This morning as I made my way between Putney & Hammersmith bridges I felt accompanied by the rat tat tat of builders as Bishops park renovations continue and a house on Holyport road had scaffolding erected.
Turning a corner onto Stevenage road, as sometimes happens, the smell of hops brewing was strong. The river carrying it on its merry way.
Starting my working week off with a drained river, seems somehow appropriate. One of those half misty mornings where the dew is still waking up while people move around – some quickly and focused, some distracted or in the phone, others already on a break.
Greetings from a posh hotel in Liverpool. I’m here for work for a few days. As I head to bed, thought I’d share a few of today’s odder events:
Gourmet food = nice food for very small people. The tiniest of the smalls. Gapping mouths around a table may cause waiters to run for extra side dishes that may arrive ten minutes after main dish quickly inhaled. I’m just saying things like this could happen.
Virgin trains are the singular cause of global warming judging by the full air con they’d going on this morning between London and Liverpool when there was absolutely no need for it.
Taking down the make and number details of random cars in a random car park will draw the attention of the security guards, especially on the docks in Liverpool.
I’ve stayed in this same hotel room before, in Dublin.
There is no way for me to be productive after 4pm on only four hours sleep and no biscuits or sweeties with afternoon tea.
Irish coffee doesn’t come with whiskey in this town, judging by the taste, what’s that all about?
What do you get when you put a bunch of people together who all work for the same company across different locations and functional areas but don’t know each other? A hefty food and wine bill that no sane individual wants to be responsible for.
So ends my first day in Liverpool (aka city #44) and I have to say it’s gone well. It was a lovely, if brief drive from the train station to our hotel with some stunning looking buildings and not a hint of Cilla Black anywhere.
Let’s see what tomorrow brings in this European City of Culture 2008 – at the very least I hope it involves me no longer having “so ferry, ‘cross the Mersey” going round my head like a car doing handbrake turns.
I can only hope.
This is a funny business jetlag. Touch wood its not something I suffer from too much, probably the result of many an unplanned late night foray building up a high tolerance for weird day / evening lengths.
What I tend to get instead though is a massive fit of physical tourettes that’s just crap on long flights. From the moment I get on the plane – especially when it’s my second long flight in less than a week – my whole body decides it needs to move every few minutes. I get so physically frustrated and feelings of crampedness and tetchiness I must be horrible to sit next to when I’m like that, I can’t help it though.
By the time I made it back to London today I was wound up so tightly I had to bypass Go and head straight to my little Chinese massage lady to see if any of that spring could be uncoiled.
I sit here now on my couch, winding down, typing this dreaming of my bed. I’ve had some food, am finishing a beer and have Croatia v Turkey on in the background. If I can last another hour or two then I’ll be happy. I’m still feeling tetchy but at least I can move about to my hearts content now.
Jet lag wise, for me, I find things work out best if I change my wrist watch the minute I get onto the plane. It helps me to get into the frame of thinking for wherever I’m heading to that little bit quicker. The second thing is to stay up late no matter what time of day I arrive in at. It’s hard and certainly there are low patches when I think closing my eyes for a minute or two surely can’t do that much harm. But it does. For me at least. So while it leads to ultra long days I get a good nights sleep and pretty much from that first day I get into the grove.
All that said of course, let’s see how I get on over the next few hours and whether tomorrow is a back to normal or back to bed kinda day.
The last few hours have been stressful. I did the usual trick of putting something important off until it was way too late for normal human brain activity to be relied upon so I chased my brain around the office until finally getting something reasonable I could put my name to.
On the way home I got a puncture on my bike.
I’ve booked my taxi to the airport for the morning. Another early start incoming.
I can’t find my US adaptor. There’s a black hole somewhere in this flat where they all decide to go on their holidays, I’m convinced of it.
I’ve got to do the wash up, sink is full of stuff.
Need to put the bins out.
Are we there yet?
The worst thing about all this of course is that I will miss tonight’s season finale BSG and not even be able to take it with me on the plane.
Boo.
Yeah, I’m beyond tired and my head is wired.
Ever since editing my school newspaper and having worked as a journalist for a few years in my dark and distant past I’ve found I’m never too far away from newspapers and stories. When I was approached to submit some content for NowPublic a few years ago I jumped at the chance to explore it to see what it was all about.
Anyway, after a bit of a hiatus it turns out NowPublic itself also went off and made some fancy changes so we’re now both back with a bit of a bang.
The theory behind Now Public is simple. If anywhere on webland you come across a story you think there may be a wider audience for you upload it to your Now Public account, adding whatever commentary you might like to. From there, readers can view the story, your commentary, add any video or photos etc to augment the story further.
As an audience you are exposed to a broader range of content than you would expect to be exposed to through typically mainstream media sources. For example, your local newspaper may have a site where they show the front page, if you think any of those articles have a broader appeal and it turns out you’re right they could be sitting very quickly in pride of place beside an article that’s front of the FT should the Now Public readers find it compelling.
You’ll probably start seeing some of the stories I read / chose to share on my Now Public stream crop here on this blog. There used to be a way to switch it off but in the new NP world of widgets I’ve not yet found that trigger. I do plan on switching it off though because I don’t want to crowd this blog with news articles.
Anyway, if you like the concept have a gander. NP is not unique, there are many others but having used this one for the last few years I plan on playing about to see the changes they’ve made.
Scientist says dolphin deaths look like a mass suicide
- Steven Morris
- The Guardian,
- Thursday June 12 2008
- Article history
The dolphins that died after becoming beached in Cornwall had ingested debris and mud, leading one of the scientists who examined some of the corpses to compare their deaths to a “mass suicide”.
Vic Simpson, who has been involved in the postmortem examinations of some of the 26 dolphins that died, said yesterday: “On the face of it, it looks like some sort of mass suicide – but the question is why?
I’m feeling the need to take a step back and mark the fact that there’s only one more episode of Battlestar Galactica left before the current (and final ever) series disappears again until 2009. SciFi and Sky One as producers of the show are toying with us, cruelly.
[for the uninitiated the final series (#4) has been split into two sets of 10 episodes due to writer strike interruptions; the first 10 episodes are almost through while the air dates for the final 10 remain unknown, it is expected to be in 2009. This delay sits on top of the year long wait between series 3 and the first episodes of series 4]
Just not fraking fair.
[Spolier alert]
Judging by the trailer for this mid series finale enticingly called ‘Revelations’, my assumption is all four existing fleet cylons come out of their synthetic closets to the amazement of their fleet colleagues and chagrin of the already beliegered Adama but I really don’t expect the final cylon to be divulged. There’s bound to be lots of left field didn’t expect that action though so who knows. I’m seeing talk of Caprica City (the newly commission prequel series) on the message boards so what are the chances it will now begin to gain more prominence as a story arc to bounce us faithful from BSG to CC post 2009. This has all happened before and will happen again etc etc to loop in adfinitum.
[Spoiler over]
Onwards regardless. If this were Star Trek Next Generation I’d say something dramatic like ‘engage’. Because it’s not however and I don’t exude any level of gravitas, I’m left to reiterate that SciFi and Sky making their fans go through yet another abrupt (this time) unenforced lay off is just not fraking fair. With so little on TV to adequately engage with it’s a shame they’ve decided to so shamelessly string out the one thing I thoroughly enjoy. Yes, you can tell I’ve had a lot of time to think about this 
So say we all!
There are certain thing that appeal to me that may (or most likely not) appeal to a larger audience. Driving all the way around London’s M25 being one of those that spring to mind seems to attract a less than enthusiastic audience, bizarrely. Another is stepping foot in each county of England, Scotland and Wales. I’ve been to all the counties in Ireland and dare I say having now been to Land’s End, who is to say John O’Groats can be that far away.
Undeterred by this lack of mass enthusiasm I’m also toying with the idea of visiting each of the tube stations along each of London’s tube lines.
Don’t ask me to explain, I don’t think I could.
Anyway, the one challenge I set myself that I’ve been working to for a couple of years now is visiting each of the cities in a book rather unimaginatively titled The Book of Cities. I bought the book a few years ago and have to say I thoroughly enjoy it.
There are a number of pretender books that came out since but this one is slightly different. I can’t say whether the cities themselves are really all that different (it does appear so) but it’s written with little snippets by famous people who lived in the city or were born there rather than being replete with information on where to stay, have dinner and get cheap condoms.
Stockholm is off the list now, tick. 43 out of 250 “done”. I’m heading stateside next week but don’t expect to cross anymore off the list, week after is Liverpool though and that’s got #44 written all over it!
(PS, I’ve added a new page called ‘book of cities’ to track them, should you be interested. There are a lot of them so bear with me as I update it though)
