Skip to content

Pay as you go

23-Jul-10

So Zoe and I were on the way back from a lovely holiday spent in the French Alps and then to Perpignan for a friend’s wedding, and at the airport we discovered that because we didn’t check-in online, Ryanair charged us 40 euro each to do so in person. We didn’t use the online option because, surprise surprise given the nature of our work, both of us were keen to stay “offline” for the duration of the holiday. So it came as something of a shock to be told that we had to pay extra to get boarding passes for the aeroplane at the airport.

I mean, can you imagine if other situations were handled with a similar, “give us your money first” level of arrogance?

At the hairdressers: “Sorry, Madam, but the density of your hair is likely to wear down the sharpness of these scissors. There’ll be an extra twenty euro charge to cover the excessive utensil strain.”

At the beach: “Excuse me, young man,” said the lifeguard. “There’s a large amount of sand between your toes. That means there’s now less sand for the others to enjoy. You don’t need me to tell you that there’s an on-the-spot fine of fifty euro under the Rules Governing Responsible Use of Sand-Based Recreational Areas. Time to pay up, I’m afraid.”

At the ferry terminal: “You forgot to validate your ferry ticket, madam, so I’m afraid there’s a two hundred euro fine attached. The validation machine is located in the engine room of the ferry. The fact that you need to board the vessel first in order to access said engine room isn’t my concern, madam. Cash will do nicely.”

It’s all a bit ridiculous, really.

Filed in Air travel, Anger, Arrogance, France, Haircuts, Mountains, Ordeal, Transport, holidays, management | | Comments (0) »

Easily distracted

03-May-10

Click. Has anyone seen….You have 24 new message…seen my atten..click. You might want to re-connect with…Has anyone…click. Has anyone seen my…Results 1 to 10…attention…of about 482, 200, 78….span?

It’s important to pay attention. How much, though, and for how long? Ideas about this are changing. The old way of thinking was, you sit down, you learn (whether it’s how to fix a car or how to study a text) and, over time, you absorb the necessary details. This is all changing, however, with the way we are all connected through the internet on our computers, on our mobile phones, our televisions, music systems and, soon, our fridges and washing machines. You have one new message: your socks are clean.

There’s just so much information now out there, on Twitter, on rolling news feeds, on the hundreds of mobile applications fighting for our attention, we’re becoming more and more used to scanning and filtering information by the bucketload. Is this always a good thing, though? I for one know that after a busy week at work, a week of endless emails pouring in, constant flicking between websites and documents and different applications, my ability to concentrate is exhausted. We need to make sure that we’re able to keep up with the flow of the thundering river of information, to avoid becoming stranded, waist deep, unsure how best to proceed.

What about our ability to sit and listen, to concentrate for an extended period of time? We’ve all been in situations where we would expect to have someone’s undivided attention, only to find, five minutes in, that they’re checking their phone.

You’re halfway through a sentence, but that doesn’t matter. Out comes the phone, and “Ah ha ha! Pete says he’s just bought a ticket to Australia for twenty euros. Legend. Sorry, go on.”

No, you go on. I might as well talk to the wall behind you, at least it doesn’t interrupt what I’m saying. “No, I’m listening, honestly. I just need to reply to this.” You don’t need to reply. You’re not wearing a flourescent jacket and Pete’s not screaming at you to help him get his hand out of the shredder. It can wait.

Next stop will surely be “attention rehab” clinics. Please leave your phone at the reception and get ready to embark upon a weekend of re-capturing your concentration skills. Last free places available for our Summer residential course, “Talking without Texting: the Ten- Minute Challenge”.

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (0) »

From outside toilets to origami

16-Apr-10

It’s been a busy few months, which for the most part were spent helping to organise a conference and all the associated chaos therein. There were no major disasters, fortunately. The exhibition stand didn’t fall on anyone, nobody got agressive during the debate and there were no paper-cut injuries from delegates rushing to pick up a report still warm from the printer (“My apologies, sir, we’ll get you a bandage; it looks like you’ve cut yourself on ‘Preventing Injuries at Work’.”).

We’ve been settling into our new flat, helped greatly by Zoe’s parents, who came over for a few days and transformed the place from a rather disorganised, space full of boxes and clothes to a welcoming living quarter with pictures on the walls, proper kitchen tools and even homemade curtains.

They’ve even cleaned up the outside toilet on our balcony. Outside toilets have always for me been dark and scary places. I had an outside toilet in the house I grew up in, and I’d regarded it as the sort of unappealing place to which I might go only if I really, really needed to. Even then, shivering from the cold wind blowing all around, it was all but impossible to get anything constructive done. You’d need to go in there with the sort of reckless urgency which is usually followed by a white-knuckled gripping of the toilet seat and at least one return journey.

The toilet on our balcony is now so clean and sparkly, people will be queuing to use it.

Even the spare room is looking warm and inviting, now with curtains and a bookshelf. This is a good start, because in most houses, the spare room often falls into the same category as the outside toilet: one of The Lonely Places. It’s the sort of place you go into, and don’t quite know what to do once you’re in there. You put your bag on the bed, maybe take your jacket off, and then…what? Wander over to the window, perhaps. Look at the bed. Have a peek into the cupboad (“Yep. Empty.”).

Maybe there are a few books in there, but you can almost guarantee that they’re not going to be the thrilling page-turners you’re hoping for. Try as you might, ‘Adventures in Origami’ just doesn’t keep you gripped until the last page. In fact, by the time you get to ‘Crouching Frog’ the book’s back on the shelf, and you’re starting to inspect the cupboard in the manner of the quietly insane.

Then, of course, someone calls you down for tea, or a glass of wine, and you’re reminded once more of what makes a house a home: The smells in the kitchen, the photos, the alarming crashing sound as Grandad trips over the cat again.

We’d like to forget the Forty-Seven Laws of Paper Folding and concentrate on the sort of charm and character that makes places feel like home. We’re getting there.

 

 

 

 

Filed in Accommodation, Belgium, Brussels, Bruxelles, Cats, Enthusiasm, Moving In, New appartment, People, Relatives, Staying In, Swearing, Tea, Tradition, appartment, family, fear, furnishings, lunatics | | Comments (2) »

Knowledge in the night

17-Sep-09

I’ve been experiencing a lack of sleep recently, due to a recent illness. I’d like to think that I’m one of those people who, upon confronting a sleepless night, gets up and starts to write rather profound ideas or poetry, inspired by the stillness of the moment or the rare opportunity to delve undisturbed into the depths of the soul.

I need…to discover the very purpose of this fleeting existence, to discover what brings us here and to speculate our ultimate destination.

I need…to put into words what it means to capture a breathtaking view, to experience the fresh scent of a new Summer’s day, or the life-affirming laughter of close friends.

I need…to pee, actually.

I suppose I am, in some respects, doing philosophy late at night. I’m questioning the foundations of knowledge, namely, trying to work out if I really know I need to go.

“Do I really want to go now? Can I wait? Should I wait? It’s cold out there, maybe I don’t need to go at all, and it’s just my body’s way of telling me it’s bored and it would rather be sleeping, thank you very much.”

When he wasn’t pondering the nature of justice, I’m sure Socrates must have asked himself similar questions.

I didn’t spend too much time on these epistemological queries, though; I would have wet the bed. If I’d have tried explaining to my exasperated girlfriend that Socrates made me soak myself, I’d be writing this with a blunt crayon and a special bracelet.

Filed in Clouds, Confusion, Experiences, Four in the morning, Futility, Hot and Bothered, House, Lateness, More than meets the eye, Obscure, Philosophy, Sunny weather, Thoughts, Waiting, You Couldn't Make It Up, appartment, boredom, flat, lunatics, pillows, reality, sleep | | Comments (0) »

Receipts and revolvers

29-May-09

The last few weeks, we’ve read about daggers, bloodletting and repeated mentions  of “handing over the revolver.” Not to mention the “torture” and those who have already “fallen“.

Is this some sort of brutal military prison in the middle of a desert? A war zone? A new film, perhaps involving drugs, gangs, sadomasochism and a close-call car chase?

You’ll realise that of course I’m talking about the UK government and the scandal over MPs’ expenses, currently making all the news in Westminster.

Of course, I can see the appeal for the media in using the most vivid language possible, but are we not making our politicians feel even more sorry for themselves by describing their ordeal over financial fiddling as if it was some epic war saga? Just imagine if this sort of language applied to the rest of us:

Dave: “It was only 50p to pay for a pint of milk on the way home, Mike, but they’ve noticed the petty cash tin’s been unusually light since Monday. Do you think you could top it up a bit, do us a favour?”

Mike: “Sorry, Dave, what’s done is done. I know you thought you could get away with it and all, but if I were you I’d work something out quick or things might get pretty nasty if you’re not careful. I wouldn’t want to be here when the boss comes in tomorrow morning, could end up with blood everywhere.”

Pete: “I think he’s right, you know, Dave. Might be quicker to…well, it’s your call but there’s a revolver in the stationery cupboard and we can all plan to get the ten past five train home if it would help…”

Dave: “Well, lads, do you fancy twisting this dagger in my back, while you’re at it? I was counting on you both to help sort me out over this whole I-just-fancied-some-fresh-milk fiasco. Tomorrow’s going to be a right festival of torture, I can tell you.”

Mike: “It’s every man for himself in this office, Dave. We already lost Jim to a thoughtless pub lunch, remember? If we get involved, the boss will only think that we’re all in this together. With any luck you might just be able to weather the storm and still come crawling out of this one without too many fatal injuries.”

Pete: “Best of luck to you, Dave. It’s by the printer paper if the shame gets too much.”

Filed in Expenses, House of Commons, MPs, Uncategorized, parliament, politics | | Comments (0) »

Sixty Seconds with St Vincent

19-May-09

St Vincent

Annie Clark, also known as St Vincent, is a US singer-songwriter whose latest album, Actor, has recently been released to favourable reviews thanks to its its haunting melodies and lyrical playfulness.

I caught up with Annie shortly after she played an impromptu gig in the Archiduc pub here in Brussels, for a quick 60-second soundbite:

What were you trying to achieve with the new album?

“I wanted to make Disney meets a horror film…pretty much.”

Where would you say you get your inspiration from?

“Real life meets Bukowski [German American poet, novelist, and short story writer].”

How about influences from the past?

“Well I read a lot of books and watched a lot of films…I watched the entire Woody Allen catalogue.”

Are you enjoying Brussels?

“Brussels is great, I really like it. It’s fun. My favourite European show I last played was at Botanique [one of Brussel's main music venues], about a year and a half ago.”

If you had to choose, which albums would you take to a desert island?

“I hope I’m never on a desert island! I would get SO bored. Let’s see…that’s really hard. It’s a serious question. I’m going to say…a Steely Dan box set of cassettes…Petrushka…and Grizzly Bear.”

You can hear more of St Vincent on her Myspace page and her new album is available from Amazon here.

Filed in Interviews, Music, impromptu | | Comments (0) »

Towards the Eternal Conversation

30-Jan-09

Well, if 2008 was the Year of Facebook, it looks like 2009, judging by what everyone’s been talking about during the first few weeks, will become the Year of Twitter. As much as I like new technology, however, there are certain limits to what I consider to be the sort of useful applications which actually make life that little bit easier, or a bit more fun, which is why I haven’t really “got” the Twitter craze. It escapes me in much the same way that I never felt the need for mobile phone  ringtones. Why bother? You either pick up within two seconds, in which case it’s not so much a “ringtone” as just a “ringt-”. Let it play and by the time we’ve all appreciated your electronic, tinny-sounding rendition of a song that wasn’t much good to start with, the caller has lost patience and hung up. It’s the same thing with those little desktop gadgets you get which tell you what the weather is like; you can click on it to open a new window on your computer or you could, hang on…just open the real window and look outside!
For me, Twitter falls into the same category, into a drawer marked, ‘What’s The Point?’. The buzzword seems to be “microblogging“, the New Thing To Do, which is essentially about publishing short text updates about what’s going on in your life. Each entry is a “status update”, or ‘Tweet“, some of the new terms for telling everyone how you’re doing.

Why, though? Surely this will lead to us all becoming like that mad old man in the train station who mutters to himself about everything that he’s doing because he’s convinced that German spies are still listening in to his every word:

“I’m just sitting down on this bench now.”

“I had chip sandwiches for tea last night, you know.”

“Status code Red, Sergeant! Target seen purchasing a suspicous item, codename “Flapjack”. Ready to roll out the next phase of Operation Platform Three. Stand by, gentlemen.”

The point here is that that something like Twitter doesn’t offer you the sort of social feedback that you would get if you said these sort of sentences in real life, to real people. Without the human checks and balances that let you know when and whether something is worth saying, what’s left is simply a license to report everything that goes on, no madder how mundane or trivial, because it’s been marketed as What the World Wants To Know.

If you believe the hype, your old friends are eager to hear that you got to bed at 2am last night; your distant relatives are now back in touch, thanks to this marvel of modernity, and can rejoice in the news that you’re away right now in your third meeting this morning, “LOL”.

It seems like there’s a sort of dichotomy going on at the moment when it comes to people who are connected to the Internet. On the one hand, everyone seems to be so concerned about online privacy, and about just who has access their personal information, whether they can accept the content of their emails being monitored and so on.

Yet on the other, people are only too willing to divulge their personal lives, whether this is broadcasting information about themselves via their personal profiles on social networks, uploading and tagging their photos, their videos, or, most recently, reporting their every actions and thoughts at regular intervals, all day, every day. You could argue that this latter sharing is “controlled” by the people using the service, but it affects other people “outside the loop” as well. We’ve all, I’m sure, met people who have been told that they are “on” Facebook, even if they themselves have never signed up to the service, because they’ve been tagged in a photo, a video, or somewhere in the maze of all that user-generated content that makes up today’s online communities.

The sheer volume of information that we upload to these sites seems to me to be less about control and more about something opposite, an almost uncontrollable urge to communicate as many things about our lives to as many people as possible.

So what’s next, after “microblogging”? With the way things are going, my guess is that the next phase will be “Omniblogging”, in which users forget even the discreet pauses between updates, until what’s left is just a constant, unedited online stream of consciousness, from every device, all the time, about everything.

By the way, have you heard about that other resource they’ve been keeping quiet about all this time? It’s being used all around the world, by millions of people on a daily basis, and what’s more it’s also completely free to use: it’s called “Silence”.

Filed in Conversation, Experiences, Flapjack, Friends, Futility, Gadgets, More than meets the eye, Networking, Questions, Relationships, Relatives, Sarcasm, Status, Staying In, Thoughts, Train stations, Trivia, Twitter, Update, Waiting, Words, boredom, habits, lunatics, personality, practical use, privacy, reality, risks, social networking, weather | | Comments (3) »

The energy generation

12-Jan-09

I’ve got an idea. First, though, I thought I’d set the scene.

According to a recent article in the Observer, there are lots of new graduates, fresh from university with good degrees and strong CVs, and yet due to the recent economic turmoil, this new generation of bright young things are all failing to find those high-flying jobs as advertised in the numerous career brochures which float around campuses across the country. In other news, we learn that Russia and Ukraine have been squaring up to each other in a standoff over gas supplies, a row which apparently has now been resolved according to the latest reports, but which only serves to highlight the increasing dependence of European countries on Russia for this sort of traditional energy. It’s about time we shifted the focus onto newer, more self-sufficient ways of generating power, which we’re going to have to think about anyway due to the recent agreement among EU countries to increase the amount of energy that the EU gets from renewable resources from a measly 7 per cent up to 20 per cent by the year 2020.

So what we have, then, are lots of graduates who are all dead keen to get stuck into something exciting and cutting edge, something which makes a genuine difference and could even have international implications. OK, so they might not have given that impression when they were still students. In fact a more accurate description might be that genuine excitement came in the form of a special offer on vodka jelly, cutting edge research involved keeping up with Eastenders and the international side of things didn’t feature too heavily beyond trying to get into bed with the lovely Italian exchange student down the road.

University was fun, now for the world of work. Given the context that I’ve outlined above, what better way to employ these young people than to get them involved in helping to develop the next generation of renewable energy? If you’re a graduate reading this, by the way, don’t run off screaming at the thought of having to put on bright yellow wellies and trudge through the countryside doing environmental impact assessments for wind farms. There’s something for everyone here, if you think about it. Renewable energy is no longer just something for hyper-environmentalists and bearded scientists. It can’t be, because we’re all going to have to get involved sooner or later. Already, we’ve read reports and seen pictures of people in places like Bulgaria, freezing in their homes this winter because of a lack of gas. Isn’t it time we learnt how to become more independent?

It’s something that everyone can get involved in, and in the case of these graduates who are now all looking for meaningful jobs, whatever subject you studied and skills you have, you can all bring something to the table. For the physicists, the chemists, the maths graduates, for example, I think it’s pretty clear that these are skills which can be put to immediate use. What use, I hear you ask, is a degree in history when it comes to this sort of thing? Plenty. Historians are generally very thorough people, good at checking facts and spotting arguments that work and those that don’t. Perfect, in my view, for fine-tuning the propaganda that will be needed if we’re going to win mass popular support for energy change.

Psychologists also have their part to play, looking at for example the difference between the anxieties that people have about what it might be like to live near a windfarm, or a hydroelectric dam, compared with the actual psychological effects of doing so. We might find that people soon forget they have solar panels on the roof once they’re actually there. (The solar panels on the roof, that is, not the people. I imagine if you were stuck on a roof, you wouldn’t worry too much about some solar panels).

English graduates can help explain the case for renewable energy in clear, easy-to-understand language, and marketing graduates can help sell the idea. Those with degrees in sports science can win support from people that do sports that use natural energy like windsurfing, kiteboarding and downhill mountain biking.

I think we can all see that renewable energy is something that’s got to be done, and it’s something which I personally think is A Good Thing. This isn’t a moment of sudden eco madness on my part, by the way; it’s something that I actually feel quite strongly about, enough at least to do my bit to help win the recent support for the Gwynt Y Mor wind farm. There are plenty of celver, energetic people out there, looking for work, and at the same time we’ve got a so far pretty empty-looking government department which is dedicated to the task and waiting to get started. What could be simpler?

Filed in Arguments, Authority, Community, EU, Electricity, Enthusiasm, Environment, Government, Independence, Newspaper articles, Newspapers, People, Society, Technology, Things I like, Things to do, Timing, Waiting, employment, energy, graduates, recruitment, renewable energy, roofs | | Comments (0) »

SPOT on Denmark

30-Nov-08

SPOT on Denmark

Here are some new photos from this year’s SPOT on Denmark event, a concert which bring differents Danish music to Brussels. You can see the photos in the photo gallery and for more information about the event, visit The Rocking Factory. Enjoy!

Filed in Ancienne Belgique, Denmark, Going Out, Music, Photography | | Comments (0) »

More articles available

01-Nov-08

I’ve uploaded some more of my articles that have been published recently, you can find them on this section of the site or by clicking on the image below.

Articles Nov 2008

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (1) »