Technology

Clocks in Barcelona

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

Recently I was working with some PhDs near Barcelona. As you are not necessarily in my immediate social circle that might have been the first time you heard me say that.

But, if you know me on a person-to-person basis – at all – you will have heard me say that quite a lot recently.

And, you will have heard me mention that I was ‘running an interactive case study on the ethics of stem cell research, which, well yes, I wrote…’

Anyway, enough of that, I am not here to show off.

(Though if you want to know more about how good the case study is and how lovely the hotel in the mountains above the city was, or how charming and fun the 40 PhDs were, then do get in touch.)

The trip involved quite a lot of waiting around in Barcelona airport for one reason or another, and unlike the stuff above, I won’t bore you with the details.

Anyway, there is no clock in Barcelona airport.

Now an airport is somewhere where time matters, so you might think even in this day and age of watches and phones, you might have a clock that people could glance up at and be sure they hadn’t missed the time to go to the gate or missed their family’s flight arrival.

There is a fake clock in the cafe, where I spent some time waiting for a friend/colleague to arrive but, it being fake, is stuck on 9.40 – and attractive though it is, that doesn’t really cut it as a clock.

I can understand the toilets being far, far down the other end of the terminal. I can even understand that the mezzanine floor is still under construction and may have been/will be for some time.

I can even, just, understand that whilst one terminal has lots of shops and thus ways to kill time if you arrive very early for your flight, the terminal I was in has Desigual and bugger all else.

( We would not have arrived so early if the taxi driver had not decided that the half hour trip from the hotel should be done in record time of 15 minutes with near death experiences thrown in for good measure.)

But no clock?

So, I got to thinking about clocks. I had a lot of time to kill, one way or another.

Meeting under the clock at Waterloo station is one of those cliches now over-ridden with more practical solutions like meeting at a cafe on the mezzanine floor ( Barcelona airport authority please note, with no clock you should get your mezzanine floor sorted.)

And the grandfather clock belonging to our previous next door neighbours which chimed, quietly, through the walls during the night.

I have tried to get us a chiming clock for our mantlepiece, and bought two ( not the same as a grandfather clock, but nice all the same) but we can never make them work.

So, our siting room has two clocks which don’t work – though I am sure anyone with an ounce of clock experience could get them going in a minute.

But, glancing at my watch, it is now time to go and cook supper – and there are two clocks in the kitchen which work – one has bird song on the hour and an image of the bird which is singing but (please at this point see previous blog about not being a detail kind of a person) the images and song don’t quite match – we have an owl’s hoot at midday….

And for those of us of a like mind, there is the daily time keeping, just after 7pm, The Archers, after which supper will be served.

 

 

Dilettante Blogging

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As with most things in my life, I am a rather dilettante blogger.

I am gratified and, rather childishly, thrilled when I see from the statistics that a heady 24 people have visited it on one day, but I don’t do anything about promoting it.

Not really sure what categories and tags are about, and only having the link on my email signature because the nice algorithm did it for me, I can’t claim to be anything other than a seriously self-indulgent writer.

Therefore, I take my hat off to people who do it so much better than me – nicely shot and embedded photos, posh layout, hundreds, nay thousands, of followers, all sorts of inventive links and stuff and stuff.

Being a woman of a certain age – when I started writing, it was on a typewriter –  and I am lax about keeping up with any technology that doesn’t find itself into my daily life.

The effort to get better at it is always derailed by a dog walk, supper to cook, a book to read or more to the point, a few hundred Oxfam books to sort.

So fuzzy photos and lazily laid out copy, lax interest in many other blogs, and writing when I feel like it rather than having commitment to get stuff out there as often as possible, and no promotion whatsoever, are what works for me.

(I only just realised that though you can schedule when your blog is posted it goes up on Facebook and Twitter that moment, so I seem to have splurged all over the place when I had hoped to spread myself about a bit.)

So, as I say, I take my hat off to anyone who does it better than me and there are no doubt millions.

But at this point I want to take the aforementioned hat off to a friend who has turned his blog about living the Good life into a book.

Tom and Barbara Good and their two children Rather and Jolly ( yes, they are indeed nom des plumes) live on a small holding in Herefordshire and Tom has written the tale of how they did it – warts and all.

Once when we were working together, he told me how to set up a basic blog and encouraged me to go for it and this, dear reader, is the result.

But whereas I just witter about what I think at that moment, he has a story to tell and I have to admit that I have been reading it rather more avidly than my current book club book which is rather ernest and worthy, albeit good for me.

I spot things I know about him and his family and things I didn’t, and it makes me laugh – a real antidote to the book club book.

One chapter mentions something I once wrote, and I was so delighted.

By the way, it wasn’t all frills and frippery of presentation but a good/Good story and in the end that is what matters to middle-aged Deepest Sussex Housewives.

So, I will refrain from scheduling this witter, and I will have no pretensions about making a good tale out of my life, but I will keep on writing.

Now though, the supper needs cooking, the dog needs walking and there is a chair which needs upholstering.

And here is the link the to his book

I want stuff that works – and someone to help with our CDs

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

I am a big fan of quotations and of Douglas Adams, and two of my favourite quotes by him came to mind today.

He wrote, ’ We are stuck with technology when what we really want it stuff that works.’

And
‘Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.’

If at this point you are expecting the writings of a middle-aged woman baffled by some aspect of technology that a babe-in-arms would handle, then you are more or less right, and you might want to go off and do something else.

I  am not at all sure why you cannot have two Twitter accounts from one email address? More than that, why the hell not?

I have set up a twitter account for the Oxfam shop – called, just in case you live locally – OxfamBookPetersfield.

(It would not surprise my friend Anthony to note that yes, I meant to put OxfamBooksPetersfield – but didn’t proof read and so I am stuck with the missing S as I have no way of knowing how to amend it.)

I tweet badly and in a desultory fashion – not because I am not interested but I don’t think I have much interesting to say and I am not attuned enough to be re-tweeting really interesting stuff.

I want this account to be accessed from my laptop as well as my phone and my other twitter account, the one you find me on, to be accessed from my phone too.

Why is that too much to ask?

Anyway, we badly need to find someone locally to take on the DVD and vinyl & CDs side of the Oxfam bookshop business.

Our two music and film experts have taken it into their heads to move to the West Country and the very nice young woman who offered to take it on, has taken it into her head to go travelling in a VW camper around New Zealand for a year.

So, I reckon we need a young person who can do the aforementioned stuff, and at the same time run a Facebook account for the shop. And indeed, if I could find someone to do just the Facebook stuff, it might throw up, as it were, a young person or two who likes music and film.

But I am useless at Facebook – these blogs only get out there because WordPress took the whole issue of my hands and do it for me without so much as a by your leave, or further bothering my not-so-pretty little head about it.

(And, I don’t like Facebook. I really don’t need to a see a picture of your Sunday lunch or know that you have just bought a fab pair of jeans…..)

I need a digital native.

Which I me definitely not, but even at my advanced age there are some things which I take for granted – Google and email, for example. (Though I can remember a time without them …..)

I heard the bright people at Oxfam in Huntingdon, faced with the same mountain of books they had to re-cycle, had contacted local art college and offered them the ‘dead’ books.

These are then used to make paper sculptures and other artworks as part of their course, and displayed in the shop window.

Never one to worry about stealing a bright idea, I fired off an email, suggesting a chat about it, to the head of visual arts at Petersfield School. ( No, we don’t have a college – we are a small, insignificant, but rather nice, market town.)

I think emails are better than a phone call, in the first instance, because a phone call can ambush someone and an email gives them time to think about their response.

Well, that is to say, think about it for a bit – a short bit. Emails are there to be responded to quite quickly even if it is only with a, ‘ Let me have a think about it and be in touch shortly,’ kind of email.

Not so in a school environment, it would seem…….