Don’t get me wrong, I like nice scenery and am plenty keen on visiting all manner off different places…but cliffs, no. Cliffs were not really in my guidebook…As far as I was aware I was wandering about a pretty, but intermittently treacherous park…The roses are pretty, but they have thorns like you wouldn’t believe…some days its been a field of orange gerberas, pink carnations, yellow roses, peach dahlias, red tulips*…and then the next nettles, bramble and flyagarics all over the bloody place…sometimes while I wasn’t looking some bastard appeared to have mown and cutback everything, and that’s much worse than the spiky, scratchy and poisonous…But a park it was, landlocked I assumed…somewhere between the East and West Midlands.

For a couple of weeks its been over-maintained…the invisible gardener has been hard at work, mowing feverishly and clippering like a man posessed…But on Wednesday morning I sighted my favourite plant, Pulsatilla vulgaris, back again. Its a slightly sad looking flower sometimes, and though not as common as its name suggests, it certainly fulfills the vulgar element at times…but there it was, which pleased me greatly…and then I spotted it again on Thursday, over the other side of the park…I was sat amongst a jolly little yellow pansy, a spiky briar rose and a bluebell when I looked up…directly in my line of site, a little obscured by a fence and a Quinine bush, there it was…and that’s when I realised my feet weren’t on the ground anymore…that somehow, somewhere along the line, without noticing, the park had moved to the coast…and I just stepped off the edge.

*slash a fucking enormous idiot…why has that become some kind of unofficial university student sport? Seriously people does not the fact that people kill themselves in that manner given you an indication that it carries a tad more risk than nicking a supermarket trolley?
*my favourite flowers…

I have got to got to got to get my individual project thing in at least draft form. Preferably, as near as damn finished as possible. And then I can find someone to read it and check I’m not a total moron (JNBT said he can skim but actually reading counts as a submission, and skimming seems pointless to me). But I do have to be strict with myself or I’ll never get it done.
I also need to revise for my Maths exam resit on Monday.Boos and hisses all round. If someone can explain to me why my brain can comprehend tricky stuff like logs, but can’t get relatively simple rules that don’t change for algebra to stay in there for more than 30seconds please tell.
And I need to get some notes for the parasite thing. Preferably not from random reports in Welsh on BSE. So that I can write that. in theory I have till May/June, but frankly I want the bloody thing out of the way. It would help if a single solitary parasite I have read about in my notes so far seemed inspiring. For causes of some major diseases they are quite frankly slightly dull little chaps.
And need to do some itty bits and bobs too, that I’d like to have finished by 7th February. So all of this semester is done and dusted.

My sting will be felt by firstly un-named power company and its repair man. Who texted at 7.30am saying “on way”, it’s now half six in the evening and still he has not emerged.
Second candidate for a big fat sting will be the student finance/support part of my college. Who have been given the money that students such as I and several of my classmates were ‘awarded’, and yet have been sat on it for weeks. The person who was dealing with it has not answered phonecalls/emails and I found out today that this is because she has changed departments (although how difficult it would be to reply to an email with “Sorry I don’t do that now, email X instead”?!) And the people who do, don’t answer their naffing ‘phones. They got the money in early December, and we were told “some point in January”. So we have till Friday then. I suspect when Monday comes N and I will indeed by going forth and kicking some ass (perfect antidote post exam). EDIT: letter today says it’ll be in tomorrow, yay. However, point still stands about it being sat on for blah weeks.
There’s a lot of things I like about the college I attend. Much of the time the apparent chaos is sort of endearing, like an elderly aunt who keeps forgetting why she went upstairs, and repeatedly buys tins of pilchards and balls of string  “just incase”.
It has some sweet little quirks, like it makes all the staff move offices yearly in some ongoing game of not very musical chairs (I gather they don’t like it so much, but I think they’re just not embracing the potential fun) and most of the telephone exchange seems to be programmed wrong (JNBT is a whole entire centre, which seems fairly unfeasable, he’s not a small bloke but a centre?)
This, however, annoys me. It’s not that they don’t have the ruddy money it’s that they’re sitting on it, without explanation. It isn’t theirs. I’m luckily to be cynical enough to assume that it wasn’t going to come in the first place, but more trusting souls, like N have budgeted on the assumption that it will. Knowing that the funding is there, but in someone else’s bank account with no reasonable explanation is tremendously frustrating.

1.Tweeted
2.Taken photos with cameras older than me and my mother added together (as yet haven’t found anyone with a darkroom to develop the film so they’re sat in my fridge still)
3.Properly offended someone that I didn’t properly know.
4.Got to play at the beeb.
5.Fallen in love with a game (y’all thought I was going to say something else didn’t you?): Bioshock
6.Learned to hula hoop and discovered that I am pretty darned good at it.
7.Got a standing order at a comic shop.
8.Had a “Sex on the Beach” cocktail (name is stupid, but it tastes okay).
9.Been drunk with Max.

9 Bizarre things of 2009.
(not very bizarre I’ll grant you, my life may be competing with a soap opera but it isn’t quite reaching the late night one off BBC2 programme that no-one is quite sure is a comedy or drama level)

1.Met a doctor, my cardiologist, who has the same name as a doctor character from one of the Star Trek series’.
2.The soap opera…
3.Had a slightly drunk man whom I’ve been fairly sure loathes me, rub my torso for no apparent reason.
4.Rode in a car with no roof (mild terror thanks to episode of The X-Files in which Fox explains the associated risks*), with someone who used to be in an actual soap opera who was loudly singing along with show tunes. (This counts as a moment of feeling kinda cool!)
5.Found another human with monkey toes (prehensile).
6.Had a man from the torygraph and a man from da beeb tell me I was funny.
7.Spent the best part of the year communicating with my nearest neighbours through mime (and a bit of French).
8.Discovered that yogurt makes my throat feel like it’s burning.
9.Bumped into someone I’ve not seen in 6 years in front of a stand for the competition for where I knew them from, got help for my IRP from someone I’ve not seen in 20 years, and been visited on here by someone I’ve not seen in 28.

9 Things I’ve discovered I like/am reasonably good at in 2009

1.Getting bones out of fish in one piece. The bone that is. The fish didn’t look so good frankly.
2.Supermarket shopping at 4am.
3.Singing Kiki Dee’s part, in tune (I think), but not terribly loudly.
4.Bargain hunting (books mostly, got the textbook for college Biology brand new for less than half price).
5.Resisting when I need to…
6.Saving up when I need to…
7.Actual full on proper sex dreams.*
8.Two wheel cornering of shopping trolleys.
9.A very specific temperature range.

* Being a dance fan obviously Isadora Duncan and her scarf are firmly etched in my head, but TV programmes are more to blame for my weird paranoias about cars. Dallas for instance has forever left me with a jumpiness at the sight of oil tankers.
*That’s not to say I didn’t have them before but in the past few months they have become somewhat more effective…

My chocolate mince pies inspired by those that a big-shop-that-I’d-love-to-shop-at-but-can’t-afford had this year. They have slightly unusual lids, including one which is inspired by one of you lot…(clicking on the photo will take you to the Flickr version which has notes)

On the subject of Flickr can anyone get Flickr’s blogging tool to work with their blog? It has no objections to my endpoint but says my username and password aren’t valid. I initially tried with a special username just for that and it refused it, even changing it from author to editor, in frustration I even tried my admin password. B tried for me and also couldn’t do it. So anyone had any success?

If you want my gramophone action (you certainly don’t hear that often either) there’s another one on my youtube.

Big squeezy hugs and kisses internet people, have a good one.

Reason one: I live on this planet. Perhaps not mentally or emotionally for a good deal of the average day, but the corporeal bit of my is very much of this earth.

Reason two: I am currently a science student. If I didn’t have at least some kind of opinion on one of the biggest science subjects around at the moment there would be frankly little hope for me.

Reason two and a half: The reason I’m a science student is because I’m very very interested (read: I could converse about it for days) in science communication, and the way that science information gets to non scientists.

The thing about reason 2.5 is that an awful lot of things that are communicated about science, be that via television, the internet or the Daily Mail’s ongoing fetish for all things oncological, much of it requires no audience interaction. Generally the audience is expected to passively take in this fascinating/crazy/scary/wasteful [delete as appropriate to publication] set of findings, or at least a cut-down and sexed up version of them. Perhaps there’ll be some whinging about universities having too much money to fund cheese sandwich measuring in the Prove You’re an Idiot Have Your Say section, or a sudden rush on tuna sales in a bid to prevent some previously not heard of, and frankly rare, type of cancer. But that’s about it.

Climate Change though is different. This stuff you are supposed to remember. You are supposed to act on. And in trying to get people to pay attention, communication seems, to me, to have become antagonistic.
Regular readers will know, and so that we stay friends they try and forget, that I happen to like the poster child of planet damage; Top Gear. For those not familiar TG is the BBC’s motoring programme. Technically it is a tad older than me, but in practical terms it is a 7 year old that has just discovered how cool cars look when they go fast. It annoys safety people for being irresponsible with speed, it annoys consumer folk for focusing on expensive cars, and it annoys green campaigners by and large because Clarkson behaves like a tosswad.
However, as Clarkson, and all those other overgrown 7year olds that aren’t on TV, annoy Climate Change people, the CC people in turn annoy them. And so it goes in circles. With one party thinking the other to be inconsiderate, and the other thinking the first stuffy.
Frankly I think they’re both a wee bit right.
Much as those with some excess personal baggage know that a touch less food, and a touch more arse moving, would help; most drivers know that it isn’t good for the planet (I’m going by the drivers I know-this ain’t scientific, or quantitative). Similarly most of us know that buying new shiny televisions, laptops and mobile ‘phones expends way too much energy and uses a plethora of unpronounceable things that aren’t great for the planet.
However, the thing is shiny new laptops, mobile ‘phones that have a hundred functions we never use, and those fuck me that’s fast Lamborghinis are fun. We don’t just surround ourselves with this stuff for practical purposes, we have them because we like them (well clearly I don’t have a Lamborghini since I can’t drive, and er, I’m skint).
Yes it is extraordinarily greedy all this stuff, and some might think it sad that people be made happy by things, but it does make some people happy. Some things make this person happy. Maybe I’m shallow but my little red laptop genuinely brings me joy. And goodness me I know it is shameful but there is something tremendously sexy about the sound of a grunty turbo.

So I absolutely understand why the car-loving folk feel like someone is trying to take their fun away. Equally, though, I understand why some of it really does need to go. Most of it really.
It’s hard letting go of stuff that you enjoy, and it’s no less hard when the other party doesn’t always appear to acknowledge that it is hard.
For instance, ignoring the enjoyment that people get from their vehicles, giving up cars from a practical point of view is tremendously hard. If you live in London it is pretty easy, apart from tube strike days. So too if you live in any reasonably sized city-Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Nottingham are all pretty well served for public transport, or have safe cycling paths.
In more rural areas it is by and large, not great. The town in which I live has a train station but it has only a track that goes up, and down. So fabulous should you wish to go to Nottingham, Leeds and Sheffield. Utterly useless for getting anywhere to the left or right. To complete a journey to a town within the same county as I am I have to go to a totally different county to start with.
The town in which my college is situated did not have a train station of its own until about 10 years ago, for the preceding thirty odd years the station in my town was named for both (this wasn’t an evil Beeching doing), and was college town’s local station. My town is 12 miles away from college town, to journey to the nearest city why would you schlep a dozen miles to the train station, when you could just drive down the M1? I’m staggered that it took so many years to realise that 12 miles is not around the corner, unless you happen to be nine foot tall.
The two tracks don’t join up though. So there’s no train between the two.
The buses take in an overly labourious tour of the northern parts of both counties, and so even at 7.30 when the traffic isn’t yet particularly busy it takes well over an hour.
I’m a non driver so I’ve long been used to having to get up earlier, and spend an hour or more sat on my bum, but for people who do drive there isn’t a particularly good immediate incentive to give up their cars. And woe betide if you are foolish enough to live in a smaller town where the buses have been planned on the assumption that you’ll only leave the village to go shopping.

I think we need a bit more carrot than stick. It is a massive threat to life on this planet, but as anyone who has tried to reason with a teenager knows there’s no point threatening they’ll just do more of what you don’t want them to do, not less.

The carrots by and large have to come from the government. They could do with a better calculator for starters, since the free pass for over sixties was badly underestimated and plenty of bus companies are still owed their funds.

• They certainly need to fund public transport with the idea that people travel quite some distances to work and school. Gone are the days when everyone worked in the town they live in and only left for an evening out in the big city. Children routinely travel across county boundaries for school, not only for those bouts of parental competitiveness, but because of available spaces and unplanned house moves. People live where they can afford, and that isn’t always where they work.

• Second we need our naffing tracks back. I will save you from one of my Beeching rants, but it should be possible for a person to get from one town to another in the same county, by train, without having to travel into a different county.

• More buses. Standing for an hour, which is not uncommon on busy routes, is tedious and sends people back to their cars.

• More school buses. Nothing quite like a bus full of screeching teenagers to put adults off using public transport. Its not fun for either group, the schoolchildren keep getting told off, and the other passengers have to ram their headphones right into their ears.

• Fund fare reductions. If I catch a bus before 9.30 it costs me twice as much as after, and since my classes start at 9.30, and the vast majority of people start work at 9 we don’t have much choice about this.

• Encourage cross company tickets. In Nottingham they have kangaroo tickets that you can use on TrentBarton, NCT and NET (tram). Its a reasonable price. The nearest relation in Derbyshire is considerably more expensive and is aimed at tourists. There should be regional versions, that are a reasonable cost and allow people to get from one town to another without needing six different tickets.

• Acknowledge that people do get enjoyment from cars. Perhaps for some its because they want to sit in their bubble picking their nose, but for an awful lot it’s about fun. And occasionally a bit of love, lust and sex. Pretending it isn’t a component is as silly as trying to pretend your daughter isn’t dating that bloke you hate, she won’t dump him just because you pretend he doesn’t exist. The aim really should be to make public transport good enough that the only people who are still driving are those that are really in love with it. (Frankly I’m not sure you should really be allowed to be in charge of a potential killing machine if you don’t enjoy driving it).

• Acknowledge that hybrid and electric cars are a tad dull. There’s a growing range of hybrids, but depending on how you drive a lot of the time having a hybrid may not be making much difference at all to your impact. If you happen to be well off you can furnish yourself with a Tesla, which is pretty spiffy, but otherwise electric cars by and large seem as though they were designed by the Early Learning Centre.

Overall though I would like for the discussion to become less antagonistic on both sides.
If you are genuinely foolish enough to believe that cars and all these lovely trappings of modern life aren’t having an impact, or it doesn’t matter, then please go to your nearest library. If books don’t work for you there’s always Al Gore’s film (though if you can take ninety minutes of that man’s voice I salute you). Denying it is just being a bit of an idiot. Worse still is if you choose not to care. I’m all for being selfish in several areas of life, but no-one owned the place to begin with so the responsibility for looking after it is everyones.
Equally though denying the difficulties of changing the way we live is just as stupid. People need to get to work on time; mortgages need paying (I’m no great fan of the mass lust for home ownership, but nor indeed would you voluntarily catch me in a tent or caravan), commercial agriculture means food isn’t free unless you fancy your chances with berry and fungi identification (and I assure you not all gardens are blessed with soil that actually grows anything) . So many other parts of modern life rely on people using the available technology and machinery. Simplification may well work for some, but there’s many who’d be acutely miserable without their modern life.

Lots of stuff needs to change, but collaboratively and not so bloody antagonistically.

All in all as much work as I am doing, and as chaotic as my head is at the moment I am so fecking happy it is ridiculous. I have zilcho money (most of it goes on bus fare-I couldn’t top up my card on Friday and it cost me £6.40 to get to and from college), I’m not getting nearly enough sleep and I am eating crap. But I have turned into such an excitable little thing.
Saturday evening I start to get a bit wired, then Sunday evening I am possibly one of the few people who is almost aching for Monday to arrive. I sit on the bus home tired and buzzing. I was so mentally hyper when I went home on Friday I probably could have run the 10 miles home.
It feels so good to be getting to do things I love. Not only getting to think, but being encouraged to do so.
Before Friday, I can’t recall the last time I spent an hour talking with another adult human being about something I’m passionate about, where I got so into what I was talking about that I nearly launched myself across the room powered by my own gesticulation. The nearest to that level of conversational bounce was when I went to see Max in July.

I’m falling to bits, and I look a bit of a state. But goodness I love my weeks at the moment.

————————————————
* I should point out it isn’t the place I used to be. Much as I loved it the awkwardness when I left* means I don’t think I’ll go back.
* I split up with someone else there, and he and I were okay but everyone else there seemed obliged to pick sides. He’s still there, and so to is someone else I dated (who wasn’t there then). And frankly it just has the potential makings of a bad American soap.

As well as gardening my grandfather, in the way that secretly nosy old men do, got very involved with neighbourhood watch. He was unbelievably fond of postcode labelling stuff, if it stayed still for more than 30 seconds it got labelled. At one point my grandmother, his ex-wife, threw him out of her house after becoming fed up with his casual visit turning into a postcoding fest.

As part of his retirement he and Cate took up doing lots of travelling, seeing the world had always been his first love.
Whilst he was on one of a number of visits to Russia he had a couple of heart attacks. However, the doctor treating him discovered that he had served aboard one of the ships that protected Russia’s supply line during the war. So not only did he manage to get a remarkably attentive doctor, but he’s possibly one of the few people to go on holiday, have a heart attack and come home with a medal.

During the last years of his life he became involved in a society set up to memorialise the ship he was on that sank.  As one of the very few living survivors at that time he was interviewed for a book, and went to the ceremony installing the memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum.

He and I had not spoken for about three years before he died, stubbornness is genetic too it seems.

References:

Apart obviously from my grandfather’s photographs and the history of his life which he wrote down I used some internet resources for a bit of help in drawing my pictures. Largely given that I hadn’t the foggiest what a U-boot looked like!

Royal Navy for erm, naval stuff. It isn’t tremendously helpful for actual information, they seem to have foregone good resources in favour of all out desperate recruitment. However, the pictures are good for uniforms, and there’s the odd ship on there.
U-Boat.Net is a great resource for pretty much all you could possibly want to know about U-boats/U-boots. As well as the boats it also has information about the people commanding them, who all to often have been characterised a rent-a-Nazi; middle aged men in dodgy roll neck sweaters and arched eyebrows.

Also the box of a Revell model of a U-boat, with picture on it. Hence why for purists the boat I’ve drawn is wrong.

If you are remotely interested in such things, the book about Dunedin’s sinking is called ‘Blood in the Sea’ and is by Stuart Gill.

After leaving Oxfordshire. As Harry went to Germany, the family had been allocated a house on the new Clifton Estate. At the time in was built it was the biggest council estate in Europe. When they came back to the UK it was to here that they returned.
However, my grandfather didn’t join them. His next posting was at Bestwood Lodge in Arnold, which was the base for Military Electrical Engineering. He went on a 3 month course to use computers “which were as big as rooms”. Coincidentally at about the same time Olive was working in the computer room of the engineering department of players.
Whilst he was posted in Germany he had met another woman (whose name I don’t know-she is not much spoken of) and lived with her in a caravan near Bestwood.

Next he began working at the recruitment office in Nottingham. Though no where near as exciting as some of his previous posts he certainly seemed to enjoy this job a lot. (It, like much of his career doesn’t sit comfortably in my world view, however, this is his story and he enjoyed it).

It was during this time that he got together with the woman who was to become his second wife, Catherine. After his long term girlfriend sadly killed herself. My mother never made any secret of her disapproval, Cate was (and still is!) a month younger than my mother.

After 13 years of work in the recruitment office my grandfather retired. I was four (and a bit) at the time. There were special blinds in the offices that were apparently bomb proof. We had some of the chain material, that they fixed onto them, at home, and quite honestly I think it’d barely withstand a firework.

“Not being one to stay still” my grandfather’s retirement was less of a retirement and more a career change. He took up gardening, and at one stage seemed to be landscaping every garden in West Bridgford.

Whilst back on dry land he went home to Oxfordshire/Berkshire, and there met Olive (my grandmother) who was working at a supply depot in Steventon.

They got married in 1946. (I can’t draw them in front of the church they got married at since at some point in the 1970s it was replaced by some odd old people’s home-church combined, and I have no idea what the original looked like). They went to live with Olive’s family in Redoubt Street, Radford.

Their first two children, my mother and her brother, were born in 1947 and 1948. My grandmother dressed them alike quite frequently, and both were named after cowboys in a radio show.

Post world war two Nottingham, like many big cities, had a housing shortage. Since it was getting a bit crowded living with Olive’s parents (and the rest of the family living in other houses in the street, probably a bit of an in-law overload) Harry decided to move the family to Oxfordshire.
His view of this period of time is of an  idyllic time, my mother is less convinced. They lived quite close to a government testing farm (Ministry of Food I imagine) and she can recall seeing, what were to her, giant sheep and chickens (nowadays pretty average sized).

My grandad’s next posting was in Berlin. He was interviewing people escaping across the Berlin Wall from the East. At first he was in Germany alone, and then the Navy sent Olive and the children (now three of them) to join him. For a while the family lived in Mönchengladbach which was probably my mother’s favourite part of her childhood.