My only progress this week is to have started physiotherapy for my ankle; it’s really hard to guess how long this is going to take, but it’s now 8 weeks since I sprained it. What have you managed to achieve this week?
This week’s question is really for people who are doing or have done C25K, and inspired by a question from Tom:
If you’re near the beginning: how do you feel about encountering Week 5 Day 3, the first uninterrupted run?
If you’ve done W5D3, how did it feel to achieve it?
This evening I attended half of a meeting at the local council offices. A friend, who is very passionate about local politics, likes to video these meetings, and he has been getting some resistance from the establishment who are, understandably, worried that it’ll be easier for them to be held to account if the evidence is out there on the internet. Plus, they quite like the current arrangement where only a dozen people are party to their shenanigans – it makes it easier to cover up.
So my friend asked me to come along tonight to give a bit of support. The whole thing was as soul-destroying as I thought it would be.
Most of the time is taken up with various slick middle-aged dudes bragging about how brilliant all these new things that they are doing are going to be. They brag and brag and brag and brag for twenty minutes, and then open up the floor for five minutes of questions at the end. A number of pensioners’ hands go up. They point out that there’s been no consultation on the things that are going on, and raise some concerns. Slick middle-aged dudes then say:
1. There’s been some consultation. Maybe not enough. But it’s moot, because it’s too late to back out now.
2. But you can still be involved! We’re inviting members of the public to decide what colour of brick to use for the new pavements! Yay!
3. We also had the same concerns as you, but we talked about it at a previous meeting, and all agreed that it’s fiiiiine, so don’t worry.
4. We’re short for time this evening so let’s move right along.
The great thing is that the video of this meeting will be available online, so I can post it and prove to you that I’m really not exaggerating.
The downside is that this meeting was scheduled to be 1h45m long, and when I left after about 1h15m it was already running 20m over, so I expect that the final video will be well over 2 hours long. Most of this is the well-dressed middle-aged dudes telling us about how great everything is. Who, in their right mind, would watch that?
As one of the nicely-groomed middle-aged dudes pointed out, we voted for all of these councillors.
I recently read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. It’s written, and set, about a hundred years ago, when socialism is just starting to become a thing. It’s heavily political, and very critical of both the wealthy elite who run things, and the working classes who buy into the myth that this is the way that it must always be. The workers have their right to vote, and they defend it passionately, while closing their minds to the truth that it really makes no difference. The wealthy capitalists leverage their positions on the council to line their own pockets. Competition between them leads to lowered prices, yes, but this is achieved by paying the workers as little as possible, and doing a half-assed job. One of the most saddening things is that Robert Tressell clearly believed that socialism would be England’s saviour, but it took less than a hundred years for Labour to go from feisty underdog to just another panel of slick middle-aged dudes telling us about how great things are.
The harder I try to engage, the more disillusioned I become.
Are you living in the same place as in 2004/05?Not nearly. I started 2004 living in an amazing flat just off Holloway Road and ended it living in a cosy conversion in Alexandra Palace, where I stayed for 2005. In early 2006 I moved to an attic room in Archway which probably counts as my worst housing choice since moving to London. In late 2006 I met my now husband, then someone was shot almost on my doorstep and so in early 2007 I moved South of The River to Brixton to live with him. We lived in Brixton for 2 years before our lovely landlady decided to sell up, and we’ve been in the same house in East Dulwich ever since.
I would have said yes, but a few weeks ago, a colleague I don’t see very often asked me if I was a new starter, so possibly not, though it might depend how many times we’ve met in person, and when those times were.
For me, I think it’d have to be the iPhone (and the app store) – or applicable smartphone type thing. That I have a device in my pocket that allows me to read the internets, books, listen to music, watch films and television, have video calls with Scotland, or New Zealand or my husband while he’s in a car on a motorway (not driving it, obv), take and edit photographs, write blog posts and emails, track any exercise I might do, do my banking, play games, watch over my infant son via an infrared webcam and just actually send text messages and make phone calls is astonishing.
There are downsides to the ubiquity of these devices, and I definitely have to watch my usage of it when I’m at home and my attention should be elsewhere, but the opportunities afforded by these devices are amazing.
I’ve always had a blog, I just haven’t always written in it. Mostly, twitter ate my blog, or at least, life ate my time to blog and twitter came along around the same time and gave me a place to write in very short bursts. I probably average more words on twitter per day than I ever did at the height of my blogging.
I still, very occasionally, blog at pixeldiva where I restarted on a new wordpress install a couple of years ago, leaving all the archives of every previous blog unlinked, but still googleable.
I started blogging at betaparent earlier this year, well over a year after buying the domain name.
I also recently got access to blog at Medium but have had too much of the fear (or what I write being considered too shit for it) to actually write anything there.
I think that’s probably got to be @pixjunior.
That I got pregnant quite quickly, carried him to (beyond) term and have managed to nourish and nurture him into the strapping wee boy that he is a constant source of astonishment to me.
I know people have kids all the time, but I really didn’t think I could, or thought that if I tried, I’d wind up in dire straights health wise – or that he’d have health issues, so to have come through pregnancy and birth relatively ok (emergency c-section notwithstanding) and with a healthy child showing no signs of the kinds of issues I had (or @MrPixeldiva has) is, frankly, miraculous.
Hmm. This is something I thought long and hard about, pretty much since I got pregnant.
I wrote a fairly long thing about it recently, called On ‘Sharenting’ and Shame in response to a hideous article about parental oversharing, but in essence, I’ve been trying to strike an appropriate balance between being me and sharing my experience, keeping friends and family up to date and recording moments so that I can remember them later.
I do so in the knowledge that sometimes I’ll go the wrong side of too much information, but that some of it will be helpful, and am trying to make sure that nothing that I share could be used to shame him at some point in the future.
It’s an incredibly difficult line to walk, because I know that just by existing, I’ll be an embarrassment to future @pixteenager but I’m hoping that I can bring him up to be a thoughtful and compassionate boy, equipped to handle a world that increasingly lives life online, and frequently publicly.
Twitter. Without a shadow of a doubt. If twitter didn’t exist, my life would be considerably poorer. It makes it easy for me to keep up to date (see: ambient intimacy, without which I’d neither know the term for what I’ve experienced using it, nor have been able to get to know the author of the term to the point where I could discuss work, childcare and parenting with her. I’d also not have the job I have without twitter, nor many people I now count as friends, so for all its faults, twitter is a definite keeper.
Instagram. When flickr got yahoo’d, instagram arrived to pick up the pieces. I have a slightly uneasier time of it now it’s owned by Faceache, but for ease of use, viewing and sharing, nothing matches it, and the community aspect has been lovely – a bit like the early days of flickr.
Facebook. I don’t really like it, and I don’t use it much, but I’m increasingly finding myself using it on a daily basis to keep up with a few people who don’t use twitter and/or instagram much.
Pocket. A place where I bookmark articles I really want to read and rarely have the time to go back and actually read. Some day, though…
Timehop. An app where each day it presents me with a rerun of my social media postings (twitter, facebook, instagram – and will now synch all old photos via dropbox, though I haven’t done this) of that day in years gone by. I’m particularly loving being reminded about those moments of @pixjunior’s early months which I shared online, and finding that seeing them becomes a kind of mental bookmark for other things. Not all of it is good (and there’s some real shit coming up), but the distance a year affords is interesting.
Pinterest. Lifestyle porn. Pure and simple. For the me I will never be.
Squarespace. When MT died I went to wordpress, which got all nasty and bloaty and I couldn’t be arsed. Squarespace isn’t perfect, but has allowed me to get back to blogging quickly and easily, without a lot of writing html and css, and the designs aren’t shite, which satisfies my aesthetic sense.
I’m going to go with no. Not yet. I haven’t come into contact with the thing, but everything I’ve read about it hasn’t changed my instinctive *WRONG* feeling about it.
I’d like to interview Graybo, because I don’t think we’ve ever met, and I’m not sure why that is.
I’d like to ask him how he’s feeling (I notice his last updated mood on his website was in 2010, and I figure he can’t sigh for 3 years…)
I’d like to ask him what he thinks has most changed in him since becoming a parent… and whether it’s the thing that he thought would change before he became a parent
and lastly, I’d like to ask him if he’s any idea why my outdoor hydrangea’s are growing like gangbusters, but my indoor one, though still living, hasn’t grown at all and seems to be stuck in some kind of suspended animation.
Over the last seven years I may have mentioned sleep a couple of times. My difficulty in getting to sleep precedes parenthood, and appears to be a genetic thing, despite having a very different parenting style from my mother, Bernard is as bad at getting off to sleep as I was at his age, and am now.
A couple of weeks ago I travelled to glorious glamorous Birmingham on a Friday evening, to run a workshop on the Saturday. The workshop part is the least interesting bit of the story so I won’t mention that again if I can possibly help it.
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This has been a productive day, with much grateful thanks to the cake-doulas of twitter who helped me to produce what may or may not be a fine chocolate sponge for the birthday party this weekend. I have made the best chilli ever. The physio made my ankle sore but gave me lots of attention, which is a combination that works for me. The laundry is outside, the floors are swept, real cider is chilling in the fridge. Let’s address the virtual drinks, then.
Having commanded everyone to share the happy, we still allowed people to be a bit grumpy if they had a note from their doctor. To the best of my knowledge, the only actual doctor we have here is Lisa, so she had better have her drinks first and then attend to the moody wounded. She and I both took instruction this week from Simon Hopkinson on how to make a perfect martini. The secret, it turns out, is to wash the ice and stir it with a chopstick. To that end, I’ve put the ice in the dishwasher.
Today’s drinks are on Gert, who has had a little windfall and is also on the gin. The first thing Gert ever said to me in real life was to offer me a glass of wine, so this seems quite in keeping. I’m putting her in charge of Pigwotflies, who doesn’t hang around here terribly often, but has invented a proper Parisian cocktail with champagne. This can be shared with the star of next week’s interview Pixeldiva, pink shoed but grumpy, so long as Dr Lisa is happy to prescribe that.
Happily, Anna and Pete can share a whisky and soda. Last night when I was rediscovering flickr, I found photos from the blogmeet when Anna and I swapped necklaces. Sadly I can’t remember which necklaces they were; presumably nothing of great value. If there’s some whisky left over, they could probably let the maligned Mr Sevitz have some of that, after his vigil. I’m going to go out on a limb and state that he writes terribly for a middle-class Jewish male, but a bigot he is not; and many of us know that feeling of being kept awake by internet unpleasantness. So make that a double. The least I can do is stop Graybo from throwing bricks at him.
Lyle‘s vodka-thyme-lemonade sounds delicious, if a little girly (can I say that? I am one). I’m confident that Clair could share that without too much danger of spilling it on the rug. Mainly because she’ll be lucky to get a full glass, especially if he farts in her general direction.
Another grumpy one: Asta, please see Lisa for your prescription of industrial quantities of Mai Tai. Next week will be better. And if you sit near Stuart, some of his cheerful will rub off.
Happy solstice, to those of you who like that sort of thing. Happy seven-years-of-parenthood to me and Pete. Have a happy weekend.
Today is the happiest day of the year: scientific fact. Even though I have to work tomorrow, I’m feeling it. I have the day off, mostly for birthday party preparations. I’ve been to the physio and she promised I would run again soon and massaged my sore ankle and gave me lots of sympathy. I have an easy week next week. Pete is feeling better. It’s all good.
Spread the love: what’s making you happy today?
It was never quite clear whether we were in Wiltshire or Dorset, but it was not particularly important. At one point, the sun came out, and I took the above photograph.
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