Go forth

A question I was once genuinely asked:

“All the buttons on this computer keyboard are in capitals. How do I get lowercase letters?”

I was tempted to tell them they’d have to requisition a lowercase keyboard from the stationery department.

Then again, this was from the same person who, when I demonstrated cutting and pasting of text in Word, turned to me with eyes widened and jaw slackened to exclaim “That’s amazing!“, as if I’d pulled a live tuxedo-clad porcupine from my nose.

I didn’t even try to introduce them to the web, in case the culture shock caused them to lapse into a coma on the spot.

1) Buying a car

A brand new Toyota Yaris will be mine in but a few weeks. Expect news stories of terrorised pedestrians to emanate from across Essex for the next six months. It’s bright red, so I’m a little worried I’ll get it confused with my boss’s Ferrari.

Ahhh, red…cheapest of all the colours. I can use the saving to pay for approximately two teaspoonfuls of petrol at current prices.

2) Camping

With old friends in a small field in the Kentish townstead of Bearsted which, though it is spelt like an ursine’s cuddly toy, is pronounced like a drinks order to a man named Theodore. Too tenuous? Maybe, but I’m in that sort of mood.

Sunny day, rainy night – which was just about perfect really, giving us a whole day for chatting, reclining, frisbeeing and barbecueing followed by the restful patter of rain on ersatz canvas from about one in the morning.

3) Watching films

In Bruges
Brendan Gleason is a world-weary and affable hitman. Ralph Fiennes is a cockney and despicable hitman. Colin Farrell is channelling Dougal from Father Ted, if Dougal were to leave the priesthood and take up swearing, drinking, drugs and hitmanning. Brilliant, brilliant film - you can tell it comes from the pen of someone more used to writing for the stage, but its self-contained nature is all the better for it. Impressive performances from the cast, particularly Farrell who I’m not normally a fan of, and a subtle, cyclical structure.

Very much recommended, plus it makes the city of Bruges look absolutely amazing.

Doomsday
An absolute mess of ideas taken from a whole slew of post-apocalyptic movies - such as Mad Max, Escape From New York, 28 Days Later – and shoehorned into a Scottish setting (but actually filmed for the most part in South Africa). A modern day B-movie which makes no apologies, or indeed realistic justification, for mixing a sexy high-tech soldier with mounted knights and car chases. Fun though, in that same guilty way as eating a whole box of Jaffa Cakes in one sitting, then giving in and opening the second box too.

4) Failing to blog

Whoops. Must do better.

…so that every pair of shoes I buy ends up squeaking as if I am constantly followed by the mournful ghost of Beaker from the Muppets?

Slight lull in posting, due to the heat-induced apathy as my brain melts like an afterburner-mounted Milkybar. Incidentally, that’s a confection which is apparently particularly suffering from the ban on television advertising of sweets to children, since adults aren’t exactly a target market. A Cadbury’s Flake can be pushed by a slow-motion naked babe in a bath; all the Milkybar can rely on is a speccy kid acting out cowboy fantasies before using the sweet as a bribe to make friends. Besides, Milkybars are just wrong - they’re the chocolate equivalent of the white dog poo you used to see around.

One of my regular haunts is Photoshop Disasters which documents catastrophic examples of inept image editing. This recent post is one of my favourites – either the housing crisis in America has meant people are moving into doll’s houses, or Godzilla has let his pet dog out to play.

I’ve seen my fair share of badly edited property photos, typically when someone’s added a lovely blue sky but forgotten to fill in the gaps where it shows through the branches of trees resulting in a horrible white halo like a severe case of arboreal dandruff.

The worst I’ve personally seen far transcends that though. Some years ago a client advertising in the magazine I work for sent through a scan of a photo that they’d obviously decided needed a little touching up. And by touching up, I mean cutting – with scissors and the trembling hands of a long-term alcohol abuser – a giant picture of a deer from another photo, and physically sellotaping it to the lawn in front of the house.

Imagine a collage made by an excessively hyperactive five-year-old in remedial class; a massive stag looming over a puny farmhouse, held back from the brink of a destructive rampage only by the wodge of tape clearly sticking it to the picture.

I don’t think the property sold - giant deer phobia is more common than you’d think.

The time has come for me to start growing my own little carbon footprint to add to the stampede of tracks conspiring to turn our bundle of rock, water and gas into a sweaty armpit of a planet.

I need to buy a car.

We’ve run out of space in the office where I work, to the point that we could only squeeze more people in if we divided a floor horizontally in two and solely employed dwarves. So it looks like a move is in order, and it’s unlikely to be within the 15-minute walk I currently enjoy.

Plus, while I’ve managed to get away without a car up till now, I’m now playing badminton twice a week at halls a fair distance from my home, and it’s also probably time I stopped relying on friends to taxi me around the country.

The thing is, though, since I passed my test over ten years ago, I haven’t driven at all. Unless you count Grand Theft Auto, but I’m pretty sure that mounting the kerb at 93mph, scattering pedestrians like bowling pins and then somersaulting into a taxi hasn’t yet been added to the Highway Code.

Unfortunately, since life doesn’t have save-game points to cater for bad driving, this means that all the money I saved in the past by not owning a car is now being used to pay for refresher lessons. And I now feel like I’m seventeen again, which in normal circumstances would be pleasant but in this case serves only to remind me how much about driving I’ve forgotten. My first session demonstrated that my driving is as rusty as I imagine the car in which I first learned is now. That mirror, signal, manoeuvre mantra is now repeating itself in my sleep.

Once all this is over, I’ll be in the enviable position of being to sink a significant proportion of my earnings into a tin box with wheels for the main purpose of transporting me to the place where I earn that very money. It’s all a bit cyclical really.

How difficult is it, exactly, to make a pair of socks?

Obviously, as a man of manly manliness I don’t – and probably never will – have much experience of knitting, at least until you can easily get patterns for racing cars, spaceships and full scale models of Keira Knightley. But I’d wager that making a pair of socks is simpler than constructing, say, a flatscreen television. Or one of those cheese toastie machines that you buy, use constantly for a month until your insides have turned to butter, and then hide away in the back of a cupboard where it will stay unloved and unused for the next twenty-five years, awaiting the inevitable machine intelligence uprising when it’ll come back and toast your face off.

In fact, I suspect that socks are probably easier to make than most other items of clothing, barring possibly the g-string. They are tubes of wool (or selected synthetic alternatives), sealed at one end and with a bend in it. It’s not difficult. I’ve had many fine relationships with some nicely crafted socks that do the job perfectly well, fitting comfortably, keeping your feet warm and preventing your skin from being ground to a moist and bloody powder by the insides of your shoes.

Someone needs to show BHS how to make socks. Because the last pack that I bought seem to fail utterly at achieving the very basic requirements of sockiness.

First off, I’ve got size 11 feet. Not massive - I don’t have to wear clown shoes or anything - but not small either. You’ll struggle to push me over; like a Weeble, I’ll wobble but I won’t fall down. So naturally, I bought the socks marked ‘Sizes 9-12′. Stupid, stupid me. Because these socks are so tight they push all the blood out of my feet, making my eyeballs swell slightly every time I put them on. I end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall when he gets thrown out into the Mars atmosphere.

I have a friend who once tore a muscle in her shoulder when she was taking off a pair of boots - having tried to put these socks on I now know how she felt. You could sell them to the military - they’d form part of the G-suits that fighter pilots have to wear. 

They’d need a bit of work first, mind you, since there’s another major sock failure that they suffer from. The moment you try and wear them, they fall apart. If you wash them, they fall apart. I fear that were you to shout at them in despair and disappointment, they’d start explosively shedding bits of thread like a poodle with bubonic mange. The leggy bit (technical term) separates almost entirely from the heel leaving your ankle exposed in a way that would cause uproar in Victorian times. 

I think these socks must be the equivalent of the velcro quick-release trousers that male strippers wear. And I really don’t think there’s a huge market out there for male foot-fetish striptease artistes.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I live opposite the family of a true animated hero: the Road Runner. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was absolutely right - cartoons are real, and Wile E Coyote’s eternal nemesis lives happily in Essex, a welcome respite from racing along the dusty roads of the American southwest.

How do I know this?

Because every time someone leaves the house in one of their many and varied cars, they merrily toot their horn twice. Meep meep.

Every.

Single.

Time.

Meep meep.

So it must be a family of Road Runners, keeping the old traditions alive by sounding the warcry and remembering the old days when life was a good straight road and an obsessive canine with an unlimited credit account at Acme Corporation.

Because the only alternative is that the house is populated by the sort of cretinous morons who, having said good-bye to their fellow simpletons, feel the need to announce to the entire street the electrifying fact that they are departing from their driveway in a motorised vehicle. Every time that meep meep sounds, crowds of my neighbours rush to their windows to stare at the amazing spectacle of a magical horseless wagon passing by. Truly we are filled with gratitude that we might be afforded a chance to see this miracle.

Middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep, five in the morning, doesn’t matter - the meep meep endures. I’m sure that even if we were afflicted by some natural disaster forcing us to evacuate our homes - flooding, perhaps, or a many-tentacled horror from under the earth - the last thing I’d hear as I rushed panic-stricken from my home would be the imbecilic double toot from opposite as the subnormal neanderthals saluted their shortly-to-be-eaten house.

It’s time to open an account at Acme.

Meep meep.

NEWSFLASH! Office cat is back!

I wrote about the disappearance of my furriest co-worker back in January, by which time I’d come to the conclusion that her owners must have moved away.

But now, heading on for five months later, the cat is back, materializing outside the door today as though nothing had happened and meowing to be let in. The resultant wander around the office and insolent roll on the floor have restored normality once more, in as much as an office with a resident feline can be called normal.

Quite honestly, it has made my week.

In the bright sunshine of incipient summer the garden bench has been commandeered by a queen wasp (not a WASP or, thankfully, the various members of W.A.S.P.). Every ten minutes she helicopters in to pick up strips of wood, chewing industriously away before carrying off her spoils to her secret base. The bench is quickly becoming stippled with the marks of her labour.

I like to think that she’s building a host of tiny wasp-sized benches, ready for her future handmaidens to populate as they train to become fully fledged yellowjackets – a kind of insectoid convent school with a particularly lively uniform.

It gave me a chance to try a few close-up photographs, and the hankering for a proper macro lens on my camera in order to do an even better job. Unfortunately macro lenses are majorly expensive so it might be a wee while…

I have new eyes.

Or to be more precise, I have new glasses in order to cater for my evidently inferior genetics – thanks for that, ancestors. Practically the entire rest of my family are long-sighted but I like to be different so I’m short sighted and astigmatic. Perhaps I’m some kind of mutant; that’d explain the instant healing and extendable claws too.

Going to the opticians is fraught with the kind of insignificant minor perils that fill the lives of we upstart hominids ever since we decided to use our opposable thumbs for more than just doing impressions of the Fonz.

Firstly there’s the eye test itself. It’s mostly pretty benign, except for that godawful glaucoma test where jets of air are fired at your eyeballs in order to test the fluid pressure (tonometry, if you’re looking for a new word). Of course, what the optician is really measuring is quite how high you jump out of the chair each time they fire the machine, in the hope of beating Gavin’s score from last week when a customer knocked themselves out on the ceiling. Next time you have to endure that test, look upwards first to see how many dents and little clumps of skull matter are embedded in the tiles above you.

Next, once it’s been pointed out that you have approximately the same visual acuity as an earthworm, off you trot to choose your frames. At this point you’ll be confronted with about a billion different concoctions of wire, plastic and lens from which you must choose just one. Rumour has it that when Sisyphus was given the choice between rolling a boulder up a mountain for eternity or picking out the perfect pair of specs, he plumped for the easier option and headed for the hills.

I’ve often wondered how people with seriously poor vision are able to choose their glasses frames because as soon as they take their current pair off to try on the new set in the shop – hey presto – everything’s gone blurry and they can’t see well enough to decide whether they look good. Bit of a catch-22, that one.

Finally, when you’ve picked the glasses that make you look least like Elton John, you come to that special point when you realise that your fabulous new pair of spectacles are actually going to be somewhat redundant. Because, in order to afford the price of the frames, the lenses, and being squirted in the eye with high-pressure air, you’re going to have to sell your corneas on the human organs black market.

Anyways, I got through all that a week ago without having to auction off too many essential body parts and took delivery of my new specs on Friday. They look like this if you’re interested. From past experience frames by Oakley tend to be extremely comfortable and fit like a glove (if your head were a hand, that is). Plus, they don’t go flying across the court when I make any particularly sudden movements in badminton.

They’re not that dissimilar to my previous pair, and what has always amused me is how ridiculously impractical the case that comes with them is: a huge rounded metal torpedo that, if you can even fit it in your trouser pocket, makes you look like the world’s most well-endowed gentleman. Venture into any airport with it and you’ll be shot on suspicion of carrying a pipe bomb, unless it’s Heathrow where they have no doubt lost the guns in the same place everyone’s luggage has gone.

I got a pair of prescription sunglasses too (here, stalkers), and the case for these is a hilariously even larger black woven-nylon lozenge – about the size of two Volvo’s and a Nissan Micra. This is not practical design, Oakley. When I pack for holiday, the glasses case is supposed to go inside the suitcase, and not vice-versa. This massive coffin will not fit in any pocket known to mankind and is more likely to sit for eternity like a 2001-style monolith.

An Easter weekend trip to Kent to meet up with old university friends included the always slightly disconcerting experience of being one of three Andrews in close proximity, and also culminated in a trip to Howletts to stare at exotic animals who have no doubt become quite befuddled by their sudden relocation to the ‘garden of England’.

It gave me the first real chance to try out my new fancy-shmancy camera (a Nikon D40X for the geeks among you). It was, to be fair, not the best of days for photography. Not only was the light terrible – he says, pretending he knows what he’s talking about – but biting gale-force winds turned my fingers into immovable stubs and threatened at one point to fling me into the elephant enclosure. Many of the animals quite sensibly chose to stay indoors, probably pining for their native savannahs of Africa. I imagine the prospect of living a constant struggle for life seemed at that point somewhat preferable to having your fur forcibly rearranged by the weather.

Despite all that though, I did end up taking a great many photos. I’ve been pretty self-critical in picking out the very few that I consider to be any good; there’s a lot I still need to learn about choosing the right aperture and focus to make the most of a photo. You can jump to my Flickr gallery by clicking either here or on the image at the top of this post.

Lately I’ve been playing a little game called AudioSurf. It’s best described as a melding of music, Tetris, Formula 1 racing and strong psychotropic drugs. In essence, it takes any music you choose from your computer and converts the beats and tempo into a winding racetrack along which you travel in a little multi-coloured rocketship, collecting coloured blocks to make groups and score points.

Sounds absolutely inane, doesn’t it?

Yet for reasons I find it difficult to explain, it’s utterly compelling. The racetrack is synced so closely with the music playing that it links you intensely to the tune – strong rhythms produce regular bumps and hills, loud guitars speed you up while mellow passages slow you down again. Colours wax and wane with tempo in a way that I suspect emulates listening to Pink Floyd on lysergic acid. If this game had been around in the sixties, flower-power might well have persisted much longer. If you’re able to ‘feel’ the music (man!) you play better and gain higher scores.

And those points become important to you as, for every song played through, the score is automatically uploaded to the global rankings. The satisfaction of completing a tricky song and finding yourself at the top of the scoreboard for the entire world is immense. Want to have the world’s best score for Hysteria by Def Leppard (cheesy rock works wonderfully for this game)? Well you’ll have to beat me first. And if you do, I’ll get an email informing me that I’ve been dethroned so I can try and claim top ranking again – I’ve defended my placing once already.

If you’re someone who likes their music, it’s a new way to experience songs, and an excellent excuse to delve into those gigabytes of dubious-origin mp3’s sitting on your hard drive in search of those that give the best rides. Furthermore, AudioSurf only costs about a fiver when bought online through Steam so it’s cheaper and longer lasting than the drugs you’d usually need to obtain the same effects.

Quick endnote here: Unusually, I imagine, practically all the music on my computer – and iTunes reports nearly 13 solid days worth of it – is entirely legal, from CDs that I’ve bought myself. I think the number of tracks that I don’t own the original recording for is probably in single figures and I’d have trouble remembering which they are. I’m a bit old fashioned in that I like to have a physical CD, with the tactile artwork booklet that goes with it. That’s probably the designer in me pulling the strings there. I’ve also got great respect for the concept of a cohesive album of music – an emotional ride through the songs in the order the artist originally intended. The move to digital has lost that a little, with people able to pick and choose just those songs that they immediately like without having the chance for other songs to grow on them. I’ve often bought an album and found that tracks I didn’t originally like all that much gradually creep up on me until I realise that they are actually far better than initial impressions suggested.

When I’m bored there are times when the mind wanders in strange directions. And one of those directions has thrown up the following list of imaginary animals.

Please, dear readers, feel free to join in if you have any of your own.

Elepant: A large animal with a shiny skin ideal for making capacious trousers for popular beat artists such as MC Hammer.

Masking Shark: A vicious fish that won’t hesitate to bite, but luckily can be pulled off rather easily. Is somewhat resistant to paint.

Boeing Constrictor: Perhaps the most dangerous snake in the world – death from above at 500mph. Not to be confused with the harmless Feather Boa.

Marrowhawk: The universe’s only known airborne carnivorous vegetable.

Glue tit: Collects berries and seeds on its body by flying at speed through bushes. Mates for life, mainly because it has no choice in the matter.

Gimpanzee: A very submissive, rubbery ape. Waterproof and, should it fall out of a tree, simply bounces.

Komodo Wagon: A rather tragic reptile that – if it can’t find a slope – can only get around by lying in wait for other animals, biting one when it gets close, and hoping that it’ll be dragged somewhere new.

Tasmanian Breville: Australian marsupial which toasts its own food in a specially adapted pouch.

Chocolate Moose: Almost extinct due to hunting. Not found in warm climates.

Ford Puma: Small feline that looks as though it should have a good turn of speed, but in reality is disappointingly sluggish.

Solar Bear: Arctic bear that needs no food whatsoever. Popular with conservationists for its very low environmental impact. Has an unfortunate tendency to drown when it tries to go swimming at night.

Sporkbill: Close relative of the Spoonbill, only more adaptable.

Ray Mearskat: Gregarious rodent that can find food anywhere, and can make a shelter, four-course meal and a canoe out of a single twig and a pawful of nettles.

Armadildo: That’s quite enough of that.

Phew. Bit of a gap in blog posting here – the past five days have been magazine deadline. Every month, the week before print date is a final rush of 12 hour days to get editorials designed, adverts in, and pages in place. Thus does the glamorous world of publishing concertina down into the reality of sitting in front of a computer until your eyeballs collapse, roll down your cheeks and land damply on the desk so they can stare up accusingly at you for inflicting such abuses upon them.

We usually try to organise deadlines so they fall on a Friday; it allows a weekend to recover. Printers work practically 24-7 to keep the presses active so the mag will typically be turned from electronic files to coloured sheets of dead wood on the Sunday. Then it’s off to the shops, and the airport lounges, and around the world in the expensive-class cabins of various airlines.

So what’s been happening out of work in the meantime? Well, for a start the spambots have found the blog, rather faster than I expected. I’m getting about five spam comments a day at present, offering me enough genital enlargement tonics that I’d need a wheelbarrow to get around. WordPress is doing a pretty good job of filtering them out though.

More importantly, the MacBook Air has arrived to satisfy my geeky cravings, and it’s pretty darn perfect for my needs. This very entry is being typed from the downy embrace of my bed as iTunes wirelessly streams post-deadline stress-deadening music across the network – a bit of Alabama 3 hits the spot just nicely.

It amused me to see how, shortly after Apple announced the launch of this svelte little slice of technology, the internet became filled with the usual barely coherent keyboard-pounding monkeys announcing how “it sucks, lol” or variations on the theme.

Have you noticed how so many of our fellow travellers in the interworldweb seem to default into only two possible reactions in situations like this? Either they profess to hate something so much it makes them physically retch up their stomach lining like a sea cucumber, or they love it with a passion that compels them to defend its honour in the manner of a sex-smitten illiterate baboon. You see it in YouTube comments, discussion forums, blogs, everywhere.

For these people there is no middle ground, no compromise. Each knows he or she is right, and will fight to the bitter death with broken English and unintelligible invective. Were I still officially studying English Language, I might be tempted to write a paper on the subject – it’s practically the opposite of Grice’s cooperative principles.

Or perhaps these aren’t real people at all. Perhaps this is just what the spambots do for fun when they’re not plaguing other people’s blogs – expressions of their essential binary, computery nature where you’re either a 1 or a 0, for it or against.

Let us fight for the middle ground, I say. Let us weigh the pros and cons of every situation. Let us champion the cause of reasoned argument, flexible viewpoints and different strokes for different folks.

And if you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong and you suck.

I have a confession to make. So here it is: I don’t drink coffee.

Not one of those earth-shattering confessions, I know. It’s not a revelation that I’m actually two people, or that I’ve been dead all along. But, from the reactions I get from people, it seems to be considered a little unusual. It’s like saying you’re not a fan of breathing, or that no, you wouldn’t like to win the lottery thank you very much.

The typical reply I get when people find out about my coffee-averse nature is for them to suggest that I’m being sensibly healthy, as if it’s a puritan choice I’ve made to extricate myself from the grasping clutches of caffeine in order to become a god amongst men. That’s not the case though – I scoff enough chocolate to easily make up for the lack of caffeine in my fluid intake, added to which there’s a regular can of Cherry Coke that makes up my afternoon ritual on workdays. Coca Cola ranks slightly below depleted uranium on the ‘good for you’ scale.

The reason I don’t drink coffee is this: I don’t like it.

I know it’s supposed to be an acquired taste; kids hate it, but for teenagers it becomes a grown-up thing to do, then by the time adulthood comes coffee is just a natural part of social life. The rise of all the Costa Bucks and Star Neros cafe-genericae shows the power of coffee culture. All these places have a range of options for coffee-dodgers like me though – hazelnut hot chocolates seem to be in season at present. Mmm, nutty.

Yet not drinking coffee still causes awkwardness – I remember a friend crying in bewilderment “But you don’t even drink coffee!” when finding out I was reading a book about the bean’s history. Equally, there are bonuses: I don’t have to get involved with making drinks at work, especially since I don’t drink tea either. Which, incidentally, to me tastes like hot, wet cardboard – I genuinely struggle to imagine how anybody could drink that stuff at all.

Nevertheless, there are signs that I might be changing, slowly adapting as I’m worn down by the constant presence of coffee around me. Last summer, I discovered frappuccinos, which although not exactly your traditional mode of coffee, are a lot closer to it than I usually get. So in ten years time I may find myself a happy part of normal coffee-driven culture. Of course, knowing my luck, by that time the rest of society may well be fixated on beverages made out of pine bark and squirrel droppings or something and I’ll be causing just as much bafflement as I am now.

This Friday was one of the semi-regular trips to London I make to meet with former university compadre Cap’n Sharp. We usually try to do a couple of museums or exhibitions, rounded off by what has now become a tradition of cocktails at a TGI Fridays. I’m not quite sure how manly it is to drink a huge banana and ice cream concoction called a Chocolate Monkey, but it tasted just fine, as did all the other cocktails I tested. Still got to pluck up the courage to ask for a Grendel though…

But that’s beside the point. It’s the culture that’s the important bit, and first stop was the Wellcome Collection, which can only be described as a smorgasbord of medical ephemera thrown into a series of rooms with only loose connections between the various items. Thus there’s an entire mummified body cheek by jowl with a Chinese sign made from human teeth, some 19th century Japanese sex aids, slivers of tattooed skin and a trepanned skull. There is a bit of an emphasis on bodily remains, so the squeamish might want to give it a miss.

There is also a small area dedicated to more recent medical research, in particular the Human Genome Project. A huge rack of books printed in tiny lettering comprise the raw DNA sequence of one person and serve to give a good insight into the sheer amount of data encoded in the molecule. But, and this was the case with most of the Wellcome Collection, I would have liked a bit more information about this. If you’re up on your biology, you’ll know that DNA is encoded with bases designated by A, C, G and T. Through the books on display, some of the letter groupings were in lowercase, while others were capitals, but with nothing to explain the difference. I would guess that perhaps these designate encodings for specific amino acids, as opposed to the junk DNA that makes up much of the molecule, but who knows? I do find sometimes in museums that not enough information is given to the visitor – I appreciate that you don’t always have time to read huge swathes of text about an exhibit, but it would be nice to have the option.

Perhaps the most cohesive part of the Collection was the current temporary exhibition Sleeping & Dreaming which benefited from being dedicated to one topic.

The afternoon destination was the Design Museum, which is always a bit of a gamble depending on what they are exhibiting at any given time. This month’s focus was Jean Prouvé, whose skills lay more in the functional than aesthetic - some of the classic school chair designs, for example, where economy and durability outweighs beauty. As Cap’n Sharp pointed out, they are some of the items that you don’t think of having been designed in the first place. Prouvé also produced some interesting modular architecture, but this wasn’t shown to very good effect at the exhibition. All in all a bit of a disappointment, for me at least. This was balanced out however by the ever-intriguing shop at the Design Museum, filled with all kinds of designery knick knacks. It could easily be extended to twice its size or more and still be successful.

One day last year at work my friend Emily and I heard a rather insistent mewing sound coming from the front door. And by insistent, I mean that we work upstairs and could still hear it. When we went to investigate, we found this:

As soon as we opened the door the cat trotted in, happy as you like, meowing all the time and rubbing up against us to say hello. After a while, and since we had to get back to work, we coaxed it back outside and regretfully headed back upstairs.

Except things didn’t end there. A couple of days later, the cat appeared again. And again the day after that. It started to jump through the downstairs windows whenever they were left open in order to explore the office and had to be chased out when it stomped over the keyboards in accounting. At lunch time, if you went outside it’d run up to you in greeting, or sleep in your lap…

Over time, it learnt when to turn up. I’d arrive each day at ten to nine in the morning to find it waiting at the door, nose pressed against the glass. It started to demonstrate better timekeeping than some of the employees. When we let it in, it’d immediately prance upstairs to the production office, which it would carefully explore to see what had changed from the last time it had visited. All this time the cat would be purring and kneading the floor with its front paws so much that it looked like it was on a rocking boat in a stormy sea. After exploration time to check that everything was to its liking, the cat would usually curl up asleep in the empty chair behind me for the rest of the day:

Inevitably, the cat got a name - dubbed Pushkin by our editor. It was evident Pushkin had a home; usually at around half four she would wake up, stretch, and paw at the door to be let out. On a couple of occasions she’d come in having had flea drops put behind her neck, so someone must have been taking care of her – there are houses behind the office which we suspect she came from. We were careful never to feed her, except for the time she pulled a packet of old, stale pitta bread from a bin and delicately munched away the soft upper side of one.

Pushkin was smart too – I was usually the one to let her out when I noticed her scratching at the door from the production office to the stairs. So she figured that she could pretend to stand there so that as soon as I stood up and walked over to open the door, she ran behind me, jumped up on my chair and curled up in a nice warm spot rather than her usual colder throne. I had officially been outwitted by a cat.

She brought tremendous enjoyment to everyone in the office – staff from downstairs would come up especially to see her and to watch her twitching in her chair as she dreamt the day away. Any deadline stress could instantly be cured by a few moments stroking Pushkin. She once spent half an hour sitting on my desk, her nose resting on my wrist, intently watching the mouse cursor dart around the screen as I laid out pages for the magazine. We (okay, I) even built her a castle from a Mac shipping box. You can’t see here the windows and nameplate that were added later:

Unfortunately, as I write this we’ll be heading into the fourth week without any sign of Pushkin. The office feels emptier without her. I hope that the reason she’s disappeared is benign – maybe her owners have moved away, or she’s found another place in which to while away the hours. Perhaps there’s another office in Chelmsford that is having their day brightened by a friendly furry visitor. But there’s a lot of traffic in the area, so I can’t help but fear the worst.

You never know, though; maybe one day when I turn into the courtyard at my workplace in the morning, she’ll be sitting there waiting. We’re certainly going to keep the job free for her.

So then…a blog.

I guess I’m coming a bit late to the party here. These are the days that have crept up upon us when it seems that ninety percent of the people you meet are running a blog, or a myspace site, or are sitting behind their computer corralling everybody they’ve ever met into their friends list on Facebook. Will we ever reach the moment where the headlines say “Man has entire world population listed as friends”?

Actually, that’s a pretty long headline, though I’m willing to bet the Onion has got it covered.

But anyway, I decided to begin this experiment for a whole range of only moderately interesting reasons. And at the risk of turning my first post into the sort of dull drivel that’ll force your brain through your nostrils and make a mess of your keyboard, here goes…

1) I enjoy writing. And despite the fact that I studied two flavours of English at university, together with a year-long creative writing course, I’ve ended up doing almost no writing for myself since. Initial searches for a job after university actually ended up bizarrely with me becoming a graphic designer in magazine publishing. Now I enjoy design very much, and no doubt there will be posts in the future covering the topic, but the only writing I really get to do at work is for marketing material and suchlike which is not exactly fulfilling creatively unless you’re the sort of person who wants to constantly tell everyone how amazing and wonderful and nipple-stiffeningly fabulous everything is.

2) To blither on about things I find interesting. And that’d be a whole lot of things which I hope will start to emerge.

3) To see what it’s all about. I’ve had this tribefive.co.uk domain for some time, nominally to set up as a portfolio for freelance design work in my spare time. But pressure of my full-time job has meant I haven’t got all that far on that score. So I might as well use the site for something, and it gives me a chance to experiment with setting up and configuring WordPress, the blogging software running this mountain of self justification and pretension.

4) As a pathetic excuse to spend a lot of money on something that is cool, but that I don’t really need. Which would be the positively bulimic MacBook Air which is so thin that you could probably fold it into a paper aeroplane. Furthermore, it’s got a swishy gesture-based touchpad that’ll take me one step closer to being Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Although I don’t really want to be that close to the Cruise-meister, seeing as Scientology appears to have sent him mental. There aren’t many religions that appear to class insanity and spouting gibberish as a desirable end result - that’s the sort of thing that usually starts religions. Anyways, my reasoning goes as follows:

- I wanted to start a blog
- I don’t really want to have to go and sit at the computer every time I want to post. Being able to blog whilst on my sofa, out and about, or lying in bed would be much better. Blogging from a reclined position is really the only civilised way to do things, after all.
- Thus, lovely wireless technology of joy must be acquired to achieve this. Yes, yes, there are much cheaper and more practical options out there, but la la la I can’t hear you. Yes, I already own two other computers but fingers in ears, fingers in ears.

 So then, the Mac’s on order, and this first post is…posted.