Posted on by JonnyB

If I have one dissatisfaction with my temporary accommodation, it’s that the television reception is not very good.

I don’t watch a lot of TV. I play bowls on Monday nights now, so don’t get to see University Challenge, so from my ‘must watch’es that only really leaves Eggheads and the Channel 4 News, and anything featuring Kirstie Allsopp or/and space travel. However since my reception has become a Cameronesque snowfest, the Radio Times is suddenly chock-full of interesting documentaries and dramas and nature programmes etc. that I really really want to tune in to see.

The Aerial Man arrives.

I greet him at the door. He has a van, and some electronic testy thing, so I do not ask to see ID and let him straight in. He removes his shoes at the entrance, which impresses me.

Initial readings on his device do not appear to be encouraging.

“I’m just going to follow this wire,” he says, following a wire. It leads out through the rear wall. The Aerial Man asks me to open the back door so that he can examine its progress.

This I do, while he goes to the front of the house to fetch his shoes. At the back door, he puts his shoes on and goes outside. It turns out that the wire does not do anything unexpected in the back garden, so he returns to the back door and takes off his shoes. Announcing that a signal booster might be worth a fiddle, he carries his shoes through the house to the front door, puts on his shoes, goes to the van for the equipment, returns to the door, takes off his shoes and re-enters the house.

By this point I am slightly anxious that I’ve fallen for some sort of shoe ‘cup and ball’ trick, and that I will go to put a pair of my own on later only to find that he has stolen all my shoes with cunning sleight of hand. It does happen. But he seems on the level and we chat amicably about signal reception.

“It’s been a bugger of a morning,” he explains, twiddling a dial. “I got the wrong house, and went next door. But the woman was on the phone, so she just beckoned me in. I think she thought I was there to see her husband. I was hanging around for ages before she asked me who I was.”

“We were both quite confused,” he adds.

Presumably he also had no shoes on at the time.

In the end we establish that he can do nothing without incurring considerable expense, the aerial socket not actually being connected to the rooftop aerial itself. He gives me some more good advice about cable types whilst packing his equipment away.

“How much do I owe you?” I ask.

“No – nothing at all. Sorry I couldn’t do more.”

“Are you sure?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Posted on by JonnyB

I go to the Village Shop.

My new Village Shop is extremely handy and well stocked, but is situated inconveniently one hills-worth away. I haven’t got much exercise recently, so I am panting and disorientated when I arrive.

“Morning!” I say to the Village Shop Man. “It’s a lot warmer out today.”

“Morning Jonny,” replies the Village Shop Man. “Not as warm as in Hertfordshire though. Only need to glance out of your window there and you’ll get a tan.”

I am a bit puzzled by his response but do not follow it up. My attention has been taken by a headline on the paper that Richard Pryor has died. I am sad about this – he was a great comic actor, and I was a big fan of The Good Life and Ever Decreasing Circles. It turns out that he set himself on fire once, which goes to show that you never can tell. I pay for my newspaper and take my leave.

It is only later that I discover what the Village Shop Man was referring to (re Hertfordshire conversation, above) – that oil tanks have taken to blowing themselves up all on their own.

This is extremely alarming. I have one in my new back garden which coincidentally I had filled up last week (it was a regular delivery, not a panic buy at all). I am not really sure what to do. I don’t really want to get exploded and have my windows blown in and my ceiling brought down; worse, whenever there is an incident like that they force you to go to a local leisure centre. I have spent my entire life giving local leisure centres the wide berth that they require, and I don’t mean to change that now.

Modern life is so full of complications. The central heating here makes the house warm and cosy, but at times like this I long for the rustic simplicity of my own cottage with its wood fire and reassuring oak beams, plus the internet access is better. But we are in general very happy here.

I settle down with the paper for ten minutes, then put the pork on to roast.

Posted on by JonnyB

Intermission for diversionary announcement:

‘2005 Blogged‘, the paperback blogging anthology edited by Tim is still available from that link just there (ad removed from right hand side due to 28k dial-up hell).

I didn’t say a lot about it before, basically because it hadn’t been printed so there wasn’t a hell of a lot to tell you. But also I guess I was unsure as to who to recommend it to. Now I’ve read it through a couple of times I’m clearer on that front, and a couple of people have asked my opinion, so here’s some sort of more detailed appraisal much of which has already been covered by Mike and the subsequent commenters, including Tim’s replies.

There’s some great stuff in there. Structurally it’s exactly as you’d expect a blog anthology to be. It’s all well-written. There are pieces that are funny; there are pieces that are serious. There are pieces written as satire or parody; there are pieces where you’re not sure whether they’re written as satire or parody or not. There are pieces that you find yourself nodding vigorously in agreement to; there are pieces that make you want to crawl into a hole and rock gently from side to side. There are pieces that are short and pithy; there are pieces that would have benefited from being included in their own pull-out, perhaps featuring advertising by the Samaritans. In short, style-wise there’s the full gamut.

Topics-wise, anthologies are always going to reflect the interests of their editor – I guess you could describe Tim’s sphere as ‘political argument’. Rather than ‘this is what happened to me today’, ‘political’ bloggers tend to write self-contained posts about current affairs that require no background knowledge of the writer. This is always going to be handy if ones brief is to compile a book of self-contained posts about current events aimed at readers with no background knowledge of the writer. Despite Tim’s genuine and perhaps heroic forays into the areas of blogland less familiar to him, politics is the lens through which he sees the medium (everybody has one) and it forms the soul of the book – the strand to which we return again and again. Occasionally and amusingly, political-blogger-parochialism does creep in to the annotations. “Robert Fisk of The Independent,” we’re told authoritatively, “is a favourite target for bloggers all over the Anglosphere”. Here in the Norfolk webring we talk of little else.

So the man or woman on the Clapham bendy-omnibus will find the year as described in ‘2005: Blogged’ familiar but also oddly disconnected from them. It’s a world in which a piece by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian just can’t pass without analysis and dissection, but in which we didn’t actually get to win the Ashes. Football gets nine lines, winning the Olympics gets five (despite being one of the ‘major events’ on the back cover blurb); there was nothing on the telly that could be enjoyed without a political deconstruction (indeed no films were released either and there were no cultural events); Ronnie Barker’s still with us; Michael Jackson’s still prancing round Neverland without a care in the world… you get the drift. Meanwhile, the nineteen pages on the ‘ID card debate’ are detailed, informative and well-argued.

As one who regularly weeps into his ex-broadsheet newspaper at the dumbing down of Western culture, society and media, pointing out an imbalance towards serious political analysis might be a little contrary. Actually, in an odd way, relying on this political core probably makes for a more coherent and focused book – ‘reviews of the year’, being a bit of an artificial conceit, aren’t often that interesting in their own right. Therefore if there’s a problem it’s not with the product itself but with the ambition to produce a catch-all ‘this is what blogging is about’, which I’m not sure is actually possible to do. So two stars for fulfilling the mission statement, four stars for an enjoyable browse. I suspect it’s likely to put off more people than it converts; those it converts will be very converted.

A recommendation? It’s the ideal Christmas gift for your annoying brother-in-law who monopolises dinner parties with his loud and entrenched opinions. Buy him the book, log him into Blogger, point him towards that particular area of blogdom and let him get it all off his chest. As such it might be construed as a public service.

Posted on by JonnyB

Intermission for diversionary announcement:

‘2005 Blogged‘, the paperback blogging anthology edited by Tim is still available from that link just there (ad removed from right hand side due to 28k dial-up hell).

I didn’t say a lot about it before, basically because it hadn’t been printed so there wasn’t a hell of a lot to tell you. But also I guess I was unsure as to who to recommend it to. Now I’ve read it through a couple of times I’m clearer on that front, and a couple of people have asked my opinion, so here’s some sort of more detailed appraisal much of which has already been covered by Mike and the subsequent commenters, including Tim’s replies.

There’s some great stuff in there. Structurally it’s exactly as you’d expect a blog anthology to be. It’s all well-written. There are pieces that are funny; there are pieces that are serious. There are pieces written as satire or parody; there are pieces where you’re not sure whether they’re written as satire or parody or not. There are pieces that you find yourself nodding vigorously in agreement to; there are pieces that make you want to crawl into a hole and rock gently from side to side. There are pieces that are short and pithy; there are pieces that would have benefited from being included in their own pull-out, perhaps featuring advertising by the Samaritans. In short, style-wise there’s the full gamut.

Topics-wise, anthologies are always going to reflect the interests of their editor – I guess you could describe Tim’s sphere as ‘political argument’. Rather than ‘this is what happened to me today’, ‘political’ bloggers tend to write self-contained posts about current affairs that require no background knowledge of the writer. This is always going to be handy if ones brief is to compile a book of self-contained posts about current events aimed at readers with no background knowledge of the writer. Despite Tim’s genuine and perhaps heroic forays into the areas of blogland less familiar to him, politics is the lens through which he sees the medium (everybody has one) and it forms the soul of the book – the strand to which we return again and again. Occasionally and amusingly, political-blogger-parochialism does creep in to the annotations. “Robert Fisk of The Independent,” we’re told authoritatively, “is a favourite target for bloggers all over the Anglosphere”. Here in the Norfolk webring we talk of little else.

So the man or woman on the Clapham bendy-omnibus will find the year as described in ‘2005: Blogged’ familiar but also oddly disconnected from them. It’s a world in which a piece by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian just can’t pass without analysis and dissection, but in which we didn’t actually get to win the Ashes. Football gets nine lines, winning the Olympics gets five (despite being one of the ‘major events’ on the back cover blurb); there was nothing on the telly that could be enjoyed without a political deconstruction (indeed no films were released either and there were no cultural events); Ronnie Barker’s still with us; Michael Jackson’s still prancing round Neverland without a care in the world… you get the drift. Meanwhile, the nineteen pages on the ‘ID card debate’ are detailed, informative and well-argued.

As one who regularly weeps into his ex-broadsheet newspaper at the dumbing down of Western culture, society and media, pointing out an imbalance towards serious political analysis might be a little contrary. Actually, in an odd way, relying on this political core probably makes for a more coherent and focused book – ‘reviews of the year’, being a bit of an artificial conceit, aren’t often that interesting in their own right. Therefore if there’s a problem it’s not with the product itself but with the ambition to produce a catch-all ‘this is what blogging is about’, which I’m not sure is actually possible to do. So two stars for fulfilling the mission statement, four stars for an enjoyable browse. I suspect it’s likely to put off more people than it converts; those it converts will be very converted.

A recommendation? It’s the ideal Christmas gift for your annoying brother-in-law who monopolises dinner parties with his loud and entrenched opinions. Buy him the book, log him into Blogger, point him towards that particular area of blogdom and let him get it all off his chest. As such it might be construed as a public service.