Sue Bailey

30 years ago, my grandfather died. For some people, the anniversaries of deaths are difficult, but this one is nothing special to me, because I weep for him every day anyway, just as I always have.

It occurred to me that perhaps 30 years is long enough – that perhaps I don’t need to grieve much more, perhaps I could just remember a guarded man in a tweedy jacket that smelled of diesel, who had the softest earlobes and a funny yellow stripe in his white hair, who was – I think – more than a little bewildered at the affection he could feel for a tiny girl, and lavished on her the things he had never lavished on his own daughter. I could remember all those things still, and not have it be like ripping a hole in my heart every day.

But I don’t want to.

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Found on the Mercury News this morning. Seems like “like” as “approximately” has, like, made it.

I think I may be changing my mind about tag clouds. I used to hate them: poor usability, poor readability, utterly useless as a navigation tool. Then – and I can’t actually remember why, it might have been that pisspoor excuse, “filling up the sidebar” – I put one on WhoTube, and found that “making the tag cloud spin round” was a fun way to waste at least several minutes.

I’ve no idea why I looked at Wordle tonight but this was the newest one. Making the assumption that there are two “you”s and one of everything else, I think it says “were you going fucking again tonight like today? you are just a slag” – I’m tempted by both the car-crash of the story behind it, and the absolute cool of someone who expresses their fury by means of the Wordle cloud.

Which started me thinking about clouds made from something other than blog tags. I’ve left the colour/tag/layout as Wordle’s random selection: serendipity is usually a word chosen by unimaginative people asked for their favourite word, but sometimes it works.

Random fact about #4 – when I first read it aged about 10, I didn’t know woodbine was a name for honeysuckle, and imagined the poet had gone out for a crafty ciggie.

A point to the house of your choice for each text you can name; none of them are difficult, all of them are things I publically like.

The first sentence of this comment is one of the more interesting things I’ve read recently.

It’s my opinion so impossible for me to be wrong.

Can he possibly mean that an opinion doesn’t have to pass any of the normal tests of rightness: logic, empirical proof and so on? Or could he, more meta-ly, mean that his statement stated his opinion; that *is* his opinion; therefore the statement is correct?

I fear it’s the former. How utterly bizarre.

I recall someone I used to work with. We’ll call her ObsessiveBackstreetBoysFan, for she was. OBBF used to buy a lottery ticket every week, with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. There was a news story that said that the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 are played by however-many thousand people every week, and I showed her this, saying that maybe she should change her numbers because if those came up, she wasn’t going to win much.

But, she said, those numbers were more likely to come up than any others.

No, I said, they were just as likely to come up as any random six numbers you cared to pick.

We argued. Eventually, OBBF explained to me how the lottery draw machine worked. It began at 1, and either did or didn’t pick it. Then 2, then 3, and so on. So the chances of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 coming out were very much higher than any other combination.

OBBF didn’t actually think the machine worked like this. She saw Arthur or Guinevere or whoever, every week, mix the balls up in a big drum and pull out six of the 49 at random. But the model in her head said, first consider the number 1…

52 pubs in Britain close every week.

Publicans failing to respond to their customers and not providing the services they want is an industry problem says Mark Hopkins, who took over the Black Swan in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, five years ago, after it had closed down.

It reminds me of many conversations I’ve had with publicans, including:

Me: Alright Dave. Was going to pop in for lunch today but you were shut.
Dave: Yeah, we had no customers, so I closed up for a few hours.

and

Me: Is it okay if I put that* on my card?
Bitchface**: [mutter mutter mutter]
Me: Is there a problem?
Bitchface: Yes, actually, there is a problem. Do you know what the bank charges us to process card transactions?
Me: Hmm. Maybe about 2%? If you wait, I’ll go get cash. But – you know – you have the machine so I assumed it was okay.
Bitchface: Just because I’ve got the bloody machine doesn’t mean I want people to use it – especially people who come in every day!

*”that” was just short of twenty quid, so I wasn’t being unreasonable.
**she did have another name, but sadly I don’t recall it. I stopped drinking in her pub after this. I’d like to think that it closing shortly afterwards wasn’t entirely due to the loss of my custom.

[QUIZZIN 1]

My mother was 10 when Bill Haley’s song Rock Around the Clock got to number 1 in the UK. When I was around the same age, there was a “25 years of rock n roll” programme on TV, which talked about teenagers ripping out cinema seats to the new soun’ that was goin’ aroun’.

“To this?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Even I find it hard to believe now.” (As people who were married before the summer of love, I’ve always found my parents to be, musically, two generations behind me. So there you go.)

As part of my current, involuntary project to turn into my parents, I had a similar experience today, with (in a bit of synchronicity that’s almost too corny to note) another Bill. Mr Idol’s White Wedding was released when *I* was ten. If I’m honest, I don’t recall the first release at all, but the 1985 re-release that coincided with some horrible family holiday in (iirc) Cornwall, with me turning on the car radio and my father telling me to shut off the noise “or else” (I couldn’t imagine what he could do that was worse than a week in a grotty place we couldn’t really afford, pretending we actually liked each other, but again, there you go).

The odd thing about White Wedding is that it teetered on the edge of all sorts of interesting Gothic stuff, as I did then myself (“what have you done with your eye makeup, young lady?”), without actually sliding off into anything beyond middle of the road rock. I can’t imagine anyone ripping cinema seats out to it. Which is why I love the literal video so very, very much:

Once upon a time when I was doing my A’levels, it was the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, and Granada Television (I think it was) made a sumptuous version of A Tale Of Two Cities to celebrate. As I was doing both English and History (though neither Robespierre nor Dickens came into it), I was one of the students dragged along to the launch event, about which I remember nothing except that we were given the Penguin tie-in edition of the book, and Kenneth Baker came to give a speech.

Someone had the bright idea of giving a room full of Manchester teachers and students a Q&A session with the Education Secretary, and the first question up was (see, I still remember it 21 years later): “Mr Baker, does the fact that you’ve given us all a copy of A Tale of Two Cities mean that the government has reversed its policy and is actually going to supply schools with books?”

After the applause had died down and we had all resumed our seats, Mr Baker’s response was that the books had nothing to do with the government and were the generous gift of Granada TV and Penguin. Oh, how we larfed. I still have my copy of aToTC.

So I was a bit sad today to read that Governor Schwarzenegger is proposing to save millions of dollars from the Californian education budget by scrapping paper textbooks in favour of digital ones. It’s inevitable, I suppose, but I can’t help feeling a little loss for the physical object of the textbook. That wonderful moment when you find that your French grammar book was used last year by the very boy in the year ahead that you’ve had a crush on for two terms! Or better still, that your physics book was used by the science nerd and his notes are still in the back!

Facebook just doesn’t, somehow, seem the same.

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BTW, if any restaurateurs are reading, I think Tempura Mutantur would be a superb name for a Japanese/Ancient Roman fusion establishment.

On Tuesday, The Guardian had a feature on the book that changed my life. I’ve been considering this question every since it arose in Mig’s comments so long ago that I can’t even find the post, and the conclusion I’ve come to is this:

to change a life is a big ask from a book.

Let me make this clear – I love books. If I had to choose between [sex + alcohol + music] or books, I would pick books. If I had to choose between the internet or books, that would be tougher – because it’s all about the reading, innit.

If you want to talk about pivotal moments in my reading, I don’t need whole books: two sentences cover it. Aged 7 or 8, reading that “most evolutionists reckon the natural world to have emerged in the same order as that listed in Genesis”, and realising I didn’t have to disbelieve in science to carry on believing in God. (I expressed my delight to my mother, who responded that the theory of evolution was just a theory, while the Bible was fact.)

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So I thought I would buy a self-help book from Amazon because it looked slightly less awful than every other self-help book I’ve ever bought –

to the ticket inspector who picked up the copy of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People which I abandoned on the train between Southampton and Reading that time, I’m really, truly sorry: it’s an astonishingly bad book

- and because it promised, you know, actual stuff to do rather than going “rah rah you’re fabby”. And because Amazon France is just terrible at delivering English language books –

mon dieu, can’t you buy a book in French? Here, we have interesting biographies of Sarko

- I bought it from a Marketplace seller.

And yes, I know that means the author doesn’t get a cut and I’m *sorry*, okay, I’m sorry. I’ll buy a dozen things full-price from Amazon UK as penance, promise.

And about a week after I’d paid, I suddenly had an email from Amazon saying I’d been refunded, and eventually another email from the seller saying they were out of stock. So I bought it from another seller. And waited, and waited, and waited. And am now about to do a chargeback with Amazon.

Shall I bother ordering it a third time? Or is maybe the Universe trying to tell me something here?