VAT goes up in January, which is no reason to go spending loads of money, but it seems to be what we’ve been doing anyway.

Today the new oven was delivered. One of these. It’s a horribly complicated beast, with touch controls, multiple functions and programmes, including a bread setting, a pizza setting, and an oven chips setting (not really).

What do I actually use my oven for? Bread and pizza, tuna bake, baked potatoes, and, er, fish and chips. Nothing very complicated, really. But now I’ve got to learn a complex programming language in order to bake a spud. Why did we feel a need to get a new one? Because neither of us wanted to clean the old one. I’m looking forward to trying the pizza and bread settings and will report back after the weekend.

Anyway, what did we save in VAT by buying it now? About £57.

For unrelated reasons (i.e. not to do with cleaning), we have also ordered a new sofa/chaise combo, which is now in stock and which we paid for today, saving another £85 in VAT. This makes a total VAT saving of £142, which I suppose is kind of worth it.

According to Wikipedia, 142 is a number between 141 and 143. Not many people know that.

We have two Ekornes leather two-seater sofas to get rid of now. One of them, the one I’ve mainly sat on, is shagged (because I am too big for it and therefore do horrible things to the fastenings); the other one is pretty much good as new. Our house is too small to contain all these sofas.

I have a yen for a new Le Creuset casserole, 28cm size. I was looking at them in John Lewis tonight when we went in to pay or the sofa. My current casserole we’ve had since before we had kids and it’s really too small for the stew and the dumplings, if you know what I mean. The price in John Lewis for one of these? £140. Coincidentally, almost exactly the VAT saving. Smells like a rationale to me. (Of course, they’re much cheaper on Amazon.)

It’s a shame the BBC are holding back the final two episodes of Toy Stories for Festivus, when I will be out of the country, because I’ve really enjoyed them.

James May thrives away from Top Gear. He was quoted in the Guardian last week (in a story that was bizarrely reprinted in the Daily Hate yesterday) as saying that if he’d known how popular TG would be, he wouldn’t have done it. But he can’t mean that because TG has opened so many doors for him, and allowed him to make these kind of programmes, which are both fun, educational, and magical.

There’s something about all of these projects that takes us back to a bygone era of course, which is the intention, but it is nostalgia for more than mere playthings. It’s nostalgia for kids running around in the street for a whole magical summer, or for long-gone British industries, for a Britain which was a kinder, gentler place, with a slower pace of life.

Airfix, Plasticine, Meccano, Scalextric. Said slowly, repeatedly, this mantra might take you back to the days of short trousers, of knowing your neighbours, of hours spent patiently building something or painting it, of the days before our attention spans were shot to pieces.

Of course there are elements of the standard TV show formula: the artificial deadlines, the is-it-all-going-to-go-wrong-oh-no-it-isn’t jerking around, but aside from this, you get a real sense of people getting involved with each other: fathers with their fathers, professionals with amateurs, neighbours with neighbours. It’s just nice, in the end, which for some people is a dirty word; but niceness has its place.

Last night’s Scalextric episode was about more than what-toys-used-to-be-like. It was a community project which broke down barriers, crossed fences, introduced people to each other, generating a sense of excitement and achievement. It wasn’t about setting a new world record; it was about those little kids running across the open-plan gardens of their 90s housing estate, treading on the hallowed lawns, as they chased little cars along a ginormous track. Hopefully, those kids will forever cherish the memory of the the summer that James May came to town and created some magic.

With a little help from a constantly refreshing playlist of Brad Paisley, Tim McGraw, Wynonna Judd, and Faith Hill (all the four- and five-star tracks for each artist, limited to 50 songs, automatically updated by least-often played), I managed to write twice as quickly as I was meant to do, and finished my NaNoWriMo project this morning. I’ll be uploading chapters for a few days yet, as we’re only up to Chapt 27 online and the final thing runs to 36 chapters, plus Prologue and Epilogue. I haven’t included the Prologue in the online version, because I didn’t write it till over halfway through.

I’ve managed to write 90,633 words since the 13th of October, which is probably going some, even for someone as habitual as I.

One tool I’ve been using, which surprised me by being absolutely perfect for the task, is Scrivener, a piece of software from Literature and Latte, that enables you to keep working, counting words, and referring to notes in one seamless interface. When I first learned of it, via the NaNoWriMo web site, I assumed it would be like a lot of these things, a piece of software that if you took the time to learn it might prove useful but that you’d never have time to learn it.

But one whizz through the interactive tutorial was all I needed. I decided to give it a go, and within a couple of days I was really enjoying it. It does so many little jobs so well, and it encourages you to work in a really organised and focused way. Above you can see the “corkboard” view of my entire novel, and here below is the “corkboard” view of the various notes I was keeping track of. Once you’re editing, you can quickly refer to a note, to a previous chapter, or even refer to both at the same time by splitting the window. The search feature is useful, too, allowing you to quickly find a word or phrase you’ve used earlier, even in multiple locations.

As you can see, the notes section allows you to keep text files, images, and even web pages (simply drag the URL into the sidebar, and the entire page is saved, as it appeared in your browser).

As a text editor, it does exactly what you need it to do without any distractions, and I’m now looking forward to revising the novel in the same software.

My plan now is to let The Obald settle for a bit, then do some revisions before self-publishing on Lulu or similar.

Side One

Side Two

Having decided to set the first half of my NaNoWriMo novel in 1983, I’ve been recalling things to mind. It was a big year for me, anyway, and I remember the soundtrack to the office Christmas party very well (Karma Chameleon, Let’s Dance, Every Breath You Take, Uptown Girl… I could go on), but I didn’t like any of that stuff myself. In fact, I was a little bit buried under a rock at the time, and wasn’t aware of what was happening in what turned out to be my kind of music… yet.

It was a few years later that a friend introduced me to what was then being called New Country (christ knows how he found out about it) by lending me a tape with The Judds, Dwight Yoakam, and Randy Travis on it). But I wondered, what if my lead character is (even) hipper than me, and is into country music in 1983 — what would there be? No Steve Earle, no Dwight, no Randy, no Mary Chapin Carpenter, but what would there be?

So I looked into things, and came up with a 90-minute mix-tape, of stuff released in ‘82, ‘83, and a couple of years before that. There would be more interesting stuff, but (criminally) it’s really hard to get hold of – for example – early 80s John Prine stuff, or the Pure Prairie League with Vince Gill (you can get them without Vince Gill easily enough), so it’s a bit like stepping back in time in itself when you try to find these things.

I’ve compiled at as two iMixes – approx 45 mins each. Interestingly, none of it sounds terribly dated. I’ve always loved that timeless feeling you get with country music. Surprisingly, I think, the most lively and up-to-date songs on the 1983 Country Mix Tape are the Nanci Griffith songs, which come from her album Poet in My Window. Sounds to me like it could have been released yesterday.

It all sounds very much like it sounded three years later, the so-called “break-through” year of 1986, and yet a lot of this stuff was blown away by the likes of Guitar Town, Storms of Life, and Guitars, Cadillacs Etc. Etc. Which seems unfair, when you listen to this. I know that for a lot of people these artists (particularly Emmylou Harris) never really went away, and a lot of people never got into the 1990s wave of new stuff, which in its turn blew Randy Travis (for one) away. Funnily enough, George Strait (who I never warmed to) just went on doing his thing, and picking up CMA awards, while the world was pulled down and reconstructed around him again and again. That’s what wearing the hat is all about, I think. It’s probably a hard hat.

Not retiring, or committing blog suicide, but doing NaNoWriMo for month of November, and because I actually hope to write more than the 50,000 word target, am starting early.

Work in progress can be found here for time being: The Obald

So I read and enjoyed my copy of The Triangle by Rashbre. The Triangle was the result of the National Novel Writing Month experiment, which runs each November. I’ve looked at it before but not been in a position to participate. I feel like this year, no longer being such a newbie as a teacher, I might be able to squeeze it in. Writing 50,000 words in a month should be no problem for me. I have verbal whotsits, though I might have to put blogging on the back burner for the duration.

I recall even buying No Plot? No Problem!, the accompanying book, though for the life of me I don’t know what happened to my copy.

I was also fascinated that Rashbre went the extra mile and published his book. I almost did this with my last novel attempt (2005/06); I was looking at services like Lulu, but I’ve always felt that novels should be edited before publication and so I stopped myself. My one criticism of The Triangle is that an editor might have improved it to make it tighter and more gripping. But then it might lose the charm it has as the result of NaNoWriMo. I’d like to see some kind of reciprocal National Novel Editing Month appear, in which people swapped manuscripts and improved the work, say in January or February.

There’s a lot to be said for DIY media (I say it all the time, in a professional capacity). I accept DIY music (and do it all the time, most lately via Bandcamp), and I accept DIY filmmaking, whether it’s the Duplass Brothers or The Hunt for Gollum. But the wannabe writer in me still feels scaredy cat of that old pejorative term, vanity publishing. It’s clever marketing, in the end, to convince people that there’s something less respectable about self-published work, as if there’s something inherently better in a book published – for example – by a branch of the News Corporation Evil Empire.

As if professional publishing was such a noble profession, with its unreadable celebrity ghost-written pap, and its inability to recognise even its own pockets of excellence (Kim Stanley Robinson got the Booker judges bang to rights recently). So I really do need to get hold of myself and accept that self-published efforts like The Triangle are the future.

My future, anyway.

This is cheating, but when inspiration strikes, it strikes.

At a shade over 1.83 m in his size 9 Doctor Martens, Ronnie Smith was just tall enough to reach up on tip-toes to unclip the faulty fluorescent tube in the small kitchen at the top of the stairs. The flickering had been bothering him for days, and the so-called technicians in Common Services had so far failed to replace it. The office kitchen was now illuminated by the faded grey daylight from the high window. It would soon be dark. By four o’clock, people would start to complain that they couldn’t see to boil a kettle. Common Services would be called.

Ronnie went back to his desk, throwing the tube into a waste bin on the way. It was November 1st, 1983, his one-year anniversary. He was officially out of his extended probation period.

The small kitchen was at the top of the main stair case in Bruch House, in the section reserved for amenities like lifts, plumbing, and entrances. To reach the main part of the office meant crossing a small enclosed bridge which reminded Ronnie of the ones over the motorway at service stations.

Through the double doors, round the filing racks, and back to his swivel seat in front of the green-on-green VDU screen in Information Processing. Studied look of innocence maintained.

The fire exit staircase was at the other end of the floor, through a grey push-to-open door with a lock but no key. The green Fire Exit sign appeared to have fallen from the wall above the door some time before Ronnie started this job the previous November. Common Services had yet to replace it. If the Health and Safety people on Floor 13 ever found out, there would be trouble, but nobody from Floor 13 ever visited Floor 4.

Ronnie logged in to his terminal, and while he waited glanced through the sealed window at the building opposite, which showed no lights. He wondered if she was there. If she was there, wouldn’t the lights be on? It was too grey outside and the windows opposite too small for anyone to be working by natural light alone. So she wasn’t there, couldn’t be. Other floors in the same building showed lights, and Ronnie could see people moving around over there through the small gaps in the window left by piled up files, empty vending cups and cardboard wall planner tubes.

What if she was there, sitting in the dark so as to better see across the way at his window? The street below was narrow, part of the town’s legendary one-way system, and frequently blocked by delivery lorries. The buildings were almost close enough to lean over and touch. Ronnie’s building had 14 floors; hers just had the five. Nobody knew the name of the Department in Ronnie’s building; her building, King House, had multiple occupants. He thought she worked for Douglas and Graham, solicitors, but he couldn’t be sure.

Common Services were on the floor below. There were three of them. Mister Nibbs, who seemed impossibly ancient, wrinkled, grey, smoky; Norman, middle-aged, mousy, bespectacled, and nominally in charge; and Nick, the young one drafted in to do the heavy lifting. All three came up to help in the Post Room first thing in the morning. Mister Nibbs, always smoking, would often bring the conversation round to his experiences during the War. Not the Falkland’s War, the 1939-45 war, which Nibbs had spent malnourished in forced labour camps somewhere in South East Asia. Nick, the young one, pretended to be keen and ambitious when Management was around, but Ronnie had caught him playing table tennis on Floor 2 on more than one occasion.

Floor 2 contained the store room, Nick’s domain, as well as the staff lunch room. The lunch room had a water boiler, plumbed in, a sink, and a table tennis table. There were three table tennis bats and two balls, which could be popped back into shape as required by the water boiler. Ronnie liked the smell. There were a few comfy chairs, no longer considered presentable enough for Reception. Occasionally, Nick timed his goofing off wrong, not realising the time. He could be found playing table tennis with Trevor, or Adam from Floor 1, the Inspectors.

Ronnie rarely visited the lunch room, preferring to spend his lunchtimes in the pub below the building along with the rest of Information Processing. Today he’d spent about an hour and a half down there: the joys of flexitime. The pub below was called The Office. It was modern, garishly lit, with chromium on the bar and a jukebox full of recent hits. The Office sought a trendier crowd but received a downtrodden, downbeat collection of disillusioned civil servants — often on their way back from union meetings. The Office was stocked with the latest trend in ready-mixed cocktails in little silver bottles. Ronnie was hooked on Sundowners, which had a lethal effect on his stomach.

The fire escape door squealed as it opened. Most people used the back stairs in preference to the main staircase across the bridge. The back stairs were bare concrete and poorly lit, but it seemed marginally quicker if you went that way. Across the array of filing racks, Ronnie could see Mel walking past on her way to the post room in the corner of Floor 4. Mel was from Floor 5: Compliance. Ronnie tensed and tried not to show it. They’d been out a few times, a couple of films and a few drinks, but she had another boyfriend who worked on the London Underground. Ronnie had seen him once, from a distance: skinhead. Since then, he’d been trying to compute Mel’s rationale for going out with him, what she was playing at.

It was on the first date she’d told him. The only reason she could do this, she said, was because Paul, the boyfriend, worked shifts. This week, he was on Lates, so Mel could see a film with Ronnie. Ronnie had immediately readjusted his expectations of the evening: this was just two friends seeing a film together. But then, waiting for her bus on a bench in the town square, she’d kissed him. More dates, and more confusion, followed. Mel was 17, Ronnie was nearly 21 — but he was out of his depth and knew it.

Mel walked past again, on the way back to the fire stairs. She didn’t look over.

Dave Cooper approached. “Cocktails after work?” Ronnie shook his head.

“Got a gig on Friday. Band practice tonight.”

Ronnie had been pursuing a career in the music business since leaving school. He played guitar and sang, but he knew he was out of step with the times. The previous year, ABC had been on the jukebox in every bar he frequented. This year, it was Culture Club. Guitar music was for chumps. Still, he and his bandmates went through the motions, rehearsing every Tuesday evening on the shop floor of a factory workshop. Jim, the drummer, was a key holder, so they were free to borrow the space and electricity for a couple of hours. Now and then, they played small clubs and pubs. This Friday, they had a gig at the local bikers’ hang-out, The Crown. The back room at The Crown held about 100 and served no less than two different types of beer.

Miguel Muniz stalked past muttering about the broken light in the kitchen. Muniz was one of the floor supervisors, the Higher Grade, who signed off on all the work and pretended not to be noting down the exact comings and goings of everybody on his side of the building. Muniz was in the Territorials and boasted about his supporting role in the Falklands Conflict the year before. It had all been over before Ronnie started in the Department. As Muniz sat down, Ronnie checked his watch. Quarter to four. He’d never quite got used to the working life, and still found his attention and will to work flagging at the same time each day; the time he used to finish school. Another one of the joys of flexitime: he usually finished work at four o’clock, cycling home on his Raleigh touring bike, making it back to his poky flat by half past, most days. He was an early riser, and usually arrived at work with Mr Nibbs, who unlocked in the morning at 7.15. Ronnie sometimes helped Nibbs open the post, tolerating his stories about the Japanese.

He looked across the street again, through his own slightly haunted reflection. Still no lights. He’d first noticed her at the beginning of October. The space by the window, previously empty, had been filled by a yellow paper flower in a small vase, and the profile of perhaps the most beautiful girl Ronnie had ever seen.

He reached onto his top tray for his last file of the day. White, Edward J. Retired teacher, 67. Name included on petition signed requesting government inquiry into sinking of General Belgrano, Argentinian navy cruiser, in May 1982. Ronnie looked through the information in the printout: National Insurance number, post code, shoe size, acronyms listing memberships of RAC, RSPB, N(ational) T(rust). He entered the national insurance number on his terminal and hit return. The records returned after a few seconds showed that White had attended an anti-nuclear protest rally in Hyde Park three years before, just after he retired from teaching at a local comprehensive. The name was recorded on another petition more recently, urging the government’s public enquiry to find against development of the Sizewell B nuclear reactor. No activity since then. Ronnie added the Belgrano petition to the list of activities recorded against White’s name: this was the third time he’d come across the Belgrano people this week. Ronnie put the paperwork in his out tray for filing, and then carried the contents of the out tray to the filing table. Someone, not him, would put it away in the morning.

There was still a lot of paper, and the middle part of each floor was packed with filing racks and shelves, filled with identical blue files carrying the variety of coloured plastic tags known as BF tags. The VDU terminal was a recent addition to the office, but most of the work was still printed out or written down. One of Ronnie’s main jobs was to gradually update the centralised computer records with the contents of the paper and cardboard files. It was soul-destroying work but there was plenty of it.

At two minutes past four, he headed for the fire exit and the back stairs, pulling on his army surplus padded jacket against the November wind. He thumped through the rear entrance on the ground floor and fumbled for his bike shed key on his key ring in the fading light. The bike was dry, but he had no lights and sunset was about 30 minutes away. Luckily, a little bit of drinking at lunch time always helped him go faster. He pedalled out onto King Street and took one more look up at the dark fourth floor of the building opposite before heading off up the road.

In his nightmare, Ronnie often found himself lost on the ring-road, not sure of the quickest way out of town, wasting energy looking for the right exit. Rather than cycle against the one-way system, he cut through the alleyway to Bruch Street, and then freewheeled down to the junction opposite the new McDonald’s restaurant.

That night at the factory, Sam the bass player had interesting news. He’d inherited a few grand from his grandmother and wanted to spend it on making a record.

“We could hire an 8-track, set up in here and record it over a couple of weeks. What do you think?”

Ronnie shrugged. The band had enough material for an album, but he wasn’t seeing any future in it and was made uncomfortable by the idea of Sam wasting his inheritance chasing a dream. Still, the others were into it. There was no reason why they couldn’t use the free electricity in the factory for another few nights a week. So they agreed, and it was left to Sam and Jim to look into the hire of the tape machine. Ronnie agreed to work out which of his songs they should record and to work out some arrangements. The other guitarist, Steve, said he’d borrow his brother’s fancy new Yamaha DX7 keyboard. The brother, The Boy, wouldn’t be welcome as a full-time member of the band, but he did have his uses. While Ronnie secretly hated and feared the whole idea of synthesis, he realised that some up-to-date sounds might give them a chance of getting something played on the local radio station.

He walked home that night feeling slightly more hopeful. As he opened the door to his flat, he could hear the phone ringing in the main room. By the time he reached it, it had stopped. Mel? Ronnie looked at the clock: five to eleven. He decided to go to bed.

For one such as myself, mildly obsessive about type, the fact that since the Snow Leopard upgrade my system’s font usage has been completely fucked up is deeply upsetting.

It started shortly after the upgrade when the font menu started going squiffy in certain applications. Font A was substituted for Font B. Font C stopped working altogether. Pages and Keynote started issuing alerts and warnings when older documents were opened. One odd thing that happened was that some fonts of FFScala disappeared from the menu, with a different name substituted. This appeared to be the traditional font conflict (two fonts with the same ID), except it didn’t exist before Snow Leopard, and I couldn’t work out which was the offending font, since removing both, or either, failed to fix the problem.

I wasn’t sure if Linotype Font Explorer was the problem, so I tried using FontBook, and I tried physically moving problem fonts, and then I tried to get Font Explorer to fix the problem by clearing the caches and all the other system stuff it does, and I’ve ended up with a situation worse than the one I started with. I now look nostalgically back on the font problems I was having just after the Snow Leopard upgrade. Wasn’t it great when FFScala Italic disappeared?

Now, I have Gill Sans installed, always have done. It’s one of the basic fonts of Keynote templates. Keynote doesn’t even warn me it’s not there, it just substitutes Lucida Grande (which I hate) and when you try to use Gill Sans, nothing happens.

One of the things I hate about OSX is that — even when you tell it not to install fonts of other alphabets (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Dvengari etc.) — it fills your system with loads of fonts you have absolutely no use for, ever, which are always there no matter how many times you try to get rid of them. System fonts are sacred.

This situation is intolerable for me, and I’m tempted to back up, wipe down, and revert to Leopard. For this issue alone, Snow Leopard blows. Furthermore, my system throws up the Spinning Beach Ball of Death far more often than it used to, and “sleeping” applications take longer to wake up when you click the icon. Feel like smashing things up.

I appreciate the power of databases, I do. After all, we all deal with databases constantly, from iTunes and iPhoto to IMovie there’s a whole lot of databasin’ going on.

One thing I’d love would be a way to organise all my lesson presentations, handouts, vague lesson plans and student records. I already use Numbers for student marks, though persuading it to understand how the exam board gets from marks-out-of-80 to something called UMS which is out of 240 is beyond my powers. It’s not that I can’t do calculations; it’s that I think the exam board makes it up as they go along.

I downloaded Bento 3 to have a look. Fairly straightforward, and reminiscent enough of the FileMaker I once dabbled with many years ago to be easy to follow, but time is in short supply, so the idea of physically entering a ton o’ data seems like fantasy. I downloaded a few templates but none of them quite fit what I do (anyway, you’d still have to enter the information to get started) and some of them are simply bizarre, like the “Student Records” template which includes such fields as photo, email address, and telephone number. If I kept such info on my students eyebrows might be raised. Aside from that, why do I want such information if I’m not actually administering a school?

The same goes for other templates – all of them would need to be tweaked extensively to become useful and I just haven’t got the time. It amazes me that there really isn’t an elegant, pretty, UK-specific solution for this kind of thing, whether in the form of spreadsheet templates or database action. There are plenty of inelegant, ugly solutions, mind.

I spent the afternoon formulating a 5-year plan for my department. I’m teaching a lot of different courses at the moment and it can get pretty confusing. Believe it or not, my plan includes a couple of other future options (music technology courses) which would add to the confusion. I did it all as a spreadsheet, adding up the required teaching hours, which was easy enough. But there are other unquantifiable things, like classroom availability, equipment costs (from computers down to headphones and cables/leads) which have implications for the whole school and knock-on effects on at least two, possibly three, other departments.

One of the things that kind of I resent about this profession is having to (a) have a form; and (b) having to teach what I call the Daily Mail subject or SHEEP, aka, PSHEE, PSHCE, PSHCEE, SPACE, PSE, what-have-you. Taking a register and babysitting a form in the morning doesn’t require a teaching qualification, and having to teach stuff-your-parents-should-tell-you instead of my, you know, specialist subject, is always galling.

My measure of this kind of thing is always to ask, and is society better as a result? Is the sum of human happiness increased? We’ve had self-help, gurus, team-building, “enrichment”, citizenship education and their ilk coming out of our ears for years now, and I can’t see it making life any better. Maybe it’s just stopping it from getting worse any quicker, but that’s a depressing thought.

Anyway, I quite like the idea of teaching some kind of music tech course. I’d probably prefer to do it instead of at least one of my current GCSEs, so if push comes to shove, I’d drop one or both of them.

Just don’t ask me to teach DJ skills.

Every time I go a few days without having anything much to say on this blog, I start to wonder if it isn’t time to commit blog suicide. It’s not about angst or self loathing or being fed up with the world, it’s just that I hate the idea of an abandoned blog. My old blog, the Blogger one, ended up abandoned – mainly because I created a Catch 22 situation. Having deleted myself as one of the blog’s authors, I was then unable to administer the blog in any way. Given that the collaborating ones then abandoned it and only one of them had the ability to administer it, it just languishes, receiving the occasional bizarre or meaningless comment (I still get the comment notifications) which goes unmoderated.

It’s a sad little entity, existing only on page 723 of Google search results and occupying a few bytes of a hard drive… somewhere.