Tales From A Crowded Island

The Conservative policy on tax breaks for married couples may well prove to be inconsequential by the time we get to the election (ever more likely to be May), but I find it one of the most irksome policies of any of the three main parties. Tory thinking, informed by the work of former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith, seems to be:

Social breakdown is bad – A good deal of social breakdown is caused by family breakdown – We need stable families as they produce the best outcomes for kids and minimise social breakdown – Evidence shows that married couples provide the most stable family structure – We need to support marriage, so lets give them a tax break.

I have always thought that the thinking here is very flawed. Are stable relationships the result of marriage, or that people that are already in committed stable relationships tend to be the kind of people who get married? It should not be surprised that married couples provide the most stable family units; by virtue of the fact they have normally survived or not been subject to the normal ravages that have prised apart other couples. Although we do not have the details of the tax proposal yet, it also seems strange that a married couple without kids should get a tax break, whilst a cohabiting couple with kids would not. I know tax is all about these types of choices, but those anomolies it throws run contrary to both the stated intent of the policy and the need for fiscal responsibility that the Tories have been stressing.

As much as we possibly can we should try to minimise governments interferance in peoples personal relationships; by all means eradicate the elements of the tax and benefit system that penalise married couples compared to those who cohabit, but lets not swing in the other direction hey? We need to make sure we support all those families providing a loving and nurturing environment for their kids, not just the ones that decided to get married. Here is an excellent blog post at the Financial Times that explains why the policy is incoherent and fiscally reckless.

We all have our little quirks; our irrational dislikes and likes, usually based on little else than gut instinct and some indefinable background noise. In any event, one of mine was always Facebook, which for some reason I was always bizarrely proud of the fact whilst the rest of the sheeple were signing up for it in droves (or herds?), I had remained above the ovine stampede, pure and untouched by the stigma. This is kind of like the social media equivalent of refusing to admit to liking pop music on the basis of whatever is popular with the masses cannot possibly be good. Well, sometimes, very occasionally, pop music can be good, so why not Facebook?

My other reasons for not wanting to sign up were based on more of a drip drip of negative news stories about Facebook over the past couple of years. Security concerns, dictatorial changes to Terms & Conditions, poxy people you went to school with tagging you in old and embarassing photos and employers going on there and finding out you are a drunken twat. Such things didn’t fill my head with positive images of Facebook. All of this was not aided by other peoples descriptions of it; lots of games, bizarre sounding groups and scrawling on walls, all of which don’t particularly appeal to me. So why join then, especially after being so scathing in the past? Two reasons:

1. Some friends who avoided my social networking platform of choice (Twitter) were resident on Facebook. I didn’t know Andy was in a relationship until Lee tweeted me and told me his Facebook relationship status had changed. Well I could hardly go on missing critical pieces of information like that could I?
2. The family trip to Australia contained a fair amount of ribbing of my Uncle for being a stick in the mud and social networking-aphobe. I could hardly maintain such a critique whilst maintaining a similarly high-handed view of Facebook. I should at least try it, with an open mind, and then draw final conclusions on its worth.

Sign up I did; then I spent a good few minutes looking at the screen and around the settings thinking ‘what next?’. Started adding a few friends, most of whom immediatly said, ‘What are you doing on here?’ and then over the next few days I started to get to grips with it and what I might use it for. I have been using it for about a week now and here are some initial positive and negatives.

Positives

• Keeping more in touch with friends who are not on Twitter.
• The iPhone application for it is really nicely put together and gives you access to more or less the full range of features.
• Tweetdeck, which I already used for Twitter, also integrates with Facebook, which allows me to simultaneously update Twitter and Facebook.
• It’s good that you can comment on all the different types of content that you can see from your friends, and that you can ‘tag’ friends into status updates.
• There is good integration with some other applications I use like Flickr, Qik and Audioboo, along with the facility through add on applications to run RSS feeds onto your page.

Negatives

• I find the entire interface very messy and confusing. Some of this is my own lack of understanding and familiarity with it, but for a novice Facebook does have several concepts that seem to overlap. There is your News Feed that can be viewed as the straight News Feed or the Live Feed, and contains the activity updates for you and your friends. There is then Status Updates, which is like a strimmed down version of the News Feed giving only, as the name suggests, Status Updates for yourself and your friends. However, not everything you do appears in your Live Feed; for example, if you happen to join a Group, this doesn’t appear in your News Feed (curiously if Friends join a Group it does), so you have to click into your Profile to see your recent Group joining history. That’s before I have even got to the messy world of Groups vs Pages and whatever the fuck Boxes are!
• It has an annoying habit of suggesting potential friends to you ALL the time. This easy access to mutual friends seems like a good idea at first when you initially want to add people, but does it have to do it all the time? When it is not suggesting friends to you, it decides it might try recommending Groups your Friends have joined instead: I am not interested OK?!
• Some of the applications you can add to your page are not altogether intuitive to get working. It took me a while to understand the setup of the Social RSS app for example, so I could ensure blog updates here flowed through to my Facebook page.
• Friend mining. I have not experienced this yet, but from chatting to people on there, due to these recommendations that get made about mutual friends, you can soon have people from your past turning up and requesting to be friends. These were people that you have the most tenuous associations with in alot of cases; quite often people who went to the same school as you or worked briefly in the same place. This entire process is supported by groups based around every school, all of which feel like complete Friends Reunited style nostalgia-fests.
• We all like our share of inane memes, but Facebook seems to produce them in large numbers in the form of bizarrely named Groups or Pages. I have seen ones with surreal names like, ‘Don’t You Just Hate It When You See Any Group That Starts Its Title With ‘Don’t You Just Hate It When..’ (well maybe not quite that, but you get the picture), which seem to attract thousands and thousands of people, whilst the official RSPB Group for example has a few hundred.

Twitter to Facebook is like comparing this:

Small, not particularly spectacular, but easily understandable and functional.

With this:

Complicated, with loads of unecessary bolt on parts, like it has been cooked up in the workshop of some mad professor.

After my last blog post on the unusual mementos that turn up when we are moving house, I have now come across the following photos:

A couple of our cat Amy (now sadly no longer with us)

I also found this wonderful photo of Grandad and Grandma Mantle, which was slid behind a plastic cover on a small notebook. Not sure when I got it, or who gave it to me, but the photo is great.

I am trying to place where it was took, but my memory is failing me, so any help is welcome.

Finally, I found my 1st year Student Union card at Leeds University. This would have been in 1992 when I was just 18. I look errrm..very studenty.

Moving house does give one the opportunity to go through some of that stuff you have hoarded and throw some of it out; and boy did my collection of flotsam and jetsam amalgamated over 10 years need some ruthless culling.

Whilst I was clearing out some stuff tonight though I came across something that reminded me of a trip taken to the Big Apple in February 2005 to celebrate Andy’s 30th. You can see my pictures of the trip on Flicker here. On the night of Andy’s birthday we went to eat at a place called Radio City or something like that, just up from out hotel in central Manhattan. I remember little of the night as we managed to polish off 9 bottles of red wine between six of us, before moving on to some bars. I do remember that I ordered a dish that was basically a selection of different types of sausage, after which, I don’t think I could face another sausage for a good few weeks.

My other main memory of that night was of the music. They had a jazz band on and a female singer who meandered in amongst the tables. At some point it was flagged to the band that it was Andy’s 30th and he had the next song dedicated to him, at the end of which she was perched on his knee, finishing with a cheeky “boop boop dee doo” and a playful rub of Andy’s head.

We were all impressed (especially Andy) and she gave us a flyer and told us where they were playing the following night, where they would also have some CDs on sale. Andy was flying back the next day, so we drunkenly agreed that we would go to this bar she was performing at and buy him a CD; of course when the next day arrived, all of us feeling somewhat delicate, we opted for a quieter night and never made it to the bar to see a repeat performance. We could also only remember the first bit of her name (Tira), so Andy christened her Tira Misu, after the dessert.

Tonight when I was clearing out some paperwork, I found the flyer in there, so thought I would scan it in (wirelessly) and share this short anecdote.

The website of the band she sang with is still up here. It even has a page dedicated to Tira with a link to her latest CD: maybe we will get that CD yet, a mere 4 and a bit years late!

UPDATE
Surreal. After posting this blog I went and had a look at the CD which it appeared that she recorded in 2000 with her twin sister Dhira. I then did a search for Tira & Dhira and this brought up this strange YouTube vid from 2007, part of a series documenting the lives of bohemian types scratching out a living in NYC. Considering what Andy christened her, it is amusing how she introduces herself in the video.

Leeds is currently in the grip of strike action by refuse collectors; bin men in old money (Not for the 1st time either). I am not going to get into discussing the claims and counterclaims of the council and the unions, but what I have found is, for a council that does a fairly well developed internet offer, just how little they are leveraging it to keep customers informed.

Our bin has not been collected in nearly three weeks now, although we do now have the advantage of a skip in a front garden because of the kitchen renovations; an advantage I would not be surprised to see some of our neighbours take advantage of too.

When the collections missed for the second time, I thought I would go on the Leeds City Council (LCC) website and see what information they had to offer. What I was hoping for was some kind of information portal that would be aggregating all updates relating to the strike action. I went to the main LCC webpage, saw a news link about the strike affecting several waste storage sites (tips or dumps in old money) and at the bottom of that a link to a webpage specifically devoted to the strike action. “Excellent” thought I, “this will be what I was looking for”. Wrong!

First of all I could not get on the page because it kept throwing up errors until I temporarily disabled my firewall’s privacy settings. Not a good start, but then when I did get onto the page, all it had were some bland stock answers about the strike action. Yes, there a couple of lines on what to do if you don’t get a collection, which is basically, put you bin out on your next collection day (Duh!), but nothing more specific than that. What do customers want to know in such circumstances? When they are likely to be getting a collection in their area of course, but that page offered nothing to manage my expectations. We have had some people taking their rubbish to the waste storage sites themselves, but how are we expected to judge if that will be necessary without more specific information.

Twitter seems ideally suited for LCC to get out status updates on the strike, including when particular areas are going to get collections, and LCC does have a Twitter account. It seems though that this is only used to push out information rather than engaging with customers and answering queries. A shame considering elsewhere LCC are trying to make some services available via the web.

From Twitter I looked at the Posterous site set up by LCC to post updates specifically relating to the strike. Again a great idea, but what does it actually offer customers? What information is there on there? It seems to be more concerned about taking on union claims than with providing useful updates to citizens affected by the strike.

It does seem now that the council will be using a combination of private contractors and working council crews to start to clear the rubbish for the duration of the strike. The latest post on the Posterous page does finally give some useful advice, which has also been sent out via letter over the weekend to all households, but it still does feel that LCC could be using the web more to get their information out.

I would have liked to have seen some information on where they were getting crews working on particular days, but what about trying to make use of Leeds Twitter users as an information source of which areas are particularly bad? Use of the internet as an information source during such disputes is only going to grow, so bodies like local councils needs to be more on the ball about how they use these new technologies.

In late April I went to Malta with friends and family, and I have only recently got round to uploading the photos. The full set can be found hereand Lee’s pics of the same trip here.

Although we mainly relaxed in the fantastic villa we stayed at, I did like what we did see of the island and I would definitely go back there again.

The villa we stayed in was north up the coast from the capital Valletta, but as we had great weather all week, you could easily make out the skyline of the city in the distance.

We were a mere stones throw from the Med

An afternoon was spent exploring some of Valletta, including getting some food in a cafe that had a great panoramic view of the famous Grand Harbour.

The day we were in Valletta was Malta’s Labour Day and the Maltese Labour Party was holding a big rally in the city.

A good time was had by all.

I didn’t quite make it out of here in time to avoid the disruption caused resulting from Andy’s latest bonus splurge: a full scale kitchen refit. Ironically it now looks like I will be in my new place (touch wood), just after they have completed the renovation and left Andy with a brand new, sparking kitchen – so fucking typical!

Our old kitchen that has served us so well for over a decade (yeah right!) was ripped out within a day and dumped out in the skip.

You may also note that the skip has been placed on the front garden crushing the 4 ft thistles we had been cultivating (see here for more on the garden). The front garden is going to be done straight after the kitchen is finished incidentally.

Here are a couple more shots of our now empty kitchen.

As we have no kitchen, it means we have nowhere to cook or wash up, so we have everything we need packed into the lounge, including the fridge and, most essentially of course, the kettle.

You will also note that Guinness can now watch TV whilst eating her food. Andy and I in the meantime are living off microwavable meals and takeaways, eaten off of plastic plates so we have no washing up to do. What’s changed I hear you cry?

I cleared the backlog of photos I had remaining to upload to Flickr tonight.

The first batch are for a holiday I took back in March to Lechlade in the Cotswolds. This was with Mum, Ralph, Lee, Jules and Oliver: our normal deferred Christmas present to one another. We stayed at a B & B that was part working farm. Accommodation was a bit cramped, but it was good to be in a place where there was plenty for Oliver to see and do.

Ralph made a new friend too.

We went and had a quick look around Lechlade itself; not that there was much to it, but we did go down to where the Thames cuts through the village and stopped at a pub for a swift pint on the way back.

We also spent an entire day at the Cotswold Wildlife Park, which is well worth a visit if you are ever down that way: a full days worth of stuff to see and if you happen to have children who like trains, as Oliver does, added bonus of a train that does the rounds.

My full set of photos are here, Lee’s are here and Mum and Ralph’s are here.

Belated pictures of my holiday with family in Wells. Good time had by all. Oliver did some crabbing and played on the beach. We went and did some birdwatching at Titchwell and at Cley Marshes. Misty views of 11 Spoonbills, Bearded Tits (fledglings), Marsh Harriers and, at Titchwell on the way back, we caught a glimpse of an elusive Cetti’s Warbler we had been tracking for a hour or so.

Here are those Spoonbills

And here is a shot of a Little Egret taken closer to the sea at Cley, where the mist had shifted

And more importantly, here’s me and Oliver waiting for food.

(Note my fabulous sunburn. My neck got burnt to buggery too at Titchwell and came up in heat blisters that lasted for about a week before clearing up!)

Of the things I will not miss when I move out of here is having the untidiest front garden in the neighbourhood. The ironic thing is that we only have a patch of grass that is no more than 20 square foot to tend, but still it ends up looking like this:

It would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that those 4ft thistles did not disperse seeds all over the lawns of are house proud neighbours. You can see in this shot a little bit of next doors gardens:

Andy has finally seen the light though I think. I told him when he got it done he should not have bothered with a lawn, so now he is getting the lawn taken out , having it zapped with weedkiller and replaced with something that does not require any tending: dead wood.

I think the straw that broke the camels back was when he tried to “mow” the grass a couple of months back. He got a few feet in:

And then our poor, long-suffering Flymo gave up the ghost.

RIP