{Cheese and Beans}

Mario had been thinking for some time about reading a big book…

Please forgive me for this momentary lapse in lucidity. I’ve not been well. Honest.

I’m off work with a cold. I can’t quite figure out how it crept up on me – yesterday evening I was fine; this morning I felt like my brain had been put in backwards.

Putting words together in any kind of sensible, lucid manner is proving difficult – hence the decision early this morning that attempting to instruct a computer to do anything similarly planned or constructive might be a bad idea.

I think this may be the second “real” day off sick since the girls arrived in February 2008. I say “real”, because I invariably end up working if I am at home.

The itinerary for the day so far has consisted of wrapping myself in old tracksuit bottoms and a fleece top, pulling on the oldest, thickest socks I could find (Simpsons slipper socks, it you really need to know), drinking multiple cups of sugar laden tea, and attempting to quietly watch a movie or two.

I just finished watching “Little Children” – Kate Winslet is lost, unhappy, and lonely – living in picket-fence middle America, and finds herself pursuing and becoming involved with a parent from the playpark in a similar situation. The voice-over between major scenes of the movie reminds me of a modern fable; it is calming and unsettling at the same time. The story draws you in early in the movie, and then systematically messes with your head. It pulls at the loose threads of your personality.

Little Children taps into the part of you that wonders “what if”. It explores the person we once knew, that we passed in the street, that we went to college with, or that we held a candle for. It’s difficult to watch at times – like a slow car crash involving several lives where the outcome is inevitable. While you might not approve of the events that unfold, you cannot help but sympathise with those involved, and hope for a good outcome – whatever it might be.

I find uncomfortable subjects in movies and books interesting. I also find other people’s reactions interesting too. Does that mean I am a voyeur, or a student of the human condition? Are they the same thing?

I read “Thus Spake Zarathustra” a couple of years ago, and it set me down the road towards some of the more famous works of Philosophy. I loved Plato – something about the abstraction, clarity and purity of thought appealed.

This virus is making clarity of thought almost impossible. I’m guessing a return to this post in days to come will result in either horror or hilarity.

Now would be a good time to stop writing. To relax. To recuperate. To recharge.

Time for another cup of tea. Better stay away from the playpark though.

p.s. I am becoming a huge fan of Kate Winslet

This weekend has served to remind me about the value of friendship, and of having a life. It’s easy to let work consume your life – in my case so much that I approached this weekend with a creeping dread that the time we were investing in social activities were taking away from time I might otherwise have spent working.

On Saturday morning, shortly before leaving for my inlaws, I wrote on twitter “Saturday morning, and the beginning of a slightly mad non-weekend. Freelance work, dinner with friends, and dinner with more friends to come”. Notice the italics.

A part of me was dreading a weekend filled with commitments – even if some of them were of my own doing. This is of course an entirely selfish point of view, perhaps engineered by a couple of stressful weeks at work, and freelance projects waking up. So many excuses. I have worked a little, but it hasn’t outwardly effected an otherwise memorable weekend; the kind we should make more effort to bring about.

Yesterday evening we visited some school friends of Wendy, and their young family. While the children happily played together in the way all small children seem particularly skilled at, we “grown ups” caught up on each other’s lives, ate, drank, and basically spent time together. It occurred to me on the journey home that it’s not complicated – all we did was spent time together, and we all enjoyed doing so. We didn’t need movies, or anywhere to visit – just each other.

Today we invited friends over that live fairly locally – a short train ride with their baby – and again, it struck me afterwards how easy it all was. Before their arrival this morning Wendy and I went a bit mad tidying around the place (that’s what happens when you are both busy all week, and then out all weekend), but once our guests arrived, we kicked back and relaxed. Again – good food, good conversation, and each other. It’s not complicated.

This weekend has also reminded me that in order to have anything worth writing about, it has to have happened to you. Life is the most interesting thing any of us has to pontificate about, and unless we get out there and experience some of it, we have little of any interest to share.

The question now is what part of life I might throw myself in the direction of.

A few of the people from my year at school are arranging a reunion this year. Quite why it has to be this year, I’m not sure – we’ll all be hitting 37 – surely 40 would have been a better number ? Last year would have been 20 years since we left. It really makes no sense at all.

As fun as it has been to get hear voices from the past on Facebook making encouraging noises about the prospect of seeing one another again, my gut reaction is to stay the hell away from any sort of reunion.

I have a couple of misgivings; one entirely pragmatic, and the other less so.

When the idea of a reunion first cropped up, everybody seemed enthusiastic. I’m not quite sure when, but suddenly all those who are either unhappily married, divorced, or still single suddenly started admitting all of their various crushes, and their excitement about perhaps seeing those people again. Some people who are happily married then got sucked in.

I’m not so sure I want to be a part of that.

There’s also the entirely irrational memory of not really fitting in at school. Sure, I had friends, but I was never one of the “popular” people. As an adult things seem to have turned around somewhat though – I have a half decent career, a house, a lovely other half, amazing kids… I wonder how difficult it will be walking into a room full of ghosts of the past.

As my other half commented – “there’s a reason you didn’t all keep in touch”.

Have you been to a school reunion? What was it like? How did you feel?

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about social networks – perhaps triggered by the reaction to my recent post about community, and children. I hinted that social networking was in many ways a part of the problem with modern society, and the breaking down of community.

Take Facebook for example. While on the surface Facebook enables you to keep in touch with friends far and wide – and allows discovery of friends from the distant past, it does not mirror real world communities. Facebook only serves the discovery and interaction with existing friends. It is insular. In the vast majority of cases it relies on the real world as a feeder mechanism – therefore you are far less likely to befriend strangers. You have no neighbours, no postman, no milkman, no boy or girl delivering your paper.

If Facebook is insular, you might imagine Twitter is the opposite – with your posts being dropped directly into the firehose with millions of others. The story Twitter would like you to believe is that the community will embrace you based on the value of the content you share. The truth is that given a large enough network, any meaningful communication on Twitter dies. You might liken it to situations in the real world – a small group of people in a room can each have a voice, and be heard. A larger group of people – in a football stadium perhaps – can still communicate with their immediate neighbours – only on Twitter everybody is heard by everybody, and therefore everybody stops listening.

It seems rather strange in this “connected” world – especially when I work on the corporate coal face of the IT industry – that I should be pondering the failures of the technology I use, rely on, and am helping to drive the adoption of.

There is a famous term, repeated endlessly – that modern communication methods have made the world smaller. Who would have imagined we would also have become more distant ?

I grew up in small town England in the 1970s. I can still remember moving house when I was five years old, and spending the first nights on bare floorboards. I remember the sound of footsteps on the landing, and the novelty of stairs. I also remember being turfed out into the neighbourhood – probably on the first night – to make friends with the neighbouring children.

We made friends instantly – in the way small children do. Within days we were visiting each other’s houses, running riot through each other’s gardens, and knocking on each other’s doors to ask opening gambits along the lines of “Hello Mrs Smith, can Claire come out to play?”, or “Can I go on your garden to get my ball back please?”

Now think about it. When was the last time you saw any young children playing outside, unsupervised ?

I watched an interesting video on the internet some time ago – detailing a list of dangerous activities that children should be allowed to do; among them “playing with fire”, and “using knives”. The presentation showed inuit children gutting fish, and cooking it on an open fire. It strikes me that the presentation missed something much more basic – letting kids play outside.

Do you know the names of your next door neighbours? How about anybody else in the neighbourhood? I’m willing to bet (if you are from a similar generation to myself, or older), you knew everybody in the street – adults by last name, and all children by either first name or nickname. Your parents didn’t arrange play dates for you – you figured it out yourself. The only rule governing your adventures and exploration was “Dinner Time”, and “Bed Time” in the summer. If you weren’t back when dinner hit the table, you were in all sorts of trouble.

Adults were allowed to reprimand other people’s children too – and the children didn’t answer back. You would never tell your parents if Mr Jones up the road had told you off, because the punishment would almost certainly have been multiplied.

Forgive me for stepping into crackpot theory territory, but I tend to think there is a link between not letting kids play outside, and community vanishing in front of our eyes. If you don’t learn how to make friends of your own volition, you are not going to naturally form similar bonds later in life.

Technology is supposed to have come to our aid in the form of “Social Networking” – with the likes of Facebook and Twitter providing a back channel to our daily lives through which we can maintain friendships that would otherwise founder.

Social Networking is a the solution to a problem that didn’t exist. It allows community to form between self selecting group of people who are already known to each other – which is quite different than a real world community, where the members are brought together randomly.

On another level, social networking was created to assist us, when in practice it causes the most basic forms of communication – speech, and physical interaction – to erode.

You could argue that modern communication methods – social networks, and instant messaging – are causing the beginnings of H G Wells Morlock and Eloi – which we can distill into the disparity between the “haves” and the “have nots”. Those with the iPhones, Blackberries, Laptops and other such gadgets hide behind walls – both real and imaginary – pretending to form friendships with many they will never meet. Those without such modern “essentials” will meanwhile be helping, supporting, and talking to each other. Visiting each other unannounced.

When was the last time any of your friends knocked on the door without calling first ?

Sunday night became Monday morning about an hour ago, and I’m skimming through the television channels. Billie Piper is on one of the channels, and she’s not wearing much. Actually – strike that – she’s being really very naughty indeed; and now I can’t turn to another channel.

It turns out the amazing scenes unfolding in front of my rapidly diminishing eyes are from the drama “Secret Diary of Call Girl” – based on the book “Belle du Jour”.

I have not read Belle Du Jour, and suddenly it seems that I should have. I’ve certainly read about it, and seen it in numerous railway station booksellers, usually topping the charts. My not having read it is an anomaly of sorts – I’ve read quite a few controversial books.

“Lolita” asked difficult questions, and didn’t answer them. “Tropic of Cancer” opened a window onto a very dark world. “We” still sits in my pile of books to read one day; famous for getting it’s author into quite a lot of trouble with the Soviet state for promoting the idea of being an individual, and having free thought.

I have Billie Piper stuck in my head now – some kind of short circuit is going on – the wholesome young girl who sang “Because I Want To”, and partnered Dr Who on countless adventures was a well rounded character in my mind. I thought I knew her. Of course that was before a few minutes ago when I saw her cavorting with an uncomfortable businessman, dressed in the most impressively fitted underwear I’ve seen in quite some time.

Dr Who will never be the same again.

While wandering around the house this morning making breakfast, I happened upon three little girls watching Sunday morning cartoons on the television, and playing various Nintendo handheld games. The bit of my brain that switches on when obvious photographs appear in front of me shouted “go and fetch the camera!”, so I did.

Interesting observation – the combination of Mario, Zelda, and cartoons rendered the girls completely unaware of my presence.

Sunday mornings rule…

The eldest blanks all other stimulus in exactly the same way I do – sometimes you have to nudge her to break her focus…

You can see the cogs turning…

Movie stars pay a lot of money for flyaway hair like this…

There are of course more on Flickr.

Saturday morning. Unshaven, untidy, tired, and weary. It doesn’t get much more real than this.

For the past two days I have commuted towards the southern reaches of London to teach a group of business people how to use a technology product I happen to know more than most about. It has been my first experience of teaching a group, and somewhat unnerving. I am not a teacher.

Somehow in my head I imagined standing in front of perhaps four or five people. Having signed into the building and followed a rabbit warren of corridors, I was greeted by a rather large room – full of people. I put on my ad-hoc teacher’s hat, consigned any natural shyness to my backpack, waved in a friendly manner to everybody and started acting.

I don’t know how to teach. Everybody who has seen the way I am with children always remarks how good a teacher I would have made – but this was a room full of grown ups. Luckily I have sat in a good few training courses over the years, so did what I’ve seen other people do.

We went around the room doing introductions, I wrote names down in high speed scribble (I even draw a diagram of where they were sitting – I saw another teacher do that on a course I was in once, and thought “that’s a damn good idea – I’ll do that one day”). Of course I only referred to one person by name during the two days, and I got it wrong.

Everybody knew my name.

Whenever I’m showing professional people anything vaguely technological, I’m always scared stiff of being found out – scared that some classroom know-it-all will know more than me about the thing I’m demonstrating, or discussing. I’ve never actually had it happen, so I’m guessing it’s another hang-up to put on the pile that make me who I am.

Of course, computers being computers, I always fear that things will not work too. When showing something to a group of people who are paying a lot of money for you to show them that something, strange things happen. The button you’ve clicked on five thousand times before doesn’t do what it did the previous five thousand times.

During the first day I stressed over absolutely everything. To the class I probably appeared calm, methodical, and knowledgeable. Unbeknown to them, my heart was in my mouth most of the time. It’s surprising how quickly you relax though – today (day two) was an altogether more relaxed affair. Part of the reason for that was down to me proving everything I wanted to do would work late the night before. Yes, I am that mad.

So, while I might appear to be a good teacher and might appear composed and clever, I don’t think I could do it as a career. I can almost guarantee that at some stage I would lose it (prompted by my own perceived failure to figure something out in front of the students). I would be found hours later in the street, talking to pigeons about strong naming in the dot net framework or something.