shadows of echoes of memories of songs

This Sunday I'm running in the Town & Gown 10k again, in aid of Muscular Dystrophy. About 5 of my colleagues are running too, and I don't think any of them are trying to raise sponsorship at all -- for them it's purely about the running. I found this surprising, but perhaps I'm just naive and lots of people take that attitude -- if so, how do these events actually make any money for the charities? (Do some people raise so much sponsorship that it makes up for it?) I can sympathise with a certain degree of embarrassment in asking people to sponsor you -- I don't find it easy, and certainly when it's a regular thing there's a sense that people are probably rolling their eyes and thinking oh no, here we go again. But if I really couldn't bear it, I wouldn't enter charity events! Or I'd just sponsor myself to the tune of £50 or so and accept that as the price of taking part. :-} I just worry that the whole thing is a really inefficient way of raising money for anything, and it's just a sop to middle-class guilt, and I'd be better writing a cheque to the charity and not wasting other people's time by asking them for money. The more I think about the whole "get sponsored to do things" model, the more absurd it seems. Mind you, the more I think about anything the more I just unravel it. Perhaps I should do a sponsored not-thinking-about-anything-for-a-day in aid of an Existentialist society or something.

But I am weary, weary, weary of being constantly made fun of by colleagues for trying to do the right thing, for trying to think about what the right thing is in situations, for trying not to be selfish; I am tired of getting snide comments like "oh you're so virtuous" and "I'm just not such a good person as you" in response to anything I say about anything I do. I don't want to preach and I try not to come across as preaching (though I do question and debate rather than just pretending to agree with things that I don't agree with), I don't think I'm particularly "good", I certainly don't think I'm "better" than other people as a person, in fact most of the time I think I'm a big heap of fail and I struggle to stay motivated to do anything. I don't think people are innately "good" or "evil", I think it's all about actions and patterns of action and choices, and you can't necessarily infer anything from the information you have about one person's choice in one situation. Obviously I think some choices are 'better' (which is almost always a relative judgement rather than an absolute) than others, otherwise how would I ever decide to do anything? But I don't even think I make relatively-good decisions more than average (how the heck would anybody measure that anyway?), I think I try hard but (as in most things) I feel as though I work harder than some to compensate for finding things harder.

But there's a whole nother blog post in there (a book, really) about trying to get things right, about guilt and blame, about fail and win, about the unfashionability of morals and the mess we've replaced them with, which I'm probably never going to have the time or energy to write.

Anyway ... in the unlikely event that you still want to sponsor me after all that angst, my online sponsorship form is here (they're officially endorsing online sponsorship this time, which is definitely progress!), & I will be very grateful indeed (because, at the risk of sounding cheesy, it does make the running seem more worthwhile, even though these days everybody's given the money before the run, so the original model sort of doesn't work any more). And if you don't, that's fine, & I promise I'm not judging you for it in any way! (Saying that makes me feel like people will think I'm saying it because I am judging and want to deny it, but honestly, no, just no. Let me at least be the owner of my own thoughts.)

I don't have time/energy to write about politics coherently, so here's a meme instead:


Help j4 and get your own badge!
(The Livejournal Electioniser was made by robhu)



About what I expected, though I am wondering who the Sinn Fein voter is...

Apologies to all the people whose comments on earlier posts I haven't answered yet, & whose posts I haven't read, & whose emails I haven't answered yet. I am very behind with everything. I wonder how long it will be before I am forced to admit that I'm never ever going to catch up. :-/

I never did post New Year's Resolutions at New Year, because the winter seemed to go on for ever and involve nothing but snow and fail and stress, so I've decided to move them to April 1st. It seems like a better time to start new things anyway, with the green shoots of spring pushing up and the new life beginning all around.

For those who care, here's ( the results from last year )

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And, if anybody's still reading, ( the resolutions for this year )

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There are lots of other things I want to make resolutions about but they're awkward things, hard to get a grip on in my head, mostly to do with keeping-in-touch-with-people and where-I'm-going-with-work-and-life-and-stuff. I think they'll need separate posts of their own, assuming I can actually get back to posting sensibly again.

Over all I think I'm having more trouble than usual inspiring myself to do things this year, but I can't keep blaming the long cold winter forever. Time to get up and start doing things, putting out shoots as well as putting down roots. There'll be time enough for sleeping when we're dead.

Things that have made me angry so far today:

* A white van nearly knocking me off my bike at the top of St Giles (YB08 KTE, a DPD van, so maybe it had an express parcel which was actually A TICKING BOMB, yeah right)
* A Post Office van (YN08 UNL) driving up the pavement about 5 inches away from me (I jumped out of the way) as I was standing there writing down the number of the van above
* Endless half-whispered conversations between my office-mate and the department's handyman (he is a bit simple & obviously has a huge crush on her, I suppose it's kind of sweet, but FFS get a room already)
* People who stand right in front of the shelves I'm trying to get to in shops while they have a long phone conversation, and then look cross when I say 'excuse me' (if you don't want your conversation interrupted, get out of the way)
* Sainsbury's till assistants asking me three times if I want a bag, having failed to take any notice of the answer because they're texting/gossiping/staring vacantly into the middle distance. NO I STILL DON'T WANT A BAG unless I'm allowed to put it over your head.
* People who shove past a crowd of people waiting at a pedestrian crossing so that they can cross on red and force the cars to brake suddenly (why do they never quite manage to get run over?)
* The woman in the Post Office who always asks me "it not urgent? you don't need it there soon?" when I send things first class, presumably trying to get me to pay extra for recorded delivery. Yes, I would quite like it to get there soon, THAT'S WHY I'M SENDING IT FIRST CLASS.
* All the people who emailed the IT staff discussion list (600-odd people) to say that they have an opinion on the iPad. (If one more person points out that it's a bit like an iPod Touch and a bit like a laptop but costs quite a bit of money but less than a real laptop, I'm not going to be held responsible for my actions.)
* All the people who emailed the IT staff discussion list to say that they don't have an opinion on the iPad. Wow, yeah, you're so individual, all of you. BORED NOW.
* Miso soup. It's cheap, it always looks/sounds like a really good idea, it tastes like rancid dishwater.
* Other people. All over the place. Like a fvcking disease.
* Myself.

On unsubscribing from some newsletter or other:

'This is the last email you will receive from us. We have added you to our "blacklist", which means that our newsletter system will refuse to send you any other email, without manual intervention by our administrator.'

Er, blacklist? Can't they just take me off the mailing list? Am I missing something, or are they talking rubbish?

I am unsubscribing from a lot of newsletters and things at the moment, having realised that all I do is either a) delete them unread with a faint sense of guilt; b) keep them for ages meaning to read them, before deleting them with a slightly less faint sense of guilt; c) read them and keep them for ages meaning to act on them, before deleting them with a fairly tangible sense of guilt; or d) read them, get angry, and keep them for ages meaning to reply/argue/complain, before eventually deleting them with a sense of guilt mixed with frustration and anger. None of which is doing anybody any good.

Happy new year!

So, that decade meme. A few points before I start:

1. It's surprisingly hard to reconstruct the LiveJournal-less years, and surprisingly hard to reconstruct some of the actual events even from the years with a LiveJournal (I do seem to write an awful lot of rubbish, don't I?).

2. I've not gone into details about all the relationships because I don't know to what extent other people want to forget things, particularly since most of them are now in other relationships too; the only ones I've mentioned are the ones which I'm fairly sure are public knowledge. Shout if you want me to delete anything.

3. It's surprisingly hard to find any kind of narrative thread. I did some stuff, and then did some other stuff. (I guess that's life; maybe if I spent more time on it I could turn it into a real story, but then it'd be a grillion words long and nobody would read it.) It came as quite a shock to the system, though, after 19 years in full-time education, just how little structure there is to life when you're not subject to the tides and terms of a school or university. I think that's one of the reasons I wanted to go back, if I'm honest with myself; I still like being able to divide the year up into terms and holidays, though I'm starting to find my own kind of rhythm to things in addition to that.

4. This is long and boring and I don't really expect anybody other than myself to be interested in it! There's no easter-eggy tickybox-poll at the end to see if you did read all the way through, I promise.

So, here goes...

( 2000: studying, romancing, examining, defecting, working )

( 2001: Perl-munging, driving, househunting, singing, drinking )

( 2002: moving, festivalgoing, blogging, driving, engaging )

( 2003: driving, disengaging, quitting, fiddling, volunteering )

( 2004: temping, crying, webmastering, escaping, loving )

( 2005: moving, raining, working, eating, singing )

( 2006: meeting, twittering, moving, returning, rethinking )

( 2007: jobhopping, geeking, engaging, running, spodding )

( 2008: running, queueing, marching, planning, waiting )

( 2009: wedding, running, homeowning, protesting, sparkling )

And now here we are in 2010, continuing to potter along through life. I've done a lot in the last 10 years; I've done next to nothing in the last 10 years. It all depends where you're standing. Either way, though, it's a lot of coffee-spoons. End of a decade: it's nothing special.

Oh, and yes, I did totally miss a day of NaBloPoMo on Thursday. I was at work all day, then volunteering at Oxfam till 8:15pm, came home, made dinner, went out to a work social thing at the pub round the corner, got home at about 11:45, spent about 10 minutes staring exhaustedly at the screen before realising that I literally didn't have any words or energy left and certainly couldn't post anything worth posting before midnight, and if I'd effectively already missed the arbitrary deadline then I might as well not miss out on sleep as well. I am definitely running out of steam. And now here I am missing out on even more sleep through trying to justify briefly prioritising sleep over arbitrary deadlines. For heaven's sake. Time for bed.

Hey, I totally wasn't going to do the diary thing this month because I don't think that counts as Proper Blogging, but I had to get up ridiculously early this morning to get the 7:53 train to London for an excellent Perl course (with added badgers), got back to Oxford in time for another great Oxford Geek Night at the Jericho Tavern, drank some very tasty raspberry beer, and now am really far too tired to blog coherently about anything. Also, I wrote a Wordpress blog post (for one of the other blogs) on the iPhone on the train home, saved it as a local draft, decided I'd be better off uploading it and tried to save it as a full draft, at which point the Wordpress app threw up its hands, showed the spinning wheel of death for a bit, then crashed. Guess where my post ended up? No, I don't know either, but it's not on wordpress.com and it's not on the iPhone. :-( Also, one of our fence-panels got torn off one of our fence-posts, presumably in last night's tempestuous winds (which kept me awake when I was trying to get to sleep in preparation for getting up early); can be fixed, but it'll take more time, more faff, more money.

So, I have a massive list of things I haven't done, minor guilt about things I have done, and general worries about the two sets of things; but I'm feeling enthusiastic about Perl, happy to be in our house even though the fence is falling down, and incredibly positive about the prospect of going to sleep within the next 20 minutes. Good night. :-)

Okay, yesterday's poll was full of fail, because it does depend a lot on context. I'm normally the one who can't get more than two questions into a questionnaire without going "ARGH BUT IT DEPENDS" and throwing the whole box of "neither agree nor disagree"s across the room in disgust, so I apologise for giving everybody else the argh this time. I think I was working on the assumption that the hypothetical communications in question were a) personal, or at least something where you personally have an interest (in either sense) in getting a reply, and b) something that obviously invited a reply but didn't specify the time-limit; e.g. if you say "please let me know by the end of the day" then obviously you're kind of expecting a reply by the end of the day, and if you send something that doesn't normally need/expect/invite a reply, then, um, you're not expecting a reply. But I did completely fail to show working.

Not sure what to do now: 48 people have managed to respond despite the fail, so I don't want to make people fill it all in again; but the results are probably a lot more meaningless than I hoped. That'll teach me to try to design surveys when I'm tired and rushing to meet an arbitrary deadline. :-}

I only realised late last night that today would be Stir-up Sunday, so I hastily scouted around for a plausible pudding recipe; in the end I rejected the ones suggested on snake_soup and plumped for the one in my excellent vintage Homepride Book of Home Baking.

The Homepride Book of Home Baking is something I've seen around in the kitchen at home for so long that I was a bit confused to find that it's not something you find in every kitchen, like a sink or an oven. Of course, our current kitchen doesn't have an oven yet, but it does have the Homepride book, thanks to my sister's generosity and eBay skills (don't worry, she got herself a copy too). If you're looking for your own copy, it looks like this (published 1970, SBN 900869054 — don't be misled by later editions; they're utterly different). It goes through the basics of baking, the different methods ('rubbed-in method', 'all-in-one method') and representative recipes, and there's a troubleshooting bit at the end of each section. Each recipe is short and uncomplicated, four one-column recipes to a page, measurements given in metric and imperial ("It's the first metric book of flour cookery in Britain ... Before very long, all other cookery books will become obsolete," raves the introduction). Okay, the recipes are very 1970s, but they're also very tasty. If there has been little innovation in the field of steamed puddings and stodgy cakes in the last 40 years it's because they were just fine to start with.

So, time for pudding. Fortunately I had a pudding-basin (the plastic sort, saved from a previous shop-bought pudding, which had been used in the interim as a general tupperware and even had 'stew soup' faintly scratched into it), and even more fortunately, this morning the local Co-op had most of the requisite ingredients. The newsagent next door filled in the gap of self-raising flour, and I cycled to Tesco to try to find almonds. They didn't have any chopped or blanched almonds — a good thing, as it turned out, because it meant that I bought their much nicer organic almonds and blanched them myself. I don't think I'd ever done this before — I was resigned to using them with skins and all — but the Homepride Book's casual instruction to "Blanch almonds (see page 16)" reassured me that it'd be easy. Turns out all you do is put boiling water on them and leave them for a few minutes, after which time the almonds' skins have loosened and you can just squeeze them off. Who knew? Okay, okay, you probably all knew. Humour me.

There was a minor crisis when I discovered that the packet of suet which I'd briefly hefted and judged to be at least a third full turned out to have less than the necessary ¼lb, and the Co-op (close enough to home to encourage this sort of disorganised shopping) turned out not to stock any, but in the end I substituted finely-diced butter instead and crossed my fingers that Saint Delia would forgive me. After some wishful stirring, I ladled it into the bowl, put the boil in the big pan of water, and proceeded to steam the thing for six hours, which does not make for interesting blogging material so I'll just use it as an excuse for a bit more rambling.

There's a poem which I always think of when I think of Christmas puddings; I reproduce it here in its twee entirety:

Our Christmas pudding was made in November,
All they put in it, I quite well remember:
Currants and raisins, and sugar and spice,
Orange peel, lemon peel - everything nice
Mixed up together, and put in a pan.
"When you've stirred it," said Mother, "as much as you can,
We'll cover it over, that nothing may spoil it,
And then, in the copper, tomorrow we'll boil it."
That night, when we children were all fast asleep,
A real fairy godmother came crip-a-creep!
She wore a red cloak, and a tall steeple hat
(Though nobody saw her but Tinker, the cat!)
And out of her pocket a thimble she drew,
A button of silver, a silver horse-shoe,
And, whisp'ring a charm, in the pudding pan popped them,
Then flew up the chimney directly she dropped them;
And even old Tinker pretended he slept
(With Tinker a secret is sure to be kept!),
So nobody knew, until Christmas came round,
And there, in the pudding, these treasures we found.

—Charlotte Druitt Cole

I only know it because we had to learn it in the Elocution classes that I (briefly) attended at one primary school. I don't recall any training in diction (though the teacher's name was Mrs Dixon — my dad thought this was hilarious and then had to explain the joke, which is how I learned the word 'diction'), but I do recall having to learn a poem every week, first writing it out in our best handwriting and illustrating it, and then reciting it before the rest of the class.

The thing is, though, I don't actually have any memory of making Christmas puddings at home; I'm not sure we ever did, and we certainly never made them in November. We made Christmas cake (always made to this recipe), and stirring it was certainly an occasion; but as far as I can remember it was usually only a few days before Christmas. My mum would ice the cake, ruffling the royal icing into snow-like peaks with a knife, and then my sister and I would add every plastic cake-decoration we owned, until it looked like an explosion at Santa's grotto. My mum only once made her Christmas cake in advance; when we unwrapped it from its foil to ice it, we found that it had gone mouldy. She blamed the organic (and hence, supposedly, preservative-free) dried fruit. Thereafter we went back to making Christmas cake just before Christmas, or even just after — okay, then we called it 'New Year cake' instead, but it was the same cake. Nobody ever felt like eating cake after Christmas dinner anyway.

So, the moral I derive from this story is that you can't store your cake and eat it, and you can't eat your cake and pudding. Only kidding — there isn't really a moral! There are just a handful of key techniques, and a selection of good recipes, and some tasty ingredients, and occasional long periods of waiting, and things you do again year after year because they work, and all these things are just rattling around in a box of terrible analogies like the little plastic cake decorations in the biscuit-tin on the top shelf that I had to stand on a chair (or, if nobody was looking, on the kitchen unit) to get to.