Tales From the Bearpit

2008-10-23T11:48:00.002+01:00

Social networking and students
We talked a lot during Bill's visit about how we manage our online identities. I was saying that I have a Facebook page under my other identity and that several of our students and past students have asked me to be their Facebook friends. I usually say yes, but as a result am very careful how I use my Facebook profile - it has no reference to this blog, for example. The extremes of such staff-student engagement in social networking were made clear in this story which Bill emailed me. The discussion about it on Digg is interesting- most people seem clear that the issue here is about how we maintain professional boundaries rather than the technology itself. So often people seem to muddle the act of engaging in social networking/Web 2.0 type activity with what we do with it, which is surely what really matters..

2008-10-23T11:42:00.003+01:00

Find me now.. how does this feel?
Yesterday Bill Thompson came to the Bearpit and gave a really interesting talk on staying human in this digital age. He mentioned that Lastminute.com now have a new thing called Radar- this can tell you your location (okay, I know, you're thinking 'but I'd know that..' ) then tell you the five nearest hotels.. and soon, nearest restaurants etc.. this got us thinking about how we would feel about that but of course I had to go and have a play. it is pretty accurate- in London more so but even here it got me to the right city.. though its choice of the 5 hotels was a tad unexpected. See what you think..

2008-10-15T22:15:00.005+01:00

Today is Blog Action Day for Poverty so I am making the effort to post.. this is very timely as on Monday we launched our Centre for Education for Social Justice with no less a person than Tony Benn as speaker, which was not only very exciting but just plain dead good- as SimplyClare would say, well to the jay bad. He spoke for just around 20 minutes so he could take questions for a good half hour, which he did really well, and we had loads of people from all kinds of backgrounds and political persuasions there who we hope will now engage with us and the Centre. One thing he said which is particularly relevant if we are to actually do anything about poverty was that one definition he had heard of apathy was to vote all your life in every local and national election but to do nothing else to make a difference..

The Centre is an attempt to engage theory with practice and thus to improve life and life chances for people in Lincolnshire, where poverty is a key factor - low wages, low skills and terrible road infrastructure making it hard to move for education or better jobs, tensions around community cohesion and the migrant workforce who often are not in good working environments themselves and are not always paid a living wage. You get the picture.. so I'm happy to post as part of this huge worldwide action day..

Driving home tonight from a talk for the local British Federation of Women Graduates, many of whom graduated at least as long ago as I did if not longer, I overheard a quote on the radio - something to the effect that 'chance favours the well prepared'. Those of us who have had the luck to get a decent education have in that sense been well prepared and are maybe more able as a result to spot a life chance and take it.. if our Centre helps even one more person in Lincolnshire feel well prepared for the chances of life that would feel pretty good.

2008-09-17T20:59:00.003+01:00

Evidence
Guy has posted about evidence and it reminded me that I have been fascinated by the French approach to evidence as we have been buying our house. We have of course had to provide endless certificates- birth, marriage, income tax- and bank statements etc for the mortgage, but I'm thinking more about the actual purchase and also the bank's approach to the mortgage documentation. For both we have had to 'prove' we have read all the documents by each initialing every page (recto and verso) of every document and then have both had to write 'lu et approuve' many times with our signature (that last e of approuve should have an acute accent, no idea how to do that here!). On occasion we have also had to write great chunks of English (once) or more commonly French in our own handwriting- and again we have each had to do this- and sign. That this is in some way ritualistic was confirmed when I queried the meaning of one bit of the insurance policy for the mortage. No-one in the bank could explain it (and I mean explain not translate) but still we signed to say it was read and approved. If one set of initials is missing from the mortgage papers, we have to go back to square one and sign all over again with another enforced cooling-off period. The acceptance has to be postmarked by the French post office to prove we have had the cooling-off period (not that easy when we were in England at the time).

Alongside this emphasis on written witness is a formal reliance on oral ritual. At the beginning of the time with the notaire to sign the compromis de vente, he read out aloud our names and addresses and so forth and we had to confirm this was us to make it all valid. The whole occasion was exactly that- an occasion. The buyers and sellers are there, plus the estate agent and notary, and there is a real sense of this act of witness being evidence that proves the transaction has taken place.

2008-09-14T20:44:00.000+01:00

We have been having a bit of an adventure. With a bit of luck in about seven weeks we will own a house in this road in France.. to celebrate I have been playing on Picasa and have found I can blog this collage that I've made.

2008-05-01T16:39:00.002+01:00

Internet viruses..

A while back Simply Clare posted a very eloquent tale about her struggles to get a GP appointment for her nasty chest infection etc.. (and I really hope you are better now Clare).. I read the post and responded and now I am off sick too with a nasty virus.. too ill even to enjoy daytime television as a guilty pleasure, A Place in the Sun feels like reading Foucault, etc.. could this be a case of an internet virus?? ( I have to say that I was much luckier than Clare though. Our GP is actually accessible- I got an appointment the first day we asked (day 5 of being ill, now it is day 7). We couldn't actually phone for one as they have changed their phone number and I couldn't find the new number, but the Motorcyclist went round and as usual they were v helpful. This is no doubt the NHS Postcode lottery we hear so much about. The GP I saw though was less forthcoming than Simply Clare's but he did give me some antibiotics which normally I would resist but this time seemed a good idea.)

When I get my head back I want to post about a brilliant conference I went to recently and of course about our house in France project..so watch this space..

2008-04-13T15:46:00.005+01:00

Later than I meant..

I meant to post a picture of this new bag of mine in Fair Trade Fortnight as it is a Fair Trade Doy bag. It is made of woven strips from used drinks cartons. Follow the link and you can see far more of the designs and patterns. I chose this one because I really liked the colour combinations of the woven strips- and this shape is really useful for shopping and stuff- as you can see the handles are long enough to go over your shoulder, there is a strap to close it with and it is pretty waterproof too. It's nice to be able to feel virtuous about buying a new bag!

Sadly not all my recent purchases are as virtuous. Today I bought a very expensive teeshirt by Paul Smith- which they describe as a 'Black & White jersey t shirt with trompe l'oeil waistcoat print'. It even has a little strap on the back like a real waistcoat.. I cannot pretend that this is in any way good for society and it was way too much for a teeshirt but it is very cute.. see?

Clearly I do not look quite like this in it and I do not have a chandelier to pose by but it is still something I am looking forward to wearing as soon as I get the right moment!

That right moment may well come next week when we are sneaking a long weekend with our friends in Lezignan-Corbieres, assuming Ryanair do their thing.. this is part of a campaign to begin looking for a house out there, cunningly timed to begin as the pound collapses against the Euro. Maybe we can get a shed or something anyway. We went to see our friends in their house there last summer and then borrowed it for Christmas. It is a very relaxing place to be and right now the idea of even two days to relax feels amazingly important! I posted a picture of the Motorcyclist relaxing there a few posts ago but here's another pic from the same trip to remind us all that there is sometimes good weather to enjoy.

2008-04-03T15:15:00.002+01:00

Events and Excitements
As I said in the post below, I'm trying to do some research work today. In theory the whole day is blocked out in the diary but of course because I'm at work various people are popping in.. This week in theory should have been one with lots of time for reflection and scholarship but in practice it has been very busy with other stuff. I have helped with table plans for a big function we have next week, and with the processional order (sorting out civic precedence is challenging but probably not why I thought I was doing the PhD etc..) I've written to a local resident about parking problems, discussed plastic chairs with a local head and signed someone's passport photo. So what's my point ( apart from a quick bit of self-pity that I haven't been able to focus more on the impending conference paper)?

One thing is that the intellectual demands of a job do not link in a neat and tidy way to its seniority.. being in charge of the Bearpit is easily the most senior job I've had but I think that teaching sociolinguistics to some very demanding teachers on a diploma in year 1 of my HE teaching career was a lot more stretching intellectually. This job is demanding but it is more about making connections and facilitation of others, about being rather than doing at times.. I do enjoy it (most of the time) but also find myself pondering this paradox more and more often as the years go by.

The other thing that all this makes me reflect on is how far the advice of time management experts can ever help. I've been reading and enjoying this blog about Zen approaches to life for a while now and it has lots of good calming stuff about putting the big things first and not doing too many things at once. I have been trying to follow some of the advice but of course real life doesn't work that way. Helping our events team decide on tablecloth colours is hardly one of my big goals in life but if I don't prioritise it they can't get on.. and although I may have more 'important' things to do than check out the latest interesting French property site the Motorcyclist has found, if I don't go and look I am valuing my time over his in a way I can't be comfortable with.. much of the advice re Zen seems to me to take a self-focused, almost selfish approach to the rest of the world and whilst I am sure I too often allow myself to be distracted by the needs of others, I can't help thinking that is not entirely a bad thing.. what do you think?

More about the French project later. With pictures. Sorry the last few posts have not been illustrated!

2008-04-03T14:34:00.002+01:00

First Monday again
I can't believe it is now April. Feels like only a week or so ago I was writing the last post. Today I'm catching up with First Monday again as I prepare for a paper I have to give soon. I have only skimmed this article but it seems to me to make some really good points about the so-called Web2.0 phenomenon. I have been trying to square the recent assumptions that we didn't do interactive social stuff on the web until Web2.0 came along with my own experience and having trouble.. I had begun to think my memory was playing tricks. Don't get me wrong- life is much easier with Blogger and its ilk than in the days when we had to use Dreamweaver and had our own websites, and of course the comment facilities make a difference, but it is more a progression than a revolution, which seems to be one point that Scholz is making. What he says about commerce is also interesting- we can use these technologies for all kinds of reasons, from flashmobs with a point like the one at Heathrow, or like the surreal and entertaining things DrJoolz finds on YouTube, to buying and selling on E-Bay. We are doing stuff we have always done, whether we are into social change, entertainment or rank capitalism- it's just a bit easier now to share it with others and to reach a global audience very quickly. Or am I missing something?

2008-01-24T17:16:00.000Z

How does your research garden grow?

Today I have had a really indulgent afternoon actually following up some of my own research interests. Some of these are linked back to work I encountered years ago at Brighton around answer gardens and answer jungles, which seem to have a lot in common with recent work people have done on wikis and student learning. Victoria Carrington's blog has encouraged me to look at the journal First Monday where I found this paper by Fei Gao and David Wong. I have ordered a vanload of books off Amazon and hope my newfound enthusiasm will last till they arrive so I can do some reading!

Victoria has also been posting quite a bit about maps. On her recommendation I explored Google Maps Mania and found this fascinating map which seems to take league tables a step further than anything we get from the Times Higher or Guardian. With today's news about the patchy effectiveness of student bursary schemes, perhaps we could do with a map like this that charts which places in England are best at managing to identify the students who are eligible for bursaries and even more importantly managing to pay the same students the actual money.. mind you, I would be in favour of that since we are apparently the 13th best in the country at doing that..

One of the interesting things about using Google to amble through a subject is of course the odd things that turn up that aren't actually what you are looking for but which are still entertaining at least for a moment. Searching on 'answer garden' brought up lots of gardening pages, including this YouTube ad for Yahoo which I would upload if I could work out how.. since I can't, and to maintain the garden theme and add a bit of summer to this dark January day post, here's a picture of our friends' amazing garden.

2007-12-19T20:11:00.000Z

Last trip Kazakhstan, now we are off to France again.

At the moment I only seem to post when I'm about to go away. It has not been a good blogging year.. maybe 2008 will be different. Anyway.. as no doubt astute readers guessed, the last trip was to Kazakhstan, very different.. this time it is a holiday and we are off to Lezignan-Corbieres, between Narbonne and Carcassonne. We are staying in the house that belongs to our friends Brian and Carole but they are in Miami.. we stayed there this summer with them and it was So relaxing.. here is the Motorcyclist enjoying himself there..

The car is loaded with the bikes and a few Christmas reindeer and lots of books and DVDs and all we need to do now is sort out the passports and finish the wine we have open then we are off tomorrow morning! See you all next year... happy Christmas!

2007-10-17T21:50:00.000+01:00

Okay, one final picture clue too..

2007-10-17T21:32:00.000+01:00

Out of the habit
Like one of my favourite bloggers, SimplyClare, I seem to have got out of the habit of blogging. I have been pondering this for a while. It is not that I'm bored with it, nor even really that I don't have anything to blog about- I have a whole series of posts I have imagined making whilst in non-blog-accessible locations. I also no longer make a point of reading my favourite blogs regularly but when I do, I still find what others have to say intriguing and thought-provoking or sometimes just downright funny. I thought for a while it might be part of a wider malaise with things electronic- I am much less often in the study at home in the evenings just messing about on the PC, I don't email or reply to emails or use Skype anything like as much- but actually I am still perfectly okay with email etc at work or on the laptop in front of the telly. There is an element of what I think of as five-year diary syndrome- you remember when you got a diary and began to keep it every day, then you missed a day or so and all those blank pages made you feel bad but you couldn't face either catching up or missing out a span of time and then restarting? (Or was that just me?) but actually I don't think that is the big thing as at least here there is no actual physical gap. Ultimately I think it is a subtle shift in how I spend my time- over the past year somehow I seem to want to spend the evenings cooking sensibly, then chilling in front of the TV for a bit, then trying to get more sleep so I can get up and go to the gym. All PC stuff that needs this big machine and all its accoutrements is thus sidelined, and so my iPod goes on without new music, the video I'm meant to be burning to DVD of the Swiss wedding sits on the hard drive uncopied, online shopping gets done at the last minute, photos remain unedited and the bearpit remains unoccupied. .

Maybe this entry will get me going again. We'll see. And unlike SimplyClare, I can't even end with a quiz about broken metacarpals. I can say that I am going somewhere very unusual for a conference next week - a country that is big on apples and horses, that has a currency you can only get once you arrive and that is the sort of word that is in cryptic crosswords, and where the weather- this week in the mid 20s and looking very nice thank you- is set to plummet to 10 degrees and cloudy as I fly out. I'll leave Birmingham on Sunday morning and arrive there around midnight their time after changing at Frankfurt and flying for another 8 hours or so. Anyone ready to guess? Okay, one more clue. There is a recent film I shan't be mentioning while I'm there..

2007-07-20T20:49:00.000+01:00

On holiday at last! Just decided to do a quick post before we go on holiday but had to do all kinds of weird stuff first with Google. Hmm.. Anyway, when I get back I intend to blog again properly.. while away we hope to visit Bern where Mary Plain comes from.. watch this space to see if we do!

2007-03-31T01:19:00.000+01:00

Oops
I can't believe it is so long since I blogged. An awful lot of stuff has happened but tonight I just want to say that in about 30 hours we are going to Mexico which should look a lot like this photo I took there in April 2004:

But whilst the bougainvillea and jacaranda will look the same, our god daughter Veronica will look much more grownup than when we last saw her looking like this:

Some of you know that I have written about Veronica and how she used digital and print literacies earlier in her life so as well as looking forward to seeing her (and her mum, dad and brother) I am going to be interested to see what she does now and how it has changed.

So, hasta luego, amigos, and I hope when I get back to have something interesting to say to get me blogging again more regularly!

2006-12-15T18:24:00.000Z

Even harder to believe..
My friend with the shared fascination with dog accessories idly speculated in an email yesterday about dog wedding sites. I googled it. And yes, there are many.. like the one with this picture:

Or this one recording the following event:

"A beautiful commitment ceremony between Pamela Anderson's two dogs was rudely interrupted when Ali G. star Sacha Baron Cohen--who is engaged to Wedding Crashers actress Isla Fisher--arrived uninvited at the event. "

And even more dresses here at My Faux Paws- made to measure- like this one:

This is a very strange world we live in..

2006-12-07T12:50:00.000Z

And moreover..

I have been pondering the issues of pet Advent Calendars. (These ones are from the RSPCA)

Assuming- and I think I am on safe ground here- that cats and dogs have no concept of Advent, aren't these a bit cruel? You train your pet, a creature of habit, to expect a daily treat for 24 or 25 days running, then suddenly there they are on Boxing Day looking up expectantly at you and there is no treat.. How do they make sense of that then? In what way is that preventing cruelty to animals, I wonder?

(But there are none at all for bears. Is that better or worse, this bear wants to know?)

2006-12-06T20:57:00.000Z

Weird what can get me blogging again..

Over the past two months I have actually done quite a few cool things that I could have blogged about. I've even done a little bit of thinking. But finally today I am spurred to post by this site:
http://www.millieandgeorge.com/
As you will see if you visit it, this site offers a small insight into the exciting world of pet accessories. I particularly like the range of accessories and jewellery.. some are helpfully described in terms of the size of dog for which they are best, or talk about how they are 'specially treated to prevent slippage and breakage'.

I should say that I was not clever enough to find this site on my own. A friend - who shall for now be nameless- has been sharing her collection of dog eccentricities for a while, and it came from her. But now I am inspired to look for more myself..

2006-10-04T22:20:00.000+01:00

Just another manic Mary..
We have been very busy this week launching the bearpit's new status and visual identity (which is what we have to call logos now). On Monday we had champagne (okay, cava..) and cakes for the staff. Yesterday it was a launch lunch! for our VIP guests plus staff who volunteered to be hosts and some students too- Gervase Phinn came and said something funny and thoughtful as usual, unveiled the logo and cut the cake with a rather manic Mary with him:

Please note my careful colour co-ordination..
Tonight the students are having a party in the bar- they got lots of free pizza from Domino' pizza and we paid for their balloons and a disco I think. I popped over for a drink and they all seem very happy playing with the balloons. They gave me a balloon too!
Tomorrow we have a civic dinner given for us by the Mayor here and that should be very nice. I will have to be much better behaved than when we met the Sheriff of Nottingham though..
On Friday our lovely drama students are performing their Edinburgh production The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and we have pre-performance drinks, v posh.. and then on Monday ( we are celebrating the octave, a v Catholic thing to do - it just means eight days not a week) we have a service on the chapel with music from the different generations of the college and then more cake.. and the amazing thing is I get paid for this..

2006-10-01T22:43:00.000+01:00

A very sensible and sober evening in Nottingham

DrJoolz has posted a picture of a very serious grown-up evening we had in Nottingham. You might want to see another moment from the same event:

Joolz and Vic were just a tad tired and emotional. It had been a long day..

Hoping to resume normal service in the Bearpit soon..

2006-09-06T21:33:00.000+01:00

Ever had one of those days?
Today has not been good.

I woke up with a cold.

The bookshelves being made for my office, already several weeks late, turned up and were, in the oh so accurate words of our temporary IT technician, 'MFI tat' so have had to be sent back and we are now looking at several more weeks with all my books and files on the Board Room table.

The shutters in my room, meant to be being restored by the same builders, were declared unrepairable- they want to make new ones, thus wasting the old wood and more delay too of course.

The painters cluttered the room up in the only hour I had to do my email, pointlessly painting said condemned shutters.

I was told the new sign on our playing fields has a spelling mistake.

The amazing designers doing our lovely new logo are completely stuck over whether we use a colon (wrongly), a hyphen (offends their design sense), two different colours or fonts (ditto), a comma (ditto and I think they are right) or a vertical line (they like, we think it is like a barrier) in the middle of our excellent new strap line (which I cannot reveal to my eager readers till early Oct) and we need to decide by tomorrow at 9am.

Whenever it was sunny I was stuck indoors. When I went to go home, and to move my car back from Reception to the house now the staff car park is finished, it was raining and I had a front wheel puncture out of nowhere. Oh, and I'm meant to be taking the car into the garage first thing tomorrow for a service.

But then..

Our wonderful evening porter Colin tried to change the wheel for me. True to the day, he couldn't get the locking wheel nuts off, BUT the RAC came - in about half an hour- changed it for me very quickly so I still saw most of Holby. And my friend Alleycat has finally posted a comment on here.

And despite all this I managed to stick to the latest attempt at a diet. So maybe things are looking up.

I've still got the cold though.

2006-09-05T17:52:00.000+01:00

Water, water everywhere part 2..
No matter what I do Blogger won't let me add these pictures to the previous post.. so.. here is the last bit with the pictures. At last.. even this has taken two days!

Sometimes the water is just an invisible presence, keeping the countryside green- despite these being taken just a week or so after the end of the long dry heatwave:

Sometimes it is a brooding hint of water to come- time to close the car roof..

(And just to clarify. I have a very sensible car, not an open top one, but we were with our friends from Geneva that day in their soft-top BMW. Very nice too.)

2006-09-03T17:46:00.000+01:00

Water, water everywhere
Looking at my photos from our French trip I can't help seeing that water keeps recurring as a theme. Some of it was in very traditional fountains like this one:

or in village fountains like this:

or in ultra-modern city fountains like this one in Reims:

There seems to be a fascination for me in capturing the water's movement but also in capturing the effect of stillness:

(I have resisted the urge to straighten this picture in Photoshop as it was the chateau itself which seemed to have been built at right angles to the slope it was on rather than me holding the camera crooked..)

Sometimes the water is just an invisible presence, keeping the countryside green- despite these being taken just a week or so after the end of the long dry heatwave:

Sometimes it is a brooding hint of water to come- time to close the car roof..

(more photos to follow, Blogger playing up!)

2006-08-31T20:43:00.000+01:00

The difficulty with graffiti in other languages..

is knowing if the person who wrote it knew what they were doing/was sober/ etc. Two of us- me with kind of okay French, and a bilingual Swiss friend (well, multi-lingual of course really, being Swiss, but a fluent French speaker) tried to make sense of this from a wall in Cluny. We think it is something along the lines of 'one could have built, written poems on the walls, ?? the police???, one could have stopped drinking, opened the cages'. Any advances? intriguing anyway!

2006-08-30T21:37:00.000+01:00

Another challenge
No-one has quite guessed where my last post was from, though I have to admit Dr Joolz was close. Can you do any better with this?

Tomorrow (or next time I blog!) a language puzzle for you..

2006-07-31T20:58:00.000+01:00

Holidays
Everyone seems to be going away. Either they have gone, like Dr Joolz and Dr Kate, or they are blogging about going, like Simply Clare. We are going away on Thursday to an internet-free zone in Burgundy where I notice the weather is just breaking after about 3 months of la canicule. . But recently we had a minibreak here: can you guess where it was?

As a clue it was about a half hour drive from here:

You have loads of time to guess till we get back. See you at the end of August!

2006-07-10T20:39:00.000+01:00

Paperdoll Heaven
When we were at this conference - or maybe at this amazing seminar, last week was so mind blowing I can't remember, what with the amazing Victoria Carrington and Jackie Marsh, not to mention our SIG members who are just outstanding- we mentioned paper dolls and I promised I would blog this site. You can dress Elizabeth and Darcy, or Camilla our queen in waiting, or even David Beckham- who seems to have the biggest wardrobe of this group. Have fun playing till I get back with a proper post. See what happens with Elizabeth and Darcy when you try to swap their clothes over..

2006-06-26T20:44:00.000+01:00

Interlude
I am going to be too busy to blog much this week so here are some flowers to look at till I get back.

2006-06-25T20:43:00.000+01:00

Extreme sports in Whitby
We had the option of indoor adventure golf to pass the time on our Whitby visit. Judging from the appearance of this pirate it looks a pretty dangerous sport..

Instead, not wanting to lose any limbs, some of our party spent a great deal of time looking through their camera viewfinders hoping to take a picture of the truly spectacular lightning we kept seeing out to sea, sadly without success:

But then it actually rained. Not for long, but very hard. And we were right by a cafe so there was only one thing to do. Yes, have afternoon tea and take pictures of that instead:

2006-06-19T19:45:00.000+01:00

Camping- but not the way Simply Clare does it..
Hard to imagine that this time last week I was driving back (through torrential rain and thunder) from 24 peaceful and mainly sunny hours camping in Whitby with our chaplaincy and students. Simply Clare does rough camping, travelling light (check out her posts from July 2005, can't work out how to link to them!) - we do extremely easy camping, taking every gadget we can lay our hands on:

And of course we stay in touch while away:

Anyway, more of our adventures later. But as a taster, one thing I did was spend a lot of money here.. and not on a mug, either..

2006-06-10T20:29:00.000+01:00

Just passing through...
Too nice to be indoors blogging. Today we went cycling and tomorrow after this I am going here.. back Monday night.. should have some pictures to blog afterwards!

2006-06-08T21:44:00.000+01:00

Couldn't blog yesterday...
I was here having a meeting over dinner under Chatham House rules.. interesting that everyone says Chatham House rules but as you will see from the link it is really just one rule. Also everyone thinks it means you can't say what happened but it is a bit more complex than that. Anyway, I will just tell you the food was great and that if we had a college helicopter we could have used the hotel helipad. But we don't, just the good old college Brava and our satnav which tried to make us go to Leicester instead.

And tonight I have been listening to two of our students talking about their work in The Gambia. They have been raising funds and begging equipment for a nursery school out there and at Easter they went out and took the stuff and worked with the teacher to show him how to use the resources. Some great pictures of the kids having new books for the first time and those little bear things you use for number work. All this during their PGCE year and at the same time they have been running Nightline, the Lincoln student telephone counselling service. I get all proud of our students when I see them doing stuff like this.

2006-06-06T21:14:00.000+01:00

More student photos
Yesterday I emailed the students who have said they are interested in digital photography, both those who made it last week and a couple of others. I reminded them about asking for photos and gave them my Flickr details so they could see some of mine (haven't yet shared this blog.. should I?). Another student sent me two great pictures today- one of her dog and one of her baby nephew. Both amazing and with a great email explaining how they got taken. She didn't say if I could use them so I won't blog them yet but it is so cool getting these emails with pictures amongst all the work stuff.
So, since I can't yet show you Emma's really great dog picture, here is one of the first pictures I took on my Canon, to pick up Dr Joolz' notice posting:

Guess where it was taken? Dr Joolz' sign is funnier but this one has a certain something too, imho.

2006-06-05T20:51:00.000+01:00

Audacity
When I was doing my little bit of research fieldwork last week I wanted to record the discussion on something digital. Probably everyone else already knows about this free software called Audacity but I didn't. It does lots of fancy stuff, or so I am told by the students, but it also does straightforward things like recording speech. Our music technican installed it for me and then I just needed a microphone plugged into my laptop and it recorded the whole thing onto my hard drive. Then I saved it as a wav and an mp3 just in case. Much less intrusive to have a laptop on the table while we talked than a tape recorder. And I like the name too, audacity is an excellent word I think. We have the audacity to be interested in digital literacies..

2006-06-04T16:35:00.000+01:00

Pot pourri post..
Several things to say to day, hence title.

1. It was very exciting to get comments straight away- thought it would be weeks before anyone noticed I was back. Thanks, Dr Joolz and Guy!

2. Another 'got back in there' today- finally, after several months of trying, we got out on the bikes today - only an hour or so but definitely a cycle ride. So here is a picture of our bikes to celebrate that. (We also managed to eat outside for the first time this year.. June 4th.. hmm. )

3. And one of the students from my research focus group has done what I asked and sent me his favourite photos with permission to use as I liked (thanks, Karl!). Most are landscapes from Kinder Scout and Wales - he is a geography and education studies student- but this one is kind of cute (it is called 'love you' but he was at pains to point out- and I quote from his email- 'the one titled, love you, well, that's just sheep, but I find this picture fascinating, and don't panic, I don't love sheep, it was just the first file name that popped into my head, ha ha') :

2006-06-01T21:37:00.000+01:00

Deep breath, jump in, start swimming..

Surprisingly hard to start blogging again after such a gap. I have planned so many entries in my head and not then posted them. Finally here I go, prompted by finally getting round to starting my research for UKLA yesterday. I have found 5 students who are all keen digital camera users and had a great hour with them talking yesterday- now I just need to transcribe it and decide what to do then..

Have seen some very nice use of camera phones lately. We had a dinner for staff who have been here for more than 10 years- many of whom are our housekeeping team- and afterwards they - and I - went to the bar. They were up and dancing with the students and several of them were taking photos on their phones too- I have a picture of this happening on my phone but haven't yet downloaded it! Meanwhile I have to confess I was captured on video on a phone dancing with several others to YMCA.. they did threaten to put this on the SU website but I have been spared. Then a student emailed me this- taken on his phone at 3am after a night of end of term celebrating:

Nice they are so pleased! (It was the only picture from that night he felt able to share.. thanks, Ken. As he says, not a bad picture given the time of night and the fact they were tired and emotional. )

2006-02-14T21:03:00.000Z

My Valentine
Although I think that actually I come somewhere after two Moto Guzzis, a Ducati and a Royal Enfield in the Motorcyclist's affections, occasionally he surpasses all expectations. As I said on DrJoolz's blog, today I was brought a heart-shaped pastry in bed with morning tea today and a Valentine's card with a Motorcyclist- written poem (and then later we had another chocolate heart-shaped cake, and a chocolate heart lolly appeared too). I am allowed to quote it (the poem):
'I will not count the days-
they are too few.
And man does not understand
The space of time he's in.
What matters most is one
More day with you.
No hour glass counts time
The way we do.'

So here he is, the romantic that he is, on a balcony overlooking the Sea of Galilee last Easter. Wish I could write poetry like that.

2006-02-05T18:31:00.000Z

Spem in Alium

Spem in Alium is a 40-part motet by Thomas Tallis. For those of you who do not know about such things- and I did not till very recently- that means that there are 40 different 'voices' in eight choirs of at least five singers each. I spent yesterday at a workshop run by the Lincoln Early Music Festival where we learned the piece and then performed it in the evening in Lincoln Cathedral's retrochoir. At this site you can hear a rather tinkly electronic version without the words but the score you can see while it is playing shows you how the parts come in and out. We stood in a huge semi-circle to sing it so the sound went round the circle and back which was cool and would have been even better had we sung it better! (We also sang Archbishop Parker's Psalter which is included- or a bit of it- in the BBC site about Tallis. And- to explain the picture- we also had some music on crumhorns and recorders by Bergamasca who are members of the LIncoln Early Music set. ) If you want to hear it properly then Naxos now do a surround-sound DVD of Spem, an interesting mix of new technology and very early music!

Spem in Alium was very hard- at lunchtime I wanted to give up and go home- but I persevered and with the support of the friends I went with and the help of the other very generous altos in choir 1 I got through it without making too much of a mess. It was interesting to be in a situation of being a frustrated learner and to feel so useless and to reflect on whether the workshop was too hard or the teaching style not right (probably a bit of both) and of course great to come out the other side. Also it reminded me of how utterly something like this takes me away from all everyday concerns as I can only think about the music. No multi-tasking in this situation!

2006-02-02T22:22:00.000Z

Two sites you have to visit
First, for those infected by the four things meme, there is a very interesting alternate version here, courtesy of Dr Rob:

And second, I was going to post about an online version of Rock Paper Scissors but it is a blocked site on our network. But while looking for it I found this site and you must go there, it is really funny I think though maybe not in the best possible taste.

2006-02-01T20:07:00.000Z

And yes, that is what I did last week. We had a very good time in New York then a very interesting time in South Carolina. This was my first ever time in the US so it was particularly interesting. I really liked New York- with the exception of Newark Airport, of which more in a later post. Like Mary Plain we looked at the Statue of Liberty:

We did it from the Staten Island ferry so my pictures are not that good technically- through dirty glass- but we did it as the sun went down so the skies were amazing. I just loved all the architecture and the detail in the brickwork and want to go back to take lots of pictures (I was there for work with a colleague and didn't feel I could really hang out taking too many pictures as a result). We also went here which is an amazing shop, and I bought this there which was in the Guardian magazine a few weeks back and yet is not available over here, it seems. I could have bought it mail order/online but it felt v cool to find a stockist in NY and get it while I was there.. (it also saved $11 postage!) .. very global-local though I do acknowledge the pollution factor of flying and would not have flown there just for the Teasticks!

2006-01-31T21:33:00.000Z

4 things meme- pushing it further

4 things I should be doing now instead of blogging
clarinet practice
endowment mis-selling claim
thank you letters for Christmas
filling dishwasher

4 people I wish I could see tomorrow
The Motorcyclist
Mis compadres (that is two)
Maggie- still miss you girl, nearly 17 years gone since you left us. Your blog would have been something else.

4 reasons to get up tomorrow
only two days till the Motorcyclist comes back
the sun might shine
our Sport and Fitness centre opening!
breakfast

4 things I want to blog about soon
New York
Historically Black Colleges and Universities
My new camera, was it a bad idea?
Stone Paper Scissors

4 things I am not happy about:
this wireless network and its unreliability
not getting a chance to sleep long enough for several more days
the tension between eating sensibly and eating happily
endowment mis-selling!

4 reasons to stop now:
I'm tired
I want a cup of tea
I want to read my book
If I don't the network might crash again..

2006-01-31T21:04:00.000Z

So far behind.. and now tagged too!
I have so many blog entries in my head and am so far from getting them posted! But DrJoolz's tag for the four things meme has got me going again.

4 places I have lived:
Sussex
Norfolk
London
Lincoln

4 jobs I have had:
Waitress
Postperson
Potato sorter
Bookmaker's assistant

4 favourite movies
American Beauty
Lost in Translation
Casablanca
Grosse Point Blank

4 favourite TV shows
EastEnders
Holby City
Spooks
MASH

4 favourite CDs
Roseanne Cash Rules of Travel
JJ Cale Special Edition
Cowboy Junkies The Trinity Session
Kirsty MacColl Tropical Brainstorm

4 places I have been on holiday
Mexico
France
Cornwall
Greek Islands

Guess which this was:

4 things I like to do:

Read
Watch TV
Travel
Cycle

4 favourite books
Lolita
Vanity Fair
Olivia
Mary Plain!

4 websites I visit daily
Google
bbc.co.uk
bgc.ac.uk
http://drjoolzsnapshotz.blogspot.com/

4 bloggers to tag.. hmm, that is hard! Don't think I can do 4.. don't know enough bloggers! - but I tag SimplyClare, Vic and Dr Rob!

2006-01-11T22:05:00.000Z

Old and new again..

One night in Madeira we went to a 'folklore' restaurant for espetada which is of course steak cooked on long skewers and hung on your table on the big hooks you can see in the picture. And of course while you eat there is authentic local dancing.. this lady seemed to be in charge of the troupe and I think I would try to learn very quickly if I were one of her dancers.

There were also authentic musicians of course. I particularly like the hats.

But look over there.. who is that on the wall?

Yes, it is authentic Barbie.. in the bit of the restaurant used for local families to let their children have birthday parties. I would have gone nearer to get a better picture but that night I was using a crutch.. this was an outcome of the scariest walk ever which we did that day. But more of that later in the week..

2006-01-10T21:20:00.000Z

And a question..

I am thinking of buying a new camera (digital SLR). My shortlist is this or this or this or - maybe- this. What should I get? I need to make my mind up as I have a chance to buy it next week when I am in the US and everyone says that is the cheapest thing to do. (Are they right?)

2006-01-10T21:07:00.000Z

New and old

I am finally getting back into a productive mode- very slowly- after a nearly three week break from work. Not quite ready to do thoughtful blog entries so this week we will do a few 'what I did on my holidays' posts. This picture is the main Toyota showroom in the middle of Funchal and as you can see they have moved into a building that used to be something else but they have kept these amazing tiled panels on the outside. New generation Yaris, old generation showroom. Excellent.

Coming soon- my scariest ever walk.. but just to round off, a picture of Madeira's national flower. I just love the way these look so exactly like slightly anxious but very flighty birds. (The posh name is estrelicia I think but the everyday name is bird of paradise. I expect everyone else already knew that though.. )

2005-12-24T21:04:00.000Z

They look-ed up and saw a star

shining in the east beyond them far..

These are the figures that I mentioned a day or so back that were sent to us by Chela and Veronica from Mexico DF- well, Benny sent them (muchas gracias compadre!) but Chela made the kings, star and bird and Veronica made the two reindeer. They are made of tin and you can find traditional Mexican Christmas ornaments like this but it is so special to have some that have been made for us. We have a tradition of exchanging ornaments but always we also keep a matching set for ourselves so that even when we cannot be together at Christmas- which is most of the time- we know that we are sharing a bit of it through these decorations. These are very special though as they are the first handmade ones and especially because Veronica (who is just 8 and whom some of you have read about here ) made the deer from her own drawings. For next year I will make a much better setting for them.

Anyway, that is it. Like all traditional Advent calendars, this one is stopping on December 24th. I am going to take a short blog break but will be back with news from our trip here early in 2006. A very merry Christmas to all my readers..

2005-12-23T23:07:00.000Z

'Twas the night before the night before Christmas, and all down the street, you could see whose Christmas illuminations were complete..
(I know, but it is the best I can do at this time of night, okay?)

It starts off quite gently

with a bit more as we go further along..

this was a hard one to capture in its full moving glory

so you need to imagine Santa swinging to and fro.

But then around the corner the real Lickey illuminations come into view..

these next three speak for themselves, I think.

The road is quite narrow at this point and without climbing into the bushes I couldn't get far away enough to get the whole lot in one shot. I suspect this can be seen from outer space..

I had to wait till it was completely dark to take these because of the problem with my camera flash I mentioned a while back, so I was excited to read here about a new Fuji that can be made to work in natural light. The Fuji F11 is the big brother to my current camera and so very tempting, but not a digital SLR.. it is so hard choosing new toys!

2005-12-22T21:59:00.000Z

Ho ho ho...

Did you see Jonathan Ross tonight? If so you will know that the US airforce escort Santa and his sleigh as they enter US air space and that you can track the progress of said sleigh via NORAD. This link tells you how.

This is a very short post as I need to go and wrap presents.. tomorrow I hope to bring you the amazing illuminated house round the corner from us.. and/or the beautiful decorations we received today which were made for us by our amazing Mexican compadres and ahijada.

2005-12-21T20:17:00.000Z

One dog dancing..

It may not be in the carol but it ought to be.. This was a highlight of the staff Christmas do- I have not got pictures of the more innovative moves (lots of dog going back and forth through human's legs) and you have to imagine that you can hear Dancing Queen playing full blast.. you too can learn this skill here.. The dog also wanted to join the group playing Jingle Bells on ocarinas:

We know how to party at the bearpit.. just like these dancing dogs here do!
(Yes, I know. I missed out Tuesday in my Advent blog calendar. I was busy having a massage and a haircut and moving from the work bearpit to my home pit. Here is a special treat to make up for that. )

2005-12-19T22:12:00.000Z

Bah, humbug?

This pretty tree is just one of the decorations in our finance department windows. I can see them from my office and today I finally went past with a camera. I had been going to say something uplifting about how even the finance team were demontrating the spirit of Christmas.. but.. the shadowy figure you can see through the window is Steve, Head of Finance in the Bearpit.And where was I going with my camera? the after-Christmas-dinner entertainment. And where was Steve? back at his desk.. clearly it takes more than a bit of turkey and a performing dog (wait for tomorrow..) to get Steve to neglect his job.

Speaking of finance- this website is for my bank. One of the things I like is that they run little online polls and you can also comment on your answers. So which was your moment of 2005? any of their choices or something else? (And which was your photo of 2005, and have you sent it to the Guardian yet? I would include the link but can't find it. )

2005-12-18T21:54:00.000Z

It's no good, I can't resist saying it..

Look at this Christmas quacker.. sorry, I did try not to use that but in the end just couldn't resist. It does glow in the dark, though, so well worth a picture. The slightly crowded composition is due to my having been involved in emptying several of the glasses you can see around the duck.

We have spent the weekend catching up with people we won't see over Christmas, and I am now very full of some excellent food. I read in the paper that the best way to avoid gaining weight is to weigh myself every day so I am going to try that. Not convinced but I will report back after Christmas!

And in case you haven't got enough decorations, go here for an extra one to make. I remember making angels this way a very long time ago.. but they didn't look like Peggy Mitchell..

2005-12-17T23:00:00.000Z

Christmas lights

Tonight we went to visit friends and drove through quite a lot of Lincolnshire and North and North-east Lincolnshire. In all the villages and towns we saw houses like this one. I fell to wondering why some of us like to have decorations like this outside our houses, with running reindeer, skating penguins and climbing Santas whilst others want just little white lights over everything or nothing at all. I have always quite liked outside lights and remember that my dad and I used to look for trees with lights on when he drove me home from work on a Saturday, but we never dreamed of where it would lead..

Meanwhile the office lights and decorations of our nation are being researched here, by the Guardian. I really like the one where someone's whole desk, chair and monitor have been gift-wrapped. How does your workplace measure up?

2005-12-16T21:50:00.000Z

O tannenbaum..

We are a bearpit of many many Christmas trees.. everywhere I turn. This artistically blurred tree is in my office ( the artistic blurring being to hide the original blurring which comes because I still can't work out the flash settings on my camera so either have daylight brilliance or camera shake). This tree is because last year when we had lights on the tree outside people tried to steal them so this year we have lights inside the windows on the front of college. It is actually quite nice to go into my room each day and see the tree with its lights, especially when I sit there signing the corporate Christmas cards. Slightly more surreal when I am trying to focus on real work!

Talking of surreal-today I circulated a document for comment and one reply included this site. Try it. I am Frosty Dancing-Cracker...

2005-12-15T22:54:00.000Z

One last night shot..

So for the last time, a picture from last Sunday's outing. Tomorrow I have to do something different! (memo to self, take camera to work..) This tree is the one outside the cathedral which has lights on in memory of people, I guess others have a similar thing near them- it is called Light a Light and it is organised by our local hospice. I think I posted about it earlier in Advent.. One of my favourite things in Lincoln is the cathedral at night.

One of my other favourite things is the different student entertainments at this time of year. Last night I went to the second year music students' ensemble (assessed performance) and they did this amazing Japanese drum thing, among other stuff- it is called taiko and you can hear a bit of it here. It is very spiritual, and visual too, with lots of dramatic arm movements and chanting. It was very loud! They also did some schmaltzy Christmas stuff including Rutter's Jesus Child which we are also doing for the staff carol service on Monday. Then tonight I have been to see our Year 3 drama in the community students doing their studio practice pieces- these are short plays/extracts where the Yr 3 students have to direct using Yr 1 students as their actors etc. We had a real range from an amazing version of the Selfish Giant using a mix of actors and different puppets (rod, shadow etc) - lots of weepy students in the audience at the end- through some much harder edge stuff to a v funny version of Aladdin set in the East End. Of course I had a million other things I needed to be doing but am v glad I went to this instead!

2005-12-14T21:36:00.000Z

Lincoln Christmas

Once the sun had gone down a bit the other night I took this shot of the top of Steep Hill in its Christmas finery. Down this hill on the right is one of my favourite shops so today's link takes you there. Enjoy..

2005-12-13T20:47:00.000Z

Forty trees
There was a special display this weekend in St Mary Magdalene which is the church by the cathedral. It was of forty Christmas trees, each decorated by a different shop from Bailgate. So we had a post office tree:

and several cute gifty shop type ones:

and the Thai restaurant one.

My favourite for weirdness was the ice cream parlour one.

It is also one of my favourite shops as I like their frozen yogurt.

So today's link is to a singing Christmas tree.. which is very appropriate as I have been talking about trees and have just come back from the student carol service and Christmas dinner, at both of which there was a lot of singing. (I would have liked to take photos of both, but I was singing in the choir for the service and then on the top table for dinner so taking pictures would have felt a bit like taking pictures at the zoo..) We still do a formal dinner for first years (they don't have to dress up though) and the choir sing the college grace and the Boar's Head Carol to start us off. We used to have a real boar's head but apparently the vegetarians didn't like it so now it is virtual. We also do the college chant ( I will share this with people in meatspace one day!) and tonight the students sang Little Donkey and We wish You a Merry Christmas too.

2005-12-12T21:36:00.000Z

December skies
Last night when I got back to Lincoln from Bromsgrove the sun was just setting. I walked down to the cathedral with my camera and took these shots:

Shame about the powerline, or shame I am too idle to Photoshop it out anyway!

Yes, that is the castle in silhouette..

Skies like this just take my breath away. After that the light went, but there are some great shots of the Christmas lights to follow this week..

Anyway, I didn't know what to put as the link tonight so I typed Christmas Surprise into Google and found this. Don't know if it works- I decided trying it would spoil the surprise.. let me know what you think!

2005-12-11T22:46:00.000Z

Christmas music
I am a sucker for Christmas music of all kinds so today here is a picture of the steam organ that was at the Christmas Market to celebrate the annual getting out of the Christmas CDs. I listened to John Rutter and part of the 'Best Christmas Ever' CD on the way back from Bromsgrove then to Maddy Prior when I got here. Even better are the live bits of music such as our candlelit carols this coming Tuesday.

And for those who prefer a more interactive Christmas, try this game with haggises.. my top score so far is a shameful 70 and I am sure you can beat that..

2005-12-10T21:58:00.000Z

Advent lights

I thought you might like to see one of our Advent lanterns in a slightly better view - this is the Advent wreath, now sitting on the chapel sanctuary to add to the seasonal atmosphere. It is amazing, especially at night with the main lights off. Even now it is hard to show scale- as a rough idea, this is at least as tall as this small bear, possibly slightly taller.

A weird thing happened yesterday. Some of my earlier posts multiplied mysteriously and appeared several times- it felt like each time a comment appeared the blog reposted the original too. I have risked deleting the duplicates but that was scary...

Anyway, it is the weekend so how about a game of bar billiards as today's surprise behind the window? Enjoy.

2005-12-10T21:52:00.000Z

Oh no, I missed Friday!
I just didn't get round to Friday, sorry. This is the picture I would have posted... so try and imagine it was yesterday..

This window was one of the first signs on campus that Christmas is coming. This is the window of our art studios. Our art students are very cool, very mature.. their final exhibitions have lots of amazing stuff and a high proportion of black paint and meaning .. but here we see that if Christmas is coming, they cut out snowflakes and stick them on their window! Bless..

2005-12-08T20:47:00.000Z

So is it really this cold outside the bearpit?
Many of my very wise blog companions (look here and here and here ) are talking about authenticity at the moment. So I began wondering about real and fake with regard to the pictures I am posting. I have been trying to create an illusion that all these Advent Calendar pictures are very contemporary. Well, most of them are. But how would those of you outside Lincoln know? do you check our weather often enough to know? it is certainly cold out tonight.. but have we had snow today? or even this Advent? And when I tell you this tree is just outside my front door, how do you know if that is true? (The answers are no, this is a snowy day two years ago, and yes, it is outside the front door. But I could of course be making that up.) And in this context does it matter if I am telling the truth?

Anyway, enough of that. Even if you don' t usually bother to follow my links you simply have to check this out, also this, passsed on to me by our e-learning co-ordinator. (Thanks, David! )In a way they also are about authenticity- will identity cards help us know who people really are? But they are both also very good pieces of parody.

2005-12-07T22:30:00.000Z

Scooby Scooby Doo, where are you?
In vast numbers on a stall at Lincoln Christmas market, that's where. To win one of these you had to win a darts thing so I still only have my Scooby-Doo socks. (Oh, and I do have a luminous Scooby Doo from a serial packet which is very comforting at night. )

Now bearing in mind DrJoolz's post tonight about authenticity, is this site genuine? While you think about that, I need to sleep..

2005-12-06T22:47:00.000Z

Jingle all the way

The Christmas Market also had real reindeer, who seemed pretty unfazed by all the attention. There were two donkeys too which the children could feed. Four-year-old Samuel, who was our excuse for visiting the animals, had a string of questions for his dad (in Spanish so this is a rough translation)- when were the reindeer going to be working? was Santa getting ready to go out now? when would he load the sleigh? were these all the reindeer? what would the route be? and so on.

I have just come back from the chaplaincy Christmas party where the games included 'pin the red nose on Rudolph' and a quiz with a question about how many reindeer do pull the sledge- leading to some heated debate about whether Rudolph took over from one of the others or was an extra. If you want to help choose this year's team go here and you can also help find Santa.

But maybe don't try and take a picture of Santa and the sleigh on Christmas Eve to sell to the papers. Following hot on last week's story about professional photographers being made redundant by all us enthusiastic digital photographers comes a story about the ways the press exploit amateur photographers and pass on the risk re libel etc. (You may not get to it from this link as it was in yesterday's Media Guardian- by Emily Bell- and I had to go through the most ridiculous registration performance to get to the media section online. ) Belll was also raising the issue of copyright- if I take a picture of a famous statue, then apparently that picture might breach copyright if I publish it.. I'd be interested to know what people think about that.

2005-12-05T22:25:00.000Z

Reindeer Ride
This was one of the rides at the Christmas market. It was sold as a reindeer ride but some of the more cynical among you may spot a close resemblance to a horse wearing clip-on antlers .. and the scenery, as you will see, has rather more cacti and cowboys than might be expected at the North Pole... Four-year-old Samuel was dead impressed though. So tonight the surprise link is about reindeer. See how you do in this quiz.. or with these games. There may not be many cowboys there though..

2005-12-04T19:13:00.000Z

Big wheel keeps on turning..
I know, you are thinking why is this a Christmas picture? Well it is because it was a ride we went on at the Lincoln Christmas Market today. Although we had really good views, the perspex round the little cage thing we sat in had lots of condensation on so I couldn't take pictures except upwards, like this. The whole thing felt slightly scary and I was glad when we got back on the ground safely, but I do quite like this picture.

It has been a very busy weekend- our very good friends from Venezuela came to see us with their four-year-old son Samuel. We haven't seen them for about four years so it was great but now I am very tired, having been to the market twice and cooked and done lots of things like that. So tonight's surprise site to visit is a Lincoln competitor Advent calendar. See if you have any more luck winning chocolate than I have had so far.

2005-12-03T12:21:00.000Z

Advent, Christmas, Christmas, Advent..
If it is Advent then at work at least it must be time for Christmas decorations. These lights appeared on one of our trees on campus while I was in London yesterday afternoon, and were there twinkling away to greet me when I got back. Aaaah!
In the supermarket today the two women on my checkout were talking to each other about Christmas shopping. They had both done all their present shopping and most of the food.. I haven't started but if I was buying for me then this or this might be on the list. But perhaps not this coffee....

2005-12-02T21:34:00.000Z

And behind the second window is.. yes, a candle..

I am working this Advent calendar thing out as I go. Next year will be slicker.. as you can see the picture without opening the little card window, there needs to be a surprise. But first.. this is our chapel Advent wreath. Did you know that there are all kinds of significances to be read into the choice of candle colour? When I was growing up, with a middle of the road Anglican vicar as my dad, we had red candles with a white one for Christmas. Now I am Catholic, in the years when I get round to making a wreath for home, I do what you'd see at mass and we have three purple candles (Advent is a season of penitence, not as heavy as Lent but still penitential, and purple is the colour of penitence) and one pink one for Gaudete Sunday which is the third Sunday of Advent which is a touch jollier. (And still a white one for Christmas Day.) Our new Anglican chaplain has used four purple candles. I haven't asked her why. It could be as symbolic as that is what Dunelm Mills had.. or it might be a bit high church but not actually Anglo-Catholic. If I find out I will report back..

Anyway, here is your surprise. If you go to this link you will find what I think is quite a funny website.. enjoy.

2005-12-01T22:00:00.000Z

Advent Calendar Blog
I have decided to try and do an Advent calendar blog. In theory I was going to take a picture a day just for this purpose but today there wasn't a moment to get my camera- there were some possible pictures but I shall take them tomorrow and save them up for later in December. So here instead is the Advent candle lantern that the children made with the Sheffield lantern makers (they made them in a school in Lincoln but the lantern makers are from Shefffield, Dr Kate) - they called it an Advent wreath but it is a bit linear for a wreath to my mind. Until they added the yellow tissue paper everyone thought it was a four-masted galleon. And because it has four candles there were a lot of re-runs of the Ronnie Barker fork handles gag.. Anyway, here is picture number 1:

In the foreground you can see one of the bird lanterns, then the candles are reclining gracefully against the front of the van. Clearly you are not seeing this wreath at its best - I couldn't take pictures during the service- or even really watch the lantern procession- as I and the other 70-odd members of the choir were concentrating on singing Hanacpachap cussicuinin which you can hear on this and watching our choir director.

2005-11-30T20:47:00.000Z

Meanwhile..
Here in the Bearpit we are getting into the spirit of Advent. We had our annual Advent Carol Service this Sunday in the cathedral and although it was v stressful because we worked with some lantern makers from Sheffield and a local school to make these lanterns:

which were only finished just before we started, with no time for rehearsals or anything like that, the whole thing was very moving and the music was excellent.

Now we are getting ready for the various Christmas carol services and singing carols. Last night our samba band (drama students) played at the Light a Light torchlit procession from our local hospice to the cathedral and I went to see them. There was an amazing long procession of hundreds of people with flaming torches and they lit the Christmas tree outside the cathedral, then gave us all mulled wine. I almost managed to get a great picture on my mobile of all the students using their mobiles to take pictures of the tree and the floodlit cathedral but couldn't find the right zip on my magic Rohan jacket fast enough. But I do now have a great picture of the cathedral as my phone wallpaper! Here is another Advent picture instead of us trying to get the lanterns back in the van:

2005-11-30T20:41:00.000Z

Photography again
I was reading The Guardian the other day- Monday I think - and still thinking about the article I posted about last Thursday and which Dr Joolz discussed much more thoughtfully. It suddenly struck me how one of the great pleasures for me in the paper, especially since its new format, is the range and quality of pictures, nearly all professionally taken, some standing there in their own right and not just as illustrations for articles. Those double page spreads they do are amazing, I think. So it seems very clear that there is a real demand for professionally produced photos and professional photographers in the paper that published the article predicting their demise..

2005-11-25T18:45:00.000Z

And then..
When you get bored with EastEnders dancing, there is some great stuff on FlickrSoup for the Soul right now..

2005-11-25T18:43:00.000Z

Friday frolic
If you want a change from playing patience tonight check out this site. Explore the settings and see - and hear- Peggy Mitchell dancing to house music. Or Dot with the broom dance.

2005-11-24T22:12:00.000Z

Seeing the big picture
I stole this heading from today's Guardian Technology supplement which has several interesting stories for us I think. The one with this title is about how professional photographers have been undermined and marginalised by digital photography which means we can all produce pictures for the media. They also now have to edit their own pictures and learn to use technology to do that. It ends by suggesting that so many images are now created that we may be at risk of image pollution.. Personally I love the image saturation I get from reading everyone's blogs and from Flickr. Will we ever get image overload?

Then inside there is a story about Facebook.com which is a social networking site for students but with the added feature that you only get to network with students from the same university, so you might also get to meet them in real life. Apparently it is v big in the States and now growing over here. I thought I would find out about it for the Bearpit to see if we can join. If we do I will blog about it. You can't see much from the website without registering. You can upload pictures too so, hey, more image pollution..

And then on page 3 there is a review of a game that sounds great, Okami. You get to draw in this game and, I quote, 'the concept of the game is to paint and interact with the beauty of nature'. I may have to put a Playstation 2 on my Christmas list so I can play this game.

Oh, and there is a really cool looking DAB radio too with turquoise and flowers. Here is a picture to add even more to this image polluted world.

and all this cost me just 60p and of course for that I also got Doonesbury, Steve Bell and a Sudoku!

2005-11-21T22:14:00.000Z

Happy Birthday Dad!
My dad is 90 on Weds 23rd November. We had a family lunch for him on Saturday which was v hard to organise and which brought 27 members of our immediate family together without bloodshed or anyone leaving early, something of an achievement. Dad enjoyed it a lot, though. My great-niece Ffion ( I have 10 great-nieces and nephews) made Dad a lovely book of memories, kind of this is your life. This is her with Dad:

The only sad bit is that my video camera has a sound problem so I couldn't film the party and I mucked up lots of my still shots- I think I have changed the flash setting by accident so lots of the pics are blurred because of too slow shutter speeds. There were, however, many other cameras present so I hope we are going to be all right overall.

2005-11-21T22:02:00.000Z

It was okay!
Well, although it has taken me a long while to post, I really enjoyed last Wednesday in the end and even the Motorcyclist has been nice about what I said and how I did it, even though for probably the first time in 31 years he had to listen to me for an hour without being able to interrupt or reply. The day itself was great as I had four lots of flowers and some helium balloons arrive from friends, look (these are just some of the flowers):

And loads of my nice research friends either came or sent me lovely cards and messages. Our IT guys are getting v excited about doing the lecture as a media stream (they have robbed their AV budget to buy the needed server) so quite soon I should be able to make a link for you to see if you want. Then you can judge for yourselves if it was any good. I watched a test bit today and it was v strange watching myself teach!

2005-11-14T20:58:00.000Z

The final countdown

Why did I say I would do this? Right now I am very aware that in 48 hours it will all be over. I have had about 6 weeks to plan what I do but until today all I had done was a) make the poster; b) make a video tape of my goddaughter c) organise the invitations and d) do a scruffy one-page plan which might be distantly related to a mind map but didn't help much today!

All day today I have been trying to sort out what I want to say and I have a very bad and much too long Powerpoint presentation ready which I shall spend tomorrow re-writing. The good bits have been finding this site when I was looking for an on-line version of Pride and Prejudice, finally learning how to draw straight lines in Photoshop and learning about the little clicky button underneath our remote mouse for the lecture theatre. (I have dressed Elizabeth and Darcy at least 6 times today and spent a long time resisting doing some research in my Georgette Heyer collection about what men wore with knee-breeches and what they wore with Hessians. ) The rest of the time has been spent thinking about how to say anything worth listening to and -mainly- wondering if I really know anything about digital literacies at all. in between that I have thought about my knee a bit, which has been hurting since I went to the gym on Friday. (I know. No need to say it.)

2005-11-10T21:34:00.000Z

Where was I?
Just before Dr Joolz went to Venice I went here:

It looks very un-English and it is- it is here in Wales. I had never been before and so I took lots of pictures. We also bought the complete DVD set of this and some badges which say we are not numbers.

On the way we tried to stop in Llangollen for lunch but it was full. We saw the river though which was also pretty full:

and this amazing shop, though we did not go and buy anything:

then we went past this lake:

One of the things I liked was that there are lots of natural frames for pictures in Portmeirion like this one where the Motorcyclist is using one of his favourite gadgets, his Lidl binoculars.

and this one looking across the estuary.

Around the village there are woods to walk in and the autumn colour was just irresistible. Or irresistable, I am too tired to tell tonight!

So it was a good break. It feels a very long time ago and work is very full again, particularly since on Wednesday this week I am meant to be doing a quite important lecture which is still just a plan on one side of A4 and a short video clip. I would post the poster but I can't find the file. Tomorrow, maybe..

2005-10-27T17:52:00.000+01:00

Yesterday..
We went for a walk. It was very sunny when we set out, so I had high hopes of getting some excellent pictures of me looking at clouds like in the poem I blogged this week, but we had a few delays trying to find an open pub for lunch and by the time we walked it was cloudy and rained too. (The good news is my new Rohan 100% waterproof jacket is just that.) But afterwards we went to one of our favourite places for tea, which is a cafe run by people who also run a windmill which makes the flour they use in the cakes, and the windmill started working while we were there. Really you need to see this as a video but I think these pictures give some of the sense of how these vast sails went very close to us as they turned.

Tomorrow..

We are going to this place for a long weekend staying here and visiting here. So I should have some very interesting pictures to blog next week! (As long as it doesn't rain all the time. It says here that it won't..)

2005-10-25T12:03:00.000+01:00

Today
I saw SimplyClare's poem last night and while I was looking for something else today and avoiding planning my professorial lecture I found this one which people might like. I used to have it on my wall at work.

TODAY
Today I will not live up to my potential.
Today I will not relate well to my peer group.
Today I will not contribute in class.
I will not volunteer one thing.
Today I will not strive to do better.
Today I will not achieve or adjust or grow enriched or get involved.
I will not put up my hand even if the teacher is wrong and I can prove it.

Today I might eat the eraser off my pencil.
I'll look at clouds.
I'll be late.
I don't think I'll wash.

I need a rest.

(By Jean Little )

2005-10-24T21:57:00.000+01:00

I nearly forgot..
Today I went to see the unfurling of A Flag For Lincolnshire. Yet another of those very special treats I get as Head Bear. And I have just found myself in a very grainy BBC Lincolnshire video on their website! (Can't work out how to add the link but it is the one for Lincoln in the same story, see the link above.) If you watch it, I am the small person in a black coat and black trousers holding a blurred umbrella. I am not sure why I was at this but I do know it rained very hard. There was a cake iced like the flag but as I am on a detox I could only have a tiny bit and even that made me feel guilty.

2005-10-24T21:20:00.000+01:00

Oops.
I am embarrassed to see how long it is since I blogged. I have been meaning to every day but have been very tired lately and so I just browse a bit on other people's, check out the fuss on Mustardland about the newstyle message boards and play a bit of patience. I was also going to do a very clever blog based on the meme Dr Joolz did (Oct 18th entry) of 10 things you don' t know about me and had a lot of fun planning it all about Mary Plain but somehow the moment passed. I have some time off this week so hope that will inspire me to write something interesting and take some pictures. Meanwhile, I guess it is time to visit Guy's site as I have been to all the others I visit regularly. (I very much like Kate's site but haven't yet been able to think of any sensible or interesting comments to make on it.)

2005-10-13T20:36:00.000+01:00

23/5
My 23rd post was about our days out in the summer. The fifth sentence is not that exciting:
'The next picture is from Coalbrookdale, the Museum of Iron.' But following California Eating's example, the sixth was better- it was about this picture, an advert for an Aga:

I just liked the way the guy looks so sleazy now, with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth- a reminder of how times, and advertising approaches, have changed. Where is the gleaming expresso machine? or amazing hand thrown pottery? And that dressing gown is amazing.

It was cool to go back to that post, though, and remember a good day out. Go on, try it yourself. What was your 23rd post about?

2005-10-13T20:29:00.000+01:00

And another thing..
Just logged out, spotted this interesting blog on the blogspot login page and then got intrigued by the blogging game here.. thing is, have I got 23 posts yet? need to check.. but DrJoolz, you have, so go on, I tag you! Meanwhile I am off to do some counting. BRB..

2005-10-13T20:10:00.000+01:00

Avatars, icons and pictures
Some of were chatting last night on MSN and the topic of avatars came up, and we began to wonder about the actual difference. One of us suggested to me that Mary Plain is an avatar- and on reflection maybe she is, as I use her as a kind of alter ego, not just a pseudonym or cop-out to avoid using my photo.. but there must be someone out there who knows properly where the boundaries lie? Any ideas?

2005-10-06T20:32:00.000+01:00

Walking the students
By popular request (thanks Guy and Joolz) a few more glimpses of student life. These are from a walk last week (part of the freshers thing though actually these are all second and third years, many of them our SU exec). I went so I could have another chance to drive the minibus.

It was a not very nice day and the forecast was rain. Two of the students rang the person organising the walk to ask if they could wear wellies. (Yes, they are at least 19 years old and they asked permission.) They had matching wellies- not a very well composed shot, sorry, but you get the idea:

However, only the members of staff had coats with any degree of waterproofing.

We saw this very strange plant in someone's garden:

We crossed a bridge so the students tried to play Poohsticks. All the sticks got caught somewhere under the bridge though.

And we saw this wonderfully useful sign in a field by a narrow kissing gate:

Then on the way home it rained a lot (while we were in the bus) and the next day I was ill. I have the Freshers Virus which is a lot like kennel cough for any dog owners out there. A very deep husky cough and a low grade fever. Have had two and a half days off and am way behind with everything which is why this blog entry is very late arriving.

2005-09-29T18:17:00.000+01:00

A giant knitted pink bunny on a mountainside
Sadly the picture is only in the paper copy of The Guardian today and not with the website article, as far as I can see. The words 'giant' and 'pink' are very accurate..

I keep hoping I will think of something more intelligent to post about. Keep looking, it may happen!

2005-09-26T22:47:00.000+01:00

Sunday Funday
Not my name for it- the Students' Union called it that. It was the staff-student rounders match, so the students prepared carefully:

The umpire (in blue) gave them a serious talk about the rules but I am not sure they were all listening:

The crowd watched intently:

and there was lots of running:

The students were very confident:

But rain stopped play while the staff were ahead:

So sad..

2005-09-21T21:29:00.000+01:00

Freshers
For many of my fellow bloggers this must be a parallel experience as we all respectively either welcome or get ready to welcome our new students, though maybe not quite like this. Tonight, as head bear in this bearpit, I went to our Freshers Dinner and then (by time honoured tradition over the past two years, three weeks) to the karaoke in the SU bar. This is an intriguing mix of past tradition and present. We start the dinner with the College grace (Non nobis Domine, the Byrd setting) which used to be used daily in College and is now used for Freshers Dinner, the student Christmas meal, and at graduation (oh, and the Old Students always sing it en masse). Then we leap to the SU bar and function room and come right up to date. The students eagerly peruse the list of songs and there is fierce competition for a karaoke slot. The SU exec tonight did Bohemian Rhapsody ( an interesting interpretation) .. a combination of music and drama students did Bob the Builder with great gusto. Bare stomachs seem to be fading from view. I am allowed to leave with dignity - and more importantly, without singing- after the college chant (ask me next time you see me) to finish the evening at my blog, a single malt and some chocolate at my side. Okay, I expect you are waiting for the point of all this. But that is it.. not even any photos. Just wanted to capture the moment.

2005-09-19T22:04:00.000+01:00

And what I was going to say today..
I have been thinking about online shopping, particularly since Victoria Carrington posted these links to amazing laptop bags. What would you buy online? I am not talking here about security and stuff like that, but what do you want to hold in your hand before you buy rather than just seeing on a website? My problem with the laptop bags is that I need to touch them and see them, maybe even smell them, and certainly try them on, to choose. Books I will risk online, also music- even without always having heard it- but bags, that just feels wrong.. Where do you draw the line?

2005-09-19T22:01:00.000+01:00

More dodgy humour
And because I emailed Ian and said I liked Downfall, he sent me this with this warning:

'Glad you enjoyed it, here's another. It's audio and contains a naughty word so if you play it at work make sure the volume is turned low.'

This one takes a while and I don't recognise quite all the people but you will get the general drift. Don't follow this link if you are a Bush fan though. You won't like it.

2005-09-18T20:51:00.000+01:00

Autumn Idyll.
Each morning (well, almost) I walk into Lincoln for a newspaper. It is often a very beautiful walk and last week, since the sky was particularly amazing, I took the camera. I saw the last rose of summer:

and the first leaf of autumn

I saw this amazing sunrise:

reflected in these cathedral windows:

and someone leaving on a jet plane over the pub roof:

Sometimes getting up early really is worth it.

2005-09-18T20:47:00.000+01:00

Downfall of a great Western power..
Sent by our friend Ian- who says
'It's different every time. I find it kind of soothing, and addictive'- is this image called Downfall. Try it. I think you will also like it.

2005-09-13T19:14:00.000+01:00

Captured- a great sporting moment.

No, not that one. Though I actually enjoyed the cricket too.

This is my alter ego winning a snail race at the college student fair last June. Picture donated by digital camera- mad student. Prize - as far as I recall- was a packet of sweets.

2005-09-08T20:12:00.000+01:00

Getting back to blogging
It has been surprisingly hard to write anything here this week. I have been telling myself this is because I have been busy- and I have, as like all the other ESRC attendees last weekend I have struggled to catch up with email and post and all the routine work things. I am now blogging and working normally for the first time, having set up the Bearpit in the summer when although I was at work it was very quiet, whereas now I am back to normal with a list of things to do that is too long to find time to write down. But I think there has been more to it than that as I could have found a nook or cranny to post in.

Last weekend the blogosphere and meatspace came together in a very strange way and although I really enjoyed the whole thing and had to think very hard about ideas I find interesting, it was a bit strange being in the same room with the people who read my blog and whose blogs I read. It has made me a bit self-conscious about what I post. I have caught myself spotting interesting stories in the news and tucking them away in my mind to write about but kind of knowing at the same time I was not going to. I think seeing everyone and hearing them all saying such thoughtful things was quite scary really.

I think I am also feeling a similar anxiety about getting back to my own research. I have two writing days this week, that I kept clear on purpose, one for today to finish a paper about future developments at the college (kind of demanding but I knew what was needed) and one tomorrow to be for revising a paper and writing to Rebekah about the seminar series and stuff. I have spent all day on the work one and it isn't done, so a bit of tomorrow will go, and I think a bit of me has gone slow on purpose to avoid that getting back in the big pool with the real swimmers. Sooner or later someone will notice I have one foot on the bottom all the time..

2005-08-31T19:41:00.000+01:00

Graffiti, good or bad?
I was about to post this story from BBC Lincolnshire with a comment to ask why they are stressing. This wall looks better with the graffiti than without it.

Then I followed a supplementary link and found I was suddenly not so enamoured of the graffiti artists. Who would want to spoil cute trains like these?

So is graffiti a legitimate expression of identity, a way of marking one's existence just like blogging or autobiography, or wanton vandalism? If both, what is okay and what not? Why do we appreciate Banksy (and I do..) when others see that as part of the wanton vandalism end of the spectrum?

2005-08-31T19:05:00.000+01:00

Toys
A while back I planned to do this post of the things on my toys wish list, and today, the last day of my holiday, seems a good time to cheer myself up with thoughts of toys to come. The thing is, which should I go for first?

This is my dream Magimix, the 5100. Around £179 from Amazon. I have brought the small one back to Lincoln and it would be great to have the big one in Bromsgrove for entertaining there.

Seeing Dr Joolz' s closeups has made me think maybe I should trade up in camera terms. I am really fond of my Fuji and it is very good but this looks even better. But is it too bulky for me to take out a lot? And should I look at other makes too or stay loyal to Fuji?

I used to have a Walkman, then a CD Walkman. Now I don' t have either.. my friend John has an iPod and it is really cute. But would I use it? And could I resist some of those cute accessories Victoria Carrington had on her blog recently?

I really need a decent sound system. Our living room is big, around 42 square metres, and needs a big sound to fill it. I have always wanted a Bang and Olufsen, and this one stores CDs on its hard drive. But it is very expensive. I could get something much cheaper. Would I love it as much as a B&O?

It is time to go big flat screen. We would love a 42 inch one and we have room for it here. But which one? and plasma or the other sort? and what would the neighbours say? (Actually we don't really have any..)

And, to counteract all the couch potato activity related to the above, I fancy a really good rowing machine- the Concept 2. There is room in the bedroom. But I can use one in the new sports centre here on campus, for a fraction of the price. Is it better to pay for us both to join the sports centre (only a small fitness suite but I could walk and cycle too) or to have a rowing machine to use at home whenever we want?

So many choices, so little money. What do I go for first? What would be on your list?

2005-08-28T21:20:00.000+01:00

The finished cake
This is the last cake post. The wedding was yesterday and after a somewhat scary drive up there with a boot full of cake boxes we arrived safely, decorated the cake with its ribbons and physalis and then it got cut and eaten. People were very nice about it. Most plates I could see got emptied and apparently the serving staff were also eating the cake behind the scenes (spotted by the Motorcyclist). Anyway, see what you think:

From this second shot you can see that the brown ribbons matched the bride's dress. The cream was to match the bridesmaids. The whole event was a lot of fun and the happy couple seemed to be just that.

Normal life now resumes and I can attempt to think about higher matters, such as the approaching seminar on Digital Literacies, Creativity and Play (not necessarily in that order) next Friday and Saturday.

2005-08-25T21:07:00.000+01:00

Random acts of kindness
Dr Joolz has pointed me to Mr Best's class rules which include random acts of kindness. I think this is a kind of movement out there but am too tired to Google it now. But we have been the recipients of some random acts recently. At least I think they count. First, we were out for a walk the other day and took a new path which led us to the middle of a housing estate. As we asked a guy how to get out of it and back to where we were going, it began to rain hard. He lent us (complete strangers) a big umbrella to get home. Then yesterday the Motorcyclist had a bit more bike trouble- this time not of the falling over kind but a lost oil plug leading inexorably to lost oil. While he was waiting for our friend to arrive a man and his granddaughter stopped to see if they could help. Not sure that one quite counts but the Motorcyclist was v impressed. So- like Dr Joolz asks, how random does it have to be? what counts? does thinking about doing something kind stop it being random?

2005-08-25T20:22:00.000+01:00

Cake update
Today the cakes have gone from being just cakes to cakes with butter icing. Tomorrow the scary bit when I have to coat them in the white chocolate layer to make them beautiful. Today has had its scary moments too though as the cakes had to be handled a fair bit to join them together in pairs. Here are a few photos from along the way:

This is just some of the chocolate that has been involved.

Cakes in various stages of baking

The baked cakes ready for their butter icing

Butter icing on

The inside of the test cake - halfway eaten

2005-08-22T07:01:00.000+01:00

Scary day
Today I am making a wedding cake for my friend Catherine. This is for her wedding this coming Saturday and it seemed like a good idea at the time. It is a chocolate cake with white chocolate icing so has to be done at the last moment. We (Catherine is coming to help) have to make three tiers plus an extra large one so there will be enough for everyone. I decided to do a practice cake this weekend and half the first one didn't cook long enough (tasted fine) so I had to make three halves.. then the icing does not do what it says in the recipe and would not roll out, so I am v scared. Can I make this work? will it look well to the jaybad or just plain bad.. please think of me! (The good news is that the failed practice half made a great pudding yesterday disguised with some brandy and fruit and tasted bostin. So it will taste okay but what about the photographs?)