Legal alien

This morning, I got to nurse my hangover in the Olympic Flame Diner on W 60th St in NYC, eating a three egg feta cheese omelette with fried potatoes, drinking bottomless coffee and listening to Pat Benatar. I couldn't have been happier.

This followed three days spent staying at the seriously weird and cool Hudson Hotel courtesy of the much less weird but just as cool Open Society Institute. I am doing a bit of guerilla knowledge management at NGO X using a platform that they have developed. I love these guys. They are thoughtful, serious and funny all at once, and I get to be the least geeky person in the room for a while. Loads to think about.

And they are fantastic hosts. I arrived on Monday a little dazed and confused, and fairly shortly afterwards someone said 'so if I took you out and bought you a beer would you drink it?' I knew from that point on that I was going to have a good time, and I did. There were frozen pomegranate margaritas, there was a long walk downtown to eat gelato in the new High Line park, there was some amazing food, and there were discussions ranging from democracy to permaculture to the origins of morality. It was, as we used to say in Blackpool in 1984, ace. *And* I did it without a credit card.

I said yes to everything because I don't know if I'll ever get back there. Which was a great strategy, and je ne regrette rien, but as a consequence I am now feeling like shit. Plus, I'm waiting for a delayed seven hour five time zone flight in an overcrowded JFK. It's going to be a long night.

joella

Guerilla plumbing

One of the many medium-level irritants for the politically aware water obsessive who lives in shonky East Oxford is pointless water wastage. You see it quite a lot round here, with our Victorian-era HMOs and their evil tightarse landlords and lazy letting agents. You hear it first... patter patter patter... in the winter it could be snow melting off a pitched roof faster than the gutters can cope with, pretty much anytime it could be broken gutters after heavy rain, but generally it's neither. It's a faulty float valve in a cold water storage cistern or a WC cistern, and it's pouring out of the overflow. 

For days. Weeks. Months, sometimes. Litres a minute, for months. In a region which is water stressed -- hard as that is to believe when it pisses down nearly every day -- because we have few reservoirs Down South, relying on our ground water supplies, and our ground water supplies are not replenished like they used to be because we have paved over every possible inch of land. Meanwhile we put in power showers like there's no tomorrow. Keep on like this, there'll be fewer of them, most def. 

In an occupied house, it's not hard to change a float valve. I've done lots of them in WCs. CWSCs in loft spaces are a bit harder, because of access, but still no big deal. But your evil tightarse landlord can't be arsed to spend the <£100 it would cost. In an empty house, it's even easier to deal with, just isolate the valve, or turn off the water. Deal with it later. But they can't even be arsed to do that. 

Last time there was such a leak on our street, I stomped into the letting agents at least three times. Every time, a smarmy slick wanker with a shiny tie said 'yes, a plumber has been called'. You are lying, I said, on the third occasion. And I *am* a fucking plumber, give me the keys and I'll do it. Oddly, it did get sorted shortly after that. 

And then a month or so ago there was another one round the corner, running down the outside wall of an empty house, day after day, week after week. Marginal plants were beginning to grow in the permapuddles. The letting agents had a sign up but it was broken, so the phone number was incomplete. Every time I saw it, I reached for my phone, sighed, vowed to Google them when I got home, never did. 

Last week, we were walking past the pattering house on our way back from a pizza we went out for because I came home from work needing to sink some red wine and have a big rant. There were wheelie bins littering the pavement -- the students left before their rubbish did and it's left to the permanent residents to put the bins back in the front gardens -- and I had an idea. 

The long-suffering M helped me manoeuvre an empty 240 litre wheelie bin into a position where it would catch the falling water. I'll come back for that, I said, and I'll wheel it down to the allotment and use it on the gherkins. (I had sunk some red wine, so wasn't really thinking through the physics involved here). 

Two days later, I walked past again. The wheelie bin was exactly where I'd left it, and full of water, as I would have expected. But the water had also stopped falling. Someone had turned it off. I wonder if a visible quarter-tonne of water in less than 48 hours (and probably less than 24) finally pressed some shiny-tied bastard's shame button in a way that damp brickwork and environmental sustainability messages just never could. 

I'd like to think it did. 

joella

Kicking against the pricks

One of those possibly ill-advised work-related posts. But hey. 

There's a pay freeze this year for UK-based staff at NGO X. I kind of get why. Were it up to me, I'd freeze the higher salaries and up the lower ones a bit, but it's not up to me. We do have a union, of which I am a member, and if there's an argument to be had, it's in a collective bargaining environment. It's a free country still, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. 

But there are some money saving measures which have been introduced with (to my knowledge) no consultation at all. For example, you can now no longer request a cash float if you are travelling within the UK, the EU or the US. You should use your NGO X credit card, they now say, or pay with your own funds and then claim it back. This is more cost-effective. 

Well, not for me it's not. I do not have an NGO X credit card. I also do not have a personal credit card. I once had the former, but they cut back on them a few years ago, and to be fair I never missed it that much. I have never had the latter.

But I will be in New York for work from 27-31 July, which is (to state the obvious) the end of the month. And at the end of the month, I'm skint. This is what happens when you have a fixed rate mortgage and a part time salary. And generally it's fine, because generally I can control my expenditure. But four days in New York will cost money that I will not have at my disposal and cannot easily access right now. 

My manager was happy to support the case for an exception, and I'm optimistic that, because I was brave enough to ask and she is senior enough to have influence, there will be a cash float forthcoming. But it's a dumb thing, speaking-in-a-personal-capacity, to have a blanket policy on. It assumes individual staff members have a) a corporate credit card, b) pillowed personal finances or c) easy access to credit, and a) are rare unless you are relatively senior and travel a lot, b) is a palpably unfair assumption and c) is what got the world into this mess. 

So I was recounting this saga to a colleague earlier today. I got to the 'and I don't *have* a personal credit card' bit. 

'Is that an ideological position?' he asked. 

Yeah, I said. Mostly. 

And it is, but not many people notice that. I could afford to pay my Poll Tax back in 1989 (I was at university and my parents basically said 'send us the bill') but I chose not to, because it was ill-thought through and wholly inequitable. If only those who literally cannot comply do not comply, it becomes something about them rather than something about the thing they are not complying with. 

Sometimes, you've got to exercise the choices you're lucky enough to have. On the whole, I don't believe in credit. Mortgages, yes, and microcredit, yes, but generally, if you can't afford it, save up for it and then buy it, do not buy it and then worry about how you're going to pay for it. So why would I *need* a credit card? 

And I can count the times I've wished I'd had one on the fingers of one hand. I may be weird, but I may also be the future. So now I need to work on that policy. Wish me luck.  

joella

A new Particle in development

I am delighted to be able to report that ex-housemate S is up the stick again. 

This is excellent news. Baby Tungsten, marvellous as he is, could benefit from a serious challenge to his current 'I am the centre of the universe and I will glare at you till you agree with me' world view. I know this because I had that world view myself once. Still do, some would say, but there's nothing like having to share to make you buck your ideas up and get devious. 

And given that this is *my* blog and therefore as much all about me as my two year old self was, I look forward to having another baby to talk about. If you're a woman in her 30s, a fair proportion of your peer conversations will be about babies. If you are child free / childless / a tragic barren spinster (delete as per your secret view on this issue), it's a bit of a challenge. It reminds me of the time all my friends were having driving lessons and I was still too young. I spent hours listening to stories of stalling and clutch control and reversing round corners and accidental dual carriageway encounters and I had nothing to say. But I knew I would learn to drive one day (predictably, by the time I did nobody wanted to hear my tales of driving my dad's car into a fence, not even my dad, dammit) and the same cannot be said of pushing one out. 

Enter ex-housemate S. Baby Tungsten has totally delivered for me here. I had the details. I have talked at length about his chucking up, his early love of salt and vinegar crisps (just like his mother!), his first deliberate breakages, his steadfast and admirable refusal to smile on demand. He rocks. 

But he's getting on a bit. The last time we went swimming (possibly the same day the photo linked to above was taken, those are my goggles he is modelling), he stood there in the middle of the changing rooms, pointed at me and shouted 'Jo's nipples!' with the unfettered joy of one who has learnt the name for something interesting since the last time he saw them. He has his own social life now, involving playdates, edutainment and nursery school. We still get on, but I sense our paths will cross less frequently. Which is cool. We'll always have Bracknell Coral Reef. 

And now Particle is on the way. I'm an old hand now. It will all be easier this time. 

joella

I went out drinking with Thomas Paine...

... he said that all revolutions are not the same...

This song came out in 1991, right in the middle of the last big fat recession. It's amazing how sharp it suddenly sounds. 

And its inspiration, Thomas Paine, died 200 years ago. It's amazing how sharp *he* suddenly sounds as well. Fairtrade cotton company Gossypium (based in his home town of Lewes) have just released a very cool T-shirt in his honour. I am tempted. As BB also famously (chez joella at least) said, the revolution is just a T-shirt away. 

Or maybe it's more the case that we just carry on reinventing a broken wheel until we go the way of the dinosaurs. In which case, I'm having one for the road. 

joella