City and country life

City Life

Dusty romanced dirty streets

Secret people indiscreet

Walking closely far apart

That’s the city centre art

Crowded busses flashy cars

Fog and fume block out the stars

Hurry slowly nowhere soon

Morning night and afternoon

Reading other people's blogs I realised I’d never put a poem here. OK so here is one that probably explains why I live in the country now.

OK so I know that afternoon comes between morning and night, but then it wouldn't rhyme with soon, and wouldn't sound right. I used to write lots of poems but now I find novels and blogs are more fun.

Which leads me to country life. We live in an old farmhouse and there is a smell of home baking all the time – well there would be wouldn’t there.

My wife Lois is somewhat obsessed with baking and for the last couple of years has been experimenting with Gluten Free baking – because Gluten makes her sick.

She has now reinvented the original concept of web logging - later called blogging. She invents new Gluten Free recipes and writes them up on her blog as she does them. [ http://blissglutenfree.blogspot.com ] This does two things, makes it easy to find the recipe and also tells us when certain things were made, so we can do tests on what their shelf life should be. How many home cooks give best before dates to their products? For those who read her blog I am Mr. Taster on there.

Gaugin

I was going to post something about visiting the Gaugin exhibition at Tate Modern, but Lois has beaten me to it.

http://apaininthebutt.blogspot.com/2010/10/tate-modern-gauguin.html

Lois is my wife, in case anyone who reads this stuff hasn't guessed it yet. Lois is very intolerant of Gluten and spends a lot of time experimenting with making, mostly baking, gluten free foods, which is why her review of the art seems to spend more time in the cafe than looking at the paintings. If anyone reads her blogs I feature as Mr Taster - maybe I'll use that as a nom-de-plume some day.

If you haven't visited the Gaugin yet then I'd say allow quite a lot of time. There is a lot of material about him that takes time to read, especially as you can expect to be buffeted by the crowd washing by. Like Lois I found the painting drab, I don't know why I was expecting more light, something about Tahiti, romance and all that, but it is just not there. I was also surprised to find that the paintings were almost all much smaller that I expected. OK so that in some ways is good, they'd fit in your living room, unlike some of the things I've seen in Tate Modern.

On the other hand none of it made me laugh, or cry, or say WOW! So why did I go? I'm a sucker for a good story I guess and there is something of that. Gaugin seemed to spend his life reinventing himself and almost living a fiction. He was obviously convinced from an early age that he was a genius. I can't think of any other reason why he would go on painting such dull paintings while he was having such an interesting life.

Who benefits?

It was fascinating listening to Cameron on the Today programme. I don’t think they laid a glove on him, in boxing parlance. What would I have said if I was interviewing him?

On universal benefits there is an interesting debate to be had. Do give it to every one, or do you try to arget those who need it most? Take winter fuel allowance, for example. I get it, I’m old enough, I’ve filled in the forms and it duly turns up each year. I also don’t need it. So why not check my tax code and stop it?

In reality, i.e. outside the rarefied atmosphere of the Today Programme, fuel poverty is not that simple. For example there are old people who have big houses because once upon a time they had children at home. By the time there is just an elderly widow left she may have a house full of memories, but it could well be too cold to be healthy. She may well appear to be rich because that great big house will count as an asset, but she might not be able to afford to heat it.

She should move to somewhere smaller, I hear you say, but maybe grandma thinks her children will never visit if she doesn’t have enough bedrooms. Modern education and work practices have scattered families all over the country – go away to university and never come back. The aspiration to send half the population to higher education not only teaches half of us to be in debt but will probably increase our chances of dying alone, or at least only connected by broadband.

Winter fuel payments could be targeted. You could put together what the local authority knows about housing stock, not just when it was build, but all that stuff that goes into meeting the better homes standard, plus those thermal image things that some councils have on the web sites. If you did that you would know a lot of stuff and you ought to be able to predict how much energy it takes to keep each house warm.

The energy companies know how much energy we all actually consume – they send us bills for the stuff after all.

If you put both of those sources together it ought to be easy to calculate who is not using enough energy to keep warm. If the winter fuel allowance were only sent to them that would be bound to save a packet.

On the other hand it would be intrusive. It means that some computer would be able to delve into our lives and if hacked into, tell the world that we were too poor to keep warm.

That is where the dilemma lies. Targeting, means testing, whatever you want to call it, is intrusive, and as it only helps the poor it means we end up living in a society where there is literally one rule for the rich and other for the poor.

The same sort of thing applies to the child benefit stuff. Back when I was a single parent I got child benefit and I did like having it. In some insane way it was a sort of acknowledgement from the government that I as a single father was able to bring up my kids. It sounds foolish in the light of day, but back then when sometimes I wondered if I could hack it, there was a certain reassurance to getting those cheques. When my youngest daughter finally passed the right age and the last cheque came I remember having a quiet drink and saying to myself.

‘Well I did it.’

On the other hand I am in no doubt that I could have managed without child benefit. I earned enough that under the new proposals mine would be stopped. What I find odd is that they are going to base it on individual income rather than household income. A single parent just over the right tax band will lose the benefit, two people living in the same house each of whom earns half of that will get the benefit, even though their combined income come to the same as the single parent. Somehow that doesn’t seem right.

‘Oh but it will be harder to calculate household income than just doing on the tax band.’

Pull the other one. We are quick enough to penalise people on benefits if they cohabit without telling social security. The ‘system’ is obviously quite capable of assessing household income when it feels like it. If they implement this proposal as written it really will be one rule for the rich and another for the poor.

I suppose one good thing about it is that it really will encourage women to go out to work as soon as their husband’s income begins to come close to the upper tax threshold. At least that chucks a bomb under a different set of traditional Tory values – or maybe Cameron is even cleverer than he looks.

Better write better

I’ve been reading Nicola Morgan’s rather good blog for some while (http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com). She did a series of posts about how to use Twitter, so, following on from my last post I decided to take the plunge.

I’ve installed Tweetdeck, again as a result of various comments. Seems like a good idea, especially as it has a column of newsfeeds so that I pick up friends Facebook updates at the same time – on the Iphone too.

Then the wierd stuff starts. I wrote a tweet saying I’d slept in my campervan on the way to a conference in London. Somewhat inconsequential information for the world in general, but one has to start somewhere. (More of the conference in a moment.) Next thing I know I have a new follower on twitter – some campervan / motor home site in the USA that claims to offer everything motor home, is now following me. Obviously they have some software that is chewing through all the tweets in the world and hitting on words like campervan, motor home etc. The mind boggles. I wonder what the package is and where I can get it?

The conference was the writer’s workshops do, in London, about getting published. It came with a one-to-one book doctor session thrown in, which seemed like a good idea since I hadn’t had one since the last update. OK so I am selling the book on Amazon, Smashwords etc. but maybe it still needs work. Plus one has to book up for these things so far in advance that I hadn’t taken the e-book plunge when I signed up.

There is a temptation to Iphone a tweet while sitting in the audience. Risky though, because if a camervan site in the USA can follow me off the back of one word, then who knows who else. If I imply that it is bizarre to listen to “Two drably dressed publishers with boring voices talking about how they want to have their socks knocked off by new submissions.” People whose presentation style seems to suggest that they have never been excited in their lives, but who may nevertheless be monitoring every word in some crafty way. These people publish books. I don’t want to offend them do I? So I thought it, but didn’t say it.

Maybe the drab presentation was part of the act. If it looks as though one would have to work very, very hard to get these people excited, maybe it gives you some idea of what you are up against. As far as I can tell from the figures bandied about at the conference, for the average writer, the odds of getting picked up by a publisher are about one in a thousand. So to a first approximation all authors are failures. Harry Bingham did let slip that three percent of the people who have been through the Oxford Writers Workshop process get picked up. So that must be seen as a huge success – to go from 1 per 1000 to 30 per 1000.

I find it slightly tedious that Harry keeps implying that the only reason you book does not get picked up is because it is not good enough. Has he never read Fred Hirsh on social limits to growth? “If everyone stands in tiptoe, no one sees any better.” If we all get much better at writing but the number of authors stays the same and the book market stays the same then still seems likely that 1 per 1000 will still be the norm.

Of course there is another problem, namely that some pretty dreadful books that appear to disobey everything the book doctors say, still seem to get published. Maybe Harry’s advice should be rephrased along the lines that for most of us the only obvious way to improve our chances of getting published is to write a better book. There may be other ways, like luck, inside contacts, or whatever, but the chances are that the people who get through by those means either don’t know how they did it, or are never going to say. So shut up and keep trying to write better.

I guess Harry’s sales pitch worked to some extent, because I now have a signed copy of his book on how to get published (Getting Published, Harry Bingham). I’ll get Nicola Morgan's book (Write to be Published), when it comes out, but chasing around to see if I can pre-order got me to Snowbooks and their rather wonderful Open Rejection Letter (http://www.snowbooks.com/openrejection.html.) It says it all, and it’s worth reading, but here’s a little quote, which I hope they don’t mind me using – it does say open after all.

“What it comes down to is that publishing companies aren't really the people you want reviewing your work. If you think about it, we have a financial incentive to put as little thought and effort into sifting through submissions as possible. We've got a lot of submissions to get through and not enough time. Plus, many publishers aren't looking to take any chances with new material; they want obvious, commercial successes, ideally from authors with a track record.”

So, while hiring a witchdoctor, bunging it on Kindle etc. may be worth a try, trying to write better still looks like the only game in town.

To tweet or not to tweet, and such like stuff

We are moving up a gear on IT. The plan is that by Christmas we will know what we are doing and be able to do it better. Lois and I are going to do a term’s course with the OU on making web sites and I’ve been to two one-day courses on stuff to do with marketing through social media. The first social media session was somewhat disrupted by me getting at attack of Meniere’s disease and having to retreat to the gents in order to be sick for ten minutes. I’m sure it was the Meniere’s not the lecturer.

Meanwhile Lois is selling stuff on e-bay, as part of developing a new skill set. Also a means of removing a lot of the stuff that fills the house – better that someone else should have it, than it sit around here not being used. I don’t know what set off this spasm of de-cluttering, possibly it was a side effect of Lois having some virus and lying on a sofa in front of daytime TV for a week. All those makeover programmes can’t be good for you.

The past comes back at us in strange ways. I spent three years living in a flat in London in the week and being at home in Worcestershire at the weekends. As a result I ended up with two pairs of black shoes, two pairs of brown shoes, etc. etc. If Lois keeps up the e-bay work I will be down to one of everything before long.

I’m not sure of the ethics of marketing through social networks. Take it out of the Internet context for a moment and think about how you would feel if someone you invited to a party tried to sell stuff to everyone else that attended. It seems to me that spamming your friends on Facebook is pretty much the same thing, whether you are trying to get them all to follow your blog or buy your book. The thing about online relationships is that these social lines are not firmly in place; ethics and manners and social customs can barely keep up – or maybe I’m just not reading the right stuff.

One result of all this course work is that I have finally got to grips with Google Reader and have linked up all the blogs I follow. It does work. At a glance I can spot new posts and save some time from bouncing through bookmarks, opening and closing windows, tabs etc. There is the added benefit that I feel very slightly more modern and on the ball, but where that might lead I can’t imagine.

I’m still left with the problem of Twitter – to tweet or not to tweet, that is the question - whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to sound off in 140 characters or waffle forever in a blog. Who knows?

I sold a book

Hey I sold a book. Actually two ebooks, one on Amazon and one on Smashwords. I had a spell of making it free, as a sort of special offer. That resulted in fifty or more downloads of the whole book. Then I put the price back on, a mere $2.99, of which I might end up with about one dollar I think.

It’s not exactly the most brilliant marketing plan, but the theory was that maybe if some people got it for free and liked it then they might tell a friend, and $2.99 is not exactly expensive. At the moment anyone can get it for that sort of amount on Smashwords, Apple or Amazon Kindle store.

OK enough celebrating, back to writing the next one.

A blog free summer

One might think that the summer would be a good time for blogging. Long days, time to reflect in the sunshine and all that.

Bear in mind 2007 and it becomes clearer that the summer may not be all it promises. This year the disasters have been less all encompassing than being flooded but still disruptive in their own way.

The garage doors started it off – random openings being the main symptom - obvious attention seeking behaviour from some piece of electronic chippery. There is a lesson in there somewhere. Random and intermittent faults get much more attention than just failing altogether. A garage door that is stuck open or stuck shut can be got around but an intermittent fault requires a man in a van to come and gaze at it and look puzzled. The same is true of human behaviour I think. If you are obnoxious all the time folk think it is character and work around it. If, on the other hand you are erratic then they call men in white coats. Actually I think that’s a bit unfair to psychiatrists as I think they operate in plain clothes these days.

Of course all the other remote controlled, silicon based stuff that we have must have some way of spotting that the garage door is getting a lot of loving attention from strangers, at least that seems to me to be a reasonable explanation for the rash of copycat behaviour that has spread like a virus around here.

The sewer is the most disruptive. I should explain that we live out in the country. Rural. Not isolated – we can still get pizza delivered so we are not cut off from civilisation altogether. We are a long way from a main sewer and when I asked the local planning department if the sewer would ever get this far they just laughed. We have our own treatment plant, a massive plastic tank thing buried in the ground at the bottom of the garden. It does clever things; blowing bubbles through the sewage and passing it between different inner compartments in some cunningly programmed way. It is called activated sludge – a great name. The end result is clean water that can be discharged into the nearby stream with the approval of the local environmental health inspectors.

All this is controlled by a box full of electronics that sits on a concrete thing to keep it out of any future flood. Actually ever since the flood this box has been producing random faults – a little orange light comes on which means we have to call out another man in a van. Maybe the garage door caught the affliction from there.

It’s easy to see how the infection could spread to the gate. The thing is controlled off the same zapper thingy as the doors. Is there some sort of newsletter that goes around motorised gates I wonder? All it took was one tragic story in the media about some poor child being crushed by a gate and our gate start to malfunction. First it took to jamming open. And that needed a new set of wheels to fix it. Then we found that the safety devices had stopped working so if you happened to be in the way it would keep on closing until it had squashed you flat. With impeccable timing it adopted this new behaviour just before the weekend when we were expecting about 100 visitors.

More vans. In fact at one time we had the sewer van and the gate van here at the some time and I had to spend part of the day operating as car park attendant.

Eventually it was decided that there was a leak inside the depths of the sewer machine. I should remind you that this is a massive plastic thing about 15 feet deep buried in a lot of concrete sunk deep in the garden. Take the top off and what you see is dirty smelly water being stirred around. Hard to spot that some of the water is coming through a hole that should not be there. It had to be completely emptied out – this requires a big tanker as well as the man in the van to supervise. In the end a tanker a van and a range rover in order to get enough combined expertise on site and finally see that about six feet down there is a split in the plastic.

So we then enter a period when we have one of those plastic outdoor loos that you see at open air pop concerts. This adds a lot of entertainment to the week we have the grandchildren visiting.

The malfunctioning disease spreads. Next my IMAC starts to slow down to walking-in-treacle pace. That little spinning wheel you see when MACs are busy takes up residence almost permanently on my desktop. I phone Apple Care, actually I just phone Apple and they ask me for the serial number of my IMAC and it turns out that I bought Apple Care when I got it and there are three weeks left on the contract. Astonishing, my luck is changing, normally they would be telling me that it ran out three weeks ago – even my bad luck is malfunctioning.

Each thing they suggest to do takes an hour or so before it fails to work and I phone them back. Over the course of the day I talk to four different friendly helpful advisors and by the end I have completely wiped the hard disc and we have come to the conclusion that it needs replacing. I end the day driving forty miles to the nearest dealer and leaving the machine there for four days.

When I get it back everything seems to be working, apart from having to reinstall all my software and files which are supposedly sitting on a thing called a time machine. A neat, sleek, Apple white plastic box with a terabyte of so capacity which is supposed to have everything backed up on it. I did actually take a sneak look at it using my laptop before I wiped the old hard disc and everything did seem to be there.

I set it going and hold my breath for the next 46 hours while it transfers files. Yes it really did take that long. There were nine hours at the beginning before it even guessed how long it might take.

It all worked and now the machine is running. The sewer isn’t fixed yet but the little plastic cabin outside is doing OK and the man who comes to empty it once a week is very friendly and helpful. We have survived the grandchildren visiting without any catastrophe. One had a stomach upset, with rather more use of the plastic cabin as part of the impact, but at least she caught it before she got to us.

The insurance company have passed the matter to a specialist company who decided that it was too complicated for them and passed it to someone else. They in turn passed it to someone else but the third company have sent a man to look at it and he turned up on Saturday.

Enough, enough I hear you say, but at least anyone who cares to read this far knows why I haven’t been blogging.