the papers, on the grounds that it would be good experience for them, and they could start building a technical network……

A few years further on in ones career, it starts to get harder to avoid conferences, as one gets invited to help organise them – either as a member of the Technical Programme Committee, or more seriously still as the Chair. I’ve not reached those latter dizzy heights yet, but for the past three years I have been on the Programme Committee of the main international conference in my particular discipline. That’s been pretty bad timing, actually, as I was invited onto the committee just after Christopher was diagnosed, with the conference itself happening just the month after he died, when I was in no fit state to attend. I’ve continued to discharge my duties on the programme committee for the past few years (helping to drum up papers, and peer-reviewing abstracts and final drafts of the papers) but haven’t felt up to attending the conference itself. Fortunately, the chair and co-chair understood the circumstances, so it wasn’t a big issue, and they were happy to accept whatever level of participation I felt able to offer.

This year however, my boss was determined that I should grasp the nettle and re-engage fully with the external research community. He has been adamant that I should make the effort to attend the conference and would accept no excuses (and I tried several!). Despite not wanting to go, I actually enjoyed myself more than I thought I would. The community was very welcoming and seemed really pleased to see me back again after a few years’ absence, and I caught up with lots of old acquaintances and ex-colleagues. It was very hard work though, especially when I found myself “volunteered” to chair one of the sessions. But I think it did me good, and certainly forced me out of my comfort zone.

25 09 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments (3) Permalink