My Quilt

I've achieved two things today: 1) I've learned how to use the timer on my digital camera; 2) I've finally got some pictures of my quilt, which I finished edging last weekend. So I've been having a bit of a camera day and have been enjoying setting up my tripod and mucking around. Here's the roll:The quilt's in the background, but notice I'm getting horrible laughter lines . . . or maybe it's just creases from sleeping . . . Perhaps I went very foetal in my pictures to compensate for this aging. Actually, it's because I wanted as much quilt as possible in the picture whilst I was still in the frame.


I'm really pleased with the edges, and particularly my mitred corners, which I hand-stitched because I couldn't be arsed with the sewing machine. I had to pin the edging in place onto the quilt to check the fabric strips I'd made were exactly the right length. But my sewing machine isn't really big enough to cope with the weight of a whole quilt tugging on it, so it was easier to just sit on the floor and do it by hand.



Annoyingly, you have to reset the timer each picture, which isn't the most intuitive of processes and I therefore kept forgetting. There probably is a better way, but I haven't found it yet.


It's not exactly the most intricate of designs, but it's so big that it took me an age to make . . . and I like it.

Where is my Easter holiday?

Sometimes I think, by doing what I do, that I'm slowly killing off sections of my personality. Other times, I get to say things in school that make me feel me.

E.g. A Year 10 or 11 kid was trying to barge past some of my Year 7 form today and shouted at them, behind me, "Let me through, I'm more superior to you." I turned around, vaguely amused, and he looked really smug. So I said, "It's just 'superior' - it doesn't need 'more'." And continued walking.

I got to "own" other kids on several occasions today. But there are too many times when you feel your personality disintegrating as you wait for time to pass.

On a nice note though, I got to hold a wee baby today. And don't tell me I'm getting all broody just for mentioning it, because my male colleague in the English department was much more excited than me at getting to cuddle a very small child.

Babies' perfect, tiny hands are the best things in the world.

Oblique Strategy of the day

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten

Plus

Ryan Adams as an internet presence is back! You can find him at a new blog called "TOTALLY BORED the musical", which he seems to update constantly. There's already a new little video-ditty by him up there, plus a DJ Reggie tune you can listen to, amongst the usual poems and general ephemera - it's great!



Writing the Hits with Stupid from Ryan Adams on Vimeo.

Awful, awful weeks

How funny that the last thing I wrote on the blog was, "Trust in the you of now." This is amusing because I've been hugely paranoid, insecure, tired and generally feeling shit all this week and last.

I've had TWO complaints from parents in TWO weeks. The parents involved were fucking crazy weirdos and awful mothers, plus their complaints were ridiculous (setting up an extra SATS booster session and rearranging it for the girl in question to attend; telling another girl to be quiet as she entered the classroom), and yet I felt so victimised and on the defensive that I really believed I was terrible with kids and everything was pointless. On Monday, having to explain myself AGAIN to the deputy head after another stupid phone-call from the mother, I cried. I was so ill and tired and felt like packing the whole job in.

Having five days off now puts everything into perspective (plus my last lesson today was observed by the acting head and went extremely well), and makes me feel a lot calmer about actually having a personality and sometimes putting it to use in the classroom. For a start, despite the complaints from the wet-blanket kids, using sarcasm or just being quick actually helps bad children pay attention and focus. Plus, if the kids are scared that you'll "own" them (i.e. verbally and quick-wittedly beat them to a pulp in front of their friends in an amusing manner) they tend to make fewer ridiculous marks and ask fewer imbecilic questions.

Anyway, though I'm feeling better mentally, I'm still physically shitty, so I'm spending the night in to recuperate.

On the plus side of being down about school, I fucked off school-work on Tuesday night to write an article about the tyranny of the so-called BRIT School which has unleashed the "talents" of Adele, Amy Winehouse, Leona Lewis, Kate Nash etc upon us. You can read it at a new music blog called Shovelled Up Like Muck, which I'll hopefully be regularly contributing too. I've put it in my Links list too, so check it out. My Foals CD is on its way to me, so I expect I'll write up a review of that imminently.

Oblique Strategy of the day

Trust in the you of now.

This, that and everything else

Some days you just think you've totally lost all capability. You're sitting there, perching, feeling shit with a sore throat and sounding very hoarse, and the excellent task you've put effort into preparing just falls flat. You can't shout anyway, and they know it (sense it, perhaps), so you're there, sighing, completely impotent.

Little bastards. One of them even put up a hand to high-five me (something to do with Marilyn Manson - don't ask), the cretin. I gave him a very stern look. I think they genuinely believe I should be flattered by their approval or whatever - they're only just 15!

Anyway, I went to the school gym afterwards which definitely helped to de-stress. My physical fitness is absolutely crap, however. I managed to row over 1000 metres, however, and ran (sometimes walked quickly) over 1500 metres. In total, I burned about 200 calories or so. That might be my future serving of apple crumble and custard this week.

So - Friday was the first "Party Lounge" (that is, the monthly night to be hosted by The Yell). The support band, AGASKODO TELIVEREK, were excellent, though their set went on a bit. They consisted of an English (I think) drummer, who drummed to a click-track throughout, two very eccentric-looking Hungarian guitarists (dressed in 118-esque short and T-shirt outfits) and a Japanese singer, who half screamed and half posed throughout the set. It was extremely entertaining.

The Yell are going to have to work on an after-party though. The night at the Pomona was fairly empty and after having an ultra-shit attempt at pool, we went home after a pretty short period of time. Pool's one of those things that really matters when you're drunk and rubbish at it, but seems ludicrous the next day.

Anyway, actually socialising has made me feel enormously trapped by the restricting mass of marking I have to do, and - full circle - makes me extremely resentful of ungrateful kids.

I'm terrified, at the moment, of that feeling that will inevitably surface, after which I'll hate every single moment of my job. I've been suppressing it all through the winter with almost total success. Ironically, I can feel it bubbling away more now that it's getting lighter and warmer - this is the time I should be using for myself, not for some children's half-arsed attempts at homework.

Ding Dong The Witch is at the Beginning of the End?

So I woke up getting excited about Maggie Thatcher being in hospital, but it's just for fainting, and she's probably getting discharged later today anyway.

It's made me think about what the public reaction will be when she does bow out. Loads of people I know say they'll be involved in the country-wide street party (I think I'm a member of the "Street Party when Thatcher Dies" Facebook group), but will anything like that actually happen? I doubt it. When it comes down to it, people like resenting her, but I think on the whole we're too restrained and nice a bunch of people to actually celebrate someone's death.

I was imagining doing a mammoth bake and giving away free cupcakes to celebrate, and how I'd get horrible looks and comments from various people saying what I was doing was in very poor taste and inappropriate.

More likely, as Ian says, there'll be this mammoth rewriting of history, and various political figures creeping out of the woodwork to tell us she was the greatest prime minister we've ever had. Rephrasing "crippling the North" as "pioneering economic reform". Whatever.

Probably that will inspire me to make more cakes with an image of her face with a big X through it.

Ed sent me a link to this though, which is more than cool

Tired. Bored. Stressed.

And all Eno can say is, "Lowest Common Denominator".

I'm going to watch ER and go to bed.

Whoa!

Prince Harry has been "secretly" serving in Afghanistan since December! Who'd have thought? There's some good pictures of him in his less-than-basic living accommodation, which I can only think is a pretty good experience for someone of his ancestry.

What's hilarious, though, are the Guardian's captions for the pictures. They're along the lines of, "Harry holds his .50 calibre heavy machine gun while sitting on his camp bed".

Jimmy Kimmel is an American comedian with his own show: Jimmy Kimmel Live! He's also in a long-term relationship with American comedian Sarah Silverman.

Jimmy Kimmel also has a habit on his show of "bumping" Matt Damon every week i.e. he says, "We've run out of time for Matt Damon." On one occasion, Kimmel went slightly too far, actually had Matt Damon walk onto the dais, they shook hands blah blah blah, but then Kimmel said his usual, "We've run out of time . . " Matt Damon went off it!

So, Sarah Silverman, being a good sport, did this to her unsuspecting partner, with hilarious results. And in retaliation, Jimmy Kimmel just aired this on his show on Oscar night. Very amusing. Where will it end?

Happy viewing.

Sarkozy in Sweary Outburst Shock

Funny remix here.

Too much stuff

I'm in full-on declutter mode at the moment.

A work colleague revealed that he'd sold loads of his books from university on Amazon marketplace and ended up £300 richer. So I was been inspired, during my visit to Newcastle, to look at my bookcases and list all the plays, anthologies, classic novels etc that I'd probably never pick up again. Of the fifteen that I decided I could happily part with (some of which are monster-sized anthologies that will cost well over £2.75 to post), I've already sold three, so I'm hopeful I can get rid of a lot more crap from my bookshelves.

Some things, obviously, aren't worth listing. Some Shakespeare editions only get listed for 1p, and other popular contemporary novels ("The Unbearable Lightness of Being" - I'd keep stuff like that, but I didn't really rate it, if I'm honest) are better off in the local charity shop.

Speaking of which, there's a book recycling bank at Tesco that was full on Sunday. So, the intelligent declutterers had just piled their books on the top. While I was investigating to see if any more would fit in, Ian noticed a Hemingway novel he hadn't heard of or read, so he took it. Is this stealing or not? We regularly buy books from charity shops, as well as donating to them, but is it morally wrong to take a book exposed to the elements? Hmmm.

I'd have taken it too, obviously. Just another form of recycling.

Not that I care, but . . .

Edith Bowman is pregnant. I care so little, in fact, that I've only just discovered this despite it being announced 0n 19th Dec. What does leave me perturbed is the idea of an annoying DJ with shit music taste producing a child with a God-awful untalented idiot from whinge-band and No. 1 Interpol-rip-off-merchants The Editors. Ugh.

What is going to become of a child with such a genetic disadvantage?

Oh yeah!

The janitor in Scrubs doesn't actually have a name. How bizarre that I didn't realise.

World Events

We're living in strange times.

Kosovo declares independence. I would like to take this opportunity to say that I recognise Kosovo as an independent state and that the Russian and Chinese governments can go sulk in the corner. Not abiding by international law my arse!

Castro resigns. What's going to happen next? Do they have a whole array of mini-Communists ready to take over? Or is Cuba going to make friends (and trade deals) with Hillary/Barrack/John? Let's face it though: Castro is one of those people who is so associated with the 60s iconism (not a word, but I can't think what I mean), that it's almost nostalgic to realise he's still alive. Like Dylan, he should already be dead, in a way.

Musharraf admits defeat. An end to power-hungry dictatorships in Pakistan? I suppose a coalition government makes it difficult to be as corrupt, but it seems unlikely that this is the end of the trouble.

And in local news:

Mohamed Al Fayed calls Prince Phillip a "racist" and a "Nazi". Same old.

How to make a imperfect quilt . . .

Ian was saying that long-term projects are good to have. This was in relation to my "quilt"-making, which I started on about Winter 2006 . . . I think, and which I'm hoping to complete this week. (I say "quilt", by the way, because the smallest pieces are actually 17 cm x 17 cm, so it's easily machinable, and not creating some intricate flowery pattern or anything of that kind.)

I understand what he means - it's nice to have a work in progress; something you can keep coming back to, rather than something which is two-days' work and then complete. Maybe the satisfaction over a long-term project is greater too.

But to me, creative pursuits can quickly turn into imagination-crippling, torturous tasks that I find boring to get on with. I'm lazy, I suppose. I like ideas, but once I start doing something and they don't live up to my mental image, I quickly begin something else and leave whatever it was incomplete, preferring to follow flitting flights of fancy rather than spend time problem-solving.

The frustrations of perfectionism or just laziness? Probably both. Anyway, I'm definitely not being a perfectionist over this quilt. It's full of flaws on the reverse side (as I'm sewing all the diagonals across the top), but I don't care. As some musician said about something or other, "You can't pay for mistakes like those."

If only I believed that and wasn't actually extremely irritated by all the mistakes . . .

Pictures soon.

Some days you wake up feeling inspired; everything captures your imagination. (No doubt this is in no small part related to the fact that my half term has commenced and I have room to think about creative things.) Unfortunately I'm too hungover to do much about anything.

I've just read about Art Sheffield in the Guide which I ridiculously have heard nothing about. There's also an amazing idea in the Guide: Sarah Kane's play Blasted being performed for audiences of only 12 at a time in a hotel room. Excellent concept. Looks like there might be some stuff worthwhile seeing in Newcastle too, art-wise. (Usually I end up at the Baltic in between exhibitions . . . )

More vitamin C required . . . despite the fact that (look away, I'm going to be crude) I drank so much cranberry juice last night that I swear my wee smelt of it this morning. Five-a-day overload.

Oblique Strategy of the day

State the problem in words as clearly as possible