There's only 8 hours left of 2008 and now the Lass has posted her own year in miniature it's about time I got my feckless arse round to doing the same before I get distracted by something else online and never actually finish OH LOOK A PONY
JUNE! I used to wonder how much I'd be willing to pay to see Tom Waits - well, now we know: not that much. Radiohead played Portishead, I travelled alone, painted some garlic and stood in a very damp Glasgow Green watching the aforementioned Radiobonce on stage.
SEPTEMBER! Skye! Lovely lovely Skye, fourth year in a row. A particularly splendid Sunday spent storytelling and headbanging (though at different times). I went back to life drawing - went okay, but I'd given up by the end of the year due to exhaustion. Big southern softy.
NOVEMBER! Busy month, quiet blog. Still, very happy about an election result, marvelled about the bogglingly wide eyes of French children and saw Messrs Albini, Weston & Trainer in concert.
Just a quick post-and-run to commend the Mark Gatiss-penned ghost story Crooked House to you lot, now it's available in a combined 'omnibus' form. Shown on BBC4 just before christmas, it consists of three 30 minute stories tied together by a door knocker. Which doesn't sound very spooky, and the first two were eerie rather than downright fearful, but the final 30 minute story brought the willies nicely. It's a fine example of stripped-down old-fashioned ghost-storytelling in the spirit (no pun intended) of M.R. James. Don't go expecting gut-strewn horror - this is subtle, chilling stuff, and the final story did a fine job of preying on my mind after the lights went out, always a good sign. UK residents have 4 days left to watch or download the combined Crooked House on the BBC iPlayer. Colonials might wish to check certain torrent websites, though I wouldn't know anything about that.
Damn it, how do I do this blogging lark again? Apologies for the break in service, caused not by the throwing of oneself from a high precipice in advance of the oncoming economic meltdown, as may have been feared from the previous post, merely by being a busy little fellow with an ever-loosening grip on time. Nevertheless, in a festive spirit of unbridled optimism, I still plan on producing some best-of-the-year posts, which tend to happen every two years (and I missed last year). Hopefully these should form themselves into some kind of publishable form before Hogmanay so I'm not spending next year still looking backwards.
Anyhoo, that'll be then, this is now, what's been going on to keep me away from you, Mildly Interested Reader?
EMSTER. Our wee pal and her parents (also our pals) popped over to see us yesterday and a thoroughly marvelous time was had by all. Highlights included multiple readings of Emily's Balloon by yours truly, all sorts of genuinely impressive sign language and monkey business, the parsnip, carrot & rosemary bread I'd baked being described as "smelling like hippy" by the Bobness, good chatter, good chuckles and an all-round sense of goodness. Except for when Emily and me checked up on our hedge-fund investments:
How was I to know the sign for "blue-chip companies as-yet unconnected with the collapsing housing market in the Western world" and "Iggle Piggle" were so blasted similar? Anyway, remember all my hooting about the charity Aid for Children with Tracheostomies? Well, Emily's fundraising is now just a few quid shy of ONE THOUSAND POUNDS which is seriously fucking cool. And if you would go and donate some money now to help push the total over that amount? Why, you'd be seriously fucking cool too!
PROMO. The polar bear and Snoopy turned out to be surprisingly effective - I got the bounder! Won't be clear for some time when it will begin or what particular position I'll be going into (steady on), but it's just a matter of time. Very, very good news to end the year with, and sets 2009 up nicely, with a view to clearing all (non-student-loan) debts cleared by 2011, a year earlier than planned. By my reckoning, if the property and credit markets are ever going to reach some kind of stable normality, it should be reaching it around then, so the timing could be quite fortuitous. I've been doing a fair bit of extra work from home recently, another reason I've been missing off blogland lately - after staring at a laptop for a couple of hours, popping onto another one to write a post doesn't seem too appealing - but if it makes any positive impact in the introduction of distance working for the department I work for in the future, it'll be well worth it. After all, distance working opens the door to distance living...
NOSH. Been cooking a good range of stuff over the last month or two and almost completely failed to document them. However, given the pleasing novelty of their appearance, I couldn't leave the blue roasties unphotographed. Yup, blue roasties.
That's the potatoes - Salad Blues, from Carroll's Heritage Potatoes - peeled before boiling. They turned out nicely, the flesh not particularly flavourful but with a pleasing texture and a good crisp roasting. And the colour! More indigo than blue, granted, and offset nicely with some roasted carrots. Parents, obtain yourself some Salad Blues and blow your offspring's mind one evening with some purple/blue tatties. And if they reckon it's just food colouring, get them involved in the peeling, so they can see just how fresh and startling the colour really is - those photos, lacking in any daylight, don't do them justice.
I also had some fun putting together a 3-course meal for my Mum & sister when they came over to see the Lass & I a couple of weeks back. Sadly, what photographs I did take were pretty shoddy (or just plain dull) but the food itself was, to my uneducated palate at least, very tasty, with main and dessert both made using Denis Cotter recipes (the chocolate/pecan brownies were almost swoonsome in their taste). I'm planning to do better next time, when they come over for some post-Christmas lunching next week, and I might even remember snaps of every course this time round.
ELSEWHERE. Even though I'm often too busy/lazy/knackered to write up full posts, I've still been putting links to interesting, chucklesome or eye-poppingly fearful things on Facebook and Google Reader - the former requires a Facebook account, but I believe anyone online can see the shared items on Reader. It's not all lolcats, honest.
WEDDING. Five months and a day to go. Jinkies. Honeymoon plans have been comprehensively scrapped as a result of stirling's downward spiral in the volatile money markets, particularly against the Euro. Instead, we'll be staying in the UK, somewhere neither of us has been to before. More on that after the event, but it should be quite the treat.
TELLY. Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe continues to be one of the best reasons for not booting your television out the window and reverting back to shadow puppets for home entertainment (along with Harry Hill's TV Burp, finally being recognised for the genius it is) Last week's episode on children's television was superb, especially the Oliver Postgate tribute. If you're reading this in the next 24 hours, you've still time to watch it again. His Review of the Year should be a treat to behold.
Reviewers kept telling us the second series Outnumbered was superb. We didn't pay attention for a few weeks, then we did. And they're right. We've seen two episodes and already it's the sharpest comedy I've seen all year. Brits can catch up from the first episode onwards using the iPlayer (including Mac users, at bleedin' last). DO IT. If the wee girl doesn't win Best Actress in the next year, she's been robbed. Here's a wee clip:
Still there? Good on you! Anyway, I'm still planning on getting a blog post out of getting locked out last month (oh, I can smile about it now...), Belgium, London, the best music, films & books of this year (well, the few that I've encountered at any rate), all of which should be coming by the end of the year along with any other gubbins that spills out of my head, onto this keyboard and into the internet, like diarrhea of the mind - ahhh, now that's blogging.
And if you want to get all Latin about things, praemonitus praemunitus. I'm currently lacking the va-va-voom to write a full-blown post about the global economy, the veritable shitstorm that's been whirling into life within it, and the websites you should be watching to get a grasp on what the hell's going on & what to do, but I couldn't let this pass by without bringing it to the attention of as many as possible. If you're a Facebook chum of mine, you'll already be sick of the sound of this, but for those poor souls who aren't, the BBC's business editor Robert Peston today published what I think is a first for the BBC News bloggers - a 6 page PDF report of surprising scope titled The New Capitalism.
Basically it's an overview of the almighty economic clusterfuck that's only really grabbed mainstream attention over the last few months, yet has been brewing for years, written with clarity and care. As a summary of what can be an impossibly complex and slippery subject, it's probably the best I've written, especially from a man-on-the-street perspective. The use of PDF is interesting, allowing the piece to be much longer than would normally be found on a BBC News article or blog, and it's to the BBC's credit that it okayed this rather than making do with some ultra-simplified post. While obviously written with a UK audience in mind, I'd recommend this to pretty much everyone who doesn't want to keep their head in the sand.
A word of caution. If you've not been exposed to many of the financial news sources over the last year (Peston being the most mainstream example), you may find this a depressing, possibly crushing read. It's as clear a warning that our current standard of living, built on a foundation of crumbling credit, that's been presented as the norm for the last two decades is not only unsustainable environmentally (which we've known for yonks, yet carried on regardless) but economically as well. As Pesto succintly puts it:
To put it in crude terms, for much of the past decade, millions of Chinese slaved away on near subsistence wages and still managed to save, both as a nation (China swanks £1,400bn in foreign exchange reserves) and as individuals. And to a large extent they were working to improve our living standards, because they made more and more of the stuff we wanted at cheaper and cheaper prices - and clever bankers took their savings and lent the cash to us, so that we could buy the houses we cherished, the cars we desired, the flat-screen TVs. [...] Tragically, they toiled for our prosperity – or we lived high on the hog while they fattened the pigs for us – for too long. Which is partly why the return to equilibrium, to a more balanced global economy, is happening in a horribly painful way that's impoverishing millions of people.
When as a country you've been living way beyond your means for so long it becomes the norm, the only way you've known, that equilibrium, that balanced global economy, is going to hurt in ways that directly affect all our individual lives. As you extrapolate further what this all really means in the real world, it gets scarier, as does the overwhelming sense of forces at work that are utterly out of your control. It's not just the nationalised banks. It's not just Woolworths. And the limits to come will be set by both economics and environment as they gradually become inseparable (see peak oil for a prime example of this). Yet as with those sober scientific reports on climate change and predictions for the coming decades, surely it's better to be aware and prepare as much as you can than to turn away, let the majority of the media keep doing what it has to do (that is, sell you stuff while you're still able to buy) and then shriek with shock further down the line "why didn't anyone tell us?" while the lights flicker and the shelves lie empty. (God, it's so easy to sound hysterical about this...)
Well, there's plenty of people already telling us, and these are the key websites I've been keeping my eye on. (Keep an eye on the 'Portents' submenu on the right-hand-side of this blog if you ever want a reminder) To be honest, Pesto is a ray of hippy-dippy banker-hugging sunshine compared to what you'll read on some of these sites - your mileage for depressingly believable predictions of near-apocalyptic civilisation crashes may vary. But, as with climate change, think of this as a prime example of hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. Well, within reason - that's a road that leads to survivalist blogs, often somewhat obsessed with weaponry, a path we really don't want to be heading down.
Sharon Astyk: Writer, teacher and farmer, with one book already out and another on the way, practicing what she preaches. Posts can be personal descriptions of modern farmlife, advice on food preservation and storage or examinations of economic instability. Excellent writing, personal and well researched, certainly worth adding to your RSS feed. An education.
The Automatic Earth: The biggie, not for the faint-hearted. Ultimately a daily collation of key economic news stories from across the world that day, brought together onto one page and given an introduction. The scope is staggering, and too much for casual reading, but even a brief scan through reveals patterns, pointers, potents. Certainly the most doom-laden of the blogs I read.
Doors of Perception: Pointed me to the Automatic Earth, being somewhere between TAE and Worldchanging. The focus, similar to Bruce Sterling's Veridian Design, is primarily on global design innovation, but this includes social and environmental subjects. Not so economy-based, but certainly relevant to those curious to make plans for the future that extend beyond holing up in a cave with a shotgun and a crate of Spam.
The Oil Drum / Energy Bulletin: Similar to TAE but with a harder focus on energy, with a particularly beady eye on peak oil.
Only for promotion, but still intensely nerve-wracking for someone of my shy, retiring persuasion. All done now. Give me a few days and I'll start getting this site whirring back into some feeble imitation of life - the next two days will be spent rinsing out all the competencies from my noggin and stopping myself from mentally replaying moments from the assessment process and wailing "OAF! You should've said THAT!" or, more often, "BERK! You NEVER should've said THAT!" You know how it is.
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