Month: April 2019

Taking A Punt On City Life

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Carlisle, Family

My daughter goes up to Cambridge this weekend.

I mean, she’s coming back again on Monday – it’s not mortarboard and cloisters so much as overnight bag and youth hostels. She’s got a job interview there in fact. She hasn’t been head-hunted for a position or anything like that; she’s simply seen a job advert, applied, been invited to attend an interview, and hasn’t let the fact that we’re the best part of three hundred miles away put her off.

By coincidence I went for a job in Cambridge many years ago, not long before my daughter was born, at a hugely profitable, up-and-coming, soon-to-be-major player in the telecoms industry. That’s what they said anyway, and the huge building, lavish offices, flashy reception and commissioner on the door certainly all looked the part. Frankly, the only thing that made me slightly dubious was the fact that I had never even heard of them, which is why I declined what otherwise seemed to be a very good offer.

According to Wikipedia’s entry on Ionica (no, I don’t expect you’ve ever heard of them either) they went into Administration eighteen months later. How different things would have been if I had taken that job, it’s hard to say, but clearly I’d have been unemployed after less than two years, and therefore wouldn’t even qualify for redundancy pay, so I suspect it probably wouldn’t have been much fun.

It would certainly have made a difference to my daughter, though, because it would have meant she grew up in the city rather than out in the countryside. She has a yearning for the city life, and at least in part that’s simply because it’s something different to what she knows. Applying for this job, and others equally far from home, is part of that – she feels the need for a change, even if she doesn’t entirely know what form she wants that change to take.

I’ve lived in a city, in as far as we were in Carlisle for almost all of my Primary School years, but we lived out in the suburbs, and looking back it was actually rather a posh bit of them too (certainly well above the flood plain). So I probably have a rose-tinted view, a combination of nostalgia and romanticism creating an illusion of the gleaming concrete jungle, a happy multi-cultural bustle, streets where anything and everything is readily available, and where jolly red buses are always at hand.

I know that there’s also noise and pollution and overcrowding and the homeless and high crime rates – but even so, after a couple of brief visits to London a few years ago, if anybody had offered me a job there I’d have taken it like a shot.

Except I wouldn’t. My wife lived in Portsmouth for nearly twenty five years, and is probably the least nostalgic person I know, and she would never, ever consider going back to city life. So for me at least the discussion is closed.

But not, of course, for our daughter. I don’t know if she’ll get the job. Thinking just about her, even though the reality will be vastly different to her expectations, I hope she does. What a huge change it will be! For me, as a parent, twenty-two looks a lot younger from the outside than once upon a time it felt from the inside, so naturally I’ll be far less worried if she doesn’t get it. So, all in all, I’m not sure whether that makes it a no-win situation, or a no-lose one.

The interview’s not till Monday though, there’s the practical worry of actually getting her there first. I’m driving her to Exeter Bus Station, from there she gets a coach to Victoria, and then changes onto the onward coach for Cambridge. So even the journey is pretty daunting.

I give myself a maximum of 700 words as being the most I feel I can get away with, without becoming irretrievably boring (although I accept that it may well be far fewer than that) and this self-imposed word count is telling me it’s time to stop. So I will.

I’ve reached my (city) limits.

Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Confused, Little Bit Of Politics, Moaning, Weather

I’m feeling overheated.

I know weather forecasters assume that sunny = good, but when it comes down to it I don’t think we’re really designed for sunshine. It’s traditionally a rather damp and cool little island, and as such I find that endless days of unrelenting sunshine just make me hot and sweaty and irritable.

Everything becomes so much more of an effort when you’re battling against the blinding glare and the sweltering heat – even writing, just pushing buttons on a keyboard, feels too much like hard work. I discovered today that there’s a celebrated sex toy manufacturer less than thirty miles from us, which you might have thought would provoke some sort of response (if only an eager look online for opening times and exact directions) but no, the weather has beaten me.

At least, I think it’s the weather. As opposed to the climate, I mean. I know that they’re two different things but… A bit like cauliflower and broccoli, I struggle to recall what the difference is.

Like so many other aspects of modern life (gender fluidity, quantum computing, the plot to Line of Duty) I find the climate/environment thing very confusing. Not in a dismissive, ‘I’m not going to bother trying to understand it’ way – but in a confused, ‘how many issues are there or is it all the same thing’ kind of way.

It’s second nature now, to put our food waste in the bin provided, to put cardboard and paper into recycling sacks, to sort plastic and glass into recycling buckets. I do it religiously, but I would struggle to explain what good it’s actually doing, or what problem it’s trying to address.

Are my flattened Rice Krispies boxes and rinsed out jam jars helping reduce pollution, or are they conserving natural resources? Is that the same thing? Alternatively, are they, in some inexplicable way, arresting the global rise in temperature? Or helping to repair the hole in the ozone layer even? For that matter, is that even a thing anymore? It used to be mentioned all the time, but (like the Tower of Pisa) I can’t remember the last time I heard anybody talk about it.

Even when I think I’m doing the right thing, I can’t be sure. We get our milk from a local farm as opposed to a supermarket so that means less travel which means reduced carbon emissions which is good. Hurrah.

But he delivers it in plastic bottles. So that’s bad. (I think).

But then, we put the bottles in the recycling, and that’s good. Probably. (Although I don’t know how.)

Should I be nagging him to switch to glass bottles? Would that be better or worse?

And then I hear that cows are bad for the environment – no, the climate – no, the environment – Well, anyway I hear that they’re really bad because of how darned farty they are. So maybe I should just cut out the milk completely?

Less confused, apparently, are the campaigners who have been in London this past week. I have a grudging admiration for anybody going on a protest, but it slightly baffles me that their main aim is to get a Big Solution from government. Yes, they could ban all non-essential air travel, but it’s never going to happen overnight… Better surely, to try and persuade ordinary people to stop flying right now?

We can wait for ‘the people in charge’ – or we can decide to all do our bit now, and that’s got to be a better option, hasn’t it? Even if, like me, you don’t really know what it’s doing. Recycle as much as you can. Don’t fly unless it’s absolutely essential. Buy locally. (Please ignore my casual decimation of both the aviation and haulage industries in a single paragraph there).

It’s not always easy, I know. As a rural area, we’re lucky in that there are plenty of local sources for milk and meat and fruit and vegetables. (Though, no public transport, so swings and roundabouts.)

There’s even, did I mention, a sex toy company in the area. Literally, I could be there in forty minutes.

Oh dear, I’m starting to get overheated again…

Off The Top Of My Head…

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Doctor Who, Family

I got my hair cut today.

If it helps in picturing it, I’ve gone from ‘Sylvester McCoy in the TV movie’ to something of an early Matt Smith (although due to my age, there’s a touch of ‘the miners of Peladon’ about the colour scheme). My brother, not that it’s really relevant, used to keep very much to the Eccleston/’Paul McGann Longleat reveal’ look, although as the years go by he’s tending more towards Henry Woolf in The Sun Makers. (Or a Sontaran.)

Details (and possible libel) aside, my hair, to recap, has now been cut. It’s not, to be honest, an experience I especially enjoy. I’m not suffering any kind of Sampson delusion, worrying that my great strength will be removed along with my colossal bouffant; and I’m not bothered that, when they use the mirror to show me the reverse view, it shows off my bald spot, nestled among my locks like the laser focussing dish on the Death Star. It’s not even the money, although I suspect it’s deliberately priced as a £9 cut so that weak, stupid people will leave the £1 change as a tip. (Which obviously I always do.)

No, my biggest problem is the chit chat.

The young lady who cut my hair today was probably the youngest I’ve seen yet; she’s still got a fortnight to go with her college course in fact, and although I would love to know the answer, I didn’t dare ask whether her hairdresser training includes, along with current styles, what not to cut, and which hair products get you really high, the art of conversation.

That’s in no way a dig, only an observation that whereas the more experienced coiffeurs have established a style and patter of their own, today’s scissor-wielder was a little more tentative. Having dealt with my singular lack of anything planned for the weekend, and having between us thoroughly analysed the weather (colder than it looked, but at least it’s dry) I was rewarded with a real classic, when she asked if I was going anywhere nice for my holidays! (I’m not.)

For many years, all through school and in fact quite a long way out the other side, my Dad cut my hair. That suited me just fine, partly because it was cheap, and also because there was no awkward small talk to navigate my way through. Dad isn’t one for too much casual chatter either (plus of course, when I was nine he would have had more idea of where I was going on my holidays than I did).

The only real downside to Dad’s stint as my barber, was his, erm, cutting-edge technology. From, I would guess, some deceptive newspaper or TV ad (the words K-Tel may be hovering) he acquired some curious barber-y tool. In appearance it was like a white comb, but with a razor blade fitted in the end, the concept being (so I believe – I never actually saw the ad) that it could remove large clumps of hair at a stroke, leaving the scissors free to swoop in near the end to do all the fine detailing and take the credit.

I can appreciate that on paper (or on ITV) it would have sounded good; but the one major flaw from where I was sitting (which was nearest to the business end of the wretched thing) was that for some reason it was apparently designed to only ever work with the bluntest of razor blades. Even now, I can recall the dragging, tearing, rending sensation – frankly Dad could have saved himself £9.99 + p&p and just yanked great clumps out of my head with his bare hands.

In short, it was agony. And by comparison, even with my conversational awkwardness, today’s experience was a breeze. When Dad cut my hair of course, he could do it of a weekday evening; whereas now I have to make sure to fit it in on a day I’m not at work.

It’s something for the weekend, you might say.

Catching Up With Old Friends

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Friends, TV

It’s Netflix’s fault.

It’s got all ten seasons of Friends, and although you might well think I shouldn’t be spending/wasting so much time watching TV, I’m already halfway through. To be nitpicky I’m halfway through in number of seasons rather than number of episodes; so in other words I’ve just finished season five, which is the one (sorry, The One) set in Las Vegas.

The previous year’s finale was set in London, with the cast filmed on location there alongside an array of UK guest stars. Vegas, on the other hand, is represented by stock footage, the cast are confined to studio sets, and there’s not even a C-Lister in sight. Suggesting, perhaps, that its popularity had already peaked?

That’s unfair, or at least a cynical view twenty years after the fact. Because Friends definitely was hugely popular in its time. For me it evokes the days when imported TV shows, especially from the US, would often take pride of place in primetime, which they never do now on the terrestrial channels. And there were so many of them – just off the top of my head, the BBC used to show Starsky & Hutch and The Rockford Files, Dynasty and Dallas; and ITV was home to The A-Team, Airwolf, The Equalizer and The Fall Guy.

They carried with them, perhaps, an air of the exotic; and certainly those US shows looked more expensive and flashy than much of our homegrown stuff. Or maybe that’s nostalgia talking again – memories of the extraordinary wait to find out who actually did shoot JR, or of being allowed to stay up late on a Friday night to watch Starsky & Hutch.

Re-engaging with shows from the past is warm and cosy, even though in truth the nostalgia is probably as much for the particular time in our lives when we first watched them, rather than for the actual content. But the flip side of it is that, objectively, Friends no longer feels fresh and modern, instead it’s already very dated.

It’s only twenty years ago but it’s a strikingly lo-tech world. Ross is the only one who has a mobile (and it’s only for phone calls). Nobody has an email address. There’s no home computing, and the internet doesn’t even exist. They spend all that time in the coffee shop, and nobody is ever checking their messages.

What’s even more striking (occasionally shocking) is how attitudes have changed too. The first thing my daughter sees, and she’s right, is that this is a show about six friends. Six Straight White friends. I can’t imagine that pitch getting further than those four words today.

In the most recent episode I watched, Monica agrees to never see her ex again if that’s what Chander wants, Chandler having forbidden her (yes, that’s for-bid-den her) in the previous episode. That’s definitely not the sort of ‘submissive female something about the patriarchy’ kind of characterisation that you’d expect nowadays. It shows how much has changed in what feels like a very short time.

For all that, though, and rightly or wrongly I’m still enjoying it. Back in the day I sort of drifted away from the show after the first couple of years, so other than the major bullet points (having babies, not having babies, and a half-memory of having once seen the very last episode) I don’t really know what’s coming over the next five seasons. It’s comfortable and cosy, at least to somebody who’s old enough to have been around at the time, and frankly it’s just nice to be in the company of people who are generally speaking, kind and fun and pleasant to each other.

In the real world, I must admit, I find friends and friendships infinitely more complicated and difficult.

Maybe that’s why I have so much time to spend watching TV…