Back in Israel, and - an unprecedented two weeks down the line - finally back in Jerusalem, where I get to sleep more than four hours at a stretch, and boy does that feel good! Nothing against Tel Aviv (at all), and it was good to see the Zend people and the Hayarkon folk and the Mike's Place gang again, but Jerusalem's like nowhere else in this world.
I'm still trying to analyse why.
I think - maybe - it's something to do with the way the sunrise paints every building golden-pink, and the sunset does the same only in pure gold. And then there's the stillness in the air. And the friendliness of the people. And the silence in the night-time. And (in Nachlaot, in 'my patch') the musicians rehearsing in the evening before they leave home to play, and the singing in the synagogues floating into the quiet night just before dawn. I think - maybe - it's something to do with all that stuff.
Whatever it is, the depression that's been on my back since March is gone. Even in Tel Aviv it was still making itself known, but not here. 'Course it helps that this is panning out to be a strangely mild winter (so far) and the weather's like a pleasant English May, but that's not all of it, by any means. (And actually the locals are hoping for rain, for obvious reasons.)
Mike's in Jerusalem has moved to a much better place - off Yafo, and through an off-road compound (very secure), and filled with tiny rooms and cellar areas. It's a brilliant building for live music, and Daniel looks so much happier there it's cheering just to see his face. The Blue Hole's also undergone some renovation, and now boasts a small underground area where they're testing out live music - hopefully on a smaller scale, because that room's perfect for something jazz-like rather than the full-on rock/blues you tend to find at Mike's. I haven't had the opportunity to check out my other old haunts properly yet - although I did wander into Egon's and gape at their shiny new bar briefly - but doubtless will do so as soon as payday arrives.
My landlady Denise hasn't changed, and I had a plate of cooked potatoes more or less on arrival :) She suffers from breathing problems these days, so the flat's smoke-free at present. That won't be a problem while the weather's still fair, but we might have to re-negotiate when the heavy rains and winds turn up, I don't know. We'll see. I got through today on a record-busting 10 Mustang...
The cats are, of course, everywhere. But they look well-fed and clean, and both are an improvement. I'm told that 2005 was the summer the tourists came back to Jerusalem, and everyone's better off as a result. Interestingly, the tourists seem to have skipped Tel Aviv for the most part - and the state of the cats there reflects it, they've become rat-like again. But hey, at least the water's clean :)
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
My Bloody Valentine
And so it was Hallowe'en, yet again, already.
It's been six unbelievable years since the one person I wanted to grow old with, died. He just didn't wake up one day and that was it; we were in our mid-thirties, and our story had a sudden ending.
We spent most of our life together in Hitchin, so I went back to Hitchin tonight in the hope of finally laying his anxious ghost to rest. I've somehow managed to miss being in this country for most of the Hallowe'en nights between six years ago and now, but there are other people in the area who still miss Floyd, and some years ago a bunch of us arranged to have a meeting on this night every year we were around.
It was a bit of a sad turnout in the Red Hart this time, in that only Andy (ex-landlord, ex-employer, owner of studio, music production man), Tracy, his gf of three years (?! when did that happen again?!) and myself were physically present. But Ken, Floyd's old buddy and supplier of Ivor Cutler tapes, who wanted to be there and couldn't, enlivened our evening with text messages from Newcastle. The other Andy, the pub landlord both then and now, stood us a round at the official end of the night; and his partner, Livi, whose task it was all those years ago to break the news to me that Floyd was dead, shared a box of wine with me after everyone went home, talked long and hard about the old days, and helped me smoke my way through all the cigarettes I could afford.
That's how I ended up leaving the bar some time after 7am and coming home on the commuter train - breathing fermented grapes, cackling over a copy of Viz, muttering lines from our play under my breath, and alienating everyone out there with a proper job. Floyd would have approved. Fuck it, Floyd would've loved it...
I don't know if it's possible to say how much I miss Floyd. I rather suspect it isn't.
It's my mother's birthday today (there's a kind of theme running through my life whereby everyone I love dies on someone else I love's birthday) and I need to get her flowers 'and shiznit', as Sara would say. Mum arrived home from Canada last night, exhausted but still sympathetic - my Dad died on Nigel's birthday, so she's familiar with the theme even when it touches on her own special day. But the note she left me this morning was pretty unsentimental and Mum-ish. It went something like 'Steph, would you please track down that funny smell in the kitchen?'.
(I had a nasty incident with a pound of cod and two unseasonably warm days last week.)
Freesias in the fridge should do the trick...
I missed the good part about walking back into Hitchin after all those years. It was down to the total stranger I met in The Albert (the bar nearest the station) who asked why I was visiting the town and who, when I told my story, was visibly stirred: "He's a bit of a legend hereabouts, is your Floyd."
You'd have to witness the crap flying around in Baldock - only five miles up the road - to fully appreciate just how wonderful it was to hear that from someone who never even met my man. I think if things don't pan out in Israel, for whatever reason, I'll be living in Hitchin for the rest of my days.
It's been six unbelievable years since the one person I wanted to grow old with, died. He just didn't wake up one day and that was it; we were in our mid-thirties, and our story had a sudden ending.
We spent most of our life together in Hitchin, so I went back to Hitchin tonight in the hope of finally laying his anxious ghost to rest. I've somehow managed to miss being in this country for most of the Hallowe'en nights between six years ago and now, but there are other people in the area who still miss Floyd, and some years ago a bunch of us arranged to have a meeting on this night every year we were around.
It was a bit of a sad turnout in the Red Hart this time, in that only Andy (ex-landlord, ex-employer, owner of studio, music production man), Tracy, his gf of three years (?! when did that happen again?!) and myself were physically present. But Ken, Floyd's old buddy and supplier of Ivor Cutler tapes, who wanted to be there and couldn't, enlivened our evening with text messages from Newcastle. The other Andy, the pub landlord both then and now, stood us a round at the official end of the night; and his partner, Livi, whose task it was all those years ago to break the news to me that Floyd was dead, shared a box of wine with me after everyone went home, talked long and hard about the old days, and helped me smoke my way through all the cigarettes I could afford.
That's how I ended up leaving the bar some time after 7am and coming home on the commuter train - breathing fermented grapes, cackling over a copy of Viz, muttering lines from our play under my breath, and alienating everyone out there with a proper job. Floyd would have approved. Fuck it, Floyd would've loved it...
I don't know if it's possible to say how much I miss Floyd. I rather suspect it isn't.
It's my mother's birthday today (there's a kind of theme running through my life whereby everyone I love dies on someone else I love's birthday) and I need to get her flowers 'and shiznit', as Sara would say. Mum arrived home from Canada last night, exhausted but still sympathetic - my Dad died on Nigel's birthday, so she's familiar with the theme even when it touches on her own special day. But the note she left me this morning was pretty unsentimental and Mum-ish. It went something like 'Steph, would you please track down that funny smell in the kitchen?'.
(I had a nasty incident with a pound of cod and two unseasonably warm days last week.)
Freesias in the fridge should do the trick...
I missed the good part about walking back into Hitchin after all those years. It was down to the total stranger I met in The Albert (the bar nearest the station) who asked why I was visiting the town and who, when I told my story, was visibly stirred: "He's a bit of a legend hereabouts, is your Floyd."
You'd have to witness the crap flying around in Baldock - only five miles up the road - to fully appreciate just how wonderful it was to hear that from someone who never even met my man. I think if things don't pan out in Israel, for whatever reason, I'll be living in Hitchin for the rest of my days.
Friday, October 14, 2005
PHP London
Matt Zandstra and I share a long history of attempting to drop in on the London PHP user group's monthly meeting, usually thwarted by either cash tragedies (mine) or parental duties (his). This month I finally made it in following a frenzied exchange of email with Matt, who wanted to go but was suffering from an ear infection brought on by (as far as I can figure) the aforementioned parental duties. Bribery, threats and whisky remedies having had no impact on his 'headful of hurty concrete', I went alone. But that was OK, because this month Rasmus Lerdorf was speaking there - there would be at least one person in the room I already knew, if not a bosom pal.
I arrived late-ish - around 9pm - and half-expected the proceedings to be over already. They weren't. I grabbed an extremely cheap (in London terms) pint of cider from the bar, then meandered down to take a look at the downstairs room, having been pre-warned that it would be filled to capacity. I could see Rasmus' hand waving in front of his APC slides above a roomful of silhouetted heads and decided it'd be an uncomfortable moment for me to walk in just then, given my Zend connections, so I left him to it for a bit longer.
Half an hour passed in pleasant small talk with one of the barmaids and some gay bloke with a lot of facial furniture. Then someone with an unmistakably geek t-shirt hove into view. I asked him if there was enough room downstairs for me to join them. He thought there was, and invited me in.
Standing at the back of a room always reminds me of school. Can't imagine why. It makes me want to chain-smoke and giggle and pass notes. There was someone with similar issues on the back-most seat, which cheered me immensely. Don't get me wrong, we were both listening intently - Rasmus had moved on from APC to talk about the many things that could be done with SOAP and the wonders of REST by then. I mumbled something about not understanding ning to the rebel guy. He looked up at me and said, very gently, 'Have you ever heard of a scripting language called PHP?' I nodded dumbly. He went on to explain who Rasmus was... which was kinda sad, I was hoping he'd explain what ning was for.
Later I asked whether Rasmus had had time to look into 'that ning thing' yet. He had, but had been left as blank as I was over it. I guess we're not Andreessen's target audience here.
My rebel friend glanced at me and said, very carefully, 'ning - right?'
The chatting time came, the rebel friend left, Rasmus was inundated, and I hung out at the end of the room where laptops had suddenly opened. They were a good bunch of guys - proper geeks, but not nasty about me using doze, and able to cope with criticism about their own code. I made an ill-advised rush to get another pint of cider before closing time - ill-advised because the group had already, unbeknown to me, decided to stroll on down to a late bar. I made a worse-advised decision to grab a plastic glass and join them there - worse-advised because it led directly to my missing the last train home.
There were some good conversations, but everyone else cleared off when Rasmus went back to his hotel, leaving me alone to psyche myself up for getting home the interesting way. It was probably best that it happened like that, but I have to say that finding the Edgeware Road (a very straightforward road to leave London by) was the most difficult part of the journey home. Two Iranians and a Greek later, I fell out of a truck (trying to protect my laptop, I normally throw baggage out first) at the Baldock services (ok but I love that site) with a 2.5 mile walk ahead of me, and it was well after 6am when I got home.
Still it was worth it, if only to see how Rasmus coped with everyone speaking the way I do - I haven't met anyone yet in the whole of php.net that can understand a Brit accent from scratch :) OK so I didn't meet the people I'd hoped to meet - the PHP London crew are organising a full PHP conference in the near future and I'd hoped to meet someone prepared/able to discuss their plans for that - but even so it was a proper geek night out. The only one I've ever joined in my own country, and it felt just like the German version (ok, but I love that conference).
I arrived late-ish - around 9pm - and half-expected the proceedings to be over already. They weren't. I grabbed an extremely cheap (in London terms) pint of cider from the bar, then meandered down to take a look at the downstairs room, having been pre-warned that it would be filled to capacity. I could see Rasmus' hand waving in front of his APC slides above a roomful of silhouetted heads and decided it'd be an uncomfortable moment for me to walk in just then, given my Zend connections, so I left him to it for a bit longer.
Half an hour passed in pleasant small talk with one of the barmaids and some gay bloke with a lot of facial furniture. Then someone with an unmistakably geek t-shirt hove into view. I asked him if there was enough room downstairs for me to join them. He thought there was, and invited me in.
Standing at the back of a room always reminds me of school. Can't imagine why. It makes me want to chain-smoke and giggle and pass notes. There was someone with similar issues on the back-most seat, which cheered me immensely. Don't get me wrong, we were both listening intently - Rasmus had moved on from APC to talk about the many things that could be done with SOAP and the wonders of REST by then. I mumbled something about not understanding ning to the rebel guy. He looked up at me and said, very gently, 'Have you ever heard of a scripting language called PHP?' I nodded dumbly. He went on to explain who Rasmus was... which was kinda sad, I was hoping he'd explain what ning was for.
Later I asked whether Rasmus had had time to look into 'that ning thing' yet. He had, but had been left as blank as I was over it. I guess we're not Andreessen's target audience here.
My rebel friend glanced at me and said, very carefully, 'ning - right?'
The chatting time came, the rebel friend left, Rasmus was inundated, and I hung out at the end of the room where laptops had suddenly opened. They were a good bunch of guys - proper geeks, but not nasty about me using doze, and able to cope with criticism about their own code. I made an ill-advised rush to get another pint of cider before closing time - ill-advised because the group had already, unbeknown to me, decided to stroll on down to a late bar. I made a worse-advised decision to grab a plastic glass and join them there - worse-advised because it led directly to my missing the last train home.
There were some good conversations, but everyone else cleared off when Rasmus went back to his hotel, leaving me alone to psyche myself up for getting home the interesting way. It was probably best that it happened like that, but I have to say that finding the Edgeware Road (a very straightforward road to leave London by) was the most difficult part of the journey home. Two Iranians and a Greek later, I fell out of a truck (trying to protect my laptop, I normally throw baggage out first) at the Baldock services (ok but I love that site) with a 2.5 mile walk ahead of me, and it was well after 6am when I got home.
Still it was worth it, if only to see how Rasmus coped with everyone speaking the way I do - I haven't met anyone yet in the whole of php.net that can understand a Brit accent from scratch :) OK so I didn't meet the people I'd hoped to meet - the PHP London crew are organising a full PHP conference in the near future and I'd hoped to meet someone prepared/able to discuss their plans for that - but even so it was a proper geek night out. The only one I've ever joined in my own country, and it felt just like the German version (ok, but I love that conference).
Lucky me
September, October... same old, same old. My mother's been disastrously ill again, this time with a chest infection that just hangs and hangs, rendering her physically weak and all too easily depressed. If it weren't for the fact that my uncle lives within reach, I'd be on the brink of cancelling my Israel trip altogether(! please god don't make me have to do that) - I'm very glad he's on hand right now.
In an effort to fulfill the last of my late father's earthly obligations, Mum's heading off to Canada tomorrow - chest infection or no chest infection - with three teenaged grandchildren in tow. All I can do is wait and see how she is when she comes back. She's supposed to be joining me in Tel Aviv for a week in late December... assuming she's well enough to be left at all, assuming I'm given a three month Israeli visa, and assuming she's well enough at that point to get on an aeroplane. (I don't really think she is at present, but there are relatives at the other end who can/will take a lot of stress off her shoulders.)
This last week in particular seems to have been one long lurch from crisis to crisis, with arguments and misunderstandings (at work, at php.net and at home). It's left me sadly lacking in enthusiasm for anything much. Instructive, then, to spend an evening with a couple of people I hadn't spoken to in a long while. Gary and I had a long and turbulent friendship, which fell apart when he spread a hurtful and wholly untrue rumour about the way Floyd died - and continued to do so long after I'd asked him to cut the crap, primarily because he didn't know Floyd well enough to know how wholly untrue it was - he was so sure of Floyd's heroin addiction it must be me that had it all wrong, somehow, poor little victim that I am. Of course 'the closest are always the last to know' came into it... Eventually I told Gary, publicly and stridently, exactly what I thought of him, and naturally I brought up everything he'd ever done to upset me while I was at it. This was well over a year ago, probably nearer two years ago, I don't know. We haven't spoken since.
We bumped into each other yesterday and I got an earful from both himself and his girlfriend, who was present when I had my angry-and-upset moment. They've been tearing themselves up over it for nearasdammit two years. WTF?!
Life's much, much too short.
I bought them both drinks, spent the next five hours talking with them, made amends. So much desperate unhappiness there you could touch it.
I'd forgotten how lucky I am. It's good to be reminded sometimes :)
In an effort to fulfill the last of my late father's earthly obligations, Mum's heading off to Canada tomorrow - chest infection or no chest infection - with three teenaged grandchildren in tow. All I can do is wait and see how she is when she comes back. She's supposed to be joining me in Tel Aviv for a week in late December... assuming she's well enough to be left at all, assuming I'm given a three month Israeli visa, and assuming she's well enough at that point to get on an aeroplane. (I don't really think she is at present, but there are relatives at the other end who can/will take a lot of stress off her shoulders.)
This last week in particular seems to have been one long lurch from crisis to crisis, with arguments and misunderstandings (at work, at php.net and at home). It's left me sadly lacking in enthusiasm for anything much. Instructive, then, to spend an evening with a couple of people I hadn't spoken to in a long while. Gary and I had a long and turbulent friendship, which fell apart when he spread a hurtful and wholly untrue rumour about the way Floyd died - and continued to do so long after I'd asked him to cut the crap, primarily because he didn't know Floyd well enough to know how wholly untrue it was - he was so sure of Floyd's heroin addiction it must be me that had it all wrong, somehow, poor little victim that I am. Of course 'the closest are always the last to know' came into it... Eventually I told Gary, publicly and stridently, exactly what I thought of him, and naturally I brought up everything he'd ever done to upset me while I was at it. This was well over a year ago, probably nearer two years ago, I don't know. We haven't spoken since.
We bumped into each other yesterday and I got an earful from both himself and his girlfriend, who was present when I had my angry-and-upset moment. They've been tearing themselves up over it for nearasdammit two years. WTF?!
Life's much, much too short.
I bought them both drinks, spent the next five hours talking with them, made amends. So much desperate unhappiness there you could touch it.
I'd forgotten how lucky I am. It's good to be reminded sometimes :)
Sunday, September 04, 2005
The Month That Was Nearly A Week
Well, August just flew by and there was too much going on to write about. Dontcha hate it when reality flaps about that way? It was pretty mixed-up too...
August opened with the week when my mother collapsed and ended up spending several days in the local hospital on a drip, first trying not to remember my father's bad times there (he died of cancer) and then trying not to panic over their MSRA record. Pending full test results, it looks like a one-off scare rather than anything horribly long-term and disabling, but of course none of us knew that at the time - we had an anxious few days while Mum lay there being ill and scared and un-Mum-like.
She came out of hospital and went straight to organising herself some private medical tests so she could get it all behind her before the next school year began. Then she went to Menorca with a friend and relaxed between clinic visits.
Somewhere between the hospital trips and airport runs, Nigel and I headed off to the Austrian Tyrol, where I introduced him to the twin concepts of sleeping in a tent and drinking hot chocolate with a lot of schnapps in it. Then we drove into Italy in an attempt to escape the Alps (you can have too much Alp) and witnessed some bizarre shit going down in a small village high up on some godforsaken Alm, while lightning flashed and thunder smashed all around us & a single mournful church bell never stopped tolling. I still think that bus-stop was stolen, I don't care how many people were sitting waiting next to it - no way was the road wide enough to take a bus. Some of those people were dribbling vacantly and may have been stuck there for years. We struck lucky and found a hotel back near sane old Innsbruck, instead of having to lie awake under wet canvas all night waiting to be murdered by Rupret the Donkey-Boy or whatever Nigel called him.
We ended the holiday in a pleasant Gästhaus in Liechtenstein, which is a very odd little country - an almost completely feudal society, and the locals speak German with an Italian accent. We bumped into the Prince (Hi, Prince!) when Liechtenstein celebrated something Nigel swears translates to 'National Ascension Day'. Uhuh. The fireworks were extremely cool that night, although the beer was a little damper than usual IMHO. Our local contact, Jürgen (say it with at least 5 'R's and you'll have the accent right) somehow managed to justify our hotel bill as a company expense, which came as a nice surprise, especially as we missed our flight home at the end of the week and had to fork out for replacement flights and an extra night camping by the Bodensee.
I came home to over 500 unopened emails on the PHP internals list alone, having been absent for a whole 6 days. Every time I look at that week's buildup I can feel my brain slithering down the back of my neck... I've been summarising it for at least 5 days in total, and it doesn't seem to get any less. It's not easy, folks. Someone mentioned PHP 6 and everyone brought their pet projects out into the open all over again (thank you so much Sara for being one of the few that didn't, or there'd have been nearer a thousand wretched emails there!). Now try and make that into seamless prose that actually conveys what was discussed. See?
Given the resulting writers' block, I concentrated on PHP-GTK 2 for most of last week, with some cheering results. I adapted the win32 build system Wez wrote for PHP, and it works beautifully on my box. Andrei gave me CVS karma for the PHP-GTK source module when I sat up and begged nicely, so the whole thing's in cvs.php.net now, waiting for someone else to be able to make head or tail of it. I did write some instructions, but in retrospect I'm not sure how useful they were - I'd relied fairly heavily on the fact that whoever tries to build the php-gtk2.dll using that system will necessarily have already built PHP 5 on the same machine and in the same way beforehand, but that might have been a little optimistic. Anyway it works, and PHP-GTK 2 looks really promising (faster, smoother, more elegant, extensible from userside, better cross-platform support, and there are even some nicer GTK error messages), but I've just found out how many fiddly little bits and pieces still need writing prior to release.
Some guy named Tom Rogers - who I'm hoping is about to come on board too so we can learn our way around the project codebase together - wrote half a decent override this morning for the colour-grabbing functions in GtkColorSelection, and I wrote the other half. I hadn't realised how much of a kick I'd get out of committing that :) it's a really good feeling to make some minor changes and suddenly something that didn't used to work for anyone, works for everyone. I could fall in love with coding all over again! As it is it's kept me out of trouble - I was up all last night beating the keys, so to speak, so I didn't spend the afternoon as planned getting drunk at Scouse's BikeFest. Which is just as well, 'cos my mother's coming over for a 'special dinner' tonight anyway.
And tomorrow it's back to the horrible long summary (and the ones that need catching up on since then), plus I've been sent two seriously cool articles over the weekend that need to be live this week on zend.com if possible...
Oh and I booked my flights for Israel now. I'm flying out on November 20th :):):)
August opened with the week when my mother collapsed and ended up spending several days in the local hospital on a drip, first trying not to remember my father's bad times there (he died of cancer) and then trying not to panic over their MSRA record. Pending full test results, it looks like a one-off scare rather than anything horribly long-term and disabling, but of course none of us knew that at the time - we had an anxious few days while Mum lay there being ill and scared and un-Mum-like.
She came out of hospital and went straight to organising herself some private medical tests so she could get it all behind her before the next school year began. Then she went to Menorca with a friend and relaxed between clinic visits.
Somewhere between the hospital trips and airport runs, Nigel and I headed off to the Austrian Tyrol, where I introduced him to the twin concepts of sleeping in a tent and drinking hot chocolate with a lot of schnapps in it. Then we drove into Italy in an attempt to escape the Alps (you can have too much Alp) and witnessed some bizarre shit going down in a small village high up on some godforsaken Alm, while lightning flashed and thunder smashed all around us & a single mournful church bell never stopped tolling. I still think that bus-stop was stolen, I don't care how many people were sitting waiting next to it - no way was the road wide enough to take a bus. Some of those people were dribbling vacantly and may have been stuck there for years. We struck lucky and found a hotel back near sane old Innsbruck, instead of having to lie awake under wet canvas all night waiting to be murdered by Rupret the Donkey-Boy or whatever Nigel called him.
We ended the holiday in a pleasant Gästhaus in Liechtenstein, which is a very odd little country - an almost completely feudal society, and the locals speak German with an Italian accent. We bumped into the Prince (Hi, Prince!) when Liechtenstein celebrated something Nigel swears translates to 'National Ascension Day'. Uhuh. The fireworks were extremely cool that night, although the beer was a little damper than usual IMHO. Our local contact, Jürgen (say it with at least 5 'R's and you'll have the accent right) somehow managed to justify our hotel bill as a company expense, which came as a nice surprise, especially as we missed our flight home at the end of the week and had to fork out for replacement flights and an extra night camping by the Bodensee.
I came home to over 500 unopened emails on the PHP internals list alone, having been absent for a whole 6 days. Every time I look at that week's buildup I can feel my brain slithering down the back of my neck... I've been summarising it for at least 5 days in total, and it doesn't seem to get any less. It's not easy, folks. Someone mentioned PHP 6 and everyone brought their pet projects out into the open all over again (thank you so much Sara for being one of the few that didn't, or there'd have been nearer a thousand wretched emails there!). Now try and make that into seamless prose that actually conveys what was discussed. See?
Given the resulting writers' block, I concentrated on PHP-GTK 2 for most of last week, with some cheering results. I adapted the win32 build system Wez wrote for PHP, and it works beautifully on my box. Andrei gave me CVS karma for the PHP-GTK source module when I sat up and begged nicely, so the whole thing's in cvs.php.net now, waiting for someone else to be able to make head or tail of it. I did write some instructions, but in retrospect I'm not sure how useful they were - I'd relied fairly heavily on the fact that whoever tries to build the php-gtk2.dll using that system will necessarily have already built PHP 5 on the same machine and in the same way beforehand, but that might have been a little optimistic. Anyway it works, and PHP-GTK 2 looks really promising (faster, smoother, more elegant, extensible from userside, better cross-platform support, and there are even some nicer GTK error messages), but I've just found out how many fiddly little bits and pieces still need writing prior to release.
Some guy named Tom Rogers - who I'm hoping is about to come on board too so we can learn our way around the project codebase together - wrote half a decent override this morning for the colour-grabbing functions in GtkColorSelection, and I wrote the other half. I hadn't realised how much of a kick I'd get out of committing that :) it's a really good feeling to make some minor changes and suddenly something that didn't used to work for anyone, works for everyone. I could fall in love with coding all over again! As it is it's kept me out of trouble - I was up all last night beating the keys, so to speak, so I didn't spend the afternoon as planned getting drunk at Scouse's BikeFest. Which is just as well, 'cos my mother's coming over for a 'special dinner' tonight anyway.
And tomorrow it's back to the horrible long summary (and the ones that need catching up on since then), plus I've been sent two seriously cool articles over the weekend that need to be live this week on zend.com if possible...
Oh and I booked my flights for Israel now. I'm flying out on November 20th :):):)
Thursday, August 11, 2005
So Bizarre...
From an elderly article entitled "Every Word You Say":
It says Stewart Copeland was filming the tour. Now Floyd told me he'd met Stewart Copeland; fairly typically, he described him in less than flowery language. Floyd didn't have much time for the middle classes, full stop. But he never told me the guy was filming them on stage...
I wonder if he knew?
The Police member who underwent the greatest shock was probably Stewart Copeland. As the band prepared to finish writing the album in February, there were continual, gruesome TV reports of the bombing of Beirut. Stewart Copeland had spent much of his youth there, due to his father's CIA - connected overseas job. "My home town was being bombed. I found out my nanny, who'd raised me, was killed by American supplied bullets. I couldn't write about anything except war and hate. I wanted to kill," he said. Though some of that hurt has filtered through to Synchronicity, much of it was sidetracked into a filmscore he's been writing, for Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish. And there was another film project, directed and shot by Copeland in collaboration with brother Miles. He spent two weeks following a tour by Anti-Nowhere League, Defects, Chron Gen and Chelsea, filming a dozen gigs on one hand-held camera. "I want to invent the 'C' film," was the explanation. Before the 30-minute "So What" goes on general release, he hopes to send it on a tour of British punk gigs with the soundtrack played at full PA volume. "We want to get the audience to react as if it was a band playing. We tried it at The Marquee but didn't get the response we wanted." That was mostly because of not knowing how to best cut the film for effect. He's now re-edited the feature."
It says Stewart Copeland was filming the tour. Now Floyd told me he'd met Stewart Copeland; fairly typically, he described him in less than flowery language. Floyd didn't have much time for the middle classes, full stop. But he never told me the guy was filming them on stage...
I wonder if he knew?
The Killing Fields
Russ surprised me tonight.
Russ is the only Maori I know. I can't properly pronounce the tribe he's from, much less spell it, but he's incredibly bolshy (and considers this normal), and he's also a nice guy when he bothers to listen. Most times he just makes decisions before listening, which isn't so cool. I'd also guess that his given name isn't 'Russ'. I'd guess that's what he calls himself here.
He's due to fly back out home to New Zealand in the next few days. I hadn't seen him for a while, so didn't pick up on this fact until tonight - although he says he'll be back for more work in the luxury of South East England in the fairly near future. He'll be missed, and not only by me; he's somehow managed to wangle his way into the hearts and minds of several locals. I wish I knew how he did that :-z
He drank a toast to me tonight: 'You walk your own way and don't take shit from no man, and I like talking to you because you remind me of my tribe. We're the same.'
Bless. It must be some kind of tradition out there, to come up with a toast for every person in the block when you leave.
Meanwhile Rose, the beautiful, engaging, funny and sharp blonde behind the bar, has hit marital quagmire after mere months of wedded bliss. She has bruises on her arms and her chin is held high. 'I've told him to leave, and he's leaving'. I hope so, he was never right for her and her five children. But I remember Rose on their wedding day, skitting across from the bar in her wedding gown to pick up cigarettes from the off-license I worked in at the time, beautiful as ever and so very happy. She looks like a female version of Derick Rethans, whom few people would (I suspect) regard as beautiful - but she definitely has the same nose, chin, eyes. I don't know how the alchemy occurs, but it does. In Rose, the slanted eyes and comically long, thin nose and mouth turn out as 'delicate' and 'pixie'. Perhaps the mischief in her makes that difference, I don't know. It disturbs hell out of me to see the marks of her being beaten. The jealous marks of a man who just discovered that his wife's children will always come first. You'd think he'd figure that idea and learn to live with it before he married her...
They seemed so happy.
And maybe that 'seeming' is why Russ gave me the toast he did. I don't allow 'seeming' in my life, I prefer the truth.
Russ is the only Maori I know. I can't properly pronounce the tribe he's from, much less spell it, but he's incredibly bolshy (and considers this normal), and he's also a nice guy when he bothers to listen. Most times he just makes decisions before listening, which isn't so cool. I'd also guess that his given name isn't 'Russ'. I'd guess that's what he calls himself here.
He's due to fly back out home to New Zealand in the next few days. I hadn't seen him for a while, so didn't pick up on this fact until tonight - although he says he'll be back for more work in the luxury of South East England in the fairly near future. He'll be missed, and not only by me; he's somehow managed to wangle his way into the hearts and minds of several locals. I wish I knew how he did that :-z
He drank a toast to me tonight: 'You walk your own way and don't take shit from no man, and I like talking to you because you remind me of my tribe. We're the same.'
Bless. It must be some kind of tradition out there, to come up with a toast for every person in the block when you leave.
Meanwhile Rose, the beautiful, engaging, funny and sharp blonde behind the bar, has hit marital quagmire after mere months of wedded bliss. She has bruises on her arms and her chin is held high. 'I've told him to leave, and he's leaving'. I hope so, he was never right for her and her five children. But I remember Rose on their wedding day, skitting across from the bar in her wedding gown to pick up cigarettes from the off-license I worked in at the time, beautiful as ever and so very happy. She looks like a female version of Derick Rethans, whom few people would (I suspect) regard as beautiful - but she definitely has the same nose, chin, eyes. I don't know how the alchemy occurs, but it does. In Rose, the slanted eyes and comically long, thin nose and mouth turn out as 'delicate' and 'pixie'. Perhaps the mischief in her makes that difference, I don't know. It disturbs hell out of me to see the marks of her being beaten. The jealous marks of a man who just discovered that his wife's children will always come first. You'd think he'd figure that idea and learn to live with it before he married her...
They seemed so happy.
And maybe that 'seeming' is why Russ gave me the toast he did. I don't allow 'seeming' in my life, I prefer the truth.
Monday, August 01, 2005
17 syllables
My mate Nigel's going through one of those 'sad and lonely' phases we all go through from time to time. For the last few weeks, when I've stayed over, we've crashed out to the strains of Have you ever fallen in love (with someone you shouldn't have fallen in love with)? - thanks so much Pete Shelley.
Eventually something snapped, the inevitable happened, and he slept with the wrong woman. It was partly my fault; she seemed like a gift at first sight, and I kinda propelled her his way, but then neither of us knew she was the wrong woman. We should both have listened to her better; she wanted something permanent, which is the last thing on his mind at present, sad and lonely or not. As things are, we're both guilty as sin and hoping she wasn't unduly upset at his instinctively blunt reaction to her too-early mention of the R word. I have to say I'd have reacted in exactly the same way he did; relationships aren't something you have, like a house, they're something that happen, like the weather, and there's something odd about asking someone else whether you can have one. But I guess that's why we're friends...
Nigel is a little nervous and twitchy since that night, particularly when it grows dark, expecting retribution to strike him down in increasingly obscure and macabre ways. So I'm publishing the slightly non-traditional haiku we wrote tonight to mark the occasion, and to remind him of the aftermath next time there's a next time. It's named Bunny Boiler, after that scene in Fatal Attraction:
(NB I should make it very clear at this point that the lady in question is a pleasant person who is entirely unlikely to do any such thing :)
Eventually something snapped, the inevitable happened, and he slept with the wrong woman. It was partly my fault; she seemed like a gift at first sight, and I kinda propelled her his way, but then neither of us knew she was the wrong woman. We should both have listened to her better; she wanted something permanent, which is the last thing on his mind at present, sad and lonely or not. As things are, we're both guilty as sin and hoping she wasn't unduly upset at his instinctively blunt reaction to her too-early mention of the R word. I have to say I'd have reacted in exactly the same way he did; relationships aren't something you have, like a house, they're something that happen, like the weather, and there's something odd about asking someone else whether you can have one. But I guess that's why we're friends...
Nigel is a little nervous and twitchy since that night, particularly when it grows dark, expecting retribution to strike him down in increasingly obscure and macabre ways. So I'm publishing the slightly non-traditional haiku we wrote tonight to mark the occasion, and to remind him of the aftermath next time there's a next time. It's named Bunny Boiler, after that scene in Fatal Attraction:
shotgun window head exploding
spattered wall my brain
death (probably)
(NB I should make it very clear at this point that the lady in question is a pleasant person who is entirely unlikely to do any such thing :)
Saturday, July 30, 2005
The Indian Takeaway
I'm English, right? - whatever else I may be, and one of the reasons I need a blog in the first place is because there's such a huge schism between me and most English people. I've not only been to Israel, I've also come to the conclusion that the Jews aren't in the wrong.
In England, that makes me akin to the guys that visited South Africa for sunlit holidays in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
But I'm English, so I had my first taste of Indian food when I was 6, and delighted both my father and the waiter by asking for more.
When I first came back from Israel, I had a fight in my local Indian restaurant-come-takeaway. They asked a simple question ('Where have you been?') and they got a simple answer ('Israel'), but I might as well have said 'Hell' or 'Breachwood Green'. The attitude changed, and although I got my food, it was made very clear to me that I was unwelcome there.
Four months down the line I risked visiting the same place. Only one of the men that worked there _that_ night, was working there tonight, and he gave me some tension. Like I'm planning to blow _him_ up... it's always interesting to live on the 'B' side. While I waited for my food to come, some skinny long-haired kid I never saw before walked by in the street outside. Our eyes met, and we both winked and smiled. The waiter promptly interrogated me: did I know that man? - because he was a bad, bad man.
I have no clue what the 'bad, bad man' ever did to deserve that accolade. Perhaps he went to Israel too?
I was trying to be sympathetic. I would like to be sympathetic. I have some problems with being sympathetic. I have issues with the fact that it was ever a problem to the owners there that I've been to Israel. I have issues with the idea that Muslims generally don't follow this thing; I saw a march against Salman Rushdie back in Sheffield that made my blood run cold. 3000+ people marching for blood and death and destruction. I haven't been on a march myself since then (I used to do that kind of thing), because the idea that this could happen in England at all, struck me deeply. Because I saw neighbours I knew and liked on that march, and because they locked up their shops and their wives and their children and they went out, men united in hatred. If the English tried to do that it would be prevented by the authorities; there's a law here about incitement to hatred. On that occasion, the Muslims were allowed to demonstrate their allegiance to a fatwah, and I suspect were under pressure to do so from the mosques. The powers-that-be felt it was more safe to allow their protest than to mention the rulebook; and on that day I walked in the opposite direction, alone.
I want to believe that there are good Muslims in the UK who hold both their religion and their civic responsibilities in their hearts, but I've yet to find a single one who does that without being compromised in some way.
I actually know more good Muslims in Israel than I do in England. What does that tell you?
In England, that makes me akin to the guys that visited South Africa for sunlit holidays in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
But I'm English, so I had my first taste of Indian food when I was 6, and delighted both my father and the waiter by asking for more.
When I first came back from Israel, I had a fight in my local Indian restaurant-come-takeaway. They asked a simple question ('Where have you been?') and they got a simple answer ('Israel'), but I might as well have said 'Hell' or 'Breachwood Green'. The attitude changed, and although I got my food, it was made very clear to me that I was unwelcome there.
Four months down the line I risked visiting the same place. Only one of the men that worked there _that_ night, was working there tonight, and he gave me some tension. Like I'm planning to blow _him_ up... it's always interesting to live on the 'B' side. While I waited for my food to come, some skinny long-haired kid I never saw before walked by in the street outside. Our eyes met, and we both winked and smiled. The waiter promptly interrogated me: did I know that man? - because he was a bad, bad man.
I have no clue what the 'bad, bad man' ever did to deserve that accolade. Perhaps he went to Israel too?
I was trying to be sympathetic. I would like to be sympathetic. I have some problems with being sympathetic. I have issues with the fact that it was ever a problem to the owners there that I've been to Israel. I have issues with the idea that Muslims generally don't follow this thing; I saw a march against Salman Rushdie back in Sheffield that made my blood run cold. 3000+ people marching for blood and death and destruction. I haven't been on a march myself since then (I used to do that kind of thing), because the idea that this could happen in England at all, struck me deeply. Because I saw neighbours I knew and liked on that march, and because they locked up their shops and their wives and their children and they went out, men united in hatred. If the English tried to do that it would be prevented by the authorities; there's a law here about incitement to hatred. On that occasion, the Muslims were allowed to demonstrate their allegiance to a fatwah, and I suspect were under pressure to do so from the mosques. The powers-that-be felt it was more safe to allow their protest than to mention the rulebook; and on that day I walked in the opposite direction, alone.
I want to believe that there are good Muslims in the UK who hold both their religion and their civic responsibilities in their hearts, but I've yet to find a single one who does that without being compromised in some way.
I actually know more good Muslims in Israel than I do in England. What does that tell you?
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Summertime (and the living is easy)
It's July, so naturally I spent two hours killing wasps as the sun struggled to rise this morning. They'd invaded the kitchen in the caretaker's cottage, even crawling across the Spanish cat Nidos' dinner. A yowl, a bang of the catflap and an appalling choking sound was readily discernable over my wasp-flattening slaps (I couldn't find the spray so dinner mats did the job). No sign of the cat, when I went looking in the grey dawn; he didn't come home for the rest of the night either. I found him some hours later, all puffy-jawed betrayal, curled in the porch avoiding the summer rain and pretending to sleep.
I swept up over thirty horrid little stripey corpses before feeding the understandably nervy cat...
On to business. I suppose 'business' ought to be writing this week's Zend summary at present, but it isn't, because I found myself within sight of the end of my TODO. That means I'm finally free to do some php.net work because I finally have spare time to do it in, so I tried yesterday to install MSVS 6.0 onto this laptop for the first time in its life. That CD-ROM has been through a lot over the last year or so; I took it everywhere just in case I needed it, and it's suffered greatly as a result. There are holes in it :-(
Microsoft seem to have finally realized that a lot of people out there code just because they like coding, and now offer some free development tools, but they don't appear to make old, stable, well-used and 'industry standard' tools available for download - just things that weigh 300 megabytes, which aren't an option without cable. Edin Kadribasic sympathised and suggested I try Visual Studio Express beta.
From the installation notes (heavily edited):
3. Microsoft Visual C++ Express Beta 2
3.1. Product Installation
3.1.1. If you only install Command Line tools, you will not need to register, and the tools will not expire. Once you add the Graphical IDE, registration will be required and expiration will take effect.
3.1.2. MSDN Express installation requires Express "Graphical IDE" to be installed.
Hidden away in the small print somewhere is some mention of the fact that you need Windows XP service pack 2 installed before you can use it at all. Over dialup? Forget it.
Just give me VC++ 6.0, eh guys? I knew where I stood with that...
I swept up over thirty horrid little stripey corpses before feeding the understandably nervy cat...
On to business. I suppose 'business' ought to be writing this week's Zend summary at present, but it isn't, because I found myself within sight of the end of my TODO. That means I'm finally free to do some php.net work because I finally have spare time to do it in, so I tried yesterday to install MSVS 6.0 onto this laptop for the first time in its life. That CD-ROM has been through a lot over the last year or so; I took it everywhere just in case I needed it, and it's suffered greatly as a result. There are holes in it :-(
Microsoft seem to have finally realized that a lot of people out there code just because they like coding, and now offer some free development tools, but they don't appear to make old, stable, well-used and 'industry standard' tools available for download - just things that weigh 300 megabytes, which aren't an option without cable. Edin Kadribasic sympathised and suggested I try Visual Studio Express beta.
From the installation notes (heavily edited):
3. Microsoft Visual C++ Express Beta 2
3.1. Product Installation
3.1.1. If you only install Command Line tools, you will not need to register, and the tools will not expire. Once you add the Graphical IDE, registration will be required and expiration will take effect.
3.1.2. MSDN Express installation requires Express "Graphical IDE" to be installed.
Hidden away in the small print somewhere is some mention of the fact that you need Windows XP service pack 2 installed before you can use it at all. Over dialup? Forget it.
Just give me VC++ 6.0, eh guys? I knew where I stood with that...
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Tulpen uit Amsterdam (and some other stuff too)
Wilhelm's still alive :-) This being a guy I met two years ago and spent all night talking to. The first night in Amsterdam, we did exactly the same thing. Result: I spent the PHP-GTK 2 talk hanging around the womens' room at the RAI trying to either vomit or sleep... and most of the rest of the conference simply trying to sleep. But thanks anyway to Sander for trying to make things feel better with a couple of lagers and a plate of chips, and no I probably would've taken those medications even if I'd known I'd be sitting next to non-drinker Zeev half an hour later (trying not to breathe out) for a pertinent-to-the-DevZone meeting.
The apartment I booked for the conference was fantastic, no two ways about it. The only thing between it and perfection was the lack of WIFI, but I'm told that this will be in place by next year's bash. Coolth * 1000, and no I'm not publishing their address before I have the chance to book us in again! Most of the time it was just me, sniper, Christian Weiske and Carsten Lucke in residence, but on the final night there we had visitors, and it proved itself capable of allowing the people in the bedrooms to sleep through our loud talking in the lounge. It's very central - close to Dam Square - and also close to a number 4 tram line, meaning it took a maximum of 15 minutes to reach the RAI. We'll be back, for sure!
The most interesting item in the whole of the conference was Andrei's talk about the pending support for internationalisation in PHP. He's spent the last few months writing support for ICU, the IBM i18n library, into the Zend engine - I believe he's been doing this during paid Yahoo time - but, as with most major development efforts in PHP these days, the actual development process has been confined to a pretty small group of core developers, and several of the rest of us had a lot of questions to ask about the implementation. The chief discussion was in the Novotel bar at the end of that day, mainly because it's the kind of 'exciting' that makes you think subliminally about it for the next several hours even when you're pretending to think about something else (e.g. not being sick in the womens' toilets). Then we all went out for beers and etc, predictably enough. You have to understand that the vast majority of these guys are still under 30, and that includes Andrei.
Apart from that it wasn't a good PHP conference for me - there seemed to be a lot of Zend-related meetings in there one way or another, and I missed the careless free-for-all of yesteryear. I haven't had time to do a lot for php.net recently, not being the fastest of coders and/or thinkers (no really, people that know me at home need to understand this - the php.net core devs are way ahead of me most of the time), and I felt very much like a hanger-on rather than central to it all. This is frustrating - there are three projects currently that I'd really like to have some involvement in, and I can't see a way clear to do it. Two of them are headed by Andrei; it's almost like he's taken Sterling's place as innovator.
I spoke with Sterling tonight, nothing to do with development, just gossing. Amongst other things, I wanted to know if it's ok to blog embarrassing stuff. He felt that it was ok to think about it twice and then do it anyway. So here goes:
The final night in Amsterdam, and Jerome (conference speaker), Philippe (the guy sleeping below my bunk in the mixed dorm at the hostel that night) and myself went out for a few beers and etc. The 'and etc' took effect pretty quickly, and the lads wanted to go somewhere 'more Amsterdam-ish' - we were in fact in a pretty good bar in the middle of the redlight, but I'm 20 years older than either of them so who'm I to judge? I figured that the places they wanted to be weren't the places I'd want to be, so I stayed where I was, alone, at a table, by a window. It's the 'by a window' part that you need to hang onto here.
This was the only window in the entire street that didn't have a naked woman behind it.
Got to there?
OK, so I'm flashing my breasts at the window every now and again, because it amuses me and I'm stoned. This went on for around 20 minutes, and then I just as suddenly lost interest in the joke and went to sleep, I've no idea how long for.
The barman woke me and asked me to leave, and the bar at this point was empty of customers, apart from one Syrian guy who was sitting opposite me and wearing a funny smile. He asked for a cigarette, which I - unusually - refused because I thought he was creepy. I was right. 400 metres down the street I took a back-alley to check - sure enough, his footsteps were still echoing behind mine. I led him around the block and then went to a hotel on the street I was staying in. It had a night bell, which I rang. The night porter came out, all smiles: "And what can I do for you, madame?" "Actually, I'm not staying here," I apologised. "But I'm hoping the guy behind me is, because he's been following me for the last half hour, so he's probably lost." The Syrian loomed up out of the shadows with a big smile on his face. "Yesssss?" growled the night porter to him. That's when the Syrian recognised that he wasn't on home territory, and he'd have done well in a Charlie Chaplin film for the facial expression he had.
I left them to sort it out and went home.
Didn't occur to me until the next morning that the poor Syrian probably saw me displaying my breasts earlier and assumed I was an unusual act...
Scuse me while I go to investigate the sound of breaking glass - it's Saturday night in Baldock again already.
The apartment I booked for the conference was fantastic, no two ways about it. The only thing between it and perfection was the lack of WIFI, but I'm told that this will be in place by next year's bash. Coolth * 1000, and no I'm not publishing their address before I have the chance to book us in again! Most of the time it was just me, sniper, Christian Weiske and Carsten Lucke in residence, but on the final night there we had visitors, and it proved itself capable of allowing the people in the bedrooms to sleep through our loud talking in the lounge. It's very central - close to Dam Square - and also close to a number 4 tram line, meaning it took a maximum of 15 minutes to reach the RAI. We'll be back, for sure!
The most interesting item in the whole of the conference was Andrei's talk about the pending support for internationalisation in PHP. He's spent the last few months writing support for ICU, the IBM i18n library, into the Zend engine - I believe he's been doing this during paid Yahoo time - but, as with most major development efforts in PHP these days, the actual development process has been confined to a pretty small group of core developers, and several of the rest of us had a lot of questions to ask about the implementation. The chief discussion was in the Novotel bar at the end of that day, mainly because it's the kind of 'exciting' that makes you think subliminally about it for the next several hours even when you're pretending to think about something else (e.g. not being sick in the womens' toilets). Then we all went out for beers and etc, predictably enough. You have to understand that the vast majority of these guys are still under 30, and that includes Andrei.
Apart from that it wasn't a good PHP conference for me - there seemed to be a lot of Zend-related meetings in there one way or another, and I missed the careless free-for-all of yesteryear. I haven't had time to do a lot for php.net recently, not being the fastest of coders and/or thinkers (no really, people that know me at home need to understand this - the php.net core devs are way ahead of me most of the time), and I felt very much like a hanger-on rather than central to it all. This is frustrating - there are three projects currently that I'd really like to have some involvement in, and I can't see a way clear to do it. Two of them are headed by Andrei; it's almost like he's taken Sterling's place as innovator.
I spoke with Sterling tonight, nothing to do with development, just gossing. Amongst other things, I wanted to know if it's ok to blog embarrassing stuff. He felt that it was ok to think about it twice and then do it anyway. So here goes:
The final night in Amsterdam, and Jerome (conference speaker), Philippe (the guy sleeping below my bunk in the mixed dorm at the hostel that night) and myself went out for a few beers and etc. The 'and etc' took effect pretty quickly, and the lads wanted to go somewhere 'more Amsterdam-ish' - we were in fact in a pretty good bar in the middle of the redlight, but I'm 20 years older than either of them so who'm I to judge? I figured that the places they wanted to be weren't the places I'd want to be, so I stayed where I was, alone, at a table, by a window. It's the 'by a window' part that you need to hang onto here.
This was the only window in the entire street that didn't have a naked woman behind it.
Got to there?
OK, so I'm flashing my breasts at the window every now and again, because it amuses me and I'm stoned. This went on for around 20 minutes, and then I just as suddenly lost interest in the joke and went to sleep, I've no idea how long for.
The barman woke me and asked me to leave, and the bar at this point was empty of customers, apart from one Syrian guy who was sitting opposite me and wearing a funny smile. He asked for a cigarette, which I - unusually - refused because I thought he was creepy. I was right. 400 metres down the street I took a back-alley to check - sure enough, his footsteps were still echoing behind mine. I led him around the block and then went to a hotel on the street I was staying in. It had a night bell, which I rang. The night porter came out, all smiles: "And what can I do for you, madame?" "Actually, I'm not staying here," I apologised. "But I'm hoping the guy behind me is, because he's been following me for the last half hour, so he's probably lost." The Syrian loomed up out of the shadows with a big smile on his face. "Yesssss?" growled the night porter to him. That's when the Syrian recognised that he wasn't on home territory, and he'd have done well in a Charlie Chaplin film for the facial expression he had.
I left them to sort it out and went home.
Didn't occur to me until the next morning that the poor Syrian probably saw me displaying my breasts earlier and assumed I was an unusual act...
Scuse me while I go to investigate the sound of breaking glass - it's Saturday night in Baldock again already.
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Another time, another planet
Having given up on my old life now, I've finally achieved some kind of equilibrium. It just means I drink in different bars and get to talk to people who haven't suddenly decided to hate me while I was out of the country, but it's better, if not altogether happy.
Friday nights are still hell, and the policemen (it's true about them getting younger by the way) all say 'hello' when I walk by. It makes me feel about 90 - if they'd done that when I was a kid I'd have been panicking inside and running the ever-present list of recent crimes through my mind. Now I'm just pleased to see them, and I guess it shows. The car hasn't been attacked since the last incident reported here, but then again it hasn't spent Friday night here either...
I managed to break (or at least, I think I managed to break) Zend's CVS server just after the weekend began, which effectively means I'm in the twin position of having a lot to do and no way to do it. 'Just enjoy the day,' offered Rick, my direct boss. Hm kay. So what do people actually do with free Saturdays? It's not just Zend - I've never taken weekends in the standard sense, usually because the kind of job I've had hasn't been the kind where weekends are different to any other days. They're very much an office construct. Historically, weekends have generally consisted of Tuesday as far as I'm concerned, which became less interesting when the licensing laws changed to allow all-day opening. Until then it used to be considered pretty wonderful if you could get market day off work - the bars in chartered market towns were allowed to stay open until 4pm on market days - and in Hitchin, where I spent most of my adult life to date, market day fell (and still falls) on a Tuesday.
Happy days :-) learning to play pool with the bikers in the George and strolling home rat-arsed at 4.10pm ('drinking-up time' was extended from 10 minutes to 20 minutes, eventually). Having a weekend on a Tuesday was easily worth having to work a Saturday and Sunday, back then. I actually still prefer it that way now, too.
So it's a Saturday, a rare Saturday when I don't have anything to do (or at least, I don't have any way to do it), and it's even a warm-ish day. The laundry's in, the kitchen's fairly tidy, the meal I'm making later won't take much over 20 minutes, packing for next week's Amsterdam trip (PHP international conference) will take maybe 10 .... I ended up looking at the stuff in the outhouse I've been promising Mum I'll clear out forever.
And then some handwriting leaps out at me from amongst a sheaf of old papers, and it's not my handwriting, it's Floyd's.
Floyd was my very ex-partner, who died suddenly on Hallowe'en 1999, just two weeks after coming out with the 'Millennium Disease' theory - "have you noticed how everybody's falling apart because of the Millennium?" - and roughly 40 years before either of us expected him to do anything so dramatic. There was a spate of sudden deaths around that time (like, 6 of my family, my cat, our dog, and over 30 of my friends) which seemed to prove his theory correct, but it's not hugely comforting to think of that. I think he was talking about marriages at the time...
Anyway there's his stuff; a short story, one of many stories and poems he wrote. I remember this one clearly; he'd actually written it for radio, and played me a recording of it he'd made (he was an excellent performer). And it occurs to me it'd be kinda nice to put it online, because if you google on 'Chron Gen' or 'bb floyd' you don't get the kind of results you would expect to find if his band had been successful after the www reached the average household, and because he didn't live long enough to even see the Internet in action, but I'm sure he'd have published his bits and bobs on it if he had.
So there's my Saturday task.
Friday nights are still hell, and the policemen (it's true about them getting younger by the way) all say 'hello' when I walk by. It makes me feel about 90 - if they'd done that when I was a kid I'd have been panicking inside and running the ever-present list of recent crimes through my mind. Now I'm just pleased to see them, and I guess it shows. The car hasn't been attacked since the last incident reported here, but then again it hasn't spent Friday night here either...
I managed to break (or at least, I think I managed to break) Zend's CVS server just after the weekend began, which effectively means I'm in the twin position of having a lot to do and no way to do it. 'Just enjoy the day,' offered Rick, my direct boss. Hm kay. So what do people actually do with free Saturdays? It's not just Zend - I've never taken weekends in the standard sense, usually because the kind of job I've had hasn't been the kind where weekends are different to any other days. They're very much an office construct. Historically, weekends have generally consisted of Tuesday as far as I'm concerned, which became less interesting when the licensing laws changed to allow all-day opening. Until then it used to be considered pretty wonderful if you could get market day off work - the bars in chartered market towns were allowed to stay open until 4pm on market days - and in Hitchin, where I spent most of my adult life to date, market day fell (and still falls) on a Tuesday.
Happy days :-) learning to play pool with the bikers in the George and strolling home rat-arsed at 4.10pm ('drinking-up time' was extended from 10 minutes to 20 minutes, eventually). Having a weekend on a Tuesday was easily worth having to work a Saturday and Sunday, back then. I actually still prefer it that way now, too.
So it's a Saturday, a rare Saturday when I don't have anything to do (or at least, I don't have any way to do it), and it's even a warm-ish day. The laundry's in, the kitchen's fairly tidy, the meal I'm making later won't take much over 20 minutes, packing for next week's Amsterdam trip (PHP international conference) will take maybe 10 .... I ended up looking at the stuff in the outhouse I've been promising Mum I'll clear out forever.
And then some handwriting leaps out at me from amongst a sheaf of old papers, and it's not my handwriting, it's Floyd's.
Floyd was my very ex-partner, who died suddenly on Hallowe'en 1999, just two weeks after coming out with the 'Millennium Disease' theory - "have you noticed how everybody's falling apart because of the Millennium?" - and roughly 40 years before either of us expected him to do anything so dramatic. There was a spate of sudden deaths around that time (like, 6 of my family, my cat, our dog, and over 30 of my friends) which seemed to prove his theory correct, but it's not hugely comforting to think of that. I think he was talking about marriages at the time...
Anyway there's his stuff; a short story, one of many stories and poems he wrote. I remember this one clearly; he'd actually written it for radio, and played me a recording of it he'd made (he was an excellent performer). And it occurs to me it'd be kinda nice to put it online, because if you google on 'Chron Gen' or 'bb floyd' you don't get the kind of results you would expect to find if his band had been successful after the www reached the average household, and because he didn't live long enough to even see the Internet in action, but I'm sure he'd have published his bits and bobs on it if he had.
So there's my Saturday task.
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Yeah yeah, it's not fair...
I keep hearing Jilted John, I don't know why...
My mother's car didn't just get egged this weekend, it got a brick through its window. She's gone to stay with my uncle because she doesn't dare leave the car out on the street here with no window, and we have nowhere to hide it, and it can't be fixed 'til Monday.
She talked about the violence on the street here last night - I was lucky, I went over to Nigel's place and missed all the 'excitement'. I'm very glad I did that, for myself, but not for Mum.
So tonight it's my turn, I'm in the flat alone, and for once there hasn't been any violence on the streets. I was treated to the violence of the bars instead, which isn't the same thing at all as it doesn't involve the physical stuff. For some reason as I got up to leave tonight I said to the one woman I most admire in Baldock that it was always a pleasure to see her. It is; she's pretty and she's funny, and she lifts the mood as soon as she walks through the door, for everyone present. Her response? "I wish I could say the same for you, Steph."
We've never even held a conversation.
The friend that accompanied her did hold a conversation with me, briefly, on the subject of child-rearing. She explained to me that Floyd and I had been cruel to the niece we raised. But then went on to describe the difficulties she's having with her 7-year-old son's manners, which to me says that she was never cruel enough. If you don't teach a child right from wrong before it reaches 7, how can that child ever know right from wrong? Obviously we weren't going to agree on that point, so I let it ride. Which led to her asking me, was I from 'that family in the High Street'? - the one where a baby was unwittingly murdered by its own mother some two years ago. Gee thanks.
The murderess in the case is from this town. Everyone here went to school with her. There's a huge amount of sympathy for her locally, and a general feeling that she was led astray by falling into bad company. Strangely, I've known the 'bad company' she was living with at that time for the last 20-odd years. When his father was dying - which took some years, as the old boy had a very slow cancer - I know that the 'bad company' was attentive and caring; he took food and beer to his father on a daily basis, he spent time with him, and he gave at least as much as he received, in the way of gossip, and company, and simple fun. But he wasn't 'from here'. And neither am I, thank God. Neither am I.
So why are we being attacked? Because I've come to the point now where I'm beginning to believe that everyone around is not being attacked, there's something personal in this; the rest of the cars in our street remain untouched.
There are a number of possibilities.
One is the recent conviction of an old (and elderly) friend of the family for paedophilia. Incidents 30 years old. No telling whether it carried into more recent years, and the guy's had a complete breakdown since his conviction, so they can't even send him to jail - just wreck his life. Of course we have to believe the conviction, and of course we're all duly appalled - but jesus, he's knocking 80. Why did it have to be now?
One is the fact that both my mother and I will attempt to stop things that we see are wrong. "Kick him again and I'll call the police," said my 65-year-old Mum to one teenager. "What the FUCK do you think you're playing at?" said me to another. They stop - but maybe they don't forget.
One is the fact that I just came back from Israel, and all England hates Israel, or so it seems.
And one is that I allegedly slept with the partner of the aforementioned unwitting murderess. (Except that I didn't, but hey, don't let the truth get in the way of the facts!)
- or it could be simply that we're not from here...
My mother's car didn't just get egged this weekend, it got a brick through its window. She's gone to stay with my uncle because she doesn't dare leave the car out on the street here with no window, and we have nowhere to hide it, and it can't be fixed 'til Monday.
She talked about the violence on the street here last night - I was lucky, I went over to Nigel's place and missed all the 'excitement'. I'm very glad I did that, for myself, but not for Mum.
So tonight it's my turn, I'm in the flat alone, and for once there hasn't been any violence on the streets. I was treated to the violence of the bars instead, which isn't the same thing at all as it doesn't involve the physical stuff. For some reason as I got up to leave tonight I said to the one woman I most admire in Baldock that it was always a pleasure to see her. It is; she's pretty and she's funny, and she lifts the mood as soon as she walks through the door, for everyone present. Her response? "I wish I could say the same for you, Steph."
We've never even held a conversation.
The friend that accompanied her did hold a conversation with me, briefly, on the subject of child-rearing. She explained to me that Floyd and I had been cruel to the niece we raised. But then went on to describe the difficulties she's having with her 7-year-old son's manners, which to me says that she was never cruel enough. If you don't teach a child right from wrong before it reaches 7, how can that child ever know right from wrong? Obviously we weren't going to agree on that point, so I let it ride. Which led to her asking me, was I from 'that family in the High Street'? - the one where a baby was unwittingly murdered by its own mother some two years ago. Gee thanks.
The murderess in the case is from this town. Everyone here went to school with her. There's a huge amount of sympathy for her locally, and a general feeling that she was led astray by falling into bad company. Strangely, I've known the 'bad company' she was living with at that time for the last 20-odd years. When his father was dying - which took some years, as the old boy had a very slow cancer - I know that the 'bad company' was attentive and caring; he took food and beer to his father on a daily basis, he spent time with him, and he gave at least as much as he received, in the way of gossip, and company, and simple fun. But he wasn't 'from here'. And neither am I, thank God. Neither am I.
So why are we being attacked? Because I've come to the point now where I'm beginning to believe that everyone around is not being attacked, there's something personal in this; the rest of the cars in our street remain untouched.
There are a number of possibilities.
One is the recent conviction of an old (and elderly) friend of the family for paedophilia. Incidents 30 years old. No telling whether it carried into more recent years, and the guy's had a complete breakdown since his conviction, so they can't even send him to jail - just wreck his life. Of course we have to believe the conviction, and of course we're all duly appalled - but jesus, he's knocking 80. Why did it have to be now?
One is the fact that both my mother and I will attempt to stop things that we see are wrong. "Kick him again and I'll call the police," said my 65-year-old Mum to one teenager. "What the FUCK do you think you're playing at?" said me to another. They stop - but maybe they don't forget.
One is the fact that I just came back from Israel, and all England hates Israel, or so it seems.
And one is that I allegedly slept with the partner of the aforementioned unwitting murderess. (Except that I didn't, but hey, don't let the truth get in the way of the facts!)
- or it could be simply that we're not from here...
Thursday, April 07, 2005
It's For Real
Sounds like an advertising slogan, no?
I'm just talking about the England I came home to, yeah yeah whinging again - I promise (tho' I often break my promises) that this'll be the last time I mention it.
My mother's car had eggs thrown over it twice last week - not by birds, but by teenagers. Don't these kids know it's not even properly Spring yet?
There was someone in our cellar a couple of nights back. There's nothing down there to steal, but it's still scary stuff, given that my antiquated (sorry Mum, going for the pink pound) mother generally lives alone; the gate aka 'drawbridge' is kept permanently locked these days, and the garden is surrounded by high walls. So where did this guy - I assume it was a guy, or guys - come from, and how?
Our wash-house - which is protected in the same way - has been broken into so often now that my mother's given up trying to keep food in the freezer there. Because it gets stolen, and she doesn't like the thought of those kids getting food poisoning.
The kids hang out on the streets any time it isn't actually raining. And no, we don't live in London or Manchester or some godforsaken suburban sprawl, we live in what used to be a pleasant, if dull, little town on the edge of nowhere.
Dave the Bar nods when I mention the hassle Mum's been going through. 'Yeah, it's gone seriously downhill around here lately.' Great. Cool. Fantastic. Fix it?
So maybe it's not just me being paranoid after all. Maybe England _is_ just turning into a land of disrespect and thuggery. Or at least, this small part of it.
My brother mailed me tonight to say he's had enough of the Big City (his joke name for our small town) and is taking his herd of children back into the sticks just as soon as he can sell his house.
Dave also has children. He's been trying to sell up for over eighteen months, so I'm not holding my breath...
People here are gobsmacked (there is no better word) when I say I find it aggressive here after Israel. After all, everything you see in the press and on the TV says that Israel's one of the scarier places to be in the world. But then, there's no big story and no good pictures to be had out of a lone middle-aged woman walking home through city streets unaccosted at 4am. Even if there are thousands like her, night after night, it just doesn't make great news! Which just goes to show precisely how limited the idea of what constitutes 'great news' is.
Oh and my tooth fell apart today too. And I don't have a dentist in the UK since mine was arrested for selling cocaine back in the caring sharing 90s.
(Not that these items are related - but they kind of are, in a way.)
That's enough of the grumblies; I started to fit in better now (I swore at someone or something, and I can cross a road without thinking about where I am too hard, and I make it to the bar before it closes nearly every night now) so I guess I'll be back to my normal self in another week or so.
God help us all.
I'm just talking about the England I came home to, yeah yeah whinging again - I promise (tho' I often break my promises) that this'll be the last time I mention it.
My mother's car had eggs thrown over it twice last week - not by birds, but by teenagers. Don't these kids know it's not even properly Spring yet?
There was someone in our cellar a couple of nights back. There's nothing down there to steal, but it's still scary stuff, given that my antiquated (sorry Mum, going for the pink pound) mother generally lives alone; the gate aka 'drawbridge' is kept permanently locked these days, and the garden is surrounded by high walls. So where did this guy - I assume it was a guy, or guys - come from, and how?
Our wash-house - which is protected in the same way - has been broken into so often now that my mother's given up trying to keep food in the freezer there. Because it gets stolen, and she doesn't like the thought of those kids getting food poisoning.
The kids hang out on the streets any time it isn't actually raining. And no, we don't live in London or Manchester or some godforsaken suburban sprawl, we live in what used to be a pleasant, if dull, little town on the edge of nowhere.
Dave the Bar nods when I mention the hassle Mum's been going through. 'Yeah, it's gone seriously downhill around here lately.' Great. Cool. Fantastic. Fix it?
So maybe it's not just me being paranoid after all. Maybe England _is_ just turning into a land of disrespect and thuggery. Or at least, this small part of it.
My brother mailed me tonight to say he's had enough of the Big City (his joke name for our small town) and is taking his herd of children back into the sticks just as soon as he can sell his house.
Dave also has children. He's been trying to sell up for over eighteen months, so I'm not holding my breath...
People here are gobsmacked (there is no better word) when I say I find it aggressive here after Israel. After all, everything you see in the press and on the TV says that Israel's one of the scarier places to be in the world. But then, there's no big story and no good pictures to be had out of a lone middle-aged woman walking home through city streets unaccosted at 4am. Even if there are thousands like her, night after night, it just doesn't make great news! Which just goes to show precisely how limited the idea of what constitutes 'great news' is.
Oh and my tooth fell apart today too. And I don't have a dentist in the UK since mine was arrested for selling cocaine back in the caring sharing 90s.
(Not that these items are related - but they kind of are, in a way.)
That's enough of the grumblies; I started to fit in better now (I swore at someone or something, and I can cross a road without thinking about where I am too hard, and I make it to the bar before it closes nearly every night now) so I guess I'll be back to my normal self in another week or so.
God help us all.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Mediterranean Homesick Blues
We had a full staff meeting today at Zend - all of us, from all over the world, connected by long-distance telephone, a common purpose, and the sound of a small child making a lot of noise. Of course we all denied having any children on the spot, but it was funniest hearing the Israeli office in full flow. (C'mon Amnon, we all know it was you!)
'Course I got homesick - for about the first 40 minutes, anyway. After that I remembered how non-virtual staff meetings always go on for at least half an hour longer than my attention span can manage, and practiced throwing paper aeroplanes at myself in the hallway alone at home.
Still it seemed strangely quiet when the meeting was over, and I couldn't settle back to work for a while.
England's becoming more itself again (to me), if still aggressive. I got a fulsome apology and part of my bar bill paid by the guy who was so obnoxious the other night; that's something to hold onto I guess. My second best friend's going through a rough patch - no work, no car, no money - and can't come over to visit, although we plan to party like crazy when my paycheque comes. My best friend of all is in Ireland practising being a husband - no point there, I know he'll either be very good or very bad at it, there'll be nothing in between, he's Catholic. And my third best friend (Capricorns always have three very good friends) is the ever-faithful Nigel, who bans me during the week on account of my being an evil influence.
I have this Saturday night reserved for his birthday, and hopefully - this being a very rural Saturday night indeed - some of the edge of this rough culture will be softened then.
Why the blather? - ack, it was just a little episode earlier tonight, standing in a queue at the garage waiting to pay a fiver for the half-litre of petrol I'd just spooned into my mother's car, and someone drop-kicked me directly behind the knees. Obviously aiming for that spot that makes you crumple and fall over, but thankfully he missed. Just some guy I vaguely know. 'Orl right girl? You been away?'
Yeah, I been away alright, and I wish to God I still was.
'Course I got homesick - for about the first 40 minutes, anyway. After that I remembered how non-virtual staff meetings always go on for at least half an hour longer than my attention span can manage, and practiced throwing paper aeroplanes at myself in the hallway alone at home.
Still it seemed strangely quiet when the meeting was over, and I couldn't settle back to work for a while.
England's becoming more itself again (to me), if still aggressive. I got a fulsome apology and part of my bar bill paid by the guy who was so obnoxious the other night; that's something to hold onto I guess. My second best friend's going through a rough patch - no work, no car, no money - and can't come over to visit, although we plan to party like crazy when my paycheque comes. My best friend of all is in Ireland practising being a husband - no point there, I know he'll either be very good or very bad at it, there'll be nothing in between, he's Catholic. And my third best friend (Capricorns always have three very good friends) is the ever-faithful Nigel, who bans me during the week on account of my being an evil influence.
I have this Saturday night reserved for his birthday, and hopefully - this being a very rural Saturday night indeed - some of the edge of this rough culture will be softened then.
Why the blather? - ack, it was just a little episode earlier tonight, standing in a queue at the garage waiting to pay a fiver for the half-litre of petrol I'd just spooned into my mother's car, and someone drop-kicked me directly behind the knees. Obviously aiming for that spot that makes you crumple and fall over, but thankfully he missed. Just some guy I vaguely know. 'Orl right girl? You been away?'
Yeah, I been away alright, and I wish to God I still was.
Monday, March 21, 2005
Bravado in the Mid-Counties
So I'm home, and it's as though I never went away - certainly nobody seems to have noticed I left at all.
Tonight there was a bully in the house, who - once he had a few beers behind him - made a big point of telling me that nobody he knows likes me.
I turned to the next person to me (who doesn't know me well) and said loudly, 'Hey, that's just one more reason not to want to be here.'
Bad move.
She assumed that I meant I didn't like being home because nobody likes me here. Whereas what I was trying to say was more along the lines of, I can't think of another place on this planet where playground bullying is tolerated in adult spaces...
It didn't cheer me a great deal when Dave (the landlord) came back into the room, heard what had occurred during his absence, and tried to fix things by asserting that he likes me. That was not the issue, Dave...
I'm homesick for Israel already.
Tonight there was a bully in the house, who - once he had a few beers behind him - made a big point of telling me that nobody he knows likes me.
I turned to the next person to me (who doesn't know me well) and said loudly, 'Hey, that's just one more reason not to want to be here.'
Bad move.
She assumed that I meant I didn't like being home because nobody likes me here. Whereas what I was trying to say was more along the lines of, I can't think of another place on this planet where playground bullying is tolerated in adult spaces...
It didn't cheer me a great deal when Dave (the landlord) came back into the room, heard what had occurred during his absence, and tried to fix things by asserting that he likes me. That was not the issue, Dave...
I'm homesick for Israel already.
Friday, March 18, 2005
No hugs please, we're British
"In a few hours from now, Jordan's exactly where I'll be."
OK, that was the theory. But I wasn't - I ended up stressing out over going there at all, with full-on nightmares on a regular basis etc etc, most of which stemmed from seeing my friends in Mike's Place making world headlines a couple of years back. After some 5 months in Israel, where everyone says exactly what they think regardless of the consequences, I could see myself starting an international incident within minutes of crossing the border. Besides which, I started renovating my area of zend.com at the beginning of this month, and this exercise has left me with no time to mess around running from country to country every time I get a short visa. All things considered, I went illegal for the final Israeli fortnight and headed back to the UK, fuming quietly to myself over Israeli visa regulations.
I said goodbye to most of my Jerusalem friends on the 15th, and spent the 16th packing and cleaning. This took longer than anticipated, and I didn't make it to Ramat Gan in time to say goodbye to the guys and gals in the Zend office. It was around 9pm when I waved back sadly at Denise, my erstwhile landlady, flatmate and provider of cooked potatoes, and set off for Tel Aviv with what seemed to me a huge amount of luggage. I had to buy a suitcase from the markets off Agripas earlier in the day to accommodate the books, jumpers and jeans I bought in Israel - still everything didn't quite make it in, so I had a lot of tonnage to haul. And it really was a haul - there's no road near my pad in Jerusalem, it's strictly steps (Ha Madragot), and it took over half an hour to find myself a taxi because I took the steps downhill rather than attempt to go up. Still, I was (eventually) glad I'd done as I did - Ariel Sharon drove by as we queued at the Bezalel traffic lights, which seemed a fitting farewell from Jerusalem to me.
Erm - make that 'seven cars, one of which contained a girl with a megaphone, all of which contained security men with guns, three of which had darkened windows, one of which may have contained Ariel Sharon'. The rest of us mere mortals in the queue had to pull over onto the pavement as the big man passed by.
Tel Aviv... ah, that was so sad and so sweet. 'Why are you going home?' 'Israel doesn't want me any more.' 'But they never asked us!' (Alan).
So I hugged Gal, and Sarah, and Alan, and the guy who plays the keyboard so beautifully, and Josh, whose birthday it was, and Jasmin, who is not having a Good Time, and Emma, and Yattir, and the guy who sells incense (who handed me a bunch especially for Nigel, 'The King'), and Canadian Dave, and Sammy, and Barry, and Assaf - and the ever-lovely Yariv, who came an extra 5 miles just to say goodbye. All too soon I had to leave, and sober up in the 3am taxi to the airport.
The Zend letter probably saved me a strip-search, and Gal a 5am phone call, but I still got the full two-hour interrogation. 'You don't have much luggage.' (I don't?) 'What did you bring when you came here?' 'My rucksack, my laptop, and a carrier bag.' 'Where is the carrier bag now?' 'Huh?' I found a carrier bag to show. 'This is a carrier bag.' 'Ah...' the security guy got the giggles, thankfully, and the interrogation was much easier from then on.
So - home, via Cyprus, and a guy named Richard who chain-smoked alongside me in Larnaca Airport for 3 hours happened to be driving to Huntingdon from Heathrow Airport. Basically he was passing my area, so I asked for (and was given) a lift to Stevenage, where I could catch a bus home - or at least, to Hitchin Station, which is the next best thing, as I actually live some 5 miles up the road from there. By the time the bus came I'd reconsidered, and asked for a ticket to the town centre instead. 'Hitchin Town Centre? But you live in Baldock, don't you?' asked the driver.
Yep, that's home alright...
I went into the Red Hart, phoned Nigel and asked him to pick me up when he could, touched my very-ex-partner Floyd's plaque in a 'hi I'm back' kinda way, realised I was out of tune, and settled down amongst my luggage to get re-conditioned into Englishness. By the time Nigel arrived to pick up his incense sticks, duty-free cigarettes and me, there was a band going through a sound-check, so we shouted greetings to one another over the strains of 'I don't need no fuckin' leadAH!' (I guess they don't know any Beatles covers.) We planned our evening - it being St Paddy's night and all that - and drove over to Baldock in his new sports car, the one with a trunk the size of a lady's handbag.
Nigel having spent Christmas week in Tel Aviv with me, he was very aware of the strangenesses of rural England, and did his best to mitigate the culture clash. We did a minor pub crawl around Baldock until we found some Irish people, drank a Guinness with them, then went for a traditional English dinner - Chicken Dansak, Aloo Gobi, Mushroom Pilau and Peshwari Naan - before rounding off the (for me) 40-hour day with a glass of red wine and grateful unconsciousness.
OK, that was the theory. But I wasn't - I ended up stressing out over going there at all, with full-on nightmares on a regular basis etc etc, most of which stemmed from seeing my friends in Mike's Place making world headlines a couple of years back. After some 5 months in Israel, where everyone says exactly what they think regardless of the consequences, I could see myself starting an international incident within minutes of crossing the border. Besides which, I started renovating my area of zend.com at the beginning of this month, and this exercise has left me with no time to mess around running from country to country every time I get a short visa. All things considered, I went illegal for the final Israeli fortnight and headed back to the UK, fuming quietly to myself over Israeli visa regulations.
I said goodbye to most of my Jerusalem friends on the 15th, and spent the 16th packing and cleaning. This took longer than anticipated, and I didn't make it to Ramat Gan in time to say goodbye to the guys and gals in the Zend office. It was around 9pm when I waved back sadly at Denise, my erstwhile landlady, flatmate and provider of cooked potatoes, and set off for Tel Aviv with what seemed to me a huge amount of luggage. I had to buy a suitcase from the markets off Agripas earlier in the day to accommodate the books, jumpers and jeans I bought in Israel - still everything didn't quite make it in, so I had a lot of tonnage to haul. And it really was a haul - there's no road near my pad in Jerusalem, it's strictly steps (Ha Madragot), and it took over half an hour to find myself a taxi because I took the steps downhill rather than attempt to go up. Still, I was (eventually) glad I'd done as I did - Ariel Sharon drove by as we queued at the Bezalel traffic lights, which seemed a fitting farewell from Jerusalem to me.
Erm - make that 'seven cars, one of which contained a girl with a megaphone, all of which contained security men with guns, three of which had darkened windows, one of which may have contained Ariel Sharon'. The rest of us mere mortals in the queue had to pull over onto the pavement as the big man passed by.
Tel Aviv... ah, that was so sad and so sweet. 'Why are you going home?' 'Israel doesn't want me any more.' 'But they never asked us!' (Alan).
So I hugged Gal, and Sarah, and Alan, and the guy who plays the keyboard so beautifully, and Josh, whose birthday it was, and Jasmin, who is not having a Good Time, and Emma, and Yattir, and the guy who sells incense (who handed me a bunch especially for Nigel, 'The King'), and Canadian Dave, and Sammy, and Barry, and Assaf - and the ever-lovely Yariv, who came an extra 5 miles just to say goodbye. All too soon I had to leave, and sober up in the 3am taxi to the airport.
The Zend letter probably saved me a strip-search, and Gal a 5am phone call, but I still got the full two-hour interrogation. 'You don't have much luggage.' (I don't?) 'What did you bring when you came here?' 'My rucksack, my laptop, and a carrier bag.' 'Where is the carrier bag now?' 'Huh?' I found a carrier bag to show. 'This is a carrier bag.' 'Ah...' the security guy got the giggles, thankfully, and the interrogation was much easier from then on.
So - home, via Cyprus, and a guy named Richard who chain-smoked alongside me in Larnaca Airport for 3 hours happened to be driving to Huntingdon from Heathrow Airport. Basically he was passing my area, so I asked for (and was given) a lift to Stevenage, where I could catch a bus home - or at least, to Hitchin Station, which is the next best thing, as I actually live some 5 miles up the road from there. By the time the bus came I'd reconsidered, and asked for a ticket to the town centre instead. 'Hitchin Town Centre? But you live in Baldock, don't you?' asked the driver.
Yep, that's home alright...
I went into the Red Hart, phoned Nigel and asked him to pick me up when he could, touched my very-ex-partner Floyd's plaque in a 'hi I'm back' kinda way, realised I was out of tune, and settled down amongst my luggage to get re-conditioned into Englishness. By the time Nigel arrived to pick up his incense sticks, duty-free cigarettes and me, there was a band going through a sound-check, so we shouted greetings to one another over the strains of 'I don't need no fuckin' leadAH!' (I guess they don't know any Beatles covers.) We planned our evening - it being St Paddy's night and all that - and drove over to Baldock in his new sports car, the one with a trunk the size of a lady's handbag.
Nigel having spent Christmas week in Tel Aviv with me, he was very aware of the strangenesses of rural England, and did his best to mitigate the culture clash. We did a minor pub crawl around Baldock until we found some Irish people, drank a Guinness with them, then went for a traditional English dinner - Chicken Dansak, Aloo Gobi, Mushroom Pilau and Peshwari Naan - before rounding off the (for me) 40-hour day with a glass of red wine and grateful unconsciousness.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Hebrew. The language of .... erm ... Hebrew speakers ...
I worked (not in a particularly productive way) today.
I should be in Jordan; there's a bit of a situation with my visa and I'm technically illegal here at present. But I dread leaving Israel. I never liked leaving Israel from the first time I came here, but it's worse when you're relying very heavily on the border security allowing you back into the country at all, and your entire life is based around that country for the next few weeks...
In a few hours from now, Jordan's exactly where I'll be.
So I went out to drown my sorrows, a little too late to catch Mike's in Jerusalem but in plenty of time for the Blue Hole. Where there was a discussion with the barmaid whose name I never caught, but she remembers mine and is always good company. I'm trying to learn Hebrew in between the waves of all-night coding and occasionally getting around to do the job I'm officially doing, but it doesn't work out too well - most of the people I've met across Israel speak English, it's a bit like being in the Netherlands in that respect. If everyone just spoke Hebrew I'd have had to learn enough to get by, but as things stand it's become a luxury item; it's not critical to my social or working life, and other things take precedence.
But there we are, and I'm trying to read a Paddy's Day promotion from Jameson, only part of which (the headline) is in English. The rest is in capitalized Hebrew, which I can read the way a bright 3-year-old can read. I still have less than a flying hope when it comes to cursive script... Anyways the girl with no name was laughing with me over my attempts, saying that she'd had similar problems when she made aliyah. Especially when she began working in bars.
The punchline:
'How would YOU write 'Southern Comfort' in Hebrew?'
a. 'sotern comfrt'?
b. 'sotorn comfrt'?
c. 'sozrn comfrt'?
A clue: if you chose 'c' you probably messed up.
I should be in Jordan; there's a bit of a situation with my visa and I'm technically illegal here at present. But I dread leaving Israel. I never liked leaving Israel from the first time I came here, but it's worse when you're relying very heavily on the border security allowing you back into the country at all, and your entire life is based around that country for the next few weeks...
In a few hours from now, Jordan's exactly where I'll be.
So I went out to drown my sorrows, a little too late to catch Mike's in Jerusalem but in plenty of time for the Blue Hole. Where there was a discussion with the barmaid whose name I never caught, but she remembers mine and is always good company. I'm trying to learn Hebrew in between the waves of all-night coding and occasionally getting around to do the job I'm officially doing, but it doesn't work out too well - most of the people I've met across Israel speak English, it's a bit like being in the Netherlands in that respect. If everyone just spoke Hebrew I'd have had to learn enough to get by, but as things stand it's become a luxury item; it's not critical to my social or working life, and other things take precedence.
But there we are, and I'm trying to read a Paddy's Day promotion from Jameson, only part of which (the headline) is in English. The rest is in capitalized Hebrew, which I can read the way a bright 3-year-old can read. I still have less than a flying hope when it comes to cursive script... Anyways the girl with no name was laughing with me over my attempts, saying that she'd had similar problems when she made aliyah. Especially when she began working in bars.
The punchline:
'How would YOU write 'Southern Comfort' in Hebrew?'
a. 'sotern comfrt'?
b. 'sotorn comfrt'?
c. 'sozrn comfrt'?
A clue: if you chose 'c' you probably messed up.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Sherutim (long distance version)
So I'm sitting on a bench in Tel Aviv Central bus station. It's 3am. I left Mike's Place at midnight because I needed to get home to Jerusalem fairly early, and if you daren't risk taxis (you have to speak fluent Hebrew in order to dissuade the cabbies here from charging you the Earth, Moon and planets to get from A to B) the only option after midnight is the sherutim.
The sherutim are a great plan that sometime gan awry. Some take 8 passengers, others take 12, but none of them take anyone anywhere until the minibus is full. And ours didn't fill.
At around 2am the sherut driver came by, canvassing. He wanted the six passengers already on board (I was counted as 'on board', having paid my 25 shekel fare already) to pay an extra 15 shekels to make up for the passengers we didn't have. I admitted to having a spare 15 shekels in my pocket, but pointed out that the rest of the passengers would (quite rightly) veto the whole idea - which, surely enough, they did.
By 2.30am there's a guy who used to be asleep on the bench, but has woken for long enough to share a cigarette with me and has now decided it's nicer to sleep with his head in my lap. There's a terribly obese guy (unusual in Israel) who has had to sit down and rest 3 times just walking from the local bus stop to the sherutim base - a matter of some 400 metres - and who dozes almost immediately he finds a real bench, knowing that his chances of reaching Haifa tonight are very slim indeedy. There's also a very young boy, a teenager, who is clutching a huge canvas under one arm. I asked to see the painting. It showed himself, screaming, and a dim effeminate ghost who was larger than he was. 'Who's the ghost?' 'My aunt.' 'I'm so sorry.' The intifada has a lot to answer for, whichever side you happen to be on and whatever way you view it.
By 3.30am the sherut driver had lost patience. He signalled me to join the rest of the passengers on the minibus and demanded that everyone on board pay whatever they could. I was totally bemused by this - it's a very un-Israeli attitude to take - but handed over an extra 20 sheks regardless. The yeshiva boys managed a few shekels above their fare, the Israeli Arabs in the back managed around the same, the American tourist feigned sleep. Then we drove around the corner and I found out what the problem was. There had never been any fuel in the sherut from the start; we sat in a filling station for a further 10 minutes while the driver counted out the price of a full tank of diesel in the single shekel coins given him by the yeshiva and the Arabs.
So - you get the picture. I'm not going to be someone who blogs PHP development. Sorry.
The sherutim are a great plan that sometime gan awry. Some take 8 passengers, others take 12, but none of them take anyone anywhere until the minibus is full. And ours didn't fill.
At around 2am the sherut driver came by, canvassing. He wanted the six passengers already on board (I was counted as 'on board', having paid my 25 shekel fare already) to pay an extra 15 shekels to make up for the passengers we didn't have. I admitted to having a spare 15 shekels in my pocket, but pointed out that the rest of the passengers would (quite rightly) veto the whole idea - which, surely enough, they did.
By 2.30am there's a guy who used to be asleep on the bench, but has woken for long enough to share a cigarette with me and has now decided it's nicer to sleep with his head in my lap. There's a terribly obese guy (unusual in Israel) who has had to sit down and rest 3 times just walking from the local bus stop to the sherutim base - a matter of some 400 metres - and who dozes almost immediately he finds a real bench, knowing that his chances of reaching Haifa tonight are very slim indeedy. There's also a very young boy, a teenager, who is clutching a huge canvas under one arm. I asked to see the painting. It showed himself, screaming, and a dim effeminate ghost who was larger than he was. 'Who's the ghost?' 'My aunt.' 'I'm so sorry.' The intifada has a lot to answer for, whichever side you happen to be on and whatever way you view it.
By 3.30am the sherut driver had lost patience. He signalled me to join the rest of the passengers on the minibus and demanded that everyone on board pay whatever they could. I was totally bemused by this - it's a very un-Israeli attitude to take - but handed over an extra 20 sheks regardless. The yeshiva boys managed a few shekels above their fare, the Israeli Arabs in the back managed around the same, the American tourist feigned sleep. Then we drove around the corner and I found out what the problem was. There had never been any fuel in the sherut from the start; we sat in a filling station for a further 10 minutes while the driver counted out the price of a full tank of diesel in the single shekel coins given him by the yeshiva and the Arabs.
So - you get the picture. I'm not going to be someone who blogs PHP development. Sorry.
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