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.