My snow trousers smell of campfire

Did I ever think I'd be saying such a thing? No. Which is one of the great things about adulthood, I think. You can keep surprising yourself. But they do: the campfire in question was built in the snow by a man I quite fell for, who also showed us how to cook sausages and (pictured) little cakes on long sticks. I don't eat sausages so he showed me how to cook a banana instead.

He also taught us about cross-country ski-ing (murderously hard work), snowshoeing (incredible fun: you can walk up anything!) and ice fishing (which I thought would be standing round a hole in the ice with a rod, but turned out to be a lot more complicated).

Other people took us snowmobiling (which I fancy I was quite good at) and husky dog sledding (which I think I was quite bad at), and still others cooked us lots of food, and gave us saunas and shots of Finlandia to warm us up. I still can't believe I went on a winter activity holiday (or any holiday with the word 'activity' in the title) but I am feeling hale and hearty and clean and serene. I'm not going to think about the pointlessness of existence, my impending middle age or the simultaneous packing up of all our white goods until at least next week.

joella

Backski

Actually, backski says it all really, I did a lot of falling over. Finland is great, it is wild and woolly and vast and empty, but friendly and has saunas. Which is a good job, because it is also Bastard Cold.

joella

Finland, Finland, Finland

You're so near to Russia,
So far from Japan.
Quite a long way from Cairo,
Lots of miles from Vietnam.

I have wanted to visit Finland for a while. I put this down partly to the song, partly to the Moomins (especially the Snork Maiden), partly to its groovy wallpaper and textile designs, partly to its mixture of Scandinavian and Soviet influences and independence of character. And partly to its Arctic proximity, delivering Aurora Borealis possibilities in the winter.

Adding these things up, a holiday in Finland seemed like a splendid way to celebrate my birthday, which is next Thursday, so that is where M and I are off tomorrow. There may be a slight break in sobriety (23 days so far) but another reason for going is the vodka. And the saunas. And the huskies.

Anyway. Back in a week, all being well.

joella

Down tools

Never have I seen hard hats look so pretty.

joella

Salad days

My mother is a nurse and has never worked in an office. I once showed her where I worked and she looked around her in wonder and bemusement. All those people just sitting at computers all day, she said. What on earth are they doing?

A very good question. One of the things they are doing is using stationery. There is a fantastic sign on a cupboard door downstairs, begging for a photo but I would need to sneak in after everyone's gone home. It says: This is the new stationery cupboard. Whatever is not in here is in the old stationery cupboard. Right.

Another is putting up Christmas decorations. There were six geese a-laying on our corridor (part of the twelve days of Christmas competition). What they were laying was balloons called things like 'critical thinking' and 'valuing diversity', and best of all they were pinned to the ceiling right next to the 'Danger: Asbestos. Do not Disturb Under Any Circumstances' stickers.

Finally, of course, is having meetings. If there are enough of you in the meeting, it involves sufficiently senior people and some of those people are Visitors, then you get sandwiches in for lunch. These are uniformly awful but you eat them anyway, and what's left you put out in the office for the less fortunate.

And eventually you are left with a tray of garnish. Which you put on the floor by the recycling bin and leave for people to make pretty shapes out of. I saw one of them doing it with my very own eyes.

Beats working for a living.

joella

Technology blues revisited

The iPod is working fine. The iPod is *great*. Apart from the things which are deliberately a bit awkward so that you buy accessories to make them easier. That's evil, but to be expected. But it does what it should and it does it very well.

No, it's fucking iTunes that's the problem.

Until I got an iPod, I used Windows Media Player, with very few problems. But Windows Media Player won't synchronise with iPods, because they are made by Apple and Microsoft hate them.

So I invested hours and hours of valuable sobriety in getting everything into the iTunes library in the right format (it won't take wma files because they are made by Microsoft and Apple hate them) and setting up preferences etc.

Plugged in my iPod and yes, glory be, it synchronised like a dream. Great, I thought, let's get some more music on there.

Ah. iTunes won't rip CDs on our PC. It should, but it doesn't. Occasionally it pretends to, but all you actually get if you play the track is a sad beep beep sound. So I have to rip CDs using Windows Media Player. And then go back to iTunes and add the new folder to the iTunes library as it doesn't automatically pick it up because it's made by Apple etc.

I've set up some great iPod playlists, and I thought I would burn a CD for someone as a birthday present. I spent ages playing with the order of the tracks, getting the exact right length for a CD, setting iTunes to burn them all at the same volume.

But it wouldn't burn via iTunes (should have guessed really). And I can't import the playlist into Windows Media Player as... etc. And now in the Windows Media Player library I have two versions of most tracks as there's the wma version and the mp3 version and I couldn't find a way of seeing all the information I needed by tiling windows so I was reduced to PRINTING THE PLAYLIST OFF so I could reassemble it. Except I didn't reassemble it. It was one kick in the head too far. Bastards.

This would never happen in the Culture.

joella

Bish bash Bosch

What I was planning to write about today was my impressive fruit and veg consumption, following a) the arrival in the house of a food processor and b) my setting up an extremely grown up and middle class arrangement with Abel & Cole, whereby they bring us organic avocados and celeriac every week (well, and more prosaic things like onions) and we pay by direct debit so it's not even like spending real money.

But instead I got home to find the dishwasher was bust. Kaput. On the fritz. Etc. Properly: we scooped all the water out of it, I sucked on various bits of pipework (through a tea towel, like *that's* going to stop me catching anything) and blasted various holes with my hole blaster thing, but we came finally to the conclusion that there was no blockage: the pump has gone.

Now I am deeply, some would say unhealthily, attached to my dishwasher, but the fact remains that it is ten years old, and I am not sure what to do. M thinks we should get it repaired as he comes from a make do and mend generation. I support this in theory but find it hard to believe Bosch are still servicing machines that are this old in anything like an economical way.

It will be ok. Of course it will. But in the meantime I feel overwhelmed by crud and complexity. It feels so much bigger than it is.

We had pasta and salad for tea, as it was gone 8.30 before we surrendered, soggy-kneed and smelly handed. The swede, leeks and parsnips stared at me accusingly from the side. And forget about juicing: even looking at the food processor generates a ton of washing up.

I'm off to watch Desperate Housewives. They don't have these kinds of problems.

joella

Another man done gone

As a nine year old, I learnt to play the flute at an after-school music club run at the local Catholic comprehensive school, now doing pretty well I hear but at the time a terrifying place with echo-ey corridors, scarred linoleum and endless teenage pregnancy rumours circulating in rooms with multiple near-identical projects about the Pope stuck on walls of institution green. I was scared. There were some friendly people there though, and one of them was a gentle boy a couple of years older than me, who was better than me but never made a point of it.

Nine years later, we were working together in a restaurant. I was on the bar, he was washing up. We got on. There was a work night out just as acid house hit Blackpool: nightclubs which weeks previously had been playing Whitney Houston and the Timewarp were suddenly home to gurning, sweating hordes in smiley T-shirts with whistles. We were all a bit bemused. We danced together and if I remember rightly he made a gentle pass at me, which I hope I gently rebuffed, though I was not known for my gentleness as a teenager.

I lost track of him for a while, but his mother and mine are great friends, so I heard about him from time to time, bumped into him occasionally in the pub when I went home to visit, and then more often when he started working in the local fishmonger's. The last time I saw him M was buying smoked haddock, and I wandered down the shop to say hello.

On Saturday, he died of meningitis.

I knew he was in hospital, and then I knew he was in intensive care, and then I knew he was on life support, so I at least had some idea, but I arrived in Lytham this weekend to find my mother looking very small and white, and telling me he'd gone. I went out in the evening and found myself telling a whole table full of people who didn't even know he was ill, but who all knew him, who had all known him all their lives. The next day, I found myself telling N&D, who were up for the day with baby C and who knew him too.

He was a lovely guy - quiet, but there in the fabric of the lives of a whole generation of kids who grew up together in a small town. And now gone, too quickly and far too young. It feels like we were all lined up against a wall and one of us taken out at random. It leaves you disoriented, a bit fearful and very, very sad.

joella

Gender in the city

A queue experience in M&S has just reminded me of a perfect illustration of the difference between sex and gender. Which I shall now share, as hey, that's part of my job.

M and I were in Sainsbury's the other week, and it was heaving. We were trying to find the best queue to join. I picked one where most of the trolleys weren't too full, but then moved down one when I saw that the cashier was a man. Always choose a woman, I said. That's a bit sexist of you, said M.

Ah no, I said. That is gender aware of me.

Supermarket checkout jobs pay badly - often not much more than minimum wage - and are often part time. These sorts of jobs are usually taken by women, who are more likely to have childcare responsibilities (early years, after school, school holidays). They need a job which they can fit round their other commitments. There aren't that many employers who will be that flexible, so options are limited.

Whereas men, if they are in work, are usually in full time work. They are much less likely to have a caring role during the standard working week, so they have far more choice of jobs. They are also much less likely to have taken a career break, and more likely to seek a senior position -- often because they are the main breadwinner in a family. So they tend to work more hours, and they get paid more per hour.

So a woman on the checkout in the supermarket is fairly likely to be capable of doing a far more sophisticated, better paid job, she just isn't. She may well also have been doing the job for a while, she knows it inside out, knows what to do when the till roll runs out and what the difference is between a Danish pastry and a Chelsea bun. She can also often scan significantly faster than you can pack, and she keeps an ultra-beady eye on the pen so it doesn't walk.

There are far fewer men, and the ones you see tend to be either teenage boys waiting for their lives to start and chronically lacking in social skills, or friendly but awkward adult men who seem to have learnt how to interact from a book, make well-intentioned but desperately inappropriate comments, and whom you can't quite imagine surviving in a less rule-bound enviroment. It's my guess that either way, most of them live with their mothers. Who are quite possibly working on the next till along.

These are of course generalisations. My ex-local supermarket was staffed seven days a week by a woman with no neck who went purple with anger if anything happened that she wasn't expecting and hadn't personally authorised. And the middle eastern supermarket down the road is staffed solely by men who have the price of everything in their heads and weigh things in their hands.

But following the law of averages, if you find yourself in a hurry in a supermarket, choose a till with a woman on it. This is nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with sociology.

joella

Paradigm shifting

Two things I have had to get my head round recently that the average twelve year old will probably take for granted.

1. Not deleting stuff. Who needs to, when you've got Google search technology? Chuck it all in a bucket and then look for what you want when you want it. You'll never need it again? No big deal. Space is cheaper than time.

2. Not having a stop button. iPods don't need one, there's nothing to wear our or stretch. You pause it, or you turn it off. I looked through the user guide seventeen times before this finally occurred to me. And it still feels weird.

joella

Spam bemusement

Viagra, I can see the point of, I suppose. In certain circumstances. Similarly, while I can't really believe it could actually a) work or b) improve likelihood of successful relationships with women, I can see why a man might want a longer penis.

But every other message I am getting at the moment is exhorting me to 'increase the volume of my ejaculation'. What on earth's the point of that? Bigger wet patch? A brief (and admittedly non-random) survey of women of my acquaintance confirms that less is definitely more.

So either I'm missing something, or this is a classic case of nobody bothering to ask the ultimate target market whether they actually want this product. Which may not stop men buying it, but the average woman is likely to be as pleased as my mum was the time my dad bought her a four slice toaster for Christmas.

joella

Supercharging

In the Guardian magazine on a Saturday they have a little profile section, where they ask people questions like 'do you believe in monogamy?' and 'what is your favourite smell?'.

Another is 'what single thing would improve the quality of your life?'. You're supposed to think 'world peace', or 'collective ownership of the means of production' or something, but right now the single thing that would improve the quality of my life is a universal recharging device.

Ten years ago, I had no recharging devices in my life at all. Then I got a mobile phone, which had a battery that lasted about eight hours (unless you actually made a phone call, in which case it lasted nearly as long as you needed to talk for). Enter carrying a recharger around all the time.

It got better a couple of years later as phones improved, and now I only have to charge my phone about once a week. But then a year ago I got a digital camera, transforming and life-improving in many ways but which has a battery that needs charging every few days if you use it a lot, and every few weeks if you don't.

And then for Christmas I got a pocket GPS machine, which has *two* chargers, and a mini iPod, which has just the one, but it's not like anything else you've ever seen. Both the above (and the camera, come to think of it) also have other leads to attach them to PCs.

I should not complain, as I am very lucky indeed to be a girl with so many gadgets. But my question is this: all these things need to charge from the mains. So why can't they all use the same kind of charger? Then everyone would have one. And offices and public places could have charging points.

Ten years ago I needed a pocket full of change for the phone, new Duracell in my Walkman, an A-Z and maybe a spare film for the camera. Now I need a bag full of bespoke black and white spaghetti. And of course the one thing that dies is the thing you don't have/can't find the charger for. I have no idea where my camera battery charger is. All I do know is that if I need to buy a new one it will cost me a screaming fortune and I am Not Happy.

That's before I even start on wma and aac music formats and their refusal to acknowledge each other's existence. Technology companies are all bastards.

joella

Still dry. Reflective.

Six days. Last time I did this it was the first time I had done it. I expected to become a bouncy morning person with an appetite for physical exercise and unmatchable joie de vivre. In January. While giving up smoking. And starting a new job. Yeah, RIGHT.

This time round it's much the same. I can't wake up to save my life. I feel like I am sleeping off an 18 month hangover. Which might well be true.

But I feel quite calm, which is an unusual feeling for me. I am usually wired and anxious after anything that reminds me how fragile we are, how much of my happiness and security is happenstance, and how temporary it could all turn out to be.

I think natural disasters are easier to process than conflicts or terrorism, even ones on this scale. At some level, there's nothing you can do: some people would have died no matter what kind of world we had created. At another, you can get angry: most of the people who died were poor, and living vulnerable lives in vulnerable places. *That* we could do something about. And we fucking well better.

Last night I was home alone. I sat in our newly minimalist living room (no tree, no coffee table) under a blanket, drank a pot of camomile tea and watched the fantastic Desperate Housewives. I felt peaceful. It was a welcome feeling.

joella

Television star

I got a bunch of emails yesterday from people telling me they saw me on TV. I was very excited as I have never been on TV before, except in the audience of It's A Knockout in about 1978.

This time it was while I was doing a shift on the tsunami donation lines. I was only one of many colleagues, but I was the only one wearing a jumper which matched the DEC posters, so I expect that's why they chose me.

It's quite sad to be excited, but probably sadder is the fact that I didn't see it myself, so I carefully tracked it down on the BBC website *and* worked out how to configure Realplayer so I could take a screen grab (which normally come through blank from streaming media). But I have wanted to know how to do that for ages. Vanity is the mother of investigation.

joella

Dry. Pensive.

Three days sober and counting! No alcohol till easter is the plan. It's going fine so far, though I have lots of spots. This could be time of month or it could be my liver detoxing. It was quite a toxic festive season.

But it's over now. Back to work with a vengeance tomorrow: I've been in a bit already, but everyone's back in the morning, and it will all kick off. Bleat.

On the bright side, I might get to blog more. M got Half-Life 2 for Christmas (not from me, I hasten to add) and the computer has been somewhat taken over by a series of boys shooting things and saying 'wow'.

There's probably a way I can blog from my new Pocket PC, but I don't know how to hook it up to the wireless LAN. I'm just techie enough to be frustrated by what I don't know how to do, that's my trouble.

Among others, but I shall take those to bed now and muse on them.

joella

So. Farewell then, 2004

  
  
  
  

Row 1 - January: Taj Mahal, New Year's Day. February: Tate Modern, Valentine's Day. March: Quince flowers.
Row 2 - April: Grape hyacinths, Easter Sunday. May: Table Mountain, Cape Town. June: Baileys with a view, Madeira.
Row 3 - July: Steward at sunset, Womad. August: Llangennith beach, Gower peninsula. September: Wheelbarrow wine cooler, M's birthday party.
Row 4 - October: Hallowe'en spider biscuits, Cardiff. November: Crisps in bed, Lytham. December: Christmas lights, home.

The temptation was to sit in and watch BBC News 24. Well, except that we don't have it. But you know what I mean. Instead we went out. Not to celebrate exactly, more to mark the end of one year and the start of another.

There was champagne, there was dancing, there was mayhem. We came home before 12 but there were lots of us and we were happy. We ate toasted cheese sandwiches and drank home-made sloe gin, and were only mildly diverted when M put his foot through the glass-topped coffee table, thinking (for some reason) he could walk on it.

And now it's 2005. May it be benign to us all, and may we be generous to each other.

joella