No country for old brands

This morning we found ourselves at a Welcome Break on the M42, needing a brief respite from lorry spray, tailbacks and general greyness. In the coffee queue, I saw a sign that awarded the southbound M42 outlet of this forgettably named hot-drinks-and-panini franchise five stars, for attaining '96% brand compliance'. I thought this was about the most depressing thing imaginable - although then I sat down and opened the complimentary copy of the Daily *spit* Mail, a brand from hell if ever there was one.

Closing it with a shudder, I drank my bucket of Americano and thought about brands. They are fascinating things. Brand compliance at the Welcome Break is about replicating the Coffee Shack (or whatever) experience. I may find the Coffee Shack experience soul-destroying (because what I really want to find on the M42 is someone offering tiny espressos and spicy noodle soup in a Vietnamese roadside stylee, and that is *never* going to happen), but there are times when we all look for the comfort of the familiar. For example, there was nothing to compare to my happiness when I sourced Laughing Cow cheese and Vimto in the Hot Place. You know where you are with Laughing Cow cheese and Vimto, and I needed to know where I was. Maybe some people feel like that after they've survived the M5-M6 merge, and Coffee Shack is there to deliver.

But if that's all there was to it we'd still all be driving Austin Maestros and cleaning our bathrooms with Vim powder, and Little Chef wouldn't be in so much trouble. We must all spend more, on new things, all the time, or capitalism will FAIL! (Um...)

Enter marketing, and hate it as I do (and I've linked to Bill Hicks on the subject before, but it's worth doing again) I have my buttons and there are brands that push them.

Sometimes, there's a brand that just gets it right. You want their stuff because it feels good, it looks good, it works better than anything comparable, it makes you feel good. It also tends to cost twice as much, but you think to yourself, maybe it's worth saving up for. And maybe it is. Apple, DeWalt and Le Creuset all come to mind.

But much more often there are the brands that you want because their marketing people have done a good job. If they've done a *really* good job you think these brands somehow help you say something about yourself. In my purchasing lifetime I've fallen for JPS, Ellesse, Aveda, Stolichnaya and Billy Bag, among many others, in this way. None of them worth the money (though my Ellesse trainers are now 12 years old and serving well on the allotment).

Somewhere in the middle there are the brands that help you navigate the overwhelming choice of everything everywhere. You have to wash your hair with something. You have to put something on your toast in the morning. You place yourself somewhere on the multidimensional axes of smell, taste, cost, quality, aesthetics, ethics etc, you make your choice, and if you've got any sense you stick to it. Here I would put Lurpak, Neals Yard, Fat Face, Moleskine, and the Co-op Bank

Having said all that, my Feelgood Wine Of The Summer for 2009 is Black Tower Pinot Grigio. Go figure.

joella

Up and down and round and round

There I was, thinking that I never did anything anymore except darn socks, explore cabbage recipes and stick pins in voodoo dolls of the Carolines next door, but it's shaping up to be quite an eventful spring.

Gigular, in particular. David Byrne played Oxford the Thursday before Easter. Wasn't planning to go, but then M read the reviews of previous shows and decided that we had to. And there were still tickets, so we did. It was awesome. There were tears, there was dancing (incredible on stage, impressively awful in the aisles), there was jumping up and down and shouting of THIS AIN'T NO FOOLING AROUND. And there were men in tutus. They can burn down my house anytime.

A far more select gathering was the spring outing of Nonstop Tango. They make it as difficult as possible for people to come to their gigs by having them in out of the way places and not telling anyone about them. Which is a shame in a way as I think they're getting pretty good. They can practise in my middle room anytime.

NST played in the Brookes Drama Studio... just around the corner a couple of weeks later the mighty Polly Jean Harvey played the main Brookes venue with John Parish. I *hate* this venue, it's an overcrowded misshapen muffled-yet-booming hellhole where they won't sell you a bottle of water with the lid still on and you can't generally see a damn thing unless you're six feet tall thanks to all the corn fed students with hats on jammed up the front. *But* Andy made me an offer I couldn't refuse and I'm glad I didn't. We wedged ourselves into a good spot in the middle, and she delivered a pretty amazing set - I didn't know much of it, but that made the screams even screamier. Pig Will Not is the song of the season.

And we've also been away to see the Finnfans in sunny Swansea, where we dragged a crippled child to the beach (above) in the boot of the car and later ate nettle tops. It was excellent, as ever, and also featured gin, before, during and after the Marriage of Figaro.

So it's not a bad life, all things considered, though I wish my gherkin seeds would germinate and my shower would stop blowing its fuse for reasons I Do Not Understand.

joella

Reality Checkpoint

... is a real place. Someone took me there once when I was a little, how shall we say, boxed. It's stayed with me.

So I was slightly freaked the other day when, walking up the stairs, I tugged at a corner of wallpaper till it started coming away. Feeling guilty (we have agreed to strip the wallpaper but we haven't actually agreed to start stripping the wallpaper, as we can't rewallpaper till we've rewired, and we haven't any money for rewiring, what with the Global Economic Downturn), I carried on up to my room. And then I saw on the wall, in tiny letters, in *my own handwriting*, the words PEEL ME.

Eight years nearly, we've lived in this house. I wonder when I wrote that.

joella

Spring cleaning

I finally tidied up my Blogger template. I'm not using Blogger Layouts, which would make it easy to add things and take things away, because I've been around longer than they have. I could switch, but then I would lose all my template tweaks, and there are quite a lot of them - the random top right photo code, the archive posts in latest-first order code, some of the styles in the stylesheet.

But not switching means I have to add widgets manually, which means delving into already fairly messy code with my rusting HTML skills. So nothing changed for a while.

But then I noticed that my Jaiku badge and my last.fm quilt had both stopped working, and I don't like joella to look neglected. So I opened up TextPad and got to work.

1. Links to Atom feed and old blogs are gone: the first is now irrelevant - surely everyone can do feeds these days - and the old stuff, well, I know where it is if I want to read it again, but why would anyone else?
2. Jaiku = out. I had high hopes when Google bought it, and I liked the multiple feed 'activity stream', though it seems to have broken when they closed down for the Google migration, and I can't work out how to start it up again. And generally, I think they might have missed the boat. Though I'm keeping my account, just in case. It has cool.
3. Last.fm album quilt - I didn't fix this but changed instead to a 'recently played' list. I use last.fm all over the place now - with iTunes, on its own and with the awesome Spotify, so it's a better reflection of what I'm actually listening to than it used to be.
4. Twitter = in. I resisted for a long time, but then two things happened: first, I realised that several people who aren't on FB and I want to be in touch with *are* on Twitter, and second, the Facebook Twitter app meant I could update FB status via Twitter. They're a little bit different, I know, but I don't like the tedious RTing of bit.ly links that seems to make up the majority of (*shudder*) Tweets at the moment. It will evolve as a medium, I'm sure though, and I do like the 140 character constraint. Constraints are good for creativity. But yes, anyway, I've been using Twitter for a while, so it made sense to make the link. But if I start doing that blogging about updating Twitter and Twittering about updating my blog thing, someone please shoot me.
5. Tidied up the 'blogs I read' list. There are other blogs I read, but many of them are only updated v sporadically, or I read them for a very specific reason. So these are more like the blogs I would recommend. There aren't very many of them, but lots of my favourite correspondents just won't blog, dammit.

That's about it. And this is one of those posts that is mainly for my own future information. Sorry about that.

joella

And so to shed

It's a non-working Monday. I'm getting back into the habit.

One thing I have realised from a couple of years of mostly non-working Mondays (and quite a lot of non-working Tuesdays) is that I don't, after all, hate summer. No. It is mornings that I hate. If I don't have a reason to rise, then 11 is the earliest you're likely to see me. Quite likely later, in these days of wireless internet access, or if I am reading a good book.

I wish it were otherwise, but it's not, and I've gradually come to the conclusion that it's hard-wired. It gets gradually better with age -- was a time you wouldn't see me before 3pm -- but in those days my phamaceutical intake was more creative and I regularly stayed up till dawn. But I am not, never have been and never will be a morning person. In the winter, this doesn't feel so bad (except on the days when I don't get up till it's actually dark, those aren't good) but in the spring and summer it feels like a criminal waste to still be lying in bed managing anxieties while the man next door but two with the mail order bride* has been up and tending to his brassicas for, ooh, hours.

It is the modest ambition of the rest of my 30s to come to terms with this shortcoming. When I think about it, it has shaped my life. I have never commuted to work, I simply can't get up early enough, so my career has been defined by the jobs available within five miles - this makes me green, but that's an accident, not a design. I never went to nine o'clock lectures at university, and have but a sketchy understanding of the thoughts of Hobbes and Locke as a result. I don't make weekend plans before lunchtime. I have only very briefly considered having children, and one of the (many) reasons for not doing it is I couldn't face the early starts. I have never caught the worm. Our household motto is 'seize the afternoon'.

And I don't think that's going to change. So my new working hypothesis is 'that's ok'. Lots of good things happen in the afternoon, and I'm about to go and plant my gherkin seeds to prove it.

joella

* No empirical evidence of this. But I can't imagine this union happening any other way.

Same old shit, different century

Not a great week for the ladies. Over here, we find out more about the man who killed his wife, daughter, horses and dogs before burning down his house, like they were so many things to cross off a list. Rich and dead, or poor and alive, I wonder which they'd have chosen if he'd bothered to ask them?

Over there, we have the public flogging of a teenage girl, for being in the same house as an electrician, at whom she may or may not have made eyes. The government are at least protesting, which is more than can be said a bit further over there, which is busy legalising rape within marriage, and making it illegal for women to *leave* the house without their husband's permission, unless it's an emergency, like maybe the electrician coming round.

Says one over there MP: "Men and women have equal rights under Islam but there are differences in the way men and women are created. Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters."

Now a) if you don't see them that's because you're not looking, and b) I don't quite see how firefighting relates to consensual sex and personal freedom. But that's possibly because I'm, you know, a little bit weak.

And back over here, of course, there was Masturgate. Clearly Ms Smith has not covered herself in glory of late, but now we've all had to think about what her husband's been covering himself in, I can't help but feel sorry for her.

If it weren't for Michelle O, it'd be hell in a handcart all round at the moment.

joella