Haven’t ever managed to get to one of these open days, but they always sound interesting.
– Taken at 6:50 PM on March 05, 2010 – uploaded by ShoZu
Archive for the 'General' Category
"Notts loves learning" – have a go at bellringing this weekend at Daybrook church.
Originally uploaded by nilexuk.
- Taken at 1:08 PM on February 09, 2010 – uploaded by ShoZu
- Taken at 12:20 AM on February 06, 2010 – uploaded by ShoZu
I’ve seen a number of reports that this is the worst winter in 30 years – including this from the Scotsman:
BRITAIN was in the grip of the worst winter weather for nearly 30 years last night, with widespread disruption and warnings that temperatures are expected to plummet as low as –20C by the weekend.
Up to 16in (40cm) of snow was forecast for southern England, while both rail lines and two major roads to the Highlands were among the key transport links blocked.
Supermarkets reported panic buying by shoppers hoping to stock up on comfort food and anti-freeze. Salt and cat litter were also being snapped up to clear paths.
One in ten people stayed off work yesterday because of the conditions, sparking concern from business groups that it would cost the economy £60 million.
And there were fears Britain could run short of gas after the National Grid warned major users for only the second time in 30 years to cut consumption, as demand rocketed by nearly a third
So, in honour of the occasion, I thought I’d post some photos of how I celebrated the last cold snowy snap in 1980 or 1981 (we’re not entirely sure)
(With thanks to my mum (pictured) for scanning a whole wodge of baby photos for my 30th birthday last year)
Thanks to the Jordan Cats.
With this change of decade as well as a change in year, the friends I see the new year in with both in person and on Twitter have been meditating about what they were doing in decades past and in decades future.
I can only really remember celebrating one decade before, and that was 1999. I was only one in 1979.
1989, the year I started secondary school, I have no recollection of New Year’s Eve. I would doubtless have been in bed before midnight. It might have been the year when we all went to my Grandad’s, and the parents promised to wake me when the clock struck 12. In the end, they weren’t able to, because Grandad had a drink or two and dropped off, blocking the door out of the sitting room.
1999 was a different ball game. I was a less happy person back then, and I was not in a good mood. I partied with a big bunch of people, and made a huge jug of margarita cocktails out of half of bottle of Cointreau and half of tequila, plus the juice of 15 limes. Then didn’t share it.
By midnight, we all walked into Nottingham’s Market Square to hear the Council House strike midnight, and the square was heaving. I was drunk, and unpleasant, and not really prepared to talk niceties to similarly drunk strangers. My friends got me out of there and my memories really end. New Year’s Day was spent horribly hangover sitting in a sleeping bag on a sofa with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon on DVD… and the decade just got better from there.
I’ve had New Year’s Eve with broadly the same group of friends since then. The parties have grown more sedate into dinner parties and murder mystery parties, and we no longer make the journey into the centre of town at all. Three years into, my partner, and now fiancé, P joined the crowd and felt much at home. This year we heated up a raclette and played boardgames and tried to keep small children and babies happy as well. Next year there will be still more children to entertain.
But the next time we change decades is a really scary prospect. One of those tiny toddlers will be in secondary school, as will my nephew. Some of us will even be worrying about turning 50.
Still, that’s a long way off. For now, let’s just celebrate the new year!
Every year I pledge to myself that this year will not be the mad dash to get cards written and in the post at the very last minute. I like to use Private Eye’s comedy Christmas cards (as do at least some of my friends, leading to us exchanging pretty much the same card for the last five years, which I personally think is hilarious, not sure what they think). So I think I’ll buy them in October when they’re ready, write them out in good time, prepare a mini-newsletter, and get them to the post long before Last Posting.
Never happens.
Didn’t happen this year either. I got the last ones out to the post at 4am two days after last posting – and that includes all the Euro ones, which were covered in 5p and 2p stamps from the back of my filing cabinet in order to get them to some approximation of the right postage for a 40g Airmail letter.
Still, for posterity, here’s the “nilesletter” I included with my cards this year.
One of the things that tickles me in the round of Council committee meetings I participate in each month is the plethora of different professions I am exposed to. Although my key interests on the council are on the transport / infrastructure side of things, I have made all sorts of forays into other bits. And every part of the council has its own special languages. Some of the words they use in reporting their work to councillors make me chuckle. Here are three recent examples
1 – “Dayburn”
Dayburn is how street lighting engineers refer to streetlights being on in the day. Street lighting is one small area of the Council that most people take for granted, until the light outside your house fails, flickers or is on in the day. At this time of year, hardworking councillors are out touring the streets in the dark noting down the numbers of failed lights.
If you live in Nottingham City and a light isn’t working – use this handy web form to report it to the Council. In my experience the emails you get from the website as a result of doing that are a little difficult to understand – but it does result in the light getting fixed within a few days. Don’t rely on other people to report it for you – some lights are out for weeks just because no-one reports it.
Nottingham is about to get a massive investment in streetlighting through a very long running PFI. Every street light will be replaced. The new ones will be much more energy efficient, resulting in more light for less power. They are changing the types of bulbs for ones which produce a whiter light, rather than the sodium orange we are all used to. The columns will all have the facility to be remotely controlled and remotely monitored, which should make “dayburn” a thing of the past. And it should be possible to dim them remotely and run them at less than 100% – although that facility will be used very carefully to make sure there are no knockon effects on crime.
2 – Sparge
Sparging is a fancy engineering word for cleaning, and when I first heard this word in a meeting about the district heating scheme, it nearly made me burst out laughing straight away. The person who said it dropped it into a sentence as if was the most ordinary word in the world and it was all I could do not to butt in and say, scuse me, did you just say “sparge” ? As it was, I made a note in a corner of a piece of paper and went home to look it up.
Nottingham has the largest district heating scheme in the UK, taking waste heat and steam from the incinerator and using it to heat thousands of homes in the St Anns area, as well as a huge number of municipal buildings and centres, including the Victoria Centre, the Broadmarsh centre, the Royal Centre and the Ice Arena. Steam is also supplied directly to Bio City where it runs the autoclaves and sterilising processes, and surplus steam is used to directly generate electricity. The scheme contributes to Nottingham’s success in generating its own energy.
But it’s not without controversy. The scheme has lost a lot of money in recent years, and the very idea of waste incineration is anathema to many environmental campaigners. My somewhat pragmatic view is that since the incinerator is there already, it’s much better to make use of the steam than not to. Tearing out the scheme and proving replacement heating systems for all the thousands of users would itself be an expensive thing to do that’s not in Nottingham’s interest.
3 – Dirty MRF (pronounced Merf to rhyme with smurf)
Waste management, one of the key roles for councils – in fact, bin collection is about the only completely universal service a council offers – has plenty of its own jargon, and key amongst those are the MRFs. It’s a phrase used so often that it’s now pronounceable as a word in its own right. A MRF is a materials recycling facility. If you have the sort of recycling bin where you mix up different types of recyclables, like card, glass and tins, the contents have to be taken to a MRF to sort them out. Clean MRFs sort out pre-sorted waste, but Dirty MRFs take a wider mix of waste, including kitchen and food waste, and sort out the reusable elements.
In Nottingham, our recycling bins are taken to a plant off the Colwick Loop Road where the lorries are emptied into huge piles which are shoveled onto a conveyor belt. The waste is sorted in a mix of automatic and manual ways – tins are removed and sorted magnetically, and then a small team of people hand sort the different sorts of plastic and paper. The tins are recycled into more tins. Some of the plastics are reused – milk bottles can easily become new milk bottles – but it is harder to find further uses for some other sorts of plastic. Some plastics are even recycled as fleecey coats! The paper and cardboard is taken a plant in the Netherlands where it is recycled as heavy board – the sort of board boardgames are made of, as well as the insides of lever arch files and the like.
I went on a trip to see the MRF at Colwick a few years ago and took a lot of photos I’ve never used or uploaded. I’ll pop ‘em on Flickr and return to this topic another day.
I’ve been a bellringer since 1989, when I learned to ring at St Mary’s church, Tenbury Wells. I kept it up when I moved to Leominster with my parents, and learned about as much as I ever have by 1995. In 1996, I went to university, and fell in with NUSCR. But here’s the thing. NUSCR’s practice night was Tuesdays, which clashed with the LGB group at the university, so I ended up alternating between the two, and never really committing to either. Ringing was fun, and always ended up in the pub; but the LGB group was pretty important in helping me come out and find gay friends.
Unfortunately, I’ve found that ringing is one of those things that you never really get better at unless you dedicate quite a lot of time to it. You have to do it two or three times a week to reinforce what you are learning and progress through the discipline. And at all sorts of times in my life, I’ve never organised myself to have the time to devote to ringing. And so it is that really, although I’ve been ringing twenty years, I haven’t made any progress in the last fifteen. One of the most advanced things I’ve ever done as a ringer was to get a quarter peal of Plain Bob Major in 2003. These days, I’d struggle to ring that, as I simply don’t get to practices on 8 bells very often.
So about 18 months, I’d sort of told myself that I’d quit ringing. I hadn’t made any real progress for years. My councillor work means I am often at evening meetings, which rule out regular practice with any one band. I don’t like getting up early at the best of times, and Sunday mornings (since the main reason for ringing is for Divine Service) are often the only time P gets for a lie-in, so it’s doubly unfair for me to get up early the one day he doesn’t have to.
And then I went shopping on a Friday night and heard the bells of Daybrook, Arnold, clattering across the car park. There weren’t many of them, and they weren’t ringing well, so I found myself thinking I’d just pop over and help out. I joined in and helped out. I probably haven’t helped the standard of ringing, but I usually add to the numbers. And doing that reminded me why it was that I liked doing this strange hobby anyway:
The people are great! I’ve had fab times with ringers wherever I’ve been – NUSCR had a wide range of fab people throughout all my university years, and although I’ve dropped in and out of their lives ever since, they’re still great. The people at the FODS, the gay bellringers association who have two tours a year – they’re great too! The people at pretty much any tower in the country when you turn up and say “I’m a ringer, can I get a ‘grab’” (ie can I ring at your tower because I haven’t run here before) will be welcoming and friendly. And the people at Daybrook are no exception. They’re great too.
The places. Being a ringer has taken me to all sorts of towns and villages I would never otherwise have visited from rural idylls to city centre churches. Ringing tours are fun. Churches are interesting places to spend a day dashing from one to the next, and although I’ve never systematically recorded the information or even completed the churches of one county, I’ve still had a lot of fun.
The access. As a ringer, you get to climb all sorts of staircases few other people have access to. You get rooftop views of cities, and privileged access to the exclusive upper reaches of cathedrals. You get to see buildings from whole new perspectives and see all sorts of fascinating things.
The exercise. I get precious little exercise at the best of times, so hoiking half a ton of metal through the sky at 60 feet a second must surely count as part of that.
oOo
Anyway, tonight, I scored a quarter peal for the first time in 6 years, ringing the tenor to a doubles method (which means: I rang the 6th bell to a pattern for 5 bells, so I wasn’t part of the method, just the person who always rang last – so I had an easier time of it than the other ringers, and even they weren’t taxed too much because it was a basic method.) We rang it as a 90th birthday compliment to a lady who lives within earshot, so hopefully she opened a window at some point and heard us at it. A passing ringer who did hear us told me on Facebook that it sounded OK, which was nice.
I’m going to try and get back into the habit of ringing quarters over the next year. Despite ringing the heaviest bell for just under an hour, I’ve not got any aches or blisters, which I’ve got before.
There’s a tradition at NUSCR that people get to ring a peal when they graduate – a peal is over 5,000 changes, and takes over two hours complete. In 2000, when I graduated the first time, we had at least three goes at getting a peal for me, but fate conspired against us and we suffered various setbacks – a rope that broke halfway through; an error in conducting, and a breakdown in ringing, so in the end, we settled for a long extent of 2,000 changes in the year 2000.
That means I’ve still never rung a peal.
So next year, I’m going to renew my efforts and score my first peal, hopefully to commemorate our wedding in October. Wish me luck. And let me know if you’d like to ring in it!
A while ago, I started putting the essays I wrote for my MA into a small section of my blog. Tonight, I noticed from my referral logs that at least six people have found my essay on Bound and that spurred me to do the work necessary to copy my final dissertation onto my blog (mostly reformatting and making the footnotes work in the very helpful plugin WP-Footnotes)
So, now you will find four short essays and one dissertation in the Writing section, that I hope will be of interest to a variety of people.
To get an MA on the Film Studies course at Nottingham University at the time, you had to take four modules, each of which ended with an essay, and then spend a summer writing a longer, 15,000 word dissertation. I wasn’t exactly a model student, and was not certain I would pass when I handed in my dissertation. Each of the four taught essays passed – but barely. The dissertation was supposed to break new academic ground, and be of original research, but when I got around to writing it, I found that the ground I was interested in had already been fairly well trampled.
All MA students were regularly encouraged to consider applying for PhD level study – and in my case, since I took the course part time over two years, I underwent the encouragement twice. But I think I found my level during the MA study. I don’t think I could actually complete a doctorate.
So here are links to the essays:
Clint Eastwood: no standard manufactured personality
Crossfire, Bound and Double Indemnity: the homosocial and the homosexual in classic and neo-noir
Splatter and Society: Braindead and Killer Condom in context – in fact, taking the horror modules was something I did entirely so that I could write about Braindead and Killer Kondom, the latter of which I saw when living in Paris, in German subtitled in French. The fun I had writing that essay is pretty evident from the essay. I got to write stuff like this and still earn credits for it:
This almost obligatory nod to the ur-Mother of all transvestite psychopaths, Norman Bates, is happily thwarted and for the first time the pair manage to catch a killer condom in the wild, by attaching it to a gas pipe and inflating it until it explodes.
“Where the prehistoric meets the pre-pubescent” – a tagline which the over-graphic box cover picture of the heroine plainly demonstrates as false
The central love story between endowed-like-an-elephant middle aged man who doesn’t shave very often, and strikingly attractive blond 20-year-old is one that figures throughout the canon of König’s work, eg Iago, where the protagonist is William Shakespeare, and Der bewegte Mann and its sequel Pretty Baby, where the attractive younger man is played in the film versions by Til Schweiger in the days when he was still a German superstar. He is now a Hollywood extra.
How did the second world war affect cinema in Nottingham? – this was a fascinating project which involved lots of looking through old editions of the Nottingham Evening Post in the Local Studies Library on Angel Row. I became a real dab hand at the microfiche reels!
And finally the dissertation:
Heterosociality and Hollywood: the Rise and Rise of Rupert Everett
That’s right. I got an MA by writing about Rupert Everett. This has been the subject of much derision from people with more serious academic credentials.
In addition to the academic curiosity, the reasons for enrolling on the MA course were all pretty trivial. I needed a reason to stay in Nottingham where all my friends were. And after four years of BA study, I actually wasn’t ready to stop writing essays, and I wanted an excuse to still write stuff. Shortly after completing my MA, I got elected to the city council – what better excuse to stay in a city? – and a year after that, I started blogging.