primitivepeople

One of the biggest issues I have to deal with at work is the fact that my job is monumentally boring. It's not difficult, it's not strenuous, and most of the time it isn't stressful, but it's repetitive and doesn't demand a huge amount of concentration - as a result, it can be quite spirit-crushing at times. Boredom has a very negative effect on me - it makes me turn in on myself and start blowing trivial things out of all proportion. I tend to spend a lot of my time at work worrying about a whole heap of things that really, really shouldn't matter.

It looks like I'm going to be in the job for about another six months, and at times I find that an alarming prospect - although that said, I've successfully stuck it out for nearly a year already, and I know I'm quite lucky to have it. The pay is decent and when I walk out of the door at five o'clock every day, I can (mostly) forget about everything until nine o'clock the following morning.

But...the boredom. At times it drives me nuts, and I've been thinking about the best way to deal with it. My casual observations suggest that the people who cope the best with it, and manage to avoid letting it get to them, are the people who have lots of other stuff going on in their lives. There's one person in particular who does so much outside work that it makes me feel dizzy just thinking about it, but she seems well able to deal with the petty office politics and mind-numbing tedium of it all. I'm not sure she ever sleeps, and that's not something I could ever do, but it's made me think about what I should do with my time and energy in order to prevent boredom-related brain-death.

I've had a couple of modest successes in selling photos recently - very modest indeed in terms of income, but it's a start and it's possible that I might get somewhere with this. One of the sites is Photo4Me, and you can see my work here. I reckon that investing some time and creative energy in this will pay dividends, more in terms of enjoyment than anything else, so I need to get some more images up there. Sadly, another site where I've had modest success (Picture Nation) is about to close, so I'll need to look at setting myself up on another photo library site or two as soon as I find time. I love taking photos, of course, and the satisfaction of knowing that someone likes my pictures enough to buy them for display is awesome. The shot I sold on Photo4Me made a mere £6 in commission, but I felt all warm and happy and excited about it for about a week. :) So...this is a project worth devoting some time and energy in.

Another thing I love doing is writing, and this blog has been a major source of enjoyment and relationship-building over the many years I've been writing in it. Sadly, LJ is a mere shadow of its former self, and traffic has slumped, and DW doesn't seem to be much better. But...I look at my recent entries and there's not much to show. You get traffic when you provide good content that people want to read. So...another project, I think, is putting some effort into blogging more regularly and providing some decent material. There's several things I enjoy doing - book reviews, photography stuff, old technology, observations on life and issues, and commenting on things cultural. I'm going to try and write in here more often, and I think bit of a re-launch is long overdue. I need to encourage my friends to read and interact again, and seek out some new audiences - when this thing goes well, again the satisfaction is priceless and I could do with some of that. So watch out for Blog Relaunch.

Finding time for this next one might be a bit tricky and might have to wait a while, but I'd love to do some volunteering again - I loved being involved in the Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway when I wasn't working. Current thought is to get involved with the Museum of Communications in Burntisland, because it is awesome. I could easily spare a few hours here and there, so I'll see how that pans out.

It's really tricky squeezing everything in, but when I put my mind to it, I'm good at not procrastinating, and it doesn't take much effort to make things happen here and there. Each day, I should be looking at advancing a thing or two in my life a little bit, getting closer to doing more of what I want. If I do that, the day job will become a lot more bearable. We'll see how it goes.

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Rather typically, the weather was awesomely good on Friday, when I was stuck in the office all day, and was awesomely bad yesterday when I wasn't, so we needed an all-weather activity to occupy us. We ended up at the Museum of Communication in Burntisland, a place I'd been keen to visit for ages but hadn't been able to as their opening hours are a bit limited. Anyway, it was worth the wait, because in my book it was everything a little specialised museum should be and the place gave me bit of a geekgasm.

The exhibition space is very hands-on and contains a fabulous array of tellies, radios, phones, typewriters, computers and other assorted obscure bits and pieces. They had some lovely old record players, the world's first model of video tape recorder, and a laserdisc player, among other things. I was rather taken by the working Strowger telephone exchange, and the first working BBC Micro computer I've been able to play with in at least 20 years. I was quite impressed that I could remember that the command ?&FE40=0 makes strange noises when you press various keys.

The museum was run by a bunch of very friendly volunteers who were also happy to show us around the store room at the back. This place was amazing - it is stacked from floor to ceiling with just about every piece of technology you could imagine from about the last hundred years. I spotted just about every model of 80s home computer, more TVs than you can shake a stick at, and a radio from the first Luftwaffe bomber to have been shot down in Scotland during the war.

Abby reckons the Holy Grail is hidden in there somewhere. I suspect that there's enough equipment there to build a machine that would open a wormhole or something.

They even give you free refreshments included in the very modest admission fee.

Given my love of Old Stuff, I found it extremely hard to hide my glee at discovering that a bunch of people have collected all these things. I'm very keen to volunteer at the place, as I feel I could probably offer some useful skills and knowledge, and I want to PLAY WITH THE STUFF.

A couple of weeks ago I took the kids to a rather different tourist attraction in Edinburgh, The Real Mary King's Close. This is an ancient street off the Royal Mile that was eventually built over, but a lot of it remains hidden under modern buildings. Given my fondness for creepy underground places, I had high expectations. It was OK, but you didn't really get to see enough and the tour was a bit cheesy. Like a lot of Edinburgh tourist attractions, they hyped up the scary factor in the advertising but under-delivered on it in the tour itself. I was comparing notes with my hardcore-horror-enthusiast work colleague, who felt it was distinctly lacking in dead bodies. I'm inclined to agree.

In other news, I feel rather overwhelmed by busy-ness at the moment and it's all a bit stressful, but hopefully things will settle down a bit soon. There's a remote possibility that we might have to move house soon. I really hope we don't, but in case we do, we've been considering various options. A lot depends on if and when we can sell my mum's place, which currently feels like bit of a millstone round my neck. I'm still not sure what to do with it either, although I'm keen to avoid living in it if at all possible.

A lot of things do feel a bit like they're happening by default at the moment, and I don't like that because it doesn't feel like I have a huge amount of control over my life. It's made me quite anxious, but Abby has been awesome as ever and helped me calm down. At the end of the day, I've dealt with every bad thing that has ever happened to me, and I'm sure we'll be fine.

This entry was originally posted at http://primitivepeople.dreamwidth.org/2260344.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

1. British Railways Diesel Traction Manual for Enginemen published by British Transport Commission (authors not named)
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited by Stephen Armstrong
4. Motive Power Annual 1988 edited by Brian Morrison
5. Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
6. Carrie by Stephen King
7. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow The Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs
8. World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone
9. Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine
10. Duma Key by Stephen King
11. The Pub Landlord's Book of British Common Sense by Al Murray
12. Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to be a Pop Star by Tracey Thorn
13. Buried for Pleasure by Edmund Crispin

Abby has a big stack of Edmund Crispin books - he wrote a number of comedic detective novels in the forties and fifties, starring Gervase Fen, an eccentric Oxford academic with a talent for solving murders. They're all set in quite stereotypical English villages and the plots get a bit ridiculous - they're a lot of fun. Abby has read me bits of lots of the books while she's been reading them, but this is the first one I've read all the way through. The prose and dialogue is seriously funny, and the author's descriptions are really hilarious. I particularly like this description of a painting in the village pub:

"...there was, over the fireplace, a canvas so large as to constitute something of a piece de resistance. It was a seascape, which showed, in the foreground, a narrow strip of shore, up which some men in oilskins were hauling what looked like a primitive lifeboat. To the left was a harbour with a mole, behind which an angry sky suggested the approach of a tornado. And the rest of the available space, which was considerable, was taken up with a stormy sea, flecked with white horses, upon which a number of sailing ships were proceeding in various directions.

This spirited depiction, Fen was to learn, provided an inexhaustible topic of argument among the habitues of the inn. From the seaman's point of view, no such scene had ever existed, or could ever exist, on God's earth. But this possibility did not seem to have occurred to anyone at Sanford Angelorum. It was the faith of the inhabitants that if the artist had painted it thus, it must have been thus."

The book is full of great little descriptive details like this, creating a fantastic farcical world populated by extremely eccentric characters, including a non-doing pig who is central to the plot. There's plenty of twists and turns and the conclusion is quite funny and surprising. You won't necessarily learn anything or be challenged or inspired by this book, but you'll certainly have fun reading it, and I'll certainly read some more in the series as and when I get a chance.

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I've been thinking about a lot of things recently, and something that is playing heavily on my mind is trying to avoid making the many mistakes my parents made. We sometimes seem doomed to repeat them, because we accept the way we're raised as normal and it can be hard to break your programming.

I should start by saying I loved my parents and I'm grateful to them for a lot. Whatever they got wrong, they made it clear that they loved me and were proud of me, and they provided me with everything I needed. It wasn't always easy for them, either - they were often very short of money, and my sister's very serious mental health problems made life very difficult for them. In those very trying circumstances, they protected me from the very many things that could have gone drastically wrong, and that safety and stability has allowed me to live the generally cosy and comfortable existence I've always enjoyed.
But...there's so much I want to do differently. Some of this is generational, and that's programming that's hard to break. My dad was born in 1933 and my mum was born in 1940, making them 41 and 34 when I was born - regarded as quite an advanced age to be having kids in the mid-seventies. They got married in 1959 and the cultural revolution of the sixties pretty much by-passed them completely - as a result they had very conservative attitudes all their lives. They're quite different to Abby's parents, who were born in 1945 and so were not quite adults as the sixties dawned. They seemed to expect rather more out of life.

So...when I was a kid, life in our house was fine but it was drearily suburban, with very little in the way of adventure, innovation or excitement. My parents got all their news and opinions from the Daily Mail. I think my mum was way less conservative than my dad, but lived in his slightly antisocial shadow - all he ever wanted to do was watch sport on telly. My parents seemed to act like your life was over by the time you hit your forties, devoted to sedate pastimes like golf, playing cards, and hanging around the house wearing cardigans and slippers, eating bland food and listening to an extensive collection of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra LPs.

If that's what the future holds, kill me now. Seriously. I sometimes worry, as my thirties draw to a close, that this is all that lies ahead and that all my best days are over. My parents seemed to begin their miserable, boring descent to the grave when they hit my age. Unless it was taking me to something, I can never remember them ever going to see a film, a gig or a big event of some kind. They never went to museums or galleries, never travelled anywhere unusual, never read interesting books, never mixed with anyone who would challenge their ideas, never tried anything new. I can't begin to imagine how utterly dull I would find that kind of life.

Unfortunately I acquired a lot of my parents' conservative attitudes and it's taken a long time to shake them off. There's things I missed out on when I was younger that I regret now, mainly allowing the late eighties/early nineties rave scene to pass me by, and not getting involved in things like the Twyford Down roads protest. I feel too old and tied down for a lot of that sort of thing now, but I shouldn't rule anything out.

I think I've managed to avoid my parents' biggest mistake, though - smoking. It killed them both, cost them a bloody fortune and made them woefully unhealthy for years. I always hated smoking so much that I've never been tempted to take it up for a second. So...I've dodged that particular bullet. As I get older, though, I'm aware that my health will decline unless I look after it. My parents just seemed to accept flab, coughing, wheezing and reduced ability to do things as inevitable, but it's not. However, I need to watch what I eat and make sure I get plenty of exercise. I really don't want to die early in horrible pain and poor health. I don't think my genetic inheritance is too wonderful on this front, so I need to work at it.

This is turning into bit of a convoluted ramble that doesn't seem to have a clear point to it, but I want to make sure I do 2 things my parents never managed - live a long, healthy life and leave some sort of decent legacy behind. I want to leave something I've created behind that will last, to have been involved in something that will outlast me. I'm very aware that it's easy to waste opportunities and fritter your life away, and I've done too much of that already. I've managed to worry and get depressed about lots of things that aren't worth the bother recently, and that's not good. Ultimately, I shouldn't worry about anything I can't control or change, and I should focus on spending time doing fun and exciting things with the people who matter.

So...that's what I shall do. I'll get everything out of life that I can, and try hard to create and make the life I want. I'll be tough on boredom and tough on the causes of boredom.

I don't want to look back on my life when I'm old and grey and regret the missed opportunities.

1. British Railways Diesel Traction Manual for Enginemen published by British Transport Commission (authors not named)
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited by Stephen Armstrong
4. Motive Power Annual 1988 edited by Brian Morrison
5. Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
6. Carrie by Stephen King
7. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow The Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs
8. World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone
9. Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine
10. Duma Key by Stephen King
11. The Pub Landlord's Book of British Common Sense by Al Murray
12. Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to be a Pop Star by Tracey Thorn

This is the memoir of Tracey Thorn, most famous for being in Everything But The Girl, but also a member of The Marine Girls and involved in various other musical projects over the years. I'm not a great EBTG fan but I do really like the Marine Girls' two albums, and the book looked good in reviews so I gave it a go.

It was a great read - a really interesting insight into the music scene I grew up with, and an account of all the highs and lows of Tracey's long and varied pop career. She writes with good humour and quite a lot of frankness and honesty, and it's interesting to see how she went from a humble suburban upbringing in Hertfordshire to some success and acclaim. You'll enjoy this a lot if you like her music, but even if you don't, it's a well-written and often entertaining story, and it's a book I found easy to read and hard to put down, which can't be bad at all.
This entry was originally posted at http://primitivepeople.dreamwidth.org/2259730.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I've had a pretty good weekend, with lots of fun stuff in it, as well as getting various stuff sorted out. Biggest thing that I seem to have finally resolved, after having far more trouble with it than I should have done, is getting a business bank account opened. It's taken ages and I'm glad to have it resolved. As I'm likely to be contracting for a while, I've set up a limited company as it's the best way to get paid, and you need a business bank account for that.

Work went alright last week, although the most recent changes to the job have made it more boring than ever. Thankfully some of my colleagues are awesome and that makes getting through the day much easier. We've just been told that our contracts will be renewed until the end of the year, which means I really don't have to worry about being unemployed any time soon.

Anyway...yesterday I took the kids into Edinburgh. I wanted to take them to the excellently creepy-looking Mary King's Close, but it looked like you had to book ahead. We went to Dynamic Earth instead, which I'd heard good things about. It's all about how the Earth was formed and evolved, and how it fits into the universe. There's loads there, and the way it's all presented is clever, original and impressive. I came away with a sense of wonder about everything, feeling very small.

Today I went out with my friend John and also took Eddie to see a steam special going from Linlithgow around the Fife loop. The loco doing the honours was LNER A4 "Union of South Africa", and here's a shot of it coming off the Forth Bridge at North Queensferry.



Other stuff has involved watching "In The Flesh" on iPlayer, a recent BBC 3 part drama about zombies. All quite originally different, and the way it's all presented is clever. The zombies are given medical treatment and reintegated into society - I've not seen that done before. :)

Anyway, I'm off to bed now.

1. British Railways Diesel Traction Manual for Enginemen published by British Transport Commission (authors not named)
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited by Stephen Armstrong
4. Motive Power Annual 1988 edited by Brian Morrison
5. Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
6. Carrie by Stephen King
7. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow The Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs
8. World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone
9. Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine
10. Duma Key by Stephen King
11. The Pub Landlord's Book of British Common Sense by Al Murray

This was another acquired-in-Portugal book. I didn't read it until after I got back, though. Basically, if you like Al Murray, you'll like the book, but if you don't, you won't. It reads a lot like his stand-up and you can imagine the whole thing being read in his voice. All very lightweight but plenty of laugh-out-loud daft moments. I think the clever aspect of Al Murray's humour is that the landlord comes across as quite bigoted and prejudiced, but Al Murray himself is the exact opposite and is pretty mild-mannered and cultured. He manages to say quite a lot about our attitudes and hangups. As I say, well worth a read if you're a fan - otherwise you won't get much out of it.

This entry was originally posted at http://primitivepeople.dreamwidth.org/2259548.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

1. British Railways Diesel Traction Manual for Enginemen published by British Transport Commission (authors not named)
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited by Stephen Armstrong
4. Motive Power Annual 1988 edited by Brian Morrison
5. Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
6. Carrie by Stephen King
7. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow The Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs
8. World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone
9. Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine
10. Duma Key by Stephen King

I've struggled to read much over the past few weeks, but I'm endeavouring to catch up a bit. This book formed the bulk of my holiday reading - I got it in a little secondhand bookshop in Albufeira. Stephen King is an author I'm really keen to read more of, first because he writes such great books, and second because he seems like a really decent guy who has great respect for his audience. He's the sort of person I'd love to have a few drinks with.

Anyway...I'd not heard of this one before. It's about a guy in his fifties who ran a successful construction company, but had a gruesome accident that nearly killed him (King clearly writing about something he experienced himself here). He lost his right arm and struggled with pain - during that time he attempted to attack his wife and they divorced. He needs time and space to recover, so moves to a big house on a remote Florida island. While there, he discovers a passion and love for drawing and painting, creating incredible artworks that stun others with their depth and quality.

But...being a Stephen King novel, not all is what it seems in the paintings, and there's something supernatural about them, unlocking a dangerous netherworld full of tragedy and suffering from the past that spills over into the present. An evil force is let loose that has to be destroyed.

Giving any more than that away would be a serious spoiler, but this long and complex novel is a real page-turner with some very creepy and gripping scenes in it. The novel is populated with some complex and credible characters, that it's easy to imagine and get behind. There's some really powerful imagery in this. I don't know if a film adaptation is planned, but I'm sure it would look amazing if it was made. :) A really good read, with plenty of surprises and a great sense of slowly advancing terror and fear as the book builds to a great climax. Quite a hefty body count too!

Given the prominence of the sea and the beach in this book, it was great to read while on holiday, although thankfully I didn't have any zombies or evil spirits to deal with while I was away. That would have seriously detracted from the peaceful nature of my holiday.
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It's been a long time since I wrote anything meaningful in here, so I don't know how many readers I have left - if there's any, hello again. :) Main reason you've not heard from me of late is that I've just returned from a week's holiday in Portugal - just Abby and I went, as her mum generously looked after the kids for us. It's the first holiday Abby and I have had on our own for a long time, and we really needed it after the stresses and strains of the last few months.

We went to Albufeira in the Algarve. It's a very tourist-orientated town so it's not hugely historic or attractive, but it's certainly an interesting and enjoyable place to visit, especially the Old Town which had some really nice little nooks and crannies in it off the main tourist trails. Apart from a day trip out to Portugal's spectacular far south-western corner, we didn't venture too far, choosing instead to stay local, eating lots of food, reading books, drinking wine, swimming, sleeping and doing a whole load of other non-strenuous activities. Let's just say I'm fatter and more sunburnt than I was when I left.

We booked the whole thing as a package deal from our local travel agent, and they came up trumps - the whole thing was easy, simple and straightforward. Outward flight was lovely but the return one wasn't so good, mainly because it was full of babies who screamed loudly throughout. I felt sorry for the poor parents having to deal with this - I don't bear them a grudge because I know how difficult travelling with babies is, but a lot of other people were much less tolerant and were quite hostile towards those they held responsible. It made for a stressful atmosphere. Oh, well. I felt much better on the train home from Glasgow, when I tried to buy a Coke from the buffet trolley. They had hardly any cold drinks left, so I didn't bother getting anything. However, the old lady sat opposite me produced a bottle of Coke from her bag and offered it to me! As I was hot, tired and suffering from aeroplane-induced headache and partial deafness, I was incredibly grateful to her for this act of kindness. :)

I found Portugal to be a friendly and welcoming place, delivering a holiday that was just what we needed after such a stressful few months. I'm actually quite looking forward to getting back to work now, 'cos my colleagues are a nice bunch and I'm looking forward to catching up with them.

As and when I get the time, I'll post some Portuguese pictures for you. It was certainly nice to see some sun, as Scotland is still as wet and cold as it was when I left...

The big event while I was away, of course, was the death of Margaret Thatcher. I won't dwell on this in detail, as anything to do with her makes me apoplectic with rage, but I will say I'm absolutely disgusted by how much her funeral is costing the taxpayer. I shall do as I did when Princess Diana died, and ignore the event completely. The government is being absolutely bloody disgusting about the whole thing, of course, turning the event into grisly propaganda. I can't stand the expectation that we're all supposed to be grateful for her "legacy", when that legacy is such gruesome social injustice and division. I shall now shut up and not mention it again. I just wish her morally-bankrupt, cruel, nasty, spiteful ideas and policies would die with her.

Better go for now, but as I've not been able to catch up with people's news for a while, tell me what I need to know about what's happening with you. :)

This entry was originally posted at http://primitivepeople.dreamwidth.org/2258969.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Lots going on in my head at the moment. Ideas and comments thereupon are welcome.

• What to do with my mum's flat - let it out or sell it?
• Getting training. I'm thinking of doing some project management software training. It costs a mammoth £1500 for three days, but could help me get a nice contracting role in transport.
• Looking forward to getting a much better Internet connection next week, and plotting what to do with it - mainly intending to showcase more photography and hopefully sell some of it.
• Wondering how I might sell my skills as a consultant in a whole range of things wot I'm good at.
• What books should I read next?
• Thinking of how I need the wisdom of Solomon raising kids, and how I'm groping about in the dark a lot of the time.
• How frustrating it is that some people are very difficult to "read" and give absolutely nothing away.
• Why are we here?

That will do for now.

This entry was originally posted at http://primitivepeople.dreamwidth.org/2258803.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Today I started the job I really wasn't looking forward to, but it turned out to be OK and I got quite a lot done - clearing out my mum's flat.

There's still a lot to do, but with the help of the children and an iPod and speakers full of good music, I made a start. Quite a lot of the smaller items in the flat have been donated to charity - there's a Cancer Research shop just across the road from the flat which we've been in and out of like yo-yos all day. We've also bagged up a lot of rubbish, and I've started washing mum's clothes and donated the first washed and dried load to charity. I've asked around on Facebook if people want any of the furniture that's left before I donate it to charity, so I'll ask here as well. You'll need to collect it from Linlithgow, but if you happen to live in my part of Scotland, you're welcome to any of the following:

• Small dining table with 4 chairs
• Brown leather armchair
• Small white leather armchair
• 2 single beds (divan type so can't be dismantled)
• Chest of drawers
• Wardrobe
• Office chair
• Small desk
• Sideboard with 2 drawers and cupboards

I expected to find the task bit of an emotional ordeal, but as it happens, it was quite straightforward. Only dealing with my mum's bedroom proved to be particularly unpleasant - it feels very nosy and intrusive to go through someone's deeply personal things, even when they're not there to complain about it any more.

Once all of the clearing up is over, there's decisions to be made about what to do with the flat. There's two choices, basically - selling it, or keeping hold of it for now and letting it out. I'd prefer just to get rid of it, but I'm aware of how depressed the property market is and if letting it will stop it sitting there empty for a long time, then I'll consider that. A third option, of course, would be living in it and giving up this place, but for a whole heap of reasons I don't like that idea. I'm going to get some advice before I jump into anything.

I've been doing OK recently - things are hard sometimes, but there's a lot of good things going on. I never expected to say this, but work is proving to be one of the best things about my life at the moment. I go in, I do the job, I come home again, and I'm never hassled or mucked about by anyone. I really hope the contract goes on for a while longer yet. Hopefully it should do, because some changes have happened to the way we do things recently, and it makes the job much slower...

I'm trying to make sure that I do something constructive and creative each day, whether that's just for enjoyment or as a step towards building a better and more secure future for us. I'm amazed I've come through so much over the last couple of years - I must be fairly capable and resilient to have coped with the unrelenting tide of difficulty and stress. I need to let that boost my confidence a bit, so I can face the challenges to come. One day, one step at a time. Things are looking up.
This entry was originally posted at http://primitivepeople.dreamwidth.org/2258524.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

1. British Railways Diesel Traction Manual for Enginemen published by British Transport Commission (authors not named)
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited by Stephen Armstrong
4. Motive Power Annual 1988 edited by Brian Morrison
5. Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
6. Carrie by Stephen King
7. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow The Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs
8. World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone
9. Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine

I've not done too brilliantly on the reading front lately. I hate starting books and not finishing them, but I had to give up on two recently, one because I found it boring and the other because it made my skin crawl. The first was a book about how we've ended up in the current economic mess - it looked interesting, but totally wasn't - I found it waffly and very tedious. The second was Lolita by Vladimir wotsisname, the "famous book" referred to in that Police song...well, literary classic it may be, but after about twenty pages the paedophile narrator creeped me out so much that I really didn't want to read any more.

So...I reached out for Broken Soup instead. I didn't know much about it besides the fact that Abby had read it recently, and it had an eye-catching cover. I expected it to be an easy, light read, but it turned out to be a whole lot more than I bargained for.

I didn't know what the subject matter was before I started reading it, and the jacket blurb doesn't make it clear, but it's about grief. It is written in the first person and the narrator is Rowan, a girl of fifteen, struggling to deal with the aftermath of her older brother's death. The book explores how each member of the family fell to pieces in the days that followed, leading to her dad moving out and her mother living in a tranquiliser-induced haze, sleeping all the time and leaving Rowan to keep everything together and look after her little sister.

Obviously this is sensitive stuff for me at the moment, dealing as I am with my own grief. But...reading it was enormously therapeutic, and it's one of the most thoughtful, well-observed and well-written treatments of death and grief I have ever read. It's clearly aimed at teenagers but it really, really worked for me, and led me to think a lot about where I am at the moment. Rowan is someone I could really empathise with, left trying to keep things together in really difficult circumstances, feeling like she had to try and "act normal".

There was one part of the book that was quite hard to read - a fairly detailed description of an attempted suicide - and I happened to read this part on the train to work this morning. By the time I'd finished walking from the station to the office, I was bit of an emotional wreck and my brain was struggling to process about a hundred different feelings all at once. I found myself sitting at my desk shaking and feeling like I was about to burst into tears, which wasn't very good, but it did encourage me to stop being superficial and pretending that everything was OK, and it led me to talk to someone about how I was feeling, which was hugely helpful and led me to feel much better later on. This is one of the things I find quite hard to do at work - there are quite a few people in the office I really, really wish I could get to know more, and talk to, but it's hard to make it happen and it's hard to know how people would cope with me being so open. I do tend to wear my heart on my sleeve rather more than some other people, so it's hard to know what to say when people ask me how I'm doing. Do they want the neat, tidy, simple answer, or do they want the real answer? Someone earlier in the week asked me how my weekend had been, and I'm not sure she coped very well with the response I gave her, and I felt bad for what I said, but then I realised it's probably far worse to lie. But then I don't want to be treated differently to how I'm usually treated...it's all quite hard to process and deal with now and again. Most of the time I'm fine, but today I wasn't. The stuff the book got me thinking about did help me deal with it properly, though, and I'm glad I sought out some company. It's good to talk and get these things out, as bottling them up is never good.

I finished the book on the train home this evening, and the ending is just beautiful, a glimmer of hope and a sign that things might get better for everyone involved. Hope is something that can be hard to cling onto when you're just trying to keep all your shit together, to deal with all the everyday things when you just want some time and space to grieve and get through it all. But there's always a glimmer of hope, that when this difficult journey is over, things will get better, and that you can move on, and reach a better place. As I read the last couple of pages, I fought back some tears and attempted to be emotional as quietly as possible in the crowded train.

I can't praise this novel highly enough - I needed it right now, as it really helped me work through some of the things I'm feeling. I'm going to write to the author and thank her for taking the time to write something so touching.



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I've been pretty busy recently. It's good, after a long period of stress and grief, to be able to feel like I'm getting my life back a bit, and it's good to have a bit more time on my hands.

One of things I finally got around to doing was setting up a limited company. If you're a contractor like me, it's the best way to handle your pay. I currently go through an umbrella company who take a huge cut and generally don't offer a very good deal. A lot of my colleagues set up companies a few months back, but I didn't have time to do it. I'm glad I'm now able to get around to doing things that will stand me in good stead for the future. My current job won't extend beyond the end of the year, but I think I've caught the contracting bug. All things considered, I'd far rather get another contracting role when I next need a job, because the money is good and it gives you more flexibility and freedom. Although it has disadvantages, like no paid holidays, there's something about it that seems very honest and rather more agreeable than most of the permanent jobs I've had. My current job has no appraisals and no meetings - you go in, do the work, come home again and that's it. My work-life balance is better than it's been in years.

I'm rather hopeful that by staying to the end of this contract I'll get a reasonably good reputation out of it and won't have too much trouble finding something else. There's plenty of contract roles in the rail industry, that pay good money, so I need to look out for those. What I really need to do is work out what skills they're looking for, and try and work out how to acquire them - I really fancy doing some training and learning, so I'll have to research that a bit.

There's some creative things on the horizon too - I discovered an obsolete technology zine is looking for articles, and I pitched them an idea for an article based on my recent adventures with a ZX81. They're really up for it, especially as I used it to make a zine, so that's something I've been working on. I'm keen to get out and shoot more pictures too.

My mum's things are gradually getting sorted out. It's bizarre how people just turn into statistics when they die, and stop being people. My mum is just a collection of defunct contracts with various organisations now - it really is the case that she has ceased to exist, and she's turned into a selection of letters and cheques that gradually show up. It's quite weird. I still find it hard to take in the fact that she's not here any more, as I keep thinking of things that I want to tell her about, and realise that I can't. Still, it's gradually getting easier. After a few horrifically miserable moments recently, I'm finding things generally less stressful and hard and I'm managing to be more positive and grateful for the good things in my life. Mother's Day wasn't easy, though, and I just made an effort to avoid it completely. I didn't go to church on Mother's Day because that's usually the entire focus of the service, and it's a bit too soon to be reminded of all that.

I was concerned about my sister and her ability to cope, as she finds things a challenge at the best of times, but thankfully she's done really well. With some help from various sources, she's sorted out a new flat for herself, and is moving at the weekend. I'm very proud of her efforts. My mum used to do almost everything for her and I was terrified that burden would fall onto me, but it hasn't. It's good that she's moving, because at the moment she's rattling around in my mum's place, which is far too big for her and still full of all my mum's stuff. My sister is taking quite a lot of furniture with her to the new place, and after she's done that, we can decide what to do with the rest.

So far, I'm cautiously optimistic and I think the future looks bright. Given all the unrelenting shit we've had to deal with over the last couple of years, I'd say it's about time.

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My father, the smoker - a rather poignant article from The Guardian

I can totally relate to this. It was quite hard work to read, as I've lost both my parents to smoking, one of them less than a month ago. But articles like this need to be written. I experienced so many of these feelings, as I saw my parents' health fail rapidly due to their neglect of themselves. I was lucky to be an adult before they died, but I lost my dad when I was 20, and he never met Abby, never got to see me build a decent career, never met my kids, and missed out on so much because he dropped dead of a massive heart attack at just 62 years old. It was because he couldn't resist smoking and eating really unhealthily, and he never got any exercise. My mum made it to a more respectable 72, and saw much, much more of my life, but her last decade was utterly blighted by smoking-related health problems, and her final days were an absolute horror to watch. I wouldn't wish that kind of death on anyone.

The simple fact is - and this makes me extremely angry when I stop to think about it - both my parents sliced years and years off their lives, and left me dealing with the fallout of it. I loved them both very much, for they were decent people who raised me remarkably well in often difficult circumstances, but they were so weak when it came to looking after themselves. When I was a kid, I had to endure living in a house that absolutely stank because I was the only non-smoker who lived in it, and I had to endure stinking of fags myself all the way through my childhood. I remember one day when I was in my first year at secondary school, when someone told me I stank of smoke, and it really hurt. I was socially ostracised for it and couldn't do anything about it.

They say that children of smokers are more likely to be smokers themselves, but in my case it has done the exact opposite. I am an ardent anti-smoker because smoking has caused so much suffering in my life. I often see young people smoking, thinking they're invincible and that they will be immune to the damage it does, but I suspect that's exactly what my mum thought when she took it up as a teenager. My dad didn't even start smoking until he was about 21, after he'd been a really successful footballer. To see him go from that fit young man to someone who coughed and wheezed and filled himself full of junk food for the whole time I knew him is really tragic. You could argue that he'd have hated his life without a few little comforts in it, and you're right - an ascetic, comfort-free life is a miserable experience - but his behaviour was ultimately bloody selfish and left behind a bereaved family. A very striking thing about that is that he left my mum massively in the lurch financially as well because he'd not sorted out a lot of things that could have provided for her if he'd ever got around to doing them.

That leaves me thinking a lot of very sobering thoughts. I'm responsible for three kids, and I don't want to make the mistakes my mum and dad made. I need to look after myself. I've done well compared to them by not being a smoker, but I can see myself going the way my dad did by failing to watch my diet and allowing my middle to expand at a rapid rate of knots. I was stick-thin throughout my teens and twenties, and now I'm...err...not. I really need to make sure I get exercise and look after myself, because I don't want to follow my dad to the grave at 62. His dad died even younger, when he was 57.

So...there's things that need to change. I need to exercise. I need to make sure my family won't be utterly screwed if I get run over by a bus tomorrow. I need to make sure I don't miss out on opportunities by being lazy. I need to make sure I don't grow old early, getting unfit and unhealthy and refusing to recognise it or do anything about it. I need to make sure I don't just withdraw and slob in front of the telly, ignoring friends and isolating myself like my dad did.

I know this is all a bit stream-of-consciousness and perhaps a little incoherent, but I feel a need to get a lot of feelings out at the moment. A huge landmark event has just happened in my life - I don't have any parents any more. I know this day will come for my kids too, but I want it to be in a very, very long time, and not in just a few years. I want the energy and fitness to carry on doing the stuff I love doing, and I want to be passionate and enthusiastic and energetic about life, like I've always been. It's led me to feel a bit more positive - in amongst the grieving and the difficult times, I'm aware of how much good stuff I have and I want to make sure I do the things I need to do to keep the good stuff coming. Abby and I were talking yesterday about how much of a burden my mum's illness has been for the last couple of years. It's been hugely worrying and draining, and took a terrible toll on us. But that's over now, and sad as I am that my mum has gone, I'm not sad about coming to the end of a very tough time for all of us.

There's things I want to do, and I'm aware that days are passing in which I don't do them, so I need to make sure that changes. Expect to see some new projects crop up - hold me to them and make sure I do them. Seeing someone's life end, in such a ghastly way, has made me realise just how bloody precious life is, and I really, really need to make the most of what I have, so that I can look back on my life and say that I've regretted nothing.

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I've had bit of a difficult couple of days. I realised towards the end of the week that I'd been trying a bit too hard to act like nothing had happened, and it wasn't doing me much good. I experienced the same rather strange emotions that afflicted me when my dad died in 1995. I sort of over-compensated for things by being a bit over the top in the zany/wacky department, and there were times when my behaviour got a bit strange. I noticed it starting to happen again, as I found myself trying to be a bit overly chatty and funny at work, and at this point I realised I'm actually nowhere near as OK as I'd been trying to make out.

I made an effort on Friday to tone down my behaviour a bit, and it worked, but I did feel pretty miserable and emotional all day, the chief thing being a deep feeling of emptiness and numbness. I was also distracted and extremely bothered by some really trivial crap that shouldn't be bothering me, but it did - deeply. I got through the day, though, and it's at times like these that I'm glad my job is so stress-free. Well, it is to some of us, anyway. Some people spend far too much time indulging in gossip and intrigue and complaining about everything, and they're the ones who end up really miserable. I've learned a lot about the politics of the workplace recently, and since starting this job I've adopted the keep-your-head-down-and-get-on-with-it attitude. It certainly seems to work better than the whine-and-bitch-about-everything approach.

Today has been better. I'm just trying to focus on getting a couple of things done at a time, and not getting too stressed about everything. The weather has been lovely, which has made a real difference, and I'm really trying hard to focus on positive things. There's quite a lot to be positive about, too, which does help chase the clouds of depression and grief away a bit.

I need to start looking to the future a bit, something I'd had to neglect for a while. Given that it seems likely I'll stay in my job until the contract ends and may well end up chasing similar work in the future, I ought to boost my CV a bit. A lot of people at work are studying for exams and are forming a study group - I never had the time to be able to consider joining, as I was too busy dealing with the stress of a terminally-ill mother. But now I can think about getting into it. I also want to look at setting up a limited company to deal with my pay - it involves a bit of work to set up that I never had the time to do, but I should think about it now, mainly because it allows contractors to keep more of their pay, and if I end up in another contracting job, it'll be good to have everything in place right from the start. Until recently, I was far too busy to even think about anything other than getting up in the morning, showing up, doing the job, coming home, dealing with my mum, eating, sleeping etc.

I also want to get creative. One of my work colleagues is looking at setting up some photography projects and I really want to get involved. I've also got some ideas for The Novel That Burns In My Soul that need to come out. Look out also for some stuff on here, that I've been planning to write for a while. I shouldn't neglect this blog as I often find writing in it to be a highly therapeutic experience.

That will do for now. Stuff to do and all.

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Test post from ElJay app on Eee running Android. Nothing to see here. Move along.

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1. British Railways Diesel Traction Manual for Enginemen published by British Transport Commission (authors not named)
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited by Stephen Armstrong
4. Motive Power Annual 1988 edited by Brian Morrison
5. Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
6. Carrie by Stephen King
7. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow The Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs
8. World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone

I picked this up in the library last week. I always enjoy reading a bit about history, and I wasn't massively familiar with the First World War, although I do remember bits of it from school. This book is indeed a short history - it's very condensed and for a lot of people it probably doesn't go into enough detail - but it was accessible and easy to read, and helped me understand things I didn't really know very well before. It does deal quite effectively with how it began and ended, how it changed the face of warfare and how it paved the way for the second war, especially following Hitler's military experience. So...interesting and informative, and fine if you're after a good grasp of the basics. This entry was originally posted at http://primitivepeople.dreamwidth.org/2256919.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Yesterday I made my annual pilgrimage to the Model Rail Scotland exhibition. I took the boys and went with my fellow train-geek John - as per usual, one of the big halls at the SECC in Glasgow was filled with layouts, displays, merchandise stands, and a big throng of people. I'd not been to the exhibition on the Sunday before, but I think I'll do that in future - previously I'd been on Saturday when it's so heaving you can't move or see anythng very easily. It was a bit quieter yesterday, so it was easier to see things without having to barge people out of the way.

If I had more time, money and space, I'd love to get a model railway going again, but I'm short of all three of those at the moment. But...for the day when I get more room, I always like to get ideas and it's always fun to observe the handiwork of others. Of particular interest this year was the number of N gauge layouts on display. N gauge is a very small scale that allows you to squeeze a lot into a small space, and the quality of N gauge models is improving all the time. The range is big now too. Only disadvantages of N gauge are the cost (very high) and the difficulty of squeezing DCC chips into the smaller locos. DCC is an amazing digital control system that is almost magical compared to the analogue systems of my childhood - you can do so much with it.

There were lots of Scottish-themed layouts on display, of course, but there were plenty of others from different eras and places in the UK, including a couple of Southern Electric models. For most of my childhood I grew up right in the middle of Southern Electric territory, and you couldn't buy Southern Electric models for love nor money. Now there's an expanding range of really nice Southern electric units from Hornby and Bachmann, and yesterday I got to drool over the really, really impressive Hornby 2-BIL unit, new out this year. Lovely. People are a bit critical of Hornby's class 423 unit, but I rather like it. The fantasy layout I'm building in my head is a Southern one, that perhaps I'll get around to building for real one of these days.

Anyway, if you've read this far, well done, as this will probably make very little sense to most people. :)

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I've only just realised just how difficult the last few months have been. Dealing with my mum's constantly declining health was very draining, and preparing for the funeral was even worse, but now it's all over, life certainly seems to be getting easier. My health isn't great at the moment - I've had a terrible cough for ages and I have conjunctivitis in one eye - but I hope that will improve now that the pressure on me is easing.

My feelings have seemed a bit conflicted at times. I do miss my mum terribly, but I'm glad I'll never have to deal with all that stress and misery again. Right now, I'm feeling quite optimistic about the future, despite everything.

I returned to work on Thursday, and I was really pleased with how it went. I realised I'd missed a lot of my colleagues and it was nice to see them again. Everyone was really nice to me and asked how I was doing, even people I don't know so well. On Friday night, a big posse of us went out to an Indian restaurant in Edinburgh called Tuk Tuk, which was a great place with a brilliant atmosphere. The food was awesome as well. It was the first night out I'd had with friends in a long time, and I really, really needed it.

The house was chaotically filled with 11-year-olds today, as we had a party for Tully. It was her birthday 2 weeks ago, but we decided to have the party this week as some of her friends were away at the time (2 of her best friends are from Ireland and go over there a lot). Given everything that has happened, I think the timing was rather good. I certainly didn't feel much like putting on a party last week or the week before.

Apart from the party, I've not done much today besides blow the dust off my old Asus Eee, which has been knocking about the house in a state of abandonment for a while. I've installed Android 4.0 on it. It was quite a challenge getting it to work properly, but it's now set up and works rather well. Brilliantly, in fact. I've tried loads of operating systems on this lightweight machine, and I think I've finally found one that works properly. I'm writing this on it at the moment. It can't quite do as much as my phone because of hardware limitations, but it's perfect for anything that needs a lot of typing.

Tomorrow is one of the geek highlights of the year - the Model Rail Scotland exhibition at the SECC in Glasgow! Look out for some pictures tomorrow. Hopefully there should be some good layouts on display.

I'll leave it there for now. Goodnight all.

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So...we had my mum's funeral today. It was something that I was dreading, because I was worried something (or multiple things) would go wrong, and I've spent most of the time since she died fretting about it. It was hanging over me like a big hanging thing, and I just wanted it over so I can get on with the rest of my life.

It actually went very well. Stewart, the minister who led the service, did a great job. All the practical arrangements worked out just fine. It was a simple service, with Abby talking about what my mum meant to her, Abby's mum reading some memories the children had of Nana, and I showed a clip of Super 8 film I made at mum's old flat in London, showing the children having tea and playing. It was a little snapshot of memory, one I'm glad I recorded. I spoke about how devoted my mum was to her family, and how she's kept us together over the years.

We went to a local pub afterwards, which worked out well - people had drinks and some of us ate, and it was a good chance to talk and catch up.

I'm glad I'm going back to work tomorrow. It's been a tough couple of weeks and I'm craving normality.

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