A weekend in August 2
If you were to ask me what my current preoccupations were, the top three would probably be breadmaking, ruby and folk music. This last week has been a pretty decent week on all three fronts.
On Friday, I drove down to Shipton Mill near Tetbury, one of the finest millers in the country, and picked up around 40 kilos of interesting flour at splendidly wholesale prices (substantially cheaper than I was paying at my local suppliers and with far greater variety). I expect to have fun experimenting with a few new bread formulae as I work through that lot. After that, I took a quick trip to the VSCC’s Prescott meeting, where my brother was selling tyres
A Longstone Tyres employee admires Chris Williams skill in using their products as the Napier Bentley leaves the line at Prescott 2006
Prescott’s really lovely, a beautiful site, some spectacular cars and a great atmosphere on the campsite. There were that many family members and Longstone staff on the site there was a virtual Longstone compound. I was sorry I couldn’t stay for the barbecued legs of lamb but I was spending the night with friends in Bath.
On Saturday morning it was off to the Sidmouth Folk Week. Sidmouth is one of the great institutions of British folk music – a week long festival that’s been running for over 50 years. These last couple of years have been run by a new set of organizers and things have been scaled back a little. It’s still Sidmouth though. I last went in 1998 (I think), so it’s been a while, but it still felt just like I remembered. I was crashing with a friend of mine who’s a Sidmouth virgin and acted as a semi-native guide. I think she might be hooked on it too.
I spent a fair amount of time with the Anchor Middle Bar Singers, a festival fringe institution that, whilst not quite as old as the festival, has been running for some time (they recently retired from competing in the “who can raise the most money for festival funds” stakes having been undefeated in this respect since about 1981). The Middle Bar is a twice daily singaround concentrating exclusively on unaccompanied singing, preferably with a chorus. It’s hot, loud, and has its own set of traditions for How Things Are Done.
For Instance, some songs have a ‘standing chorus’; when the singing reaches the chorus of, say, Thousands or More everyone stands for the choruses so, if you’re not completely au fait with which songs have standing choruses, it pays to keep your eyes open.
Monday night was my last night in Sidmouth and when it looked like the twig wasn’t going to make it around the room more than once (a twig is passed around the room to signify who’s singing next) I mentioned that I would really appreciate getting a second song to one of the people on the bench (the people who run the session and who start and finish the singing) and, bless him, he swapped places with me at the end of the night so I was one of the last three singers.
I sang Si Kahn’s song Here is my home, a secular hymn about the fellowship of singing in harmony. It’s a great song with plenty of opportunity for the chorus to join in (it doesn’t just have a chorus between verses, it has them within the verses too) and the singers in the bar were on top form that night, they were sounding wonderful. What nearly stopped me singing though was when the last chorus came around. I’d closed my eyes as I went into it and when I opened them again the whole bar was on its feet belting it out with me. Not something I’ll forget in a hurry.
So, that’s bread making and folk music attended to
On Tuesday I spent the morning in another singaround in the theatre bar before heading off to London for the London Ruby Users’ Group meeting at Skills Matter. A couple of cracking talks (about Domain Specific Languages and tips on working well with front end types) both excellent, one of which was very much last minute after Geoffrey Grossenbach had to cancel when a proposed London workshop he was planning to give fell through. Once the technical stuff was out of the way (I might write more about them when I’ve mulled them over a bit more) we retired to the pub and spent the rest of the evening talking about Ruby, Rails, Smalltalk, Perl 6 and probably a bunch of other stuff. I shall have to make it down to London more often.
Estimating driving time from Devon to London is never going to be an exact science, so I arrived in Clerkenwell about an hour before the meeting and, not being one for sitting in a pub by myself, I repaired to a nice shady bench, pulled out my powerbook and did a bit of light hacking on stuff. I was just starting to get a bit of flow going when someone came into the park and recognized me. Which is just weird. This is the first time I’ve ever been recognized by a stranger. Admittedly, I was wearing the same shirt as I’m wearing in the photo in the sidebar, but still. Embarrassingly, I’ve forgotten the chap’s name – with any luck he’ll comment here and jog my memory.
So, in all a jolly good extended weekend. Flour, songs, and my first microfame moment. Now, if I could just work out how to do that for a living…
WYL4: Easy Life
Exercise 4 of chromatic’s Write Your Life tells me to:
Create a new invention, change your life circumstances, or somehow write away a difficult or time-consuming task. First define the problem, show how it affects you, and then invent it away.
But I’m not going to do that, exactly, because I already did it.
The Perl 6 Summary is a weekly summary of the traffic in the various Perl 6 related mailing lists. I’ve written it for the last two and a half years, and I’ve managed to pretty much stick to a weekly schedule. But it’s a resource hog. Even once I got into the swing of it, a busy week on the lists could easily mean I would spend 8 hours writing the summary—after all, if you want to write a decent précis of a thread with 100 or so messages in it you’re going to need to read (or at least skim) it. Some threads were easy to handle, especially those in perl6-internals which could often be summarized as
Joe Bloggs had a problem with IMCC’s string parsing. He and Leo1 discussed it for a while to nail down the problem, then Leo fixed it.
Dan Sugalski’s design documents often prompted rather more discussion, but I could usually hand-wave it away with ”... then it all got a bit technical” and simply link to the root of the thread for those who were interested.
The other list, perl6-language is a different matter. It would go quiet for weeks at a time before pulling a Mount Saint Helens and exploding into life. Sometimes there was provocation—an Apocalypse or an Exegesis, say. Sometimes a seeming innocuous starter question or proposal would precipitate a pyroclastic torrent of proposal, counter proposal and the odd moment of sanity. Once things quietened down, you could usually rely on Larry2 to extract the good stuff, but discussions could run for weeks.
Whilst such behaviour can be seen as a sign of a healthy list, it was far from easy to summarize. Threads would branch off in weird directions, only occasionally reuniting with the main line of the discussion (assuming there even was a main line anyway). Getting something I was happy with could take ages.
Ages I can’t spare any more. So, last week, I gave up writing the summaries. My teacher training course is using too many of my own personal computrons for me to be able to spare the mental effort required to get the summaries written. It’s been a wrench to do it, but it’s a big weight off my mind.
And the feedback from summary readers has been phenomenal. I’ve always solicited feedback in the summaries, and the little I got was positive, but I’ve had more feedback since I stopped than I’ve had in, probably, the last year, and it’s all been good. Which is lovely.
Bah! Paperwork.
As you may or may not know, one of the banes of a teacher’s life is the paperwork. There’s tons of it. Timetables, lesson plans, seating plans, medium term plans, schemes of work. If you’re a trainee then you have fewer lessons, but twice as much paperwork per lesson. UK teacher training is now ‘evidence based’ which means that part of your job as a trainee is to collect evidence of your competence as a teacher. And evidence is usually on paper.
So, anything I can do to reduce the weight of paper I have to tote around every day has to be a good thing. Ideally I want some way of tying everything together. I want clickable seating plans so I can quickly check my notes on a particular pupil. I want all my lesson plans in one place, linked back to any assessments of the lesson as taught. I want links from my timetable to the sets I’m teaching…
In short, I want a Wiki.
One of the great things about the web is that often you don’t have to invent something yourself, you just have to be aware of possible solutions. So on Thursday I grabbed a Wiki installation3 and spent a couple of hours feeding it some of the information I’ve been gathering about the classes I’ll be teaching in the next half term. It’s great.
I’ve not really used a personal Wiki before - I’ve not had the need - but now I’ve started with one, I’m not sure why it’s taken me this long. It’s great. Now, if I can just hack it to generate inline images from TeX markup.
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want
Teleportation. That’s what I want. I really resent losing an hour and half of every week day to the delights of commuting to Middlesbrough from Gateshead. I drive a Mini Cooper, and it’s a lovely car to drive. But plugging up and down a dual carriageway isn’t where it’s at it’s best. If I could zap myself to and from school every day the problem would be solved. What a shame that our current understanding of The Rules seems to imply that, whilst quantum weirdness doesn’t rule out teleportation, other complexities seem to rule it out big style for anything on the macro scale. Bummer.
1 Leo Tötsch, the Parrot Patchmonster.
2 Larry Wall, creator of Perl. If you’re reading this and don’t know who Larry is already then I’m curious to know how you found this blog.
3 I went with Instiki for reasons of not wanting to be arsed with Apache configuration, coupled with a desire to learn more Ruby if the time presents itself (Hah!).
WYL3: A Day In The Life
Exercise 3 in the Write Your Life project.
On a typical morning, I wake up before the alarm goes at 0630, stumble through into the bathroom, then back into the sitting room where I get suited and booted for the day. (Gill, being a sensible type, gets to sleep in some more, so banging around the bedroom in the dark isn’t a particularly good idea). If I’m running to time, I nip into the office, check my mail and skim through my RSS feeds.
Because the commute into Middlesbrough is rather time dependent, I try to get out of the house by 0715. If I manage to do that, the run into the school where I’m on placement takes about 45 minutes—if I leave much later then it’ll take at least an hour, and punctuality is essential when you’re teaching. I still find being in school as a ‘teacher’ a little weird; it feels like being backstage. Right now, I’m spending most of my time observing classes. I’ll be doing a little bit of teaching in the next week though, and I start my teaching practice proper at the beginning of November.
I’m enjoying lesson observations, but I’m itching to get teaching now. The way they work is that I watch while the teacher introduces the topic, and then we both help the pupils with their exercises. I sometimes find it shocking what the kids get wrong though and, after spending almost all my school years ignoring teachers who nagged me to show my working and do some bloody homework for once, I’m finally starting to understand where they were coming from. I’ve even managed to explain to kids why it’s a good idea without having to resort to the “If you show the working and you go wrong, we can spot where you went wrong and you might not lose all the marks” gambit by pointing out that, whilst they may understand what they’re doing now, they’ll be coming back to these books in two years time when they’re revising for exams and a page full of answers isn’t that useful1.
The school day finishes at 1530 and it takes about an hour to get home (Middlesbrough’s clogged with parents doing the school run, so things take longer). Once I’m home I’ll either sit and read, do some preparation for the next day, burn some time on the X Box or hang out on IRC and generally catch up with mail and stuff. Gill’s usually home before me, and she’s recently been drawing the cooking short straw. Lately I’ve been going to bed by nine—I dread to think how I’m going to cope once I’ve started teaching; I’m exhausted now.
Every other Tuesday night however, I head over to the Cumberland for a singing session with a bunch of fellow folkies. The Cumberland session is one of the most enjoyable singarounds I’ve been to, it’s relatively small with a really high proportion of good singers. And, unusually for a singaround, the majority of ‘em sing traditional songs instead of modern songs in the ‘folk idiom’. Last night saw a particularly bloody selection of Child ballads, a couple of delightfully bawdy songs and the odd selection from the Sacred Harp. I think I may have been the only person who sang a ‘written’ song, and that was Composed in August, which isn’t exactly a new song. I’ve had some fabulous nights there, including one glorious evening with Alistair Anderson, Sandra Kerr, three of the Witches of Elswick and “fiddly” Jon Boden at one point we were competing for who could sing the longest ballad (Fay Hield won with a 15 minute reading of Tam Lin) which we followed up with a couple of rounds of Peter Bellamy appreciation. We were glad there was an extension that night.
And then to bed. Not the most exciting of daily routines I’d be the first to admit, but I’m happy enough on it.
1 Note to Extreme Programmers: this argument may be familiar.
WYL2: Putting Myself On The Map
This is exercise 2 in chromatic’s excellent Write your life exercise.
Home. Four letters. Easy to understand. Hard to pin down.
If we take home as being “The place where one sleeps”, then home is a two bedroomed first floor Tyneside flat. If you are fortunate enough to know Tyneside well, then I’ve just told you a great deal about where I live; you can probably sketch the floorplan, especially if I tell you that there’s the usual extension at the back with a kitchen and bathroom in it.
For the majority of you: Tyneside flats are purpose built flats. Originally built as rental accommodation, a large proportion of them are now owned by their occupiers. Built in terraces of two storey buildings, flats are arranged in pairs; upper and lower. Ours is an upstairs flat, which means it’s slightly larger than the flat below it because there’s no hallway apart from the stairs, there’s also a possibility of extending up into the roof void.
You enter the flat through the right hand door and come straight upstairs to a small inner hall with three doors leading from it. The door to your left leads through into my office, a small, cluttered space which barely contains a huge, height adjustable desk with a dual screen PowerMac G5 setup, a Digidesign Command|8, a couple of audio monitors and an A4 Wacom tablet on it. There’s a certain amount of other detritus on the desk, and every other available horizontal surface. I really should tidy the place up; it’s driving Gill up the wall, but somehow I never seem to get around to it.
Back at the hall, the next door, moving clockwise from my office door, is the door to our bedroom. It’s a large room, with a kingsize bed, a couple of built in wardrobes, a couple of bedside tables overflowing with stuff, and an airer full of drying clothes. Gill’s side of the bed is the tidy side, my bedside table is as disorganized as my office. Unusually, there are no dirty clothes on the floor by the bed at the moment. Probably because we’ve just done a load of washing.
The last door on the landing leads into the sitting room, which is reasonably large, and it needs to be. There’s a small sofa; an easy chair; a Stressless recliner (which is causing a depressing amount of stress at the moment—it keeps breaking); Gill’s desk; three deep bookshelves filled with books (most of the books aren’t here yet); a (small) dining table; a small dresser base with a mini hi-fi on top; the TV/TiVo/DVD collection; a surprisingly pretty new gas fire; and an annoyingly proportioned built in cupboard.
Opposite the door you came into the room through is the door into the small galley kitchen. It’s cramped but there’s all the essentials there, except for a dishwasher (we’re still trying to work out how to cram one in there. If you’ve ever owned a dishwasher you will no doubt be aware that they very rapidly decay from luxury to essential). Carrying on through the kitchen there’s the cat’s landing (where their food and drink bowls live) to the left, stairs lead down to the back door and the litter tray and straight ahead is the bathroom complete with too small bath and the depressingly cramped (when you’re built on my scale) shower over it.
We spend most of our time in the sitting room, as you can tell from the books scattered about, the teapot that always seems to be on a side table or in the kitchen beside a kettle that’s about to boil…
However, I wouldn’t call this flat home. Not properly. It’s a transitional space; where we live until we’ve sold the Newark house, when we’ll be able to sell this flat too and move into big old house somewhere, with room for guests, an office for Gill, a recording area, a darkroom, a decent sized kitchen…
The Newark house?
The Newark house is where we used to live, and it’s far nearer to the kind of place I want to make my home in. From the street, it almost looks like a child’s drawing of a house. Four windows, a door in the middle, a pantiled roof with a chimney stack right in the middle of the roof. The bit you can see from the road is an approximately 400 year old, timber framed cottage. You come in through the front door into a long, low-ceilinged dining room with a 12 foot long dining table running the length of it. The Newark house is a huge, rambling building, from the road it looks like a simple two up/two down cottage, but it’s deceptive, the house goes back a long way. There’s four bedrooms; a big kitchen with huge range cooker; a library with built in shelving holding some of the books; small bathroom holding a huge bath and a shower room with a fabulously large shower.
There’s a lot wrong with it too. For a start, it’s in Newark, which is a little tricky when I’m training as a maths teacher in Middlesbrough and Gill’s doing a degree at Newcastle University. Then there’s the surveys…
We thought we’d sold it. We really did. The buyers liked the fact that it’s old. They liked the eccentricity and general lack of verticality in the front section. They liked the beams and the lime plaster. They even liked the 4’ high door from the main bedroom into the bathroom. What they didn’t like was the results of their structural survey. According to their surveyor, the house is subsiding and subject to progressive and continuing movement and even if remedial action is taken, he can’t guarantee that the house will remain standing. The phrase “only delaying the inevitable” was used in his report. Understandably, our buyers were somewhat taken aback by this.
So, we’ve called in our original structural surveyor, who reckons that there’s been no movement since he surveyed the building over a year ago. Our insurers’ surveyor has paid a visit and reckons there’s no subsidence (but there’s some engineers turning up for a peace of mind check on the drains). With any luck we’ll be able to get away with reinforcing some of the ties and supplying a bunch of certifications from the various surveyors and the buyers (who love the house) will be willing to complete. Or they won’t.
If they don’t, it looks like we might be moving back to Newark for a while come the summer while we get the work done and maybe while I do my induction year as a newly qualified teacher, then sell the house and move back to the North East so Gill can either complete her degree or switch to a masters. Or we’ll stay in Newark for a while longer; it does have the advantage of being a good deal nearer to friends in the South, but it’s still within striking distance of Gateshead, which is where my step-daughter lives.
WYL: Introducing myself
This is the first exercise in chromatic’s Write Your Life essay writing project. Follow the link for more information.
How do I look? Right now, I look uncomfortable; I’ve just changed career tracks and after years as a happy Perl programmer, I’m training to be a maths teacher. Which is fine, not a problem. What makes me uncomfortable is the dress code. After years of working in environments where the most formal outfit you’re likely to see is a polo shirt with the name of the company embroidered on it (worn only by weirdoes and the poor schmucks who drew the “Manning the trade show stand” short straw), suddenly, I’m having to wear a suit.
It’s not all bad; when one is as generously proportioned as me, off-the-peg suits aren’t an option. Once you reach the realms of the 64 inch waist and the 60 inch chest the only option is bespoke. So, right now I’m wearing two pieces of a bespoke dark grey woollen suit that (oh joy of joys!) fits me. It doesn’t ride up around my ears when I’m writing on the board. Give me a few more weeks and I might even start feeling comfortable in it. I already look slimmer in it.
Hmm… somehow I don’t think you’d recognize me from the above. So… I’ve a large head, crew cut dark brown (and rapidly greying) hair. I wear a full, but close cropped, beard which is slightly redder than the hair on my head, but it’s going grey too. My eyes are grey/blue behind a pair of rimless glasses with rounded rectangular lenses that turn dark brown in UV light. I’m 6 feet tall and weigh more than my bathroom scales can measure (and they top out at 25 stones).
There are very few photos of me; I’m generally the one behind the camera. I enjoy taking what I think of as ‘candid portraits’ of friends at parties, but I don’t always carry my camera with me. Photography’s a strange thing, if I want to take good photos, then it’s as if the social part of my brain gets turned off, or turned to other things as I concentrate on where the light is, where I need to stand, where to put the edges and all the other minutia of taking a photograph instead of a snap. I’ve taken some great photos at parties, but I haven’t really enjoyed the parties as much as I would if I were actually taking part. The “photographer’s stance” almost requires you to stand apart. People have commented on how, when I’m taking photos I kind of disappear into the background—no mean feat when you’re built to my scale and shooting with long, fast lenses. I’ve no idea how I do it. I prefer film to digital for most things, but I’ve still gone with a digital SLR camera. Just because I prefer the quality of a black and white silver print doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the benefits of almost instant feedback that digital gives you. A couple of months ago I was shooting at my cousin’s wedding. With my laptop and an appropriate card reader I’d put together a slide show of everyone’s digital photos before the party had finished, which went down rather well with the bride and groom.
I’m generally laid back. All the courses and material I’ve seen on behaviour management in the classroom emphasises the importance of under-reacting; responding with the head, not the gut. Most of the time I do this naturally, I’m not pretty when I lose my temper, and I try not to do it most of the time.
I am naturally argumentative though. As far as I’m concerned, argument is a sport. I think it runs in my family. My dad’s long enjoyed a good argument with my uncle Joe, who seems to enjoy it too. A good argument is far more enjoyable if both parties are aware that it’s not ‘for blood’. The old saw, “Do not wrestle with pigs, you only get muddy and the pig enjoys it” is appropriate here. I’ve noticed that, sometimes, it can be hard to tell who’s the pig in the more vicious kind of argument.
Politically I’m a pragmatic anarchic atheist pacifist, which tends to boil down to something approximating ‘woolly liberal’ most of the time. The problem with anarchy as a system of government is that it requires good will and understanding from all concerned, which is probably possible to maintain if you already have a functioning anarchy, but a complete bloody nightmare if you want to get to a functioning anarchy from anything else. Being a pacifist/coward means I’m not about to propose any bloody revolutions, so I’ll continue to choose the alternatives that tend to increase freedom.
I’m not a big fan of recorded music. As far as I’m concerned a recording is a pale shadow of what happens between musicians and the audience during a live performance. Live performance is what it’s about, whether music, comedy, theatre or poetry reading. Nothing else comes close. As a folk singer, I prefer the informal performance of a session or singaround to formal performance with a stage and PA and all that jazz. When audience and performers are sitting together, when the audience is made up of performers waiting their turn. Well, it doesn’t take much for the magic to happen. Once there’s a stage, and PA, and all that stuff in the way it’s far harder for the thing to catch light. It takes a Springsteen, a Prince, a U2, or your favourite live band here, to really do the business in a big arena.
Having said I don’t particularly like recorded music, I still have a home studio and a small collection of condenser microphones. Just because listening to a recording isn’t as good as being there doesn’t mean that recording has no value. My recording gear is a tool; an objective listener if you like. Just because I’m not a professional performer doesn’t mean I don’t want to get better at the craft of singing, and one way to do that is to record myself then listen to the results critically, to think about how I did something and how that made it sound. It’s a good deal easier to try something for the first time in front of a microphone than it it to try it in front of an audience…
