A Very English Weekend

Well, English in the best possible sense of the word, something like I feel when I'm feeling patriotic - combining a strong sense of tradition with an intellectual fertility from a constant incorporation of other peoples' ideas. It started off with a dance at Cecil Sharp House by GIG CB, who play a monthly French/English session just south of Tower Bridge, and the odd Euro-ceilidh, with a mix of French and English dances, at Cecil Sharp. I turned up to find almost no-one there, but I'm glad I stayed, as an audience trickled in over the evening, including some people I knew (Chris, Mike, Sarah), and some I didn't (Mylène, Heike and her friends from the Goethe Institut), and I ended up having a very good time and being able to spread the French dance gospel a little! I almost missed a bus through talking to Mylène and Heike while absent-mindedly walking back towards Camden Road station - I'd forgotten that I was due to go back to Claywell to see Mum and Dad that night.

Cards

Christmas card envelopes for hand-delivery (the ones that went in the post were much more boring).

Stornoway and Borderville at the Jericho Tavern

A gig to which I certainly would not have gone without Dave and Mauro, but an excellent one! Stornoway were on first, and were very impressive, with some tinges of country in their songs that I really appreciated, being a bit of a country fan (as my growing collection of Johnny Cash/Gram Parsons/Carter Family/relevant Smithsonian Folkways CDs attests), but also clever and affecting lyrics, and a song about marine conservation, hurrah! Borderville were what people were really waiting for, though, and I soon saw why, when they launched into this wonderfully layered incredibly dramatic set of tunes, some of them in 3/4 time - and one even very suitable for a mazurka. I think I was probably the only one in the room thinking that, but I was also surprised by the number of non-students in the room, probably about a quarter. The bands all seemed to be students, or student-age, and I suppose I assumed that anyone over 25 wouldn't turn up, but there they were, even standing on tables and benches at the back of the room to get a better view. I was right down at the front with Mauro and Dave, definitely the best place to be, and even if I did get a bit of tinnitus afterwards walking down the street, it cleared up in the half hour it took us to walk back to Iffley Road.

Iffley Road was where Liz's birthday was being celebrated, with a kitchen full of half-empty bottles and a house entirely full of interesting and friendly people to show how something should be celebrated. And a whisky cave - or, rather, several whisky cupboards since there wasn't enough space for Ed's and Roger's collection of bottles. If I get an invite to their Burns Night supper, I shall definitely try and go, and see if I can bake the Burns Night cake recipe I spotted in the Guardian's guide to baking that came with the Saturday Guardian. It, er, involves whisky. But not tatties, neeps, or haggis.

Blowzabella, Béla Fleck and Chick Corea

Well, the Sunday before last, Manon arrived, which set off my preparations - I packed some of the roast lamb and quiche that I'd made, went off to meet her at Liverpool Street, and then we headed off to Bush Hall to see Blowzabella. I'm sure it was a very good concert if you wanted to sit and listen, and they did of course play wonderfully, but as we'd gone to dance it was a bit disappointing. We arrived late (an hour in) but they wouldn't give us a discount on the door, and when we got into the hall we found that the floor was carpeted, and there were very few other people up dancing. On top of that, they were playing at concert speed, not dancing speed, and so the two successive sets of jigs and reels they ended the night with were almost undanceable, and the fast waltz they played earlier was just as bad. And then there was their hurdy gurdy player, who was fantastic when combined with the rest of the band, but when given a solo spot played about five minutes of what I can only call self-indulgent prog folk. When they played schottisches, they got plenty of people up dancing - but as they only played one set of schottisches all night, the dance floor usually had only one or two couples on it. Bush Hall is a fairly small venue, and had been set up cabaret-style, so the two hundred or so attendees took up most of the floor space, leaving a (did I mention it was carpeted?) dance floor of about eight metres by three metres. Since their website stated (the relevant page has now been deleted) that their concerts were aimed at both dancers and the seated audience, I feel they weren't exactly living up to that on Sunday night. I'm sure the seated audience had a great time, but next time I'll try and see them somewhere else. Did get some nice dances in with Manon, though only three: a polska to a slow waltz they played, a schottische, and a bourrée. I sat out and watched some of the dancers, though - one guy doing some lovely shuffly almost soft-shoe stuff in a bourrée, and the couple who managed to get round the fast waltzes and one of the sets of jigs (though they were exhausted by the end of it, and couldn't manage the encore) through speed and impeccable footwork.

Further adventures in commercial radio

The radio station that my colleague has going from her phone speaker all day has just played the first Christmas tune of the season. And there's 23 working days until I leave the office for the Christmas break. Hmm. Speaking of electromagnetic pulse guns, I wonder how a mobile phone responds to being microwaved at the lowest setting for a couple of seconds, without the battery in it? The trouble is, if I ask her to turn the damn thing off, she refuses, and a couple of days later the thing mysteriously fails to turn on, I'll be suspect no. 1, but if I just microwave the blasted thing I'll feel guilty I didn't give her a chance to turn it off in the first place. Better not. Dammit.

Geekery ahead!

I just got an extra 512 MB of memory in the post, enough to bulk up my computer to the point where I can run a copy of Windows 2000 inside an Innotek VirtualBox environment in my install of Ubuntu (7.04, holding off on 7.10 until it gets a few more weeks of bugfixing). And I'm very happy indeed! I'm installing Windows 2000 into the environment as I write, and although processor load is high, Ubuntu is still incredibly responsive at load levels that would have my native Windows 2000 installation gasping to load the Programs Manager. And the volume buttons on my Logitech internet keyboard were instantly recognized and respond immediately to my keypresses. In my Windows installation, with the original Logitech program installed, it would sometimes take a minute for the system's sound to respond, with consequent frustration when it responded to several presses all at once, and made the sound too low to hear, or too loud to bear.

Pentreffest 2007 post now has music

Thanks to the magic of the XSPF player plugin for Wordpress, and a good deal of help from the author when it refused to work on this blog, the Pentreffest 2007 post now has music. The tracks are now much better labelled, thanks to Michael's corrections to my metadata.

Prize-giving

On Friday I was asked to attend a prizegiving - I won't mention the name of the college, save that it was in East London - to present some of the successful candidates with their certificates. I really was a bit hacked off at first about this, since I've got enough on my plate at the moment, what with two committee meetings and two appeals by colleges to minute, college exam results to collate and analyse, rolling out the new timesheets for everyone in the office, a series of seminars to book/publicize/manage, and umpteen other little tasks that seem to be found for me. The thing is that everyone's a bit stretched at the moment - perhaps that's the way in any organisation that's working hard, and getting ahead, and I do like the thought, in the abstract, of having plenty to do. Goodness knows in my last job there were times when there was often not a lot to do, and I did feel a bit useless. Some of that, of course, was me not being proactive and going out and finding things to do for other people, though due to the internal accounting system, they might not have wanted my time to be billed to their project anyway. That system was positively Byzantine for anyone from QA because we might be working on eight or ten different bits of work for four or five different clients each month. Even with my wrong attitude to work, I might have got two years of an OU degree out of the way while I was there: they were willing to pay for it, and, as I've said, there was quite a bit of spare time to do it in. Shall we just roll our eyes up at further evidence of Tom often having been a bit of a waste of space, and move on?

Anyway, was annoyed at being (pretty much) required to go to the prizegiving, since it would take all afternoon, when I had more important things to do; not least to compile a submission to the Home Office with our suggested charges for educational visas and other bits of paper an international student needs to come here to study. It's an industry worth about £5 billion a year to the UK economy, and obviously we need to keep the UK's international reputation high, and entry costs as low as possible. It's already an expensive place to live in, especially London, where lots of foreign students naturally want to study, and charging them a couple of hundred pounds as an initial charge couldn't help but put people on a tight budget off. Fortunately, I managed to get the thing done about eleven thirty, then spent from twelve to twelve thirty going over changes with the person who'll actually be submitting the document, and then hared off to the college, feeling much happier now that the damn thing had been sent off. And it was sunny, which helps, and it was interesting wandering down the High Street from the station and seeing all the people, buying a poppy for my buttonhole, and then walking into a fantastically Victorian town hall with all the trimmings. The whole event was a bit ramshackle, though evidently heartfelt, and the stories of some of the students showed the value of what the college was doing - there were local businessmen learning accountancy, elderly Asian ladies learning English, young lads getting teaching qualifications, single mums doing computing courses, and a ten-year-old who was obviously on his way to Cambridge at the age of fifteen.

Amusing thing: the ten-year-old kid taking a very art-h0use approach to filming the proceedings using his mum's camcorder. He had it for about a quarter of an hour, and I don't think he stopped walking round the hall the whole time, with the camcorder pointed straight in front of him no matter which direction he was walking in. It probably made for a kind of commemorative video that gives you motion sickness; and I remember an episode of Doctor Who that was filmed in a revolutionary new style of 3D photography that only worked if the camera was constantly rotating round the subjects which probably produced a similar effect.

Uncomfortable thing: the almost unrelieved whiteness of the invited award presentees (apart from the 'civic representative' from Newham Council - it seems that there's three people entitled to wear big chains, and it all rotates round - very PC!), versus the almost unrelieved Asian/blackness of the college staff/award receivers.

Ha-hey!

Just got complimented on my French (despite making a dreadful hash of everything's gender) by a pretty young French sales assistant at the Paul's bakery across the road, who then paused to slightly self-consciously tuck her long curly dark hair back behind her ear. Which is always pleasant, as previous attempts to order my weekly loaf were met with English, and what sometimes seemed like downright hostility rather than human interest. Skim-reading Le Monde on the bus is not enough, though, and I need to talk with French people more. Eh bien, there's always St Chartier in 2008, and perhaps Gennetines if I can spare the time, which should improve my French if there's any of the people there that I met dancing this year who didn't speak English.

Which brings me on to a second thought - she complimented me on my French, saying it was very good, when I was making mistakes all over the place. I really do despair that my standard of French has to be considered very good if I'm compared with the rest of the English. That and I suspect my accent - a French accent in English, as she had, is charming, but I hardly think that's the case for an English accent in French. My 'r's in particular - I know you produce them mainly from the back of the throat, but I'm sure I'm doing them wrong.

I should take a moment to recommend the hot chocolate from Paul's - it really is fantastic. It feels silky and a little grainy in the mouth, and the taste of almost pure dark chocolate is almost overwhelming. I think they put in only just enough milk to make it flow, and if I'm a good boy and get plenty of BAC and OU work done this week, I shall treat myself to a large cup on Friday, knowing that the ceilidh in Kidlington on Saturday night should work it off.

Noise pollution

As if the constant tinny sound of Heart FM from a colleague's mobile phone ALL DAY was not enough, now a car alarm has been going for the last ten minutes. Happiness would feel like a warm HERF gun, and though these seem to be more of a threat to the user than the target at the moment, I live in hope.

The Grand Bal de Bath 2007

Which happened last weekend - it's been a real flurry of dancing, and I'm settling down in London this weekend, with a bit more dancing, but a whole Sunday dedicated to sorting out stuff back at the flat and getting on with Quantitative Methods for Business. Speaking of which, I'll be using stats shortly, collecting and analysing the exam returns from a group of colleges accredited by us.

Anyway: Grand Bal. I ended up leaving very early on Saturday morning, catching the 6:30 bus to Oxford, dropping my suit off with Leyla (and leaving my boots in her room, which raised eyebrows when her parents came round!), and then getting a lift with Andy Letcher to the Bal itself. The lift was wonderful - I think we chatted all the way there about all sorts of random things like health and safety, 3/2 hornpipes and how to dance them, and whether it would be possible to do a Gotan Project with French traditional music. The first workshop was a bit underwhelming - being shown how to shuffle round the floor in Auvergne bourree style by Sarah Capel for an hour and a half - but after lunch was a huge improvement, with lively group Auvergne bourrees, odd mazurkas, and a lovely Breton workshop with Andre Liorzou. The Breton workshop he ran was a real revelation, showing how to drive the dance along without theatrics - though it helped that I was alongside Maya, lead singer for Dragonsfly, a good deal of the time. She's got a lovely way of putting a swing into the dance, completely within the rhythm but complementing it, and having her singing the harmonies to some of Serge's songs was such a lovely experience I just shut up and listened.

Glasses

Have just received my first set of glasses, and, of course, me being me, I had to get the frames off Ebay and the lenses off these people, they being the only ones who would provide what I wanted. Wearing them was weird; as the optician said, "Trees will have leaves again!". He didn't predict the weird feeling of unreality, something like stereoscopic HDR, or the brief but fairly intense headache that only fully faded away after about an hour of wearing them. I'm still finding it a little harder to judge distances - perhaps my brain was partly relying on how fuzzy things were to identify how far away they were. And talking to people is rather odd, since my eyes want to wander over interesting creases in their faces, to absorb the extra detail now available. They are going to come in fantastically useful when driving/at events, though. It really did surprise me how large the difference was, and I still haven't got tired of lifting them up to see how blurry even moderately close things look without them.

Pentreffest 2007

[xspf]_start('Pentreffest 2007')[/xspf]

Was particularly lovely. I wasn't sure what to make of it, as previously the festival had been held in the Norwegian Church Arts Centre in Cardiff Bay, a particularly appropriate location with a good floor for dancing on and very interesting surroundings (as seen in several Doctor Who location shots). This time it was in Rudry Village Hall, just outside Caerphilly, and well away from anything like the dozens of restaurants minutes away from the Norwegian Church. It started off well, though, with a very early morning start from Paddington and a half-empty train pulling through London with the morning sun giving everything a coat of reddish-gold paint. I just sat there watching the city fall away from me as I listened to some of the most cheerful music on the planet - Cab Calloway in full-on swing mode. Got to Cardiff remarkably quickly, then to Caerphilly on a slightly delayed train and then hung around in a cold car park for twenty minutes waiting for Michael and John to pick me up. By the sound of it, it was a mercy they turned up at all, as they'd had a nightmarish journey on Friday, having to detour round rough mountain roads and at one point having to jumpstart the car by both pushing on it, and then jumping in as it began to gather speed.

On to Pentreffest! Where a Breton dance class showing us various ways of dancing the kost'ar choad was in full swing - this is a great dance, full of little skips and hops, and a funky little pause which throws the beginner but the expert relishes.

A lovely time had by all

Just a quick post before I head off to Cardiff for Pentreffest in the morning - Michael has just texted me to say that the dancing was wonderful, so I'm looking forward to this even more now - because I feel, at the moment, pretty happy. Some of you may know about my personal problems over the last year or so, and the heartbreaks I've both felt and inflicted, but tonight, after the ceilidh I've been to, my heart was light. It's a little heavier now, but it's still buoyant, my feet are pleasantly tired, my legs feel nice and warm, I'm ahead of schedule on my OU work, the seminars I've been organising at the BAC have been successful so far, and, in truth, I feel like I'm on an upward trajectory. Long may that projection continue!

Kawaii! ^_^

I really think this goes beyond Western forms of cuteness, into something that the Japanese specialise in. Next time someone posts something utterly revolting on the Internets and I get to see it, I think I'll run away and wash my visual cortex out with this. And while you're there, have a look at some of the other Flash games, they're ingenious, childlike, and fun.

Nutting (and quincing)

It was a very autumnal weekend - though unfortunately I couldn't remember any appropriate folk songs while out nutting. We've had two walnut trees on the farm for as long as I can remember, never growing much taller, just wider. Which is actually a good thing when it comes to harvesting the nuts as they're easy to climb up into, find some promising-looking branches, and then jump up and down on them, listening to the thudding of the nuts as they fall down. I managed to get about four kilos of nuts in twenty minutes - the squirrels are obviously really lazy at Claywell.



This is them after being hulled and washed - see the wonderful pages at The California Backyard Orchard. Now, they dry - and wait for their fate at Christmas, or maybe to be added to brownies or fruitcake later in the year.

Also picked: quinces. Lots of quinces. First for Khoresht-e-Beh, an Iranian stew made with lamb and quinces (I made enough for twelve, and four ate it all), and then for freezing quinces - and stewing them so slowly had the benefit of filling the house with the smell for at least two hours. Going out to pick them was also a lovely experience, reaching into the tree to twist them gently off their branches, the bucket slowly filling up to the brim.



A very pleasant experience - and I hope to get some more to store away when I go back to Claywell next, assuming the squirrels have left the walnuts alone. I don't think anything eats quinces apart from humans!

Balls

Well, it looks like the Oxford Grand Viennese Valentines Ball will be happening again - perhaps with Jane, and possibly with her hooped skirt too - and, further ahead than that, the Jane Austen Festival's Regency Ball, with everyone in period costume, though my presence is less likely due to the cost and not living in Bristol any more. Did I mention I like dressing for the occasion? Especially when it involves white tie (though I've never tried Regency costume)? Proof can be seen in this video, which features me (in tails) and Jane (in purple silk) right at the beginning.

TXR248 now over

Well, a few days ago I sent off the second (and last) piece of work demanded of me as part of TXR248. This marks the first time since about 2001 that I've actually completed a course that I signed up to do, and though it all got done at the last minute, it all did get done, and I think it was of reasonable quality, which is several long steps up from what's happened previously. Now only BM240, T306, L204 and AT308 to go....

Update: final grade of 63%, a fairly solid 2:1.

Red Dog Green Dog and Primaeval at Cannings Court Farm

It was a long drive down to Cannings Court Farm in Dorset, and it had been dark for an hour by the time I got there - having found first Salisbury, then a very slow A-road, and then a T-junction marked as a bend in the road on my 2007 map. But it was wonderful once I got there! I'd seen Red Dog Green Dog at St Chartier in 2005 and again in 2007, both times providing wonderful dancing, and Primaeval, the second band, came highly recommended by Michael and Andy, who also mentioned how fantastic the venue was. And it really is!

Towersey Village Festival 2007

Towersey was great fun, especially Monday night, when I got dressed up in my pink shirt, glowsticks and home-made shirts for Tickled Pink, and got some of the best ceilidh dancing of the weekend in. Great, sweaty fun, a fantastic band, and a whole room of people determined to get as much fun out of every dance as possible. Other highlights were Hotel Palindrone on Sunday night, with four fantastic musicians, me managing to lead a line doing something resembling the kost ar'choad, and the lead guy pulling out first a set of two very long pipes that he played simultaneously and made these incredible strange Scandinavian harmonies on, and then going all Hendrix with his bagpipes later on. Him going down on his knees, pulling the mike with him and playing the bagpipes one-handed really was something to be seen.

Ah yes, home-made t-shirts. Very much a collaborative effort between Fiona and me, the product of several lunchtimes of work, I present to you the transfers what I made for Tickled Pink.



I particularly like "i likes ur volume can has it loudr" - and go here if your reaction is 'cats? cutesy text? what?'.

The weather was excellent, I saw some old friends, got to camp out with Gordon Potts and Diane Moody (who brought a fridge, a carpet and a gazebo in their Transit van, all three highly useful), Fee Lock (who made an astoundingly good curry on Sunday night, and supplied Marks & Spencers voiceover material), Jane (who needed to bring nothing else to be welcome), Steve (who brought coffee beans and a grinder), Martin Kiff (who brought prodigious dancing skills), and Fiona and Drak (who brought glowsticks. Lots of glowsticks).

Monday night was also distinguished by the costumes for the Demon Barbers concert - they played as the Demon Barbies, and the theme was, indeed, Demons and Barbies. Which was fair enough, and there were some fun ones - lots of blokes in drag, etc, etc, but I did think the S&M theme went some way too far. I'm glad I went to Tickled Pink!

Old email addresses

Having just been told that my GMX email address, which I used for years, is now inactive, here's a list of email addresses I used until I found the magic of Gmail. Neither of which I now check, but which, perhaps, people who I knew some time ago may google out of idle curiosity!

motmot@hotmail.com

tomrichards@gmx.net

If you have found me in this way, leave a comment or email me!

The full Turkish

I feel like the hand towels they give you in aircraft - synthetic, smooth and lemon-smelling. Why is this? Read on....

More Promming: Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra for Mahler's Third

Well, it was a wonderful experience. Dad sucked on his teeth and said it was a bit of a trial, but live and with this orchestra and conductor it was just fascinating. I'm very glad I read the program notes before the performance, as the idea of it being a progression through the natural world made a lot of the music make sense. Claudio Abbado is an absolute phenomenon. He's this small, rather spindly old man who, when turned away from the audience, looked more like he was dressed in a dark grey mac than immaculate white tie, but because of his wide white cuffs every movement of his hands could be seen. Close to his body in the quiet parts, wide and swooping the loud parts, the baton often looking more like some tai chi exercise, tight lethal curves that looked predictable but moved before you realised he hadn't done what you were expecting. Much like the music, which never did what you expected, but always surprised pleasantly. And there I'll have to leave it, since it's late and I need to sleep, but I really have had some wonderfully contrasting orchestras, between the SBNYO and tonight. It's also almost pleasant to queue for the Proms, if you arrive in good time. I sat with my paper and MP3 player, and waited for the doors to open, and chatted with my neighbours, and felt a real fellow-feeling with the other Prommers on the arena floor. Ears still sore from the three encores I stayed for - I think they probably did five in the end.

Prom 2: Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela

Who were absolutely amazing (the BBC page on them). They got four encores and a standing ovation, and deserved them all. I got there too late for an arena seat, and ended up in the gallery, which was a happy chance: seeing a big orchestra from above you get a real sense of the physicality and movement of the players. The orchestra formed up in good time, and what I could see was an almost insectile series of the same movements (turning a page here, raising a bow there) repeated at random across the entire orchestra, my eye trying to follow or predict the twitches of movement. Then the conductor came on, and the orchestra formed itself into lines around him, structure coming out, the blackish mass of the violins and violas suddenly going amber as the instruments all lifted at once, and paused, and waited. It was almost a pure movement, one done because it's a side-effect of your purpose, and it got echoed after a moment, when they all came in together, every string player's hand and bow moving to the left and right together, hypnotically. Being down in the arena makes you aware of the crowd around you, but being up in the gallery makes you aware of the mood of the entire hall, and I think the sound quality is better, since you have a clear line of sight to every instrument. The sound quality was certainly much better than at Nitin Sawhney's Prom, which did get a bit muddy at times.

Copernic problem: Indexing kernel cannot be initialized

I use Copernic Desktop Search quite a lot at work - it's very useful since I can search through all the documents on all the network shares I can access, and it's much quicker than Outlook for searching through my emails. This morning, it stopped working, and just displayed "No matches found" no matter what I did. Turning on logging, I was given the cryptic message "Indexing kernel cannot be initialized. Please contact our technical support team. Error = 80004005".

Rabbit sandwiches

Well, I was amused, anyway. A nice, dense, chewy sourdough loaf from Paul, Wensleydale cheese, and English apples makes a very tasty sandwich.

Spamalot

Just went to see Spamalot and it was absolutely wonderful, so many little jokes playing off The Holy Grail without ever boring you by following the plot or the dialogue too closely or for too long. Lots of good visual gags, the Lady Of The Lake was a commanding (6' 2") presence who looked and sounded all gorgeous all the time, Arthur not quite as good but a very capable and earnest support, with his horse Patsy. Lancelot was fun, and did I mention the lovely little jokes? Several had to do with him. Excellent set, too, God's Feet coming down at one stage, then taking off later, Tim the Enchanter coming in with a sparking broomstick, the audience being involved, musicians getting shot or threatened, glitter, Camelot as Las Vegas (with showgirls), a very self-aware production that played just about everything for laughs. I went with my flatmate Paul and a whole bunch of his friends, and we all had a very good time. I was sat next to Paul's sister Evie, and I think she laughed almost the whole way through.

London Underground Anagram Map

I can't claim credit for the idea, and I have no idea who did the original work of finding out that Gospel Oak can go into A Log Spoke. But I can claim credit for posting it as a PDF so it can be printed at any size, and working out some new anagrams for the bar on the left-hand side. Thankyou, Anagram Genius!

Here's my version. If anyone has suggestions for improving it, please leave a comment.

Nitin Sawhney’s Prom last night

Very good! It was good to talk to Mary and find out what they'd been up to in France, and we were lucky to get in. There was an absolutely enormous queue, something like 1500 people long, which seemed to have been forming since about six o'clock for a nine o'clock performance. A very wide range of guests, and Natacha Atlas showing off her flamenco singing skills. I was a little disappointed that Sidi Labh Cherkaoui and Akram Khan didn't do any dance, but their physical theater about a man getting through an Indian(?) train station was pretty mesmerizing. The only really Western orchestral music going on was when he and the orchestra played music that he'd scored for the new game 'Heavenly Sword' - the rest was often more Indian than Western. Anoushka Shankar was excellent on the sitar, although I couldn't see her when she sat down. Her sitar itself looked interesting, definitely the result of a Western design aesthetic rather than an Indian one. It looked like something off the cover of one of John Meaney's books - blue and white and vaguely organic. Standout for me, though, was when Imogen Heap came on. She wasn't more technically skilled than the others, but she inhabited the music and pushed these gorgeous rolling multi-layered beat sequences forward. We weren't sure if she was looping her own voice or not, but whatever it was, I'd have liked more than one track! Huge applause at the end, and entirely merited.

Sidmouth Folk Festival

The backstory: last Friday, around 4, Fiona said "You know, they're still desperate for stewards at Sidmouth". And I thought, hmm, and looked outside at the weather, wondered where I would rather be, and then made the phone call to Stephen. At five I'd sorted a lift, at seven we were round at Fiona's house (playing on the Wii - 178 on my first game of Wii bowling, but I don't want to discuss my performance at Wii boxing), and by nine o'clock we were on our way to Sidmouth courtesy of the fantastic Julia, playing folky tunes all the way down thanks to my little MP3 player => radio gadget.

Back from TXR248 residential school

Not as fun as Saint Chartier, but TXR248 was very interesting. A rather odd gender balance (about 90% male, when the chemistry and maths residential schools were about 60% male), but a very good mix of people from the engineers who'd been forced to do a 10-point systems course (who, without exception in our group, started as skeptics and ended as evangelists) to thebusiness people, QA staff and business students, which made for some interesting talks in the bar. I've come back wanting to draw systems diagrams of everything in sight, and will probably start by looking at the accreditation activity of the BAC - I think that will be a better way of showing how Clare and Gina work than trying for several pages of text as I did with the finance department. Now to complete the second assignment, and wait for September, when I'll find out what mark I've got for the first real piece of academic work I've submitted in the last five years.

Time to do right by at least some Iraqis

I think Crooked Timber has it absolutely right, and I'll be writing to David Cameron to say so. The discussion there gives nuance, but I think that offering refugee status to people whose employment by the British Government has made living in their own country impossible is morally correct.

My Daemon

I have the Daemon Onthia, apparently, because I am spontaneous, assertive, modest, humble and fickle. I'm not sure how I can not explode from internal contradictions, but here I am, so I suppose I must have avoided it somehow - probably by not engaging in much self-reflection. To find your own daemon, go to goldencompassmovie.com.

Morceaux de Saint Chartier

Well, there were many lovely morceaux - from the food and the music, the dancing and the conversation. First of all, get this MP3 so you can listen to Sylvain, Danielle and their friends and family playing as they usually did every morning.

First post!

Somehow, that doesn't feel like very much of an achievement.