I seem to be posting a lot of work-related stuff at the moment, but that's because I'm finding it quite useful to use the blog to help me think (both in words and visually) through work issues. This one is about how we can more visually describe routes through the large range of courses we offer. I trying the idea of a tube-map type approach, with all the metaphors this offers for changing trains and lines, different routes to complete the same journey and so on. 

We were working through senarios they want to use with their students - in this very visual way - to uncover the knids of pitfalls they and their students might encounter. This one was about prescribing aspirin for longhaul flight passengers. 

Thought you might like to see what I get up to during the day. These are pictures of the walls of our iLab in which I've been working today with the group who are developing problem-based learning approached to teaching pharmacy at UEA. 

My new blog

Just to prove that I can post pictures here's my new boat blog.

John's boat

The idea is that I can use it to host pictures on the internet and then publish them on to L,the U and E. Hope it works! Meanwhile feel free to look at my boat - the blog is about four days behind reality.

Jim Moray

I never thought I would ever again hear a version of ' Early One Morning' that had the power to move and exite my musical senses. Nor did I expect to hear a better version of the Raggle-taggle gypsies than Planxty's from their first album of 30-odd years ago. So someone who can take these utterly familiar cliches/canonical texts of folk music and give them fresh life is quite out of the ordinary. Once again, it was our blessing and Norfolk's curse that the place was half empty. How can people be so deaf and blind to their cultural heritage?

Jim Moray was wonderful at the Arts Centre last night! Thanks to John for making sure we went. A genuine new link in the tradition being forged here. 

The election and digital technologies

Given Ed's comments on the election I thought that I would use it as a blatant opportunity to advertise my other blog which is my field notes and learning journal for my dissertation which just happens to be on digital technologies and literacy. Feel free to comment on MA or Bust. More seriously I agree with what Ed says but am concerned not just that older people may be left behind but also that the superhighway may never reach certain areas of a community and therefore disenfranchise and marginalise people in the same way that politics does now. End of sermon and plug.

here's one for you Paul, we came across this on our walk, near some jacobs ladder growing wild, it looks like a bluebell that hasn't come out yet, and you can see the spotted leaves. I wish I had another camera to take a picture of Roy contorting himself to try and take this picture! 

these telephoto lenses are amazing aren't they, that's our new home from across the hillside about 3-4 kilometres as the crow flies.  

on our way back, just metres from our pigsty we realised that we could see our barns across the valley, you can just make them out in the centre at the very top of the ridge. 

the Gorre again 

these views of the Gorre were taken on our walk the other evening after supper. It was a warm and balmy evening and the riverside was delightful! 

same wee hoossie, from the otehr side, same blue sky! and I'mnot sitting on the well, but behind it, very worn approach step suggests its age! 

here we are in the "pigsty", Sue's dogs know Penguin is inside and are trying to dig their way in! Hungarian Vizlas or is it twizzlers(?) dont give up easily! 

News from Roy and Michelle

well I wouldnt want to do that journey again! We left at 6.50am and arrived at 11.30pm, and only had 1 meal stop apart from on the ferry,which was an hour late.
The cat eschewed his cosy bed and crapped and wee-ed in and on it, and spent the journey in the litter tray, I suppose once you've crapped in your bed the options are limited!
He's a bit unsettled, doesn't want to go outside and doesn't like the litter tray now he has more choices,we keep looking around for puddles, but none located so far, one of his favourite places to lurk is under the bath, then the top of the wall by the roof in the bedroom, but I'm sure he'll settle down, he sits with us on the sofa and purrs madly, will come to us both for a stroke but if anyone else comes in he hides.
We're trying to make the best use of our limited space, r has been building shelves and we're trying to find storage. The barn will be the opposite extreme when we eventually get there.
Just got a completion date in may from the agent, notaire then changed it, but it should be about 16th, fingers crossed!
tried to find seed trays and plastic pots today, finally located some and nearly had a fit at the price, 2 bags of compost, and we'd spent 50+ euros!!!!!!!!!!!
will know next time, start washing out the yogurt pots, for reuse. some things are soooo expensive, for no apparent reason.
It was lovely to see you, and we really enjoyed our trip, but it would have been even better spread out over a week, too much in too short a period, ideally.
We're off to the Jazz venue tonight, with Manu - sue's 'boyfriend' if he gets his chores done.

continued on Sunday - the weather has been glorious today after the last couple of indifferent days with some rain and some sun, today has just got better and better, we planted lots of seeds this morning and have filled the diy mobile greenhouse we bought - its almost identical to the ones we got from B & Q last year. After lunch we went for a walk out the back of sue's land, we walked through a neighbours fields that slope down a hillside, through some woodland to the Gorre river. Horses graze in some of the fields and we saw lots of pulmonaria growing wild, cowslips and violets, lower down in the deeper woodland we found carpets of white wood anenome/anemone (?), and some other interesting flowers which r endeavoured to photograph, we will try and publish them on the blog. The river was lovely and peaceful, no one around, I was really enjoying it until r reminded me about the wood piles being perfect habitat for aspic vipers! R was taking pictures of various things and we could see our barn across the hillside at one point, which was very pleasing.
It really is delightful countryside, walking randomly across the fields and through woodland, a bit like being in Blickling, but without the people, set paths and "grooming" of the environment.
Yesterday we went on a regular browse round a Depot Vente (basically secondhand/junk furniture) and found a chair for r's work area, it is a wooden chair with a cane seat, you know the holey type, apparenty it was a barber's chair because the backrest can be moved up and down on a ratchet type system, which makes it a bit more interesting.

Well, what can I say? 

More gardening and the tale of the Gunnera

On our return to The Exotic Garden I was quite taken with idea of getting a Gunnera. One look on Paul's face told me that this was not good. I couldn't think why until Linda reminded me of our trip to Wisley and this...

Back to gardening

I wanted really just to update everyone on the visit to The Exotic Garden. We have now planted some of our purchases in our newly vamped courtyard (posh eh!) garden. Really this is just an excuse to show off because I can do links now.

The Election

As the worm of politics has been introduced, I’d like to record my thoughts and feelings, which have been crystallised by reading “So Who Do We Vote For Now?”, an excellent account of the current situation by John Harris, published by Faber at £7.99 - read it before you make the cross on that ballot paper!

To cut to the chase, he concludes that tactical voting on a constituency by constituency basis is the only answer to our current situation. His premise is that the worst result possible is a Tory victory; his spur for writing the book is the appalling record of Blair’s Government in three significant areas, and the need to administer a kicking to New Labour in order to reinforce the traditional centre left party that we’ve all supported and to which we’ve (often) belonged, those issues being: Iraq and the peculiar relationship between Bush and Blair; creeping privatisation (PFI, outsourcing of chunks of the NHS and State Education); and Tuition Fees and the acceptance of the meritocracy as the model for society.

He interviews many of the major figures who will be involved in the election outside of the Tory Party and New Labour, including Lib Dems, Trades Unionists, Greens. Scots and Welsh Nationalists, Roy Hattersley and even Gorgeous George Galloway.

As an appendix to the book he publishes a list of Labour MPs’ voting records on his three key issues: the invasion of Iraq, Foundation Hospitals, and Tuition Fees. (I was really pleased to see that Ian Gibson voted against the government on all three; unsurprisingly Charles Clarke was for them).

George Galloway (and I was surprised by his eloquence) sums up the reasons for giving New Labour a kicking quite succinctly: “To allow ...(these issues).... to go unpunished would be merely to encourage more blunders. If people on the centre-left continue to vote for the New Labour project, however right-wing it becomes, why should it stop becoming right wing? If it’s guaranteed the votes of centre-left people because they don’t want Michael Howard in, why should it stop where it’s stopped? Why shouldn’t it march endlessly into wars and more and more privatisation? Unless centre-left people make a stand, there will be no centre-left.”

The conclusion the book arrives at is that you should vote on the record of your sitting (Labour) MP, bearing in mind that we don’t want a Tory government. Plaid Cymru and the ScotNats are real and worthwhile alternatives in those countries, but unlikely to make much impact. In constituencies where Labour has a huge majority vote tactically to reduce that majority. If the SDP candidate has a chance of displacing Labour as the runner up in a seat like ours, vote SDP.

What seems to me clear is that I should not vote Labour in our safe Tory seat; the only outcome of doing so is to add my admittedly puny endorsement to the illegal war in Iraq; to support creeping privatisation of public services and the setting up of creationist Academies by loony fundamentalists to replace perfectly decent state schools; and to endorse the imposition of tuition fees by a Government which promised just four years ago not to introduce them.

This is not an easy decision for me; I’ve never not voted Labour. And there’s a tendency to “never lose the hand of nurse, for fear of finding something worse”. But I was at the anti-war march in 2003; I saw the whole of the centre of London brought to a standstill by nearer 2 than 1 million people, the largest political protest ever in this country - around 3% of the entire population of the UK; and I heard Blair, at his most nauseously messianic worst, say on TV after the event “I respect their opinion, but they should respect mine.” And we went to war. I can’t forgive that. Nor can I “draw a line under it”.

If, as is obvious, all political parties’ manifestos are largely propaganda, if manifesto promises can be reneged on so easily (tuition fees again), then we must vote on the record of the government, and on what the other parties said in that parliament. So I want a return of traditional Labour values, and I don’t think that we will achieve that by returning a New Labour government with the same size majority. Many Labour people want a small majority or even a hung parliament, and Blair to be forced to go this year. I’m with them. The second worst possible result is perhaps the most likely one: fewer than 50% of the population bothering to vote, and Blair returned with a majority of more than 100 (which he would regard as a ringing vindication of all his actions). But I live in hope.

Sorry to be so serious (and so prolix), but I think these are serious times. Traditional loyalties may get us into worse trouble.

Salle Quiz

What a great night! And we beat the objectionables! Thanks for the invitation, and the organising, and the question setting, and the food and drink, and Paul's pictures. Next year the stars . . .

My next posting is a bit serious, so I'll take a deep breath and . . .

Meanwhile the quiz meister (and meistresses) carry on regardless. 

..and John..!!!!. 

Max...!!! 

Mike - can you repeat the question please? Was that a doughnut or a meringue? 

Our team - preparing for the onslaught. 

Salle Village Hall - theatre of dreams 

Salle Quiz Night

Thought you might like to see a few pictures from the annual Salle village quiz night. Naomi spent days sorting out and collating the questions, getting the furniture together, cooking the sausages for the hotdogs. But for Max, Anthea, Linda , John and I it was time well spent!

..and there's the proof 

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?...

... and that is despite all my misgivings about Tony I still have to vote Labour because I never have and never will be thinking what the Tories are thinking. I like being part of a multicultural country and seeing that great raft of blue ranging across the map of East Anglia the other day made by blood run cold. So the poster has gone up in the window and I at least have pinned my colours to the mast, even if it only a tiny dot of red in a big blue blob. Naomi

OK count me in 

Chris and Jim's garden, before the walk 

Now I'm back blogging again...

... I'd better put up a picture from the walk last weekend, while Roy and Michelle were here, when we all set off from Chris and Jim's garden, straight over the back fence and ultimately to Booton Common. Perfect weather, lovely walk, home-made cakes to follow. Can't beat it!

Better looking outside than in. 

Back from Nottingham

Three days in Nottingham without email or internet access. I will make a point in future of avoiding the Nottingham Gateway Hotel. It had some good points – lovely moat; bright, imaginative, glass-clad frontage. But two carveries a day…? And no guest computer access…??

I rang Martin today to see if he had managed to locate the logbook for the Land Rover. He said no, but that if I called in on the way home from UEA he would have found it by then. The saga of the logbook goes back to the end of last week, when Martin first said that he wasn’t sure whether he or the current owner had it. Anyway when I got there, he’d seen me coming round the bend and rushed to the phone, simultaneously rifling through his desk in a two-pronged quest for the missing document. But to no avail. I think we’re still on track to collect the Discovery on Saturday. Otherwise we could be a one-car family if Naomi’s Ka sells tomorrow!

Sunday morning

The good thing about drinking as much as I did last night is that I can't remember much about it. The bad thing is that I can't remember much about it, so I don't know who to apologise to (Linda loyally says no-one). It was good to see Michelle and Roy again, and, indeed, everyone else.

Meanwhile I'm starting work on the dinghy I bought last week. It's a ten foot lugsail GRP dinghy which used to be in Greenway's hire fleet on the Broads. I need to do a complete renovation, the first stage of which is to take it completely apart. I've begun to separate the hull from the deck (which is the bit that needs most work), revealing some minor nasties where the poor thing has been bashed frequently on the nose - presumably people just rowing or sailing it into hard objects - and also where the bow mooring eye has been pulled out so often that there are at least fourteen distinct holes in a very small patch of GRP where it's been repeatedly replaced. When I've had my photo-placing tutorial from Paul I'll post some pictures of the poor old thing. I'm looking forward to getting on with it, so it's time to finish here.

Musical Obsessions

I thought I’d write a reflective note about my musical obsessions, because their pattern seems to be changing. For most of last year I would listen to the object of my obsession to the exclusion of everything else for weeks, sometimes months on end. The CD players in the house, in the car, the DVD player and the computer would be filled with Mark E Smith and the Fall (about fifty albums listened to over and over again) between March and September. Then it was Frank Zappa and the Mothers until Christmas. I must have listened to other things but I can’t remember what they were.

This year however my obsession span has been much shorter – days sometimes – and nothing like as single-minded. The year started with free improvisation: Derek Bailey, AMM, Japanese noise artists and Sun Ra’s very free phases. That was pretty exclusive: if you are listening to music completely devoid of tone or meter, then anything else jars horribly. That slipped into modern ballet music in February, then Detroit Techno, then the Grateful Dead. I’ve been avoiding the Dead all my adult life: I knew they were an obsession I could not afford, either financially or psychologically. But then Mick Kelly told me about the website from which you can freely download 2,777 Grateful Dead concerts, ie all the ones not commercially released. Fortunately I stopped after six three-CD sets.

And then a couple of days ago Will mentioned that he was listening to a lot of old hip hop again. Coincidentally, I’d been listening to contemporary hip hop – Madvillain, Peanut Butter Wolf, Beans etc – but talking to Will sent me back listening to the 90s and Gang Starr, Jungle Brothers, Quanum; which made me want to step forward in time again to El-P and Company Flow, Aesop Rock and Prefuse 73, all of which are on the car CD player now. Then yesterday I bought a Snoop Dogg CD….oh no, hip hop is tightening its grip on my musical life!

Nevertheless, Sun Ra’s ‘Life is Splendid’ is what I’m listening to as I write this, the atmosphere of which makes me think of Richie Hawtin’s club mixes, so perhaps things aren’t so bad. I’m not trapped in a single musical dimension again….at least not for a while.

Me on the tarzan swing. Rob looking on: encouragingly, I think 

Go Ape

I was in a meeting this morning with someone from the job evaluation team, going through the results of the HERA interviews with all the admin staff. Not the most exciting part of my day. After a while my computer slipped into screen saver mode, which at present is a slide show of various random photos. At one of the pictures our sombre and business-like mode changed as she laughed in recognition of the location and the activity. “That’s Go Ape in Thetford Forest!” she said. “I’ve been there three times – It’s brilliant!”

bugger blogger

Can I just record how ineffably pissed off I am with Hello, Picarsa and Blogger? I have now loaded these sodding programmes three times and spent about four hours trying to post one picture on the blog - without any success at all. I've read the help files and the oh-so-helpful articles over and over and they don't deal with the problem I seem to have. I think I'll give up.

Could there be a more pefect floatplane? 

Boats, planes, automobiles...

Yesterday was a day of transportation stories. I went to see Martin about a new tyre for the Kangoo - a special order as it’s a Michelin 4x4 tyre, and less common than hens teeth – and knock me down with a feather, but he’s already got the Land Rover MOT’d and fitted new brake pipes, new pads, new shock absorbers, number plates, done the bodywork etc, etc. It’s all ready to go! So now we have to sell the Ka, transfer the Kangoo to Naomi and pick up the Discovery. I’ll post a picture once it’s been to Soapy Joe’s.

And on the phone to John to consult about best ways to sell the Ford, he casually mentioned he’d bought a boat. I expect we’ll get the full story before too long. As for aeroplanes, I lied...there are no aeroplane stories. I might post a plane picture later on though – my favourite picture from our Alaska trip of Naomi and the floatplane.

Tadpoles and other important issues

We are very pleased to announce that the tadpoles have hatched (spawned?) and are now lying at the bottom of the pond. I am rather anxious as they don't appear to be moving but Paul assures me that all is well.

John and I have begun a conversation on the question of fashion as he has reminded me that he is himself a victim of fashion travelling all the way to Gt Yarmouth to acquire the very thing in trousers. I only hope he sorts out his bit of the blog so that he can post some pictures of his last purchase (with him in them of course).

I am thinking of striking out on my own and starting my own blog for my dissertation. To do anything on my dissertation has surely to be an improvement on my current lack of activity. However, I had a very interesting discussion today on integrating blogs into literacy teaching so I have made a start... I think

Here we go (perhaps)

Thanks for the new invitation, Paul. I will now try to re-install Picasa etc and, who knows, I may soon post some pictures (but don't hold your breath).

Ornette Coleman: free jazz, no tadpoles.