Ye Sacred Muses

Ye Sacred Muses is a song written by William Byrd after the death of fellow composer Thomas Tallis. It's one of my favourite pieces, usually sung by a male alto (as it would have been originally).

I rearranged it a while ago as an experiment, so here it is for your listening pleasure!

By the way "ye" is pronounced "the" - the "y" is actually a "th" written in a way that makes it look like a "y". So "ye olde tea shoppe", like you see in certain English towns, should actually be pronounced "the old tea shop".

I've never heard a recording of Ye Sacred Muses that gets it right...

  
Download now or listen on posterous

Ye Sacred Muses (Byrd arr. Baldwin).m4a (3709 KB)

I'm not dead yet!

Buying travel insurance for my imminent trip to China (Shanghai and Beijing over two weeks - very excited!) I was a little concerned at some of the small print in different policies.

One insurer offered to pay me £50 every day in the event I am kidnapped. Up to a maximum of £500. Go figure.

Another promised to pay for me to be cremated or buried, but omitted the clause "in the event of your death". Fearing some overzealous undertaker knocking on my hotel bedroom door, I decided not to go with them.

Reminds me of this classic sequence from Monty Python and the Meaning of Life:



Or this, from The Holy Grail

English Ways of Saying Goodbye

My friend Qin, who is Chinese, rang me the other night and after about 30 minutes the time came to say goodbye. I had to go do something (can't remember what - eat, I think) so I said so. "Okay, bye" she said.
I panicked. "What?"
"Bye" she said.

This was new to me. Normally when the English (I would say British but I don't know if it's true of the rest of the UK) say goodbye they enter into a protracted process of drawing things to a close. I first became aware of this when watching The West Wing, and then other US TV shows. In those, a telephone conversation would suddenly end, often without any form of goodbye at all. The last sentence would be spoken and bang the phone would be hung up.

How rude. How very un-English. But how efficient.

I think most of my hang-ups (no pun intended) about the telephone revolve around the whole process of starting up and winding down the conversation. It is almost entirely redundant but you start off with the "how are you?" stuff that takes up a few minutes before you get on to the meat of the conversation. If you're calling someone you've never spoken before you have to give your life story and explain who you are.

But it's the "good bye" that is particularly draining. We can't just say "bye" and hang up. When I told Qin I had to go eat I was telling the truth but I was signalling that I would shortly have to go and do this. I wasn't saying "go away I need to have food". To the English the signal is like the coda in a piece of music. It says "right, we're all done but let's bring things nicely to a halt". Saying "well I suppose I'd better go let the cat in" is just that - it's a polite signal that the conversation has run its course, you have nothing new to say and, much as you may love the person on the other end of the line, pretty soon all you'll be able to do is resort to a bit of heavy breathing cos you're all out of conversation. The signal is a way of politely saying you know you're both about to get to the end of the conversation and moving the discussion on to a roundabout way of acknowledging it.

When Qin said "okay, bye" it pulled the rug from under me. "What?" I said. "Bye" she repeated.

If she'd been English she'd have said "ok - what you having?" I'd have said "a ham sandwich" or something and she'd have told me what she'd had to eat, or was planning to eat. We may have riffed on that for a minute, swapped recipes, delighted in each other's preferences for mustard or mayonnaise, brown bread or white before gently bringing the conversation to a halt. "Okay, I'll let you get on" is often the preferred conclusion to the coda, the imperfect cadence, if you will, (to keep the music metaphor going) that leads to the final "good bye" and hang up.

It always has to be the person who made the call who "lets the other one go" - the receiver of the call can't do it.

I tried to explain to Qin the etiquette she was breaking by simply accepting that I had to go and hanging up but she couldn't get it.

There are similar things in English behaviour: we can't buy anything without saying thank you several times, for example. I seem to remember hearing a comedy routine on this years ago but can't remember. Basically it goes like this...
We take our goods to the counter and put them down. "Just those, thanks" we say. The cashier puts everything through and tells us how much. "£5.65, please". We hand over the cash. "Thanks" we say. We get our change. "Ta". We gather up the bag. "Cheers". We head off "See you later. Thanks" We may add another "Cheers, bye" and then we're off.
I count at least five or six instances of "thank you" or its variants.

It's hard work being English, sometimes.

National Novel Writing Month

I'm taking part in National Novel Writing Month in November - trying to balance it with my other commitments. I'm already a bit behind. :-(

A former student of mine is taking part too. The badge below shows our relative progress towards the 50,000 word target. At the time of writing this I was well behind her (I'm the top line).



Might catch up a bit today...

Northumbria University Design School

I was invited to go down to Newcastle on Wednesday to give a talk at the University of Northumbria's School of Design, now situated in its rather spiffy new building (the one on the left in the second image below)

Northumbria is Jonathan Ive's old stomping ground. Like me, he got his first break designing for the toilet industry so it's almost like we're twins. Er...

I was given an open brief which is always a bit tricky so I decided to do an amalgam of two talks, my annual "Good Design/Bad Design" lecture (where I challenge conventional wisdom on what 'good design' is) and the best bits of the keynote I gave in Texas in June (where I suggested university-based design education should be about making a difference in the world, not just churning out industry fodder).
When I arrived in Newcastle (I hadn't been there for a while and had forgotten how cold it can be, despite it being a few hundred miles south of where I live now) I was pleasantly surprised to see this sign:

Resisting the urge to add the missing apostrophe and correct the spelling of my name (ahem) I quickly took a photo with my iPhone and emailed it to my boss. I've now decided to make similar notices and pin them up around my own uni to make me seem much more popular than I am.

The lecture theatre we were moved to unfortunately was a little lacking heat-wise which (and here's my excuse) led to me forgetting quite a few of the points I wanted to make, as did the fact that the head of design for Philips was in the room and I had planned on making quite a few criticisms of some of their products, including an electric shaver I was asked to review for Amazon.co.uk! (I must post that this weekend, in fact - suffice to say it doesn't get very good marks from me, largely because of the excessive packaging and use of proprietary chemicals for cleaning). Needless to say I hastily skipped all the slides relating to that but because I couldn't quite remember where they were I was keeping half an eye on my presenter display ready to click my remote furiously.
I was told later he'd have loved to have heard my take on things. Oh well.

It was, incidentally, a pleasant surprise to be greeted by a never-before seen sight: students voluntarily sitting on the front row:

Despite the cold (the hats and scarfs above were a necessity) and having to skip through the last bits due to time constraints (top tip: when combining two different talks, both an hour long, you might want to chop half of it out if you still want to stick to 60 minutes) I think it went okay. I'm always a bit nervous about these things - as an outsider I'm able to be a bit more controversial than I could be normally and drop a few metaphorical bombs before leaving them to carry on the discussion, and I had planned a few zingers but was in the end a bit more restrained than usual, even skipping my traditional (half joking) rant about typography. Oh well.

I was also a bit down what with it being my birthday - enough to depress anyone the wrong side of 35.

Excuses, excuses.

I was really pleased to be asked and appreciated the audience's participation in some of the 'magic' tricks (one of which I tried on a colleague in the pub when I got back to Scotland that night and, much to my surprise, it worked). I won't tell you any more about it - if you want to see it you'll have to invite me to come and talk ;-)

My thanks of course to the students who found their way to the new venue and suffered through the cold (and my talk), to Jamie Steane, Head of Visual Communication and Interactive Media Design, for inviting me, and to Dr Joyce Yee for taking me to lunch and giving me a tour round the new building. Design is clearly a feather in Northumbria's cap and the university's investment in the building sends a clear signal about that. One that, I noticed on my way home, lights up for all in Newcastle to see at night:

Speaking in Newcastle later this month

I'm giving a talk at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle on 29th October - my birthday, as it happens!

Chinese Cooking

After the Olympics closing ceremony yesterday, my friend Qin cooked me dinner - quite an honour! I thought I'd capture the moment so that anyone could follow along at home:



In case you're wondering, it tasted lovely. :-)

"You have to scream!"

Qin in Brighton from Jonathan Baldwin on Vimeo.

After the conference finished last week in London I met my friend and colleague Qin off the train and took her to Brighton. I've been telling her for a while that it's somewhere she had to visit, and I'd arranged for us to stay for a couple of nights with my former students, Shaun and Amelia. We also met up with Matt, another of my prodigies (or is it progeny? Is that rude?)

Having lived there four years I can safely say I never did the whole touristy bit so I took her to the pier, the funfair, the museum and the Pavilion (which, let me say, is absolutely fantastic inside. I never realised. You have to go). Qin was fascinated by the chinoiserie inside, the Western idea of what China was like in the 18th/19th centuries.

I took my new Flip video camera with me and followed Qin around so she had a souvenir. Here's the video. My favourite moments: in the seaside rock shop after she'd spend several minutes looking for messages appropriate for her friends, Qin pointed to sticks of rock that said 'Man City' all the way through them. I thought for a few seconds and then realised her mistake: "It's short for Manchester City, the football team" I told her.
Then at the end of the video, about three minutes out, we're on a roller coaster. I hate roller coasters but decided to risk it. Just before we set off I felt my harness come undone but we started going before I could point this out to someone. So I went round the whole thing clinging on for dear life. As we went round each bend my feet came out of the car and I tried to push back down. Meanwhile I was also trying to point the camera somewhere meaningful.
Turns out my harness wasn't undone after all, but that's not the point. Qin told me the views from the top of the roller coaster were amazing. I missed them all. "You have to scream!" she told me. I told her I was saving my last breath so I could say something poignant as I was flung out into the English Channel. Something to be remembered by.
"What were his last words?" people would ask. "You should see the view from here!" perhaps...

My MA thesis Wordled...

This is rather nice. Wordle is a web tool that takes a bunch of text and converts it in to something akin to a tag cloud, with word size based on the frequency they occur.

Here's my 2001 MA thesis on polysemy in advertising:

Click on the thumbnail to try it out yourself, and take a look at these created from the subtitles for various episodes of Doctor Who.

To hell via Chicago

I just got back from a great conference in Dallas organised by the chaps on the Visual Communications programme at the University of North Texas. I'll write more about that when my brain catches up with me - suffice to say I really enjoyed it and met some fantastic people.

But I thought I should share the hellish experience I had on the way back. I wrote this at Edinburgh Airport and haven't had a chance to edit it - it was one of those 'get it out of my head in one go' things...
My thanks to American Airlines for making my journey so, erm, eventful.

I arrived at Dallas Fort Worth airport well before time on Sunday for the flight to Edinburgh via Chicago and Heathrow. When I got there I saw the flight was delayed by an hour (thunderstorms in Chicago - the news was full of floods in Louisiana and other states, quite bad), but as this was the flight to Heathrow anyway it didn't matter. The poor buggers going to Brussels were given a choice: go to Chicago and hope, go to Chicago and stay over, or stay in Dallas.
For me it was just a case of getting to Chicago and waiting till they'd refuelled.
So the flight to Chicago is packed, mainly with domestic flyers. I'm sat next to a young lad who clearly hasn't flown before as he asks me all sorts of questions, like I'm the Ancient Mariner or something. He's going to Jordan.

As the flight lands in Chicago, the pilot tells those of us going to Heathrow that we need to go to gate L8 and get a plane from there instead. So a few of us confirm what we've heard and, not knowing what time it's going (the information screen just, very helpfully, says 'on time') we all leg it to L8 which is about half a mile away in the same terminal. You have to go through all the shops and things and step over people sitting down on the floor using their laptops or calling on their phones.
Eventually I get there and discover the flight to Heathrow isn't going until 6pm, so an hour to kill. So I kill it - having gone to the desk to check this is the right flight. It is.

Come 6pm the flight just starts to board and as the guy at Dallas helpfully moved me forwards in the plane I'm one of the last groups to be called forward. I give the woman my boarding pass, she swipes it and... a red light flashes.
"You're not on this flight you need to be on AA86" she says. That's the flight I was on before, the one they told us to change. She shouts to another woman "is AA86 gone?" They're still boarding, apparently. "You'd better run".

So I run. It's half a mile at least and everyone's really slow and really fat and I've got my laptop bag on and my leg's sore from a cramp that morning, and it's hot hot hot.
I don't think I'm going to make it but I run to the desk and see the words 'Heathrow boarding" and throw myself in front of them, breathless. "Calm down sir, you're fine" says one of the staff there. I don't feel fine, I tell her, through gasps.

She scans my pass and checks me in and I go to join everybody else in the departure lounge. I don't see any of the other people from the earlier flight and I wonder what happened to them.
There's another flight letting people on and an attendant goes up to the girl and says 'all done, let's go' and they both step on to the plane and I watch the bridge retract, leaving the plane alone on the tarmac. By now I'm beginning to catch my breath and I look around and see another passenger looking at the screen I'd seen earlier. "7.45" she says and I assume this is when my flight is going, which is too late for my connection to Edinburgh. So I get up to go to the desk to check I can make a later flight at Heathrow and I see the words "Heathrow: Boarded". I look back to the window and I realise: that's my fucking plane! And it's going!

There are two passengers talking to a lone attendant at the desk and a religious-looking guy behind him. I decide not to be British and interrupt: "Excuse me, that's my flight! I'm not in it!" I'm staying calm inwardly but screaming like a madman externally.
"Didn't you hear the call?" she says. There was no call, I say. I was waiting for the call. In Britain if you check in but don't get on the flight they shout your name from the rooftops. "I can't get you on the flight, sir, there's nothing I can do."
"But my bag's on there," I say, at which point she thinks. The thing that surprises me about the US and Chicago in particular: the security is tight. At DFW I had to go through a body scanner that puffed compressed air at me and made some grinding noises, which interestingly had no one staffing it, so I suspect it was just some bicycle pumps and an old washing machine.
And there are no calls. At Chicago the only calls I heard were that members of the military service were welcome in the smoking area (which is public, so it's hardly a perk) and that the current threat level is amber. And I think that's what's got her concerned so I press the issue: "How can the plane leave with my bag on it? Surely that's a security risk?" One thing I know after Lockerbie is that they introduced rules that say baggage that's checked in by a passenger can't go if the passenger isn't on the plane. Which is one of the reasons they make all those calls for "Passenger X" to get out of the bar or the duty free shop and get to the gate before they have to go through all the bags to get theirs off.
This hadn't happened here, and they hadn't even done a head count: 500 passengers checked in, only 499 on the plane equals, as Dickens might have said, a might cock up.

She took my name and disappeared for a minute, then came back with a man. "You'll have to get the bridge back out there" she told him and he rushed me to the door. I stopped to gather my stuff, dropping bits everywhere.
Now you know that scene in Star Wars where Luke and Leia are running from Stormtroopers and they come to a retracted bridge? Luke nearly falls in but Leia pulls him back.
Well this was very nearly what happened as I ran after the little fat man but didn't notice that he sidestepped into a control booth while I clattered towards the open door leading to the tarmac. He started moving the bridge while I steadied myself. Eventually it hit the plane and he, get this, *knocked* on the door! Like he was just popping round for a cup of sugar. God knows what they were thinking inside but after a few seconds the door opened and I fell inside, completely unable to speak, dropping things everywhere. The attendants smiled at me and asked for my boarding pass - but I'd lost it! I only had the ones for the first and last leg of the journey, not this one! "I'm in seat 23H" I said, remembering it from the ticket.
"I trust you" said the head woman - you trust me? It's bloody amber alert out there and you TRUST me??
Suits me, I thought, and went to get to my seat, still dropping then picking things up.

I get to my seat and I'm sat next to a young woman who smiles at me like "bugger I thought I was going to be sitting on my own" but then an attendant comes up to me and says "that row's free" and points to the back row in the front cabin, lots of lovely seats all unoccupied except for one American woman who spreads herself over three of them and says "they're mine" while miming sleep. Fine, I think, and sit down, still sweating from the half mile jog.
After this the flight seems to go smoothly except there's a screaming baby up the front and across the aisle from me there are four American lads who don't know the meaning of the words 'quiet whisper' who talk and laugh all the way through the flight. The woman next to me knows them (turns out she's their teacher) and tells them twice to be quiet so others can sleep, which they are for about five minutes. At about 4am UK time I tell them to shut up too and that works for about three minutes. Bastards.

The flight makes up time and we land an hour late. I notice my connection to Edinburgh is actually half an hour later than I thought so I have time to make it. I rush off the plane to get the bus to Terminal 5 (third visit now, still don't see what the fuss is about) and then through security, which is held up, as last time, by a lack of trays to put stuff in. Unlike last time I don't have to hold a random baby while his mother folds up the push chair, but I do worry about the large old American lady who's puffing away behind me while telling the staff she can't go through the metal detector because she has a pacemaker.
I get through all that and rush to the gate... and the plane's delayed anyway. Of course.

On the flight to Edinburgh I find I'm sat next to a compulsive throat clearer. But not just a normal bit of throat clearance - he makes a meal of it (well, not quite literally) getting a good run-up to it. Every few minutes. For the full 55 minutes of the journey plus the 20 minutes sitting on the tarmac. But at least I made my flight - I'm going to be on time getting back home despite everything!

The flight lands (during the flight the staff try to wheel the breakfast trolley up the aisle while the plane's still ascending and all the meals slide out on to the floor, but as I got mine I don't chalk that up as a personal event in teh catalogue of disasters) and we all go to belt 6 to get our bags. Now I remember joking with the guy at DFW as my bag disappeared behind him. "Will it get transferred all the way to Edinburgh?" I asked him. "It should" he said, "but this is an airline". I watched it go off fearing I'd never see it again and wondering if I'd been insured for the trip.
Belt 6 goes round and bags appear. Last time I did this the first thing that appeared was a suitcase handle. Just the handle, with the airline luggage tag attached to it. No suitcase. Poor bugger, I thought and, judging from everyone else's faces they were thinking the same too.

The belt went round. More bags. More bags. Then not so many bags. Then just a couple. Then more bags! But this was the next flight. Eventually I gave in and went to the baggage office.
"Was there any problem with the flight?" the guy asked me. "Any delays?" I wanted to tell him the full story but I thought it might get in the way of any film rights I could exploit, so I just murmured something about delays in Chicago. He typed something in to his computer. "It's on the next flight" he said, "should be here at 12.30. Do you want us to send it on?" When he learned where I lived he said it wouldn't arrive with me till tomorrow so I said I'd wait the 90 minutes. "You sure?" he said. "Oh yes" I said and then I went to have a little cry but couldn't. So I sat down with a cup of tea (a real one! Yes!) and typed this.
I'm going to be writing a brief letter to American Airlines soon to suggest that their boarding procedures might need a little bit of tightening up. And maybe a few useful announcements in the airport instead of telling us we're good to smoke if we're soldiers or that we need to keep our baggage with us at all times. I'm beginning to think I learned that particular lesson.

A Walk Up The Fife Coast

This VoiceThread tells the tale of a walk I made last summer

Light Show - recursive animation

Here's a short animation I produced over Christmas that uses recursive patterns to produce an interesting effect.

The music's "Decisions, Decisions", something I wrote around 1992.

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Eye Forum on Design and Education

I will be one of the panellists at the third Eye Forum being held at London College of Communication on 22 January.

If you've got a question on the topic you can email it to the magazine or contribute from the floor on the night.

If you're coming along, let me know!

Eye Forum no. 3: ‘Design and education’

The third Eye Forum promises to be the best yet, so we hope you can come. The Forum takes place at the London College of Communication (LCC) on Tuesday 22 January at 6.30pm. Please come along to debate some of the ‘burning issues’ in design education, together with broader issues such as recruitment, lifelong learning, design literacy and the role of self-taught designers. As before, after the main event in the lecture theatre, there will be drinks, canapés and plenty of time to network and socialise.

There’s plenty to talk about, so we are again inviting delegates to submit questions – in the manner of the BBC’s long-running TV show Question Time – which can be short or long, plain or nuanced, serious, heartfelt, flippant or funny. And this time, I'd like to encourage delegates to read their questions from the floor. The chair will open up each question to the audience, so that everyone is free to join the debate, and to challenge or develop points made by the panel.

Please get involved.
To submit your question(s), email eye.freelance@haymarket.com by 7 January 2007, or add them to this blog.

Here are some of the ‘burning issues’ already suggested for the Forum:
* Standards: is everyone speaking the same language?
* Do educators select students on their mark-making ability – at the expense of communication?
* Do employers regard new talent as a renewable source of cheap labour?
* Is design art? Is it time to separate the two?
* Is it important to have a visually literate nation (in a post-literary world)?

Our distinguished, expert panel will comprise:

• Jonathan Baldwin (design historian and lecturer, University of Dundee),


• Jamie Hobson (head of marketing and admissions, London College of Communication).


• Lesley Morris, (Design Council),


• Tim Molloy, (head of design, Science Museum)


• Simon Sankarayya (art director, AllofUs)


• The chair will be Alan Livingston (principal, Falmouth College of Arts)

Please come along to join us for ‘burning issues’ and warming drinks on a cold night - Tuesday 22 January 2008.

To book your place, email clare.mcnulty@haymarket.com, call 020 8267 4804, or go online Tickets cost £30 (£25 students) including wine and canapés.

Be seeing you

John L. Walters, editor, Eye

The sponsors for this Forum are Represent, the bespoke recruitment agency and Quark.

Diplomas to become 'the qualification of choice'

From the BBC:

Diplomas could become the 'qualification of choice', says the Schools Secretary Ed Balls, raising the prospect they will replace A-levels.
Mr Balls has announced new diplomas in academic subject areas - science, languages and the humanities - for 14-19 year olds in England.

[...]

Diplomas, a new type of qualification intended to bridge the divide between academic and vocational learning, are to be initially introduced from next year, in a limited range of vocational subjects.

[...]

'If diplomas are successfully introduced and are delivering the mix that employers and universities value, they could become the qualification of choice for young people,' said Mr Balls.

[...]

The success of diplomas will depend on how they are recognised by employers and universities - and Universities UK stressed that the new qualifications will need to 'genuinely provide an appropriate progression route on to higher education'.

A statement from the Russell Group, representing leading universities, also cautioned that 'we are concerned to ensure that the diploma sufficiently equips candidates with the skills and knowledge they need to flourish on our courses'.

There have already been 14 diploma qualifications announced, with the first five - construction and the built environment, creative and media, engineering, information technology and society, health and development - beginning in autumn 2008.

All of the diploma qualifications will include a basic skills element, in English, maths and information technology.

I had a small role to play in the development of the creative and media diploma, being part of the working party that put it together, writing a report on access to HE that (I hope) was influential, and making a suggestion about the way the curriculum was illustrated in one report that, I gather, helped quite a lot of people make sense of it. (It's a small thing, sure, but probably the most useful thing I did!)

When I started on the project I had my doubts about the idea of a diploma that set in stone from the age of 14 that someone would 'be a designer' - or an actor, a film director, an editor, a radio engineer etc. But when I saw the curriculum I was pleasantly surprised. Unless it's changed since then, it wouldn't mean kids dropping English and History to do art and design (and as I've said before, I think we need more people on design courses who took those subjects instead of art) but would instead mean a much better arts-based curriculum all round.

My big worry remains, however: if your school decides it's going to offer the construction diploma but not the creative and media one, does that mean your chances of entering the latter sector are worsened? It's a bit like schools that 'specialise' in things like IT or (god help us) sport. I can just imagine how happy I would have been as a child if my school had specialised in sport...

So I'm with the Russell Group on this - the qualifications have to be proven before they're taken seriously. In my report to the working group I predicted it would take a lot for art colleges to overcome their usual prejudices for students from the right Foundation Courses and 'feeder colleges', and suggested ways to do it. I hope they took my advice.

A foul slur!

It's not true!

Everything's an experience these days

At Dundee airport the other week I stopped at the little coffee cart (it's a tiny airport) and asked for a hot chocolate. Except they don't sell hot chocolate.

No, what they sell is a "hot frothed milk and chocolate experience". Or words to that effect.

Whatever, most of it ended up down the sink because my flight was called (needlessly early as it turned out) and you're not allowed to take hot chocolate, or indeed a "hot frothed milk and chocolate experience", through security in case you're a terrorist.

I suppose it could be a weapon, though hardly a weapon of choice. You could throw it in the face of a member of the cabin crew ("Experience this!" you would shout, presumably) but then you're stuffed. It's all gone and there's still a plane full of passengers, another member of the cabin crew, and a locked door to get through before you reach the pilot.

As it turned out, the flight was uneventful, except for one slightly worrying moment. I was sat next to the emergency exit which, every time that happens, comes with the phrase 'at least it means you can stretch your legs' but for some reason reminds me of those dreams where you're at school naked. (Everyone can see!)

As the plane took off (small plane so very noisy and bumpy) the little plastic cover that goes over the door-pull fell in to my lap. I jumped a bit, as you can imagine. Staring down, and calming down, I noticed it was normally attached via Velcro (which wasn't particularly reassuring, though I suppose it makes sense). All through take-off I kept looking at the now-exposed emergency door release fighting the urge to see how easy it would be to pull it. I mean, that has to be one of the least-tested parts of any plane, doesn't it?

After the plane levelled out I thought about sticking it back on again but had visions of being wrestled to the ground by an over-keen Harrison Ford wannabe who might have mistaken me for, well, a terrorist. So I did something I always wanted to do... I pressed the little button that calls a member of the crew. She appeared instantly (small plane, you see) and looked a bit puzzled (in a sort of 'here we go again' way) when I pointed at my lap. 'It fell off' I said, sheepishly, and she picked it up and stuck it deftly but firmly back on the patch of Velcro before returning to her duties (primarily, it later turned out, stewing the tea - must be why they used to be called stewardesses, I suppose).

My feet hurt

I just got back from an 8 mile walk round Dundee using part of the 'Green Circular' route. (Click the image above for a bigger view. The numbers are mileposts - I walked clockwise from my home, down to the Tay, past the airport, up to Invergowrie, then north to Camperdown Park, up to Camperdown House, then south back home. A mix of country path, suburban cycle dirt track, pavement and concrete).

I planned it using a site called 'Map My Walk' which if you do a lot of walking might be worth a visit. There's also 'Map My Run' and 'Map My Ride' for cyclists. It's a nice mashup using Google Maps - I visited it last year when it was in beta and it's come on a long way. Well worth a look.

You can convert your route in to a Goggle Earth file so you can see your seemingly long walk on a global scale. If you're planning a round the world trip this could be just your thing. Here's my walk as a Google Earth file...

Inappropriate music

This story today reminded me of a post I meant to make after flying on one of these planes, with the same airline (Flybe), recently.

An aircraft has had to make an emergency landing at Edinburgh Airport.
The Dash-8 Flybe plane had 36 people on board when crew members were forced to shut down one of its two turboprop engines on Monday morning.

The airport was put on full emergency alert after the plane's captain put out a mayday call at 0740 BST."

Flybe have an annoying habit of playing music as you board the aircraft, but what's worse is the speakers are so poor it reminds me of the 70s, listening to the radio on longwave (those of you too young to remember pre-FM or even pre-digital days, you don't know what you missed).

Anyway, the song playing as I got on? "Buck Rogers" by Feeder. The repeating refrain didn't fill me with confidence: "I think we're gonna make it"...

It played twice on the way there, and again on the way back. Inspiring.

I meant to write and complain...

What have I been doing for the last twenty years?

Lawrence Miles (an excellent writer) sums up exactly my own take on the recent 40th anniversary of Sgt Pepper. I wasn't so much celebrating the album as remembering watching a documentary on it in 1987:

in 1987, ITV broadcast a documentary called It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, marking the twentieth anniversary of Sergeant Pepper. In those days, 1967 seemed to exist in the same “times that never really happened” bracket as Jason and the Argonauts or films about dinosaurs fighting cavemen, and probably featured stop-motion hippies courtesy of Ray Harryhausen. But a few months from now, it’ll be twenty years since the documentary, forty years since the album, and – logically – sixty years since Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. It wouldn’t be so bad, if I’d actually done anything useful in those twenty years. I turned thirty-five last month, for Christ’s sake, I’m entitled to a midlife crisis.

I feel the same when I watch old episodes of Doctor Who (which is the link between me and Lawrence - who I just realised is a year younger than me but in many ways seems to have had the life I was supposed to, the bastard). Take Robot, Tom Baker's first story, which I saw on DVD the other day. I remember watching that when it was first on, about 8 weeks after my fourth birthday. Do you know how sad (in an emotional, not, you know, 'sad' way) this made me feel?
Not long ago I saw Logopolis, Baker's last story and again it made me sad, both in an 'end of an era' way and in a more complex mathematical way.

Let me see if I can explain. A few months after they first showed Logopolis, the BBC did something we Doctor Who fans could only dream of in those days: they showed a season of old stories beginning with the very first, An Unearthly Child from November 23 1963.
Now to someone born in 1970 (hello) 1963 is, as Lawrence puts it: 'in the same “times that never really happened” bracket as Jason and the Argonauts or films about dinosaurs fighting cavemen'. In 1981, 1963 was nearly 20 years ago (you see, I can do maths!) which was pre-history as far as I was concerned. So last year, when I watched An Unearthly Child again (on DVD - you get the impression I was lying about the 'sad' don't you?) I couldn't help working out that (and stick with me here) the gap between my first viewing it and seeing it now was actually longer than the gap between it first being shown and my seeing it in 1981...

That's mind-bending.

I remember when my dad turned 40 and we thought he was old. Apparently, 60 is the new 40 which is just as well - this is one goal post I don't mind them moving. But like Lawrence I reckon I had my midlife crisis far too early (unless it's God's way of telling you you've only got another 30 years to live in which case I may cash in my pension now). Why do we seem to have our mid-life crises earlier than ever, despite the fact our life expectancy is longer? Simple. It's down to cheap TV channels showing programmes you dimly remember from your childhood, and it's down to the BBC releasing its entire archive (the stuff it didn't wipe to record new episodes of Hetty Wainthrop Investigates) on DVD.
I'm looking at a video of the entire series of Willow The Wisp that a friend bought me one Christmas because they presumably thought I was of the age that I would find it amusingly nostalgic, when in fact it made me want to go and bury my head in a pillow and cry like a baby.

People ask me why I teach, or what I like about it. They rarely ask me what I don't like about it. It's the fact that every year, the people I teach become 12 months more detached from my own experience. I used to use the rescue of Princess Leia from the Death Star to introduce the concpet of project management (try it: produce a Gantt Chart of the rescue plan) but I stopped doing that when the number of people who'd never seen Star Wars came dangerously close to making me faint.

I was on the phone to a friend yesterday reporting on a recent visit to the doctor. 'It was frightening' I told her, 'suddenly all the leaflets I used to ignore now seem to be aimed at me'. The day you reach 35 the list of things you have to be worried about, check and stare at before flushing away increases dramatically.

So maybe this is why I haven't played Sgt Pepper in homage to its creation. Not because I don't like it (I do) but because I can't stomach the fact that the first line 'It was twenty years ago today' might be a temporal jolt too far.