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Saturday, October 04, 2003
Whilst browsing for a picture of Bobby G with a bob haircut to go with Tim Footman’s ace article I found this. Brought back some memories… Showin’ me age. Oh well.


No Simple sneakers. A new batch coming in February. Ha! I may as well fly to New York and buy a new pair… Sometimes I hate living in the sticks.


Turn the fucking sound off. Kid sitting playing with a mobile phone, some game, bleeping every second. Killing the feeling we’re in a library and not a coffee shop, which is exactly why I choose to come here and not some costabucks shack on the high street. Here in the vast high ceilinged wood floored space that feels like a reading room, where the punters read the Guardian and sip on espresso. Or tap on PoweBooks and drink de-caff. Whatever. Just turn the fucking sound off.

Downstairs, two women talking. One forty plus, the other I guess around twenty. The conversation revolves around a photo of Sting:
‘look at that photo of Sting’
‘gorgeous’
‘yeah? I suppose so, but it’s a bit of an odd picture what with all that pink jumper and all’
‘maybe, but he’s still gorgeous’
‘isn’t he into that whole catholic thing though?’
‘even better!’
‘ha ha… and he’s happily married, which makes him even more attractive’
‘yeah, he’s a nice bloke as well as gorgeous’
‘you sound like you have a cold…’
and so on and so forth.

Think you know which woman was saying what? You’re probably wrong. I have no faith in the youth of the land. If I ever did…

The darkness is descending again. Three weeks to half term. Roll on the end of October when I can get a week to catch up with myself a bit. The past week has been particularly mad. On one day I taught five classes (upwards of 110 students), unpacked and installed two printers (one colour laser, one large format deskjet) and an A3 scanner, designed and printed out a poster and flyers for a school exhibition / creative arts event and created a slideshow video for a school open evening. All the while thinking, ah, I guess some jobs might have one or two of those tasks in a day… and some might take a couple of days to design a poster. Or longer. No wonder mine looks half assed, then. Sigh. Actually it looks okay. But I was frustrated by printing from Freehand and having grid lines appear on the imported tif files, or worse, having those print out in greyscale when they were rotated (they didn’t have the grids though…). And you know, if I didn’t have to look after the kids I could figure out what was happening and fix it, but – sigh (again) – it’s not so.

Plus the school is totally fucking up with the finances for the specialist schools status, and I’m starting to think I wont even be able to buy any more of the stuff we need for our digital arts suite, and all the effort I went to supplying carefully considered quotes on costings etc was just a waste of fucking time because no other bastard is playing the game by the same rules. And then there’s fucking Apple taking forever to deliver PowerBooks which were ordered back in July. They put a hold on the order because upgrades were due to the 12” model and that delivery would be delayed by ‘two to three weeks’ (this at the start of term) we’re now four weeks into term and there is just a deafening silence. The students and I are muddling by with some work that doesn’t involve computers, but fuck it, how long can we sensibly go in a digital photography course without computers? If we hadn’t invested already in Mac software and I wasn’t so loathe to go back to using plug-ugly windoze machines I’d be tempted to tell Apple where to stuff their PowerBooks. But I wont because they look too pretty and I know that I’d only end up hating the windoze machines more than I care to imagine, so… we persevere. And I know Apple plays on this fact, that it’s a part of what makes them seem to fucking superior and arrogant, which of course doesn’t help the way I feel.

I need to take a chill pill, don’t I?

Well I got a haircut this morning and that’s helped. And I’ll try and get out on my bike this afternoon, although I haven’t managed out in a week, so I expect I’ll feel the atrophied muscles objecting. Plus there are new Tangents articles to put up, and I need to do some writing, and my email inbox is burgeoning once again, and we need to buy a new vacuum cleaner, and I need to update my photo journal, and I need to tidy the geek layer. And I need to go see if I can pick up a new pair of Simple sneakers. And maybe buy some picture frames….

So I should stop typing this and move. But the sofa is comfy, and the silence now that the cellphone gaming kid has gone is so nice that maybe I should just get another de-caff in and read the press releases that came in the mail this morning. - (third and final) sigh – but the day is going away from me already. And more small children have arrived. It’s definitely time to move (starts singing the Kinks’ ‘you gotta move’ in head).