Mistaken Identity

I am a self-confessed hypocritical Luddite. My favourite soap box rant is generally in the field of technology and yet I use my new version of windows 10 (it’s ok, not sure I quite understand all the excitement about it) to carry out my work and much of my life. I blame my phone for stealing any potential spare moment and yet I have arthritis in my thumb from an over-use of texting.

And then there’s Facebook. It seems to me that the concept is brilliant, less so the actualisation, perhaps. It allows people to stay in touch without needing to turn up or phone. Speaking to each other has its merits, of course, but unless you’re going to find a platform and give a speech, you are limited to how many willing participants you can communicate with at any given moment. Use Facebook and not only can you tell all your friends about your holiday, but all their friends as well, if you so choose.

The great thing about posting photos online is that you don’t see people yawn.  I still cringe at the memory of my poor sister travelling over from America to stay with us. After settling her down on the sofa with a cup of Yorkshire Tea and a block of Dairy Milk, the fire crackling and the snow falling softly outside (ok, it was raining, it's a minor detail), we decided that now would be the perfect opportunity to show her the photographic evidence of our summer holiday, using our ‘new bit of kit’ (it was a few years ago): the television through which you could magnify your photos to the size of a small painting. Wonderful if you’re under ten, automatic soft focus would be kinder for anyone over 35. Said sister was stoic for the first 10% of the photos but after that the head began to nod and the eyes roll and as she really needed to stay awake until at least 8pm, all parties were unanimous in the decision to save the photos for 4 o’clock the next morning instead, when she had her jet lag induced insomnia.

So, I click on Facebook at the weekend, wander around, see who’s also frittering away their Saturday, and I see that ‘Tom’ - we’ll call him, ‘Tom’- is ‘at an event near you.’ That’s nice, I think, but what if Tom doesn’t want me to know that he’s at an event near me? Or, put it another way, if Tom wanted me to know he was at an event near me, I’m sure Tom could have told me. I was amused at the potential for misunderstanding that this technology could cause. What? You were two miles up the road and you never popped your head through the door even for a measly cup of Yorkshire Tea? 

I mentioned my amusement to Tom and he said that it was funny because actually, he wasn’t at an event near me at said time. Definitely not. In fact, if I looked on Facebook I would see photographic evidence of him in an entirely different place.

Oh! If ever there was a story to be written.    

Small Job, Big Task

As part of sparkly VikLit’s happy bloghop, Celebrate The Small Things, I’ve been challenged to talk about the small things which make us happy. And I happen to have some big news about a small project which took on unprecedented proportions but is today, finally, finished.* It’s my beautiful, re-painted, re-furbished and inflated (it really wasn’t this big before) study. And its wonderful calm and cleanliness is making me supremely happy. Work, you say? Bring it on!

*Ok, it isn’t completely finished, (I only started on the project five months ago and did you ever hear about Rome?) as my notice boards still need to be hung up. Essential as they are, they will make the study seem a little more cluttered again so today I’m going to call it finished and show you a picture before we all start to unpick the good work.

  

Shameful! Click to see how it got quite so bad.

‘Sorting Out The Study’ had been on our to-do list since we moved into this house eight years ago and finally, we had a date: December 2012. Meanwhile, in November, I would, ‘clear it out’. I took the job very seriously, sifting through the junk, every photo and every piece of paper in my determination to keep only the absolutely essential. The five months the task took I blame on the ‘photo box’, reams of my teenager’s pre-school artwork, my slightly baffling need to keep copies of every freelance project ever worked and several notes to boot and, ah yes, the diaries I wrote between the age of 13 and 23. But all that work! It would be such a shame if nobody read them from cover to cover, wouldn’t it?

New desk beginnings.

There was a gremlin in our plans. With the hugely expensive debacle of the boiler in December, as detailed in A Damp and a Freeze A Damp and a Freeze, I’d put the new study on the *back-burner* for a while. However, my very lovely and equally handy husband, who likes few things more than an excuse to browse an internet auction site which begins with ‘E’ and ends in ‘bay’, secretly sourced some end-of-line wood officially assigned to kitchen work surfaces and set about building a desk and shelving. He paid £400 for the wood. The nice man at the wood merchant’s, who agreed to saw the pieces down to size for a few pennies in the ‘beer pot’, assured hubbie, with much in-taking of breath and nose-tapping, that we would normally have paid five times as much.

Nearly there.

With some careful planning of how to re-use parts of the old desk and re-arrange some of the existing cupboards, and with the purchase of one pot of paint and two packs of dye for the curtains, the entire job came to less than £500. Wasn’t that the budget for Changing Rooms? And not a staple in sight.

Et voila! Note to self: tidy pc cables.

Every day’s a school day, as my French friend frequently quotes and this is what I’ve learnt, or perhaps been reminded of, over the past five months of the Study Job.

Even if the tax man says, ‘Keep This’ with a demonic point of his stubby cigar of a finger, it doesn’t mean you have to keep a record of every pencil ever bought since 1998. Ditto electricity statements, last year’s totally defunct house insurance and the MOT certificate for the car you sold three years ago.

It’s so much easier to discard children’s artwork if it can be left alone for ten years after its production (NB. Factor browsing and cooing time into its disposal).

Photos which do not make it to the photo album do not need to be destroyed and thus should not heap guilt onto the shoulders of the principal house keeper on every sight of the bulging box. Ok, boxes. Indeed, the small house required to store them should be off-set against the great waves of reminiscent joy on their re-discovery. However, easy access is not required, and frankly not conducive to the industrious purpose of a study, so a dusty corner of the loft might be a more suitable place for their housing (loft conversions may be possible).

A4 plastic wallets were of far superior quality in the good old days, as were cardboard index dividers. Gosh, things were made to last in the much maligned nineties!

Notice boards benefit from a clear out, rather than an additional box of pins.

It’s ok not to be able to get rid of cherished favourite novels but they don’t need to be on sight for you to know they’re there. Double rows of books are perfectly acceptable.

Just because something doesn’t have a specific purpose, doesn’t mean it does not have a place in a room where many hours are spent. Although, for the greater good, it is reasonable to fabricate a use to help the husband’s understanding – the door hanging heart, for example, would it double up as a stencil?

I have a lot of notebooks. I’ve spoken of my love of notebooks here before. It will be a sad day for me if I-pads, smartphones, tablets etc. etc. usurp the art of hand-writing. I know I should embrace the times but I’ve always been something of a luddite, way before I reached three score years and something. Besides, they do look pretty, don’t they?

I hope you’ve had a happy week and may all your projects be fun ones which unexpectedly take half of the allocated time!