We have a new place

It's Laura Place, about 300m down the street from where I first moved to in Bath in 1988:

Haven't actually seen it yet, Jess did the deal, moving in Sunday. Come visit!

Best thing is that it's near the Holburne Museum, which I used to hate as a kid but like now. It's just some colonial dude's collection but there's some fun stuff. Al was writing in his award-winning Yorkshire blog about the appeal of small museums, this is one of those - there are some genuinely terrible paintings where the artist has gone back and changed the head, or added a child to a family portrait, which is interesting from a social history perspective.

They also have some good Imari porcelain - stuff made in Arita, Japan for the European market and exported via the port of Imari, hence the name. There are also really bad renderings of Western paintings onto custom-ordered porcelain plates where the Japanese artists have become flummoxed by different artistic traditions of perspective etc. The V&A would have quite understandably binned them for space reasons, so I wouldn't have learned that fact.

I don't have a complete understanding but there's some interesting stuff about how the fortunes of Imari porcelain rose and fell because of economic and technological factors: first the Chinese got their act together and started trading internationally again, undercutting the Japanese, and then a factory in Meissen figured out the 'hard paste' technique that had been kept secret by the Chinese/Japanese - leading to situations where English porcelain makers were copying Japanese styles that had been 'Westernised' by the Japanese for export in the first place.

So yeah, let us buy some furniture and then come down!

First tapestry completed

TAPESTRY

Got this starter kit for my birthday just to learn the ropes - finished it over the weekend. It's as relaxing and enjoyable as I expected:

The next one is a "proper" one designed by Kaffe Fassett and manufactured by the Ehrman people.

SAUERKRAUT

Made way too much sauerkraut - it's going a bit dry in the fridge, two cabbages' worth. Using a smaller jar now. I tend to drain a completed sauerkraut batch and keep the brine for the next batch, if that makes sense - I don't eat it right from the fermenting jar.  Might need to rethink that if it goes dry. One good thing was, I used one white cabbage and one sweetheart cabbage, interesting flavour. I told my grandmother I was making a batch and she advised adding a few whole peppercorns.

LIVING

Living at home is pretty good although I can't get a moment's peace. Just about managed to get through 20 pages of The Pasteurisation of France by Bruno Latour before my concentration was ruined for good and I decided to have a little blog instead. I read somewhere recently about silence being the most jealously guarded commodity of the rich, or something. Not anyone's fault, just thin walls and doors. I'm being very well looked after though, Jess is cooking every night and getting up at the same time as me (around 7.15am) to make me an egg on toast.

Jess is really enjoying her job at the Little Theatre in Bath so we've decided to find a flat here rather than Bristol - my office is right next to Bristol Temple Meads station so it's no problem - the commute in is actually really beautiful. 

Bath Spa to Bristol Temple Meads

The issue was really the money, it's £1500/yr (although we get 3% cashback with our new joint Santander account) but it's worth it for Jess' peace of mind - she's been juggling studying with all kinds of crazy jobs for three years now, when you get a good one that pays OK and doesn't take it out of you too much mentally, you have to keep it. 

They're all really nice there, it's a Picturehouse cinema but it's only part-owned and everyone there from the manager down hates the Picturehouse - Jess has been told off for trying to sell memberships, they genuinely thought she might be a spy from head office when she started there! So far I've seen Two Days and One Night, Pride and A Most Wanted Man and can recommend them all, especially Pride, which could have been terrible in a BBC/Richard Curtis/Guardian way but is actually very sensitively done.

PENDING

Tai Chi starts tomorrow. Scoping out rehearsal studios in Bath to spend a few hours working on some songs - no hope of getting anything done here. Will buy basic brewing kit with first paycheck in October. Probably playing a little bit too much Minecraft. Drinking levels still too high but trending downwards. Spacesuit intact. More later.

Embracing change, uncertainty and dynamism

This is a canapé of an argument.

The people who tell you to see a "fast-paced, changing, uncertain, dynamic, global, unpredictable world" as a good thing - and seek to create change and dynamism where there was staid certainty - are usually the ones getting rich from the changes and the collapse of old certainties. This is obvious. 

By getting rich, though, they are in fact reducing change and uncertainty for themselves and their families. So they don't really believe that change, uncertainty, dynamism and unpredictability are good things. Like most people, they crave stability. And they will take yours away to get more for themselves and their kids.

Next time they start bullshitting about the virtues of change, uncertainty and dynamism, shove this canapé in their greedy mouths.

(Further reading - Ulrich Beck on the "Risk Society". Inequality is not just about distribution of resources, it's about distribution of risks.)

Excerpts from "Personal Brand" brainstorm

Things to talk about with colleagues and clients:

Trends in PR

Football, inc. non-league

Design, Copywriting

Things happening in Bristol

Bristol business

Homebrew & Craft Beer

PR experience inc travel, in moderation

Nice things about SW

Things not to talk about:

Sumo

Socialism

Opinions about pubs

The Arts

My life, 2013-2014

Tai Chi

Cynicism about PR

Cynicism about digital / online / social media things

Dislike of Apple

Anti-materialism

Japanese literature

Home fermenting

Needlepoint

Exercise

Oxford

Travel

Preference for going out in London compared to Bristol

My band, past or present

Music in general

Other points:

Dress carefully.

Don’t eat anything too weird for lunch.

Get a new sticker for the laptop!

What are your expectations, salary-wise?

France 2016 and Russia 2018

As with all of my once-in-a-lifetime trips, I'm no sooner back than I'm thinking of how to do it again. We may as well start planning now, no?

FRANCE 2016

This is looking pretty good already. I'd particularly like to do the south coast - never been to Marseille. Bordeaux to Toulouse to Marseille to Nice? Maybe a camper van convoy? Or gites with swimming pools. Family style, big sprawling group, bring the WAGS and whatever kids might exist by that stage. Football an afterthought to general chaos. Finish up with one or two big nights in Paris.

RUSSIA 2018

This is grizzled boys on tour. Everyone pushing 40, most of us will have probably given up drinking by this stage but we'll go crazy and drink far too much vodka anyway. I'm disappointed to see there are no games played in Vladivostok - I like the idea of watching the first match in Moscow and then spending seven days on the Trans-Siberian, relying on train station kiosk attendants for the scores and manually putting together the tables on napkins. The whole thing will have to be done by train in any event, because A) it's more fun and B) Aeroflot. Moscow and St Petersburg are musts. Kaliningrad looks promising just because when else would you go there. And I reckon Yekaterinburg, just because it's the furthest east - I reckon people there would be happiest to see you. I went through it on the train, it looked OK. I reckon take a train to Russia from the UK as well, maybe stop off in the Baltics.

As I said before, though, I'm only going if they waive visa requirements, or at least get the visa application down to one page. I never want to have to fill that fucker in again.

BONUS: ENGLAND AWAY TO SAN MARINO, SEPTEMBER 5, 2015

I have a crazy friend who is obsessed with the England's qualifying campaigns, more so than their actual tournament performance. As he puts it, qualifying campaigns are more engrossing because there is an absolute (and generally quite reasonable) expectation that England will qualify - they just have to beat a whole bunch of teams who are not as good as them. That's what makes it so perversely, almost morbidly fascinating - you're just watching the team try not to slip on a long series of banana skins. It's a metaphor for a certain type of life - where you're just about holding it together, everything's basically fine, there's no reason for you to really worry, you're perfectly capable of dealing with this, but just a little slip-up will not quite ruin everything, but start to put a lot of pressure on you, etc.

Anyway that's by-the-by - the main thing is, I've always wanted to do an away trip to a European minnow, and San Marino is the next one we play. It would appear to have a gondola. It's in Italy, so in theory you could tack it on to a weeklong hired-cottage WAG-friendly holiday, but I almost think it would be better as a slightly pointless, not-really-value-for-money lads' weekend.

USA 2022...

Song stuck in my head

I heard this song played live a lot in samba places, it was stuck in my head the whole time I was there - just realised that it's the ITV World Cup song!