Now this is funny: search Google for ‘a bloody stupid idea’. And how did I find out about that? By reading this very entertaining little article at Internet Magazine… I’m kind of surprised – I don’t want this to seem like a campaign – I’m just trying to explain why I think the Guardian competition isn’t really in the spirit of weblogging and encourage people who think the same to say so. If you want to enter, you won’t get lynched!
Birthday in a nutshell (I’ll complete the post over the day):
Thursday 18th July
Midday: There’s a tube strike in London so I’m working from home. The plan is to write a spec for a project at my new job at UpMyStreet, pack everything I need to take to Norfolk with me and then hop onto a train – having organised my gas problem at some point during the day.
4pm: The spec is still far from complete. I am starting to sweat.
8pm: The spec is still far from complete. I am starting to sweat.
10pm: Have a freak out about the spec. Far from complete.
Friday 19th July
12am: And suddenly, with the spec still far from complete, it’s my birthday and I’m thirty. I send a few e-mails and text messages, go for a little walk around outside and feel like a tremendous weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
2am: The spec is still far from compleete, but I’ve done enough for one day. Haven’t managed to get to Norfolk yet, but I’ll do that in the morning…
7am: Wake up exhausted like someone has dumped a bucket of cold water on my face and look around frantically. Check my watch which has been broken for the last two and half weeks. Yes, it’s still broken. Scrabble around for bags and clothes and things I have to take to Norfolk.
8am: Everything’s packed, but do I take a shower? I have no hot water, after all – not until the gas is fixed. Decision made on spur of moment – damn the shower. Run outside and wait for bus.
8.30am: Bus still hasn’t arrived. I now have an hour to get to the train station.
8.45am: The bus just drove past fully loaded with people.
8.55am: Arrive at tube station having given up on bus. Am carrying huge bag of crap. Tube station is closed due to flooding.
9.05am: Arrive at other bus stop, hop onto bus – surely everything will be ok now.
9.30am: Have moved about ten minutes walk down the road. Old ladies are lapping us. They’ve literally walked around the world once while we’ve been in this queue.
9.40am: Get off bus and walk to nearby tube station. Pay for ticket and walk through barrier. Take off iPod headphones. A message comes over the tannoy, “There are no southbound services on the Bakerloo line at the moment”. Swearing, I turn tail and get back on a bus.
9.50am: God it’s hot on this bus.
10.00am: Arrange to meet Nick C. and drive up with him from Primrose Hill as whole public transport thing is slowly destroying my mind.
10.25am: Bump into old friend at tube station. Declare that I am thirty. He’s older than me. Feel like I’ve joined a club.
10.40am: And we’re off to sunny Norfolk!
11.45am: Nick and I are driving around in the sun and it’s really good fun and we’re talking and really enjoying ourselves. I keep getting nice text messages from friends, and then – while driving through Elveden – I get a phone call from Gideon in St. Petersberg wishing me a happy birthday which is so entirely cool.
2pm: Arrive at my parents’ place in Norfolk kind of sweaty and exhausted. Which makes it sound like we arrived at orgasm rather than a nice house in the countryside, but we really didn’t. We lounge around for a while, I show Nick around the house and the village, we have a drink, get cleaned up and wait for the first people to start arriving…
Today ladies and gentlemen, I will mostly be writing like a barely-literate hack with no grasp of the English language and a tendency to create long, convoluted sentences with little structure, pace or glamour.
I’ve had my first interaction with Blogroots.com today – which I knew was on the horizon, but had somehow completely managed to miss the launch of. It’s a metafilter-style board in structure (except that it has a nice category feature that reminds me of Whedonesque) – and it’s all about weblogs and weblogging. It’s quite an interesting project in and of itself, but of course I came in at this thread – which is about (you guessed it) the Guardian’s weblog award…
Contrary to popular reports, my thirtieth birthday in Norfolk was not a weekend retreat for a cabal of elite webloggers. Quite the opposite in fact – I invited Mo Morgan for god’s sake! But there were webloggers there because I have friends who are webloggers. So thank you to Mo above, Cal, Matt and Meg and Paul for trekking across country to keep me company. Paul has written up his side of Saturday evening here.
As a brief aside before I get all excited about my lovely birthday weekend again (which I’ve no doubt is boring the world to death), I should probably return to the issue of the Guardian ‘Best British Weblog’ award – which is currently being defended over at Onlineblog.com. I feel a bit sorry for Neil, actually, because clearly the intent behind the event is completely altruistic – but as anyone who has participated in things even vaguely like this in the UK knows, the only thing you can guarantee about throwing something large and full of implication before webloggers is that you’re going to get a fair amount of stick for it. Someone somewhere isn’t going to agree with it, or think it misses the point, or is prepared to fight about it. It’s just a shame that this time the person throwing a strop has to be me… Increasingly though I’m wondering if there is enough groundswell of support to make a sufficiently large statement by not entering. By itself a weblog is a tiny tiny thing, mostly incapable of generating any kind of change. But weblogs are jumping off points for memes, and memes in blogspace can be all powerful. But if the meme doesn’t travel… Perhaps a better idea would be to enter the competition on the understanding that there is the tiniest possibility that it might give you a platform to explain why you think the whole thing was a bad idea in the first place in the most public and outspoken way… Although that could just be an attempt at rationalisation…
Oh shit! I completely forgot to write about this, so I’m going to do it now, while I’m all full of blog-love. On Tuesday I came home after work to change for a dinner thing, except when I got home I couldn’t get in. The gas board had come around, broken into my flat, taken the gas meter, changed the locks and left! The last tenant hadn’t paid their bills and information about me hadn’t got to them yet. So for quite a lot of last week I was washing in kettle-boiled water out of a really big saucepan that I don’t think I’ll use for entertaining any more. Plus no heating or cooking facilities either. I really should get that sorted out!
I kind of can’t stop writing. Everything’s all smooshie. It’s all daze and blurry soft-focus. Not drunk soft-focus, but kind of happy internal trashy soft-focus. Like a bad novel’s cover. I’ve got all these little pictures in my head – sunsets, Pimms, cartwheeling friends, Cossacks, kebabs, candy floss, boating irishmen, big bearded men with scrambled egg, handfulls of goat-feed. And when I think about them everything just feels really kind of warm and wonderful. And I know it’s a feeling that’s not going to last, because I can feel some edges already. But god I had a wonderful time.
I got two e-mails about my birthday that were important to me this year. One from someone I didn’t expect to hear from, another from someone I really hoped I’d hear from. So one of them is really cheery – and you have to wonder why. And the other was really sober and you think, should it have been? I think maybe people are like songs. Some songs have a huge impact on you – they make you happy, they make you sad, they make you shake your head around so hard that I think maybe your brain gets all small like balled-up white bread bouncing around your skull. But you never know whether a song you used to love will make you dance or leave you cold – or just make you think of something dumb you once did which makes you smile. Some people only listen to dumb songs . I wonder – do you choose your taste in music or does it choose you?
I think my superpowers are my friends, who are lovely
and wonderful and make me able to do all kinds of cool
things that I couldn’t do by myself.