Currency...

After a summer spent computing exchange rates in my head and getting to grips with foreign notes and coins......



(Hong Kong notes: some these appear to have been printed by my bank, which I wouldn't trust to produce anything secure or technical...)



(Australian notes: all of which have a see-thru bit and have gone "polymer" meaning they can be recycled into bins and other stuff at the end of their life...)(not my fingers, by the way...)



(Australian coins: which have kangaroos and koalas and echidnas on the one side, but are reassuringly royal on the other...)



(She looks really grumpy, doesn't she...?)

It seems bizarre to come home and find the money is just as foreign...



2ps and pennies seem to be very prevalent already, but haven't seen the rest yet...



...only in the picture.

If you get asked what's on the front on a ten pence piece, you might hesitate then say "Britannia" or "portcullis" or "lion" or something else really random because we're a bit ignorant about something so common which we handle everyday, yet hardly look at.

Of course, what's really on the front of the ten pence piece is the Queen's head, because that's what's on the front of all the coins (something else most of us forget - the front is really the back and the back is really the front...)

That hasn't changed with the new designs, but the answer to what's on the back of the coins will now always be "a bit of shield...", which might make pub quizzes easier, but surely lacks a bit of variety...

Currently...

Currently have this view...



...as I type, from 25 floors up.

(Ab)Normal service will be resumed here in September. For goings-on in August, see the other side of the world.

OZ -6 (HK -3): Wired up...

I am in the process of not-quite-packing.

This is a procedure which involves gathering together things which might be necessary for my holiday without actually packing them into anything. The suitcase is still in the loft.

It's a very useful phase of the proceedings as I am also getting a number of other jobs done as a by-product. For instance, sorting out my "home file" (a product I swore I would never possess) while trying to find my passport in it. This involved a trip into town to purchase A4 filing wallets (or "slippy dippies" © Chris Kilby 1990s). These were cheap, which is good, because I could have just lifted some "used" ones from work... This led to several hours sorting out contents of aforementioned boxfile and categorising and shredding and wondering why, in the light of the advice I give my Dad, I still have the receipt for a printer I bought in 2001 and threw away in 2002.

Anyway, here is the collection of electronicage I have to take abroad...



USB cable, another USB cable with slightly different end (in white), camera batteries (why it can't take ordinary batteries, that you buy in a shop, I don't know...), charger for camera batteries, earphones for iPod, memory card for camera, USB stick to back up photos to avoid what happened to Tina's Australia photos, socket adapters to turn safe, earthed three-pin plugs into wonkily angled, two-pin, flimsy death-trap plugs, phone charger...

That's the luggage allowance gone then.

Trainspotting...

I'm not sure if this is classed as one of the Great Railway Journeys of the World, but me and my Dad went on the Settle -Carlisle Line on Friday. Didn't get much time in Carlisle (probably enough...), but that wasn't the point.

The line is now more widely used than it was when it was under the threat of closure in the 80s. This is mainly to do with the fact that it's been well marketed as a tourist attraction. It's a great way to see the western Yorkshire Dales...

This map shows the stations all the way from Leeds as captured by GPS along the route... (Just got geeky new phone which does that...)



The journey takes about three hours, heading up the Ribble Valley to Ribblehead where the famous viaduct is...



..and where we stopped for a look round. There's a great restored station with a very knowledgable live-in railway enthusiast station master. You can buy a postcard and other paraphernalia...

The viaduct is really huge. You only get how huge it is if you're standing underneath it, or when you see a train going over the top...



The line then goes to through Blea Moor Tunnel, into Cumbria and to Dent Station, which is at the head of Dentdale and the highest mainland station in England, and then past Ais Gill, which is the highest point on the line.

As you might expect, the views are spectacular all the way... the three peaks of Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside, many more viaducts other than (but none as big as) Ribblehead, beautiful dales and villages, plunging waterfalls and raging rivers, and the forests in the Eden Valley.

And then you get to see the other side on the way home!

I might become a trainspotter yet.

OZ -15 (HK -12): Too hot...

I am very excited that it's going to be winter in Australia. I like it being cold. (Actually it won't be cold, but it won't be boiling. It'll be comfortable.)

I've been so busy looking forward to the winter evenings, dark early etc that I totally failed to appreciate how hot it's going to be Hong Kong...

I realise there are ways of coping, but I really don't want to have to wear linen and sandals...

Branded...

I finally went to the Minnellium Dome last night...

Yes, I know, only eight years late, but nearly everything they planned for the minnellium was late. And still doesn't work. It's a British thing.

In those eight years, I've flown over it, driven under it, sailed past it, tubed through it, but never actually been in it.

It's bloody clever actually. On a very narrow peninsula they've managed to thread the Jubilee Line under the Blackwall Tunnels - that's four tunnels under the Thames in total - and construct this very iconic building on top. (Although I suppose it's not really a building - just a big tent - and the buildings underneath it are fairly ordinary.)



And, of course, for about the last seven years of the eight, no-one in their right mind wanted to go there because it was an ill-conceived, publicly-funded white elephant full of crap. It was all cultural - Mind Zone, Body Zone, Spiritual Zone - and no-one wanted to spend their "lee-zhure" time doing all that nonsense, even if it was inside a triumph of civil engineering...

So what happened?

Well, firstly, someone decided it would be better if it were full of things people actually wanted to do - shop, eat, go to cinema, see Bryan Adams in November (OK, not the last one...)

Secondly, someone else decided it would be good if people could actually get there, so they built the aforementioned tube line...

But most important, branding happened.

Someone, probably in what Eddie Izzard calls one of those "4 o'clock in the morning, stroky-beard meetings", came up with the ludicrous suggestion of calling it after a phone company.

O₂ is one of the most successful marketing exercises of all time. The phone company used to be BT Cellnet - deeply untrendy and lagging massively behind the likes of Orange and Vodafone. No clear identity and losing money and subscribers.

But now, the strength of the brand is overwhelming. It can be identified by the subtle blue fade of the corporate colour, the little subscript ₂, the bubbles, Sean Bean being all northern and reassuring on the ads, etc.



And now, not only has it made the Dome very cool and trendy, every person who goes there (23 000 watching Kylie last night, not to mention all the people eating and drinking and watching films) gets the brand lasered right through their eyeballs into their brains at every available opportunity.

The branding is so successful that The O₂ is the only fully commercial organisation to have what is effectively a free advert on that other icon, the tube map...



Now that is bloody clever...

Mammoth...

I think it's the warm weather and the long summer evenings (both of which I really can't be doing with) which have resulted in my house becoming a haven for wildlife. (Again.)

This doesn't bother me much - I am not mottephobic - but there is a big difference between moth being at rest and still, and moth being flappy and confused and fast and in your face, trilling away like some tiny, winged pneumatic drill.



This one had an appreciation of art and sat (? stood??) long enough on The Great Bear for it to be captured using the time-honoured glass/piece of card technique often used on spiders. And then it got let out of the window.

It will probably twitter back in again if I put any bright lights on.

And then I might get fed up and swat it.

We fill your homes with lots of groovy things...! *

It looks a bit like they are building IKEA in Southampton like most people build IKEA furniture.

In other words, they're ignoring the instructions completely, not checking they've got all the bits and going with a bit of gut instinct and hoping for the best.

This can be the only reason they've put the name up on one side before they've finished building the other side.



Or perhaps they are taking the obvious marketing opportunity of getting the sign up early to suck people in with anticipation. As if the several million square metres of blue wall didn't give you the clue as to what it was.

The Swedes are coming...

• IKEA Southampton Store info
• Latest photos (better than this one I took with mobile phone...)

* Mitch Benn...

OZ -21: Apparently...

...people do person does read this blog, which is all very encouraging and spurs one on into making a bit of an effort.

With this in mind, I have invested time and coffee in producing the very nascent map below.

It shows the basic route and main destinations and its creation, in that it was bloody hard to do, gives the lie to Google's corporate "do no evil" philosophy (see number 6) and drives a cart and horses through most of its design principles (especially number 3).



(You can zoom in pan about and look at an aerial photo of Heathrow, if you wish...)

I intend to add those groovy little place markers in various colours and styles to bring some actual tourism to what is currently only flights, and they may (or may not) appear on this map (see number 5).

OZ -22: Countdown has begun...

With only three days officially left at work now (but probably about seven or eight left unofficially) and with some other people (who had sensible Easters actually at Easter) having finished work for the summer completely, I thought it was about time to start looking forward to the holidays.



The last time I did this properly was in 2005 when I went off to New Zealand and it's been really good to look back at the blog and the photos from them to remember what we did and saw, what with memory failing through age, early onset Alzheimers etc.



Being as I'm going nearly as far again this time, I have decided to "temperately"* interrupt this blog (no imposition as I haven't written on it since April and no-one reads it anyway...!) and produce a self-contained "interactive postcard" of...







(I really spend too much time on the computer...)



There are several good reasons for this:

1. It's cheaper than phoning people;


2. You don't have to master any foreign language to buy stamps for real postcards (in this case, Australian...);


3. It's a good back-up for all the photos in case the memory card goes tits-up;


4. It saves making a real scrapbook like I used to do when I was little (my OCD meaning that I would only ever buy John Hinde postcards...);


5. It will give Ann Crocker something to read (I still have a dog in my boot that's hers... fluffy, not real, so don't phone the RSPCA...);


6. It will divert attention away from the fact that I have failed Project366 (but kept going longer than some...).

* © Nicola, Pinkney Hydro (someone will get that....)

Meet your chickens...

As Magda said...




..."it's bad enough having to read most of the crap that's written, without 'avin to look at a photo of the bastard that wrote it..."

Well, now it's poultry with egos too...



All I can say to Tesco is that I feel it's ethical enough to buy the locally sourced, Shiny Happy Farmers Free Range eggs, without 'avin to look at a photo of the chickens that laid 'em...

Papering over the crack...

It's not often you get to see an art work destroyed, but here it is....



It's Shibboleth again.

To create the crack, Doris Salcedo had to destroy the floor, so it can't be moved or installed elsewhere. Mending the floor destroys the art work. Destroy to create, create to destroy... It's, like, totally an aesthetic paradox and that....

It does, however, appear as though they are mending it with giant duct tape; which seems to be from the same school of civil engineering as the repair of the Huka Falls footbridge with a tile adhesive gun...

I think it was all a bit too clever for its own good. At least with the slides you were meant to fall down them...

* Thanks to Paul for the photo.

Welcome to Felpersham...

Hereford is a dump.

It's a grotty, featureless hole, masquerading as a city on account of a (rather small, squat, dirty) cathedral.

You know you are in trouble when the Hereford City Council website offers you this:



...a wonky black and white scan of a map from many years back. You can spend many a happy hour trying to locate the Tourist Information Centre. Go on, try it. I imagine that when you get there, the Tourist Information they offer would be "Go anywhere other than Hereford".

(It is helpful, though, to have the toilets categorised into Male & Female; Male, Female & Disabled; Female & Female Disabled; Male.)

Having just come from Cardiff, which is lively and cosmopolitan, Hereford is like being stuck in the 70s. Nothing opens after 5.30pm. The only things that were open after that? McDonalds, a Pizza Express (which I imagine is the height of sophistication for people in Hereford - "if you're celebrating, sit in the window") and a Beefeater.

If you're Welsh and crossing the border into England for a bit of a day out, say from Abergavenny or Monmouth or Brecon or Llandridnod Wells (Google maps...!) then you are going to be very disappointed. Cerys was right - "Every day, when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh..."; the little known next line perhaps being, "Because I don't live in Hereford..."

If I ever go there again it will really be too soon.

Urbi et Orbi...

Not your standard Papal Balcony affair, I'm afraid - just a few Easter things I need to get off my chest.

Stop moving it around...

It's confusing and inconvenient. Last Easter Sunday I was here...

(...where, coincidentally, it was also snowing)

...but that's not twelve months ago to the day - it was actually on April 8. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This year it's about the earliest it can ever be because the spring equinox was on Thursday and the full moon was on Friday, so here we are. No wonder Tesco had to have their Easter Eggs on display by Boxing Day...

It was stolen by Christianity...

As we all know, the days used in the calculation - spring equinox, all druids and Stonehenge; full moon, all witches and werewolves and magic - are totally pagan things and nothing to do with the crucifixion or the resurrection. This is because Easter was happily going on for donkey's years before Christianity hit Britain - as a celebration of spring, new life, fertility etc... hence bunnies, eggs, chicks. It was a celebration of the goddess of spring and fertility Estre (or Oestre or Ishtar) and the word comes from her. As does the word "Oestrogen"...

"Do you wish to remove unused files?"

I went to Church of England primary school, so stored away in my brain, taking up valuable space, is...

There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.

We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffer'd there.

He died that we might be forgiv'n
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heav'n,
Saved by his precious blood.

I will never need this for any useful purpose again in my life (ie. beyond blogging and quizzes)and yet I can remember it verbatim. I didn't look it up. Some kind of brain clean-up facility is needed, along the lines of the excellent example here...

Even at the age of 8, I remember being bothered about "without a city wall" because I thought that it meant it hadn't got one. It was only a green hill far away, why would it have needed one? Only as my grammatical understanding progressed did I realise it meant "outside the city wall..." (Makes mental note to use this construction more often in everyday speech to confuse people... "Where's Starbucks? Just down the way, without the front doors...")

I'm still bother'd by the whole rhyming of "forgiv'n" and "heav'n" and the sing-them-as-if-they've-only-got-one-syllable thing, both of which happen loads in hymns. I suppose it was because the tunes and the words were probably written by different people, maybe centuries apart, and someone had to crowbar it all together. Maybe if Rice and Lloyd-Webber had done it instead...*

Open the bloody shops...

Why are they closed?

It can't be to force people into church, because it doesn't work...
It can't be an objection to making profit, because all the little shops can open...
It can't be an objection to trading per se, because of car boot sales...

It must just be to remind us about suffering...

Sod health and education and social justice, in the next election I'm voting for whoever sorts the Sunday Trading laws out. Or moving to Scotland.


*Oh...

"Tell me Christ how you feel tonight
Do you plan to put up a fight?
Do you feel that you've had the breaks?
What would you say were your big mistakes?"

They did...

It must be the holidays...

...because emails with this kind of thing in usually go straight in the junk mail. And are usually from Tina. But on this occasion, thanks, Sarah, for wasting a considerable chunk of my Saturday morning! Baaaaa!



I haven't got above Bobbing Bobcat yet; I have only had one coffee though....

Whiteout...

The sun has come out now, but for the last couple of days it's been really cold. -6°C at its lowest and not much above freezing during the day. And foggy!

And this morning, although it hadn't snowed where my Dad lives, it had snowed a couple of miles to the east (closer to Russia).



Now, why couldn't it have done that at Christmas?

Don't try this at home...

...try it at someone else's home!

Happy Pancake Day!

31 down...

...335 to go.

I take lots of photos, but I'm not a good photographer. I have a medium range Canon digital camera, which I don't really know how to work unless it's on the automatic mode. Should I be required to take photos of fireworks, or on ski slopes (one of which I have done), it has built in settings for those. It also has "Night" setting, which doesn't really work. I've tried to take photos of floodlit landmark buildings (Eiffel Tower, Houses of Parliament etc) which always look fantastic in those shots taken by professional people, but always look over/under exposed, or blurred, when I do it. The nearest I've got to success is this...



Which is Grand Central Station, reasonably in focus, looking warm and comforting in what was about -2°C. I like it. Some more knowledgeable people than me would say the composition was wrong or the aperture/focal length/otherphototographyterm was rubbish. I don't care. At least it's not wonky... A classic case of "very expensive camera" + "photography course" + "subscription to Digital Camera magazine" ≠ "good photo"... But don't worry, she's my friend. At least she was until she read this... ;-)

SO. I'm now one month into Project366 (Normally Project365, but it's a leap year), which is a flickr group taking one photo for every day of the year. January has gone and I've not missed one yet...



That's the trendy montage, all the photos are here...

I'm ignoring the themes in the project, which the rules say you can do, because I'm setting themes alternately with Chris, who I used to work with. Complicatedly (?), we have decided to change the theme every six days, because 366 divides neatly by 6, so 61 themes for the year.

What is much more interesting than I thought it would be is looking at a selection of photos taken on the day from hundreds of people around the world. It's a real snapshot of... well, the lives of a self-selecting, flickr-using, digital camera owning, possibly OCD-suffering group of people.



I'll let you know if I make it to December.

Did I miss the pancakes...?

Only just been born, but in Tesco (which seems to have taken over my blog...) He is already dead.