Ever thought about converting a chapel into a cosy little house? Or driven past a derelict barn and wished you could renovate it? Have you taken the plunge and bought a chicken shed that’s just oozing potential? And are you going to do something green with it?
Well, I had a call from a lovely chap called Greg Goff at Twofour Broadcast this morning who’s looking for an eco-rennovation project to film for a new series called House Wrecks to Riches. The team are currently filming a number of builds, including a warehouse, a windmill, a milking parlour and a lighthouse, and Greg is really keen to find a green project that they can add to their list.
The programme will follow a project from the very beginning, so you should have planning permission and be ready to rock and roll, but not have quite started yet. The production team will then come and have a look round the existing building and talk to you about what you’re going to do with it. They’ll then film through until the end of the year, which will hopefully be enough time for you to reach completion!
Your project doesn’t have to be huge, it just has to be green - and part of the interest will be in seeing how you interpret the idea of ‘environmentally friendly’. One thing I’ve learnt in the short time Kits and Mortar has been around is that ‘green’ definitely means different things to different people. The key thing is that green is at the centre of your build. That might mean a reed bed water filtration system, or straw bale building, or turf roofs, or using any other green technique or material.
It also doesn’t matter what you’re intending to do with the finished property, whether you move in to it as your primary family home, sell it on at a profit, or run it as a holiday let. The build can be almost anywhere - Twofour Broadcast are based in Plymouth, so most of England and Wales is within easy reach - and they are following projects on Anglesey, Essex and Cornwall
If you have such a build in mind, and you’re ready to take the plunge, get in touch directly with Greg Goff by email, or phone his direct line: 01752 727528.
There was one closing quote in the blurb Greg emailed me yesterday: “The UK needs 250,000 new homes built every year to keep up with demand. Each year we’re 100,000 short of the target… but there are 750,000 empty properties out there to be renovated.” Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Kevin and I have started ourselves a new blog - Kits and Mortar. As you might have guessed from the title, it’s about building an eco- and cat-friendly house, something that Kev and I dream of. Right now, we know really very little about self-building, or even about what we want or where we want it. We’re not entirely sure what “cat-friendly design” means either, although I suspect that it’s going to involve providing our future moggies with somewhere from where they can look down upon us.
So Kits and Mortar really is going to be a voyage of discovery. If you’re into house building or cats (or both), please do pop over and have a look, or add our feed to your RSS reader.
We - ORG and a number of other groups - have been campaigning against the extension of copyright term on sound recordings for quite a while now. My last big campaign as Executive Director of the Open Rights Group was Release The Music, wherein we called on the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property to reject calls by the music industry to extend the term. We were successful.
Not only does extending the term not make sense economically, it doesn’t make sense for musicians either, as only a tiny, tiny minority of them will actually benefit. The rest will just have to sit and watch their back catalogue recordings sit and rot in the vaults of record companies who don’t want to be bothered to re-release or promote them. Sir Cliff will rake in the cash whilst jobbing musicians will get nothing.
The following individuals state their opposition to a copyright term extension for sound recordings.
We ask the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers to ensure that policy in this area reflects all concerned stakeholders, including consumer and public interest organisations, and not just the commercial rights-holders who advocate for extended copyright term.
We’re back! Sorta… We got back from Barbados on Sunday, but this morning Kevin flew off to Sydney for five days and my brain is definitely still in the West Indies. So yes, only sorta back, only sorta with it. I’ve been trying to work today, and failing on pretty much every count. If I want to keep Friday free, I’m going to have to really pull my finger out tomorrow!
The Big Day The wedding was absolutely amazing - we both had such fun! The morning was surprisingly relaxed, really. It all started off with an 8.30am hair appointment, which was pretty relaxing, followed by an hour or so of having my make-up done by my cousin Sonia in my parents lounge, with no one else around as my Mum was off getting her hair done, and Dad was busy ferrying people about. Eventually people - my bridesmaids, Matt who was our photographer for the day, my cousins - started to arrive, the flowers came, and it all slowly started to come together.
I even found a moment to sit down and check last minute emails.
I only had one moment of tension, when I started to worry if we were going to get everyone’s make-up done in time, but that turned out not to be a problem at all.
Thence to the venue, and my Big Entrance! It’s such a cliché, but the ceremony really did go by in a flash. We wrote the ceremony together - I’ll post the whole thing in due course - and I had been concerned that it would turn out to be too long, but it was perfect. Kevin’s cousin, the Reverend Gary La Croix, was a wonderful officiant.
After photos, and spilling wine down my dress - d’oh! - it was time for the Wedding Breakfast. That was a nice chance to slow down a bit, and to look about us and just drink it all in. It was so lovely to have a moment to talk to Kev and enjoy the moment. The food was fab, although I couldn’t eat much with that corset on! And the entertainment - our wandering minstrel, Dante Ferrara - was just fabulous.
The cutting of the cake, which was predictably chocolate, came next.
And then the speeches. Dad did a really lovely, touching speech which was really two Pam Ayres poems, one for Kevin, and one for me. The Groom and Bride chose to speak together, as is our custom. And then The Big One - Chris Vallance gave the Best Man’s speech, which was completely inspired… and at times, a touch embarrassing.
And then, of course, the dancing! We had Diabolus in Musica to do a Tudor Ceilidh, which was a hoot. You’ve never seen so many people look quite so silly all in one spot before!
The best bit was watching the men ‘paw the ground like stallions’. Tee hee!
And before you know it, it’s time to throw the bouquet and leave. I gathered all the unmarried people together, male and female - we’re all equal here! - and stood with my back to the crowd. Then, well, I threw.
Vince recorded his thoughts on the day too, in a typically Vincian way. If any of our guests would like to, I’d be really happy for you to leave a long of a comment as you like, telling us about how the day went for you.
A few people have their photos up on Flickr already, including Ian, Vince, James, Amanda P, Amanda H, Jeff, and Jo. (If you have photos up on Flickr, you might like to join our group and add your photos to the pool.)
I will, in due course, put together a book, probably using Blurb, with the best of the photos and stories, quotes and excerpts from the ceremony, and any other things that come to mind. So please do leave a comment here, and do let me have copies of your photos if they’re not already up online.
And now…
Now I am Mrs Suw Charman-Anderson, although I still have some hoops to jump through to make it completely official, i.e. on my passport. Being married is wonderful. It really was the best day of my life. Kevin makes me so happy, and to be able to stand up in front of all our friends and family and declare our love and commitment has been very important to both of us. All the planning and hard work over the last year was so worth it - the day was everything we wanted it to be, and went as smooth as clockwork.
Huge thanks to everyone who helped, especially my parents Rob and Brenda, my Matron of Honour, Kate, and Kev’s Best Man, Chris. And thanks, of course, to my wonderful husband, without whom all of this would have been a very expensive and complex work of fiction.
I’m both delighted and sad to report that we have united Foggle - real name Orlando - with his owner. I’d put a flyer in the local shop and Orlando’s owner had put flyers up near where she lives, and an anonymous person had seen both my flyer and her flyer and had put two and two together. This anonymous person texted me with Orlando’s owner’s number, and also gave my number to her, and yesterday afternoon we managed to get in touch.
Orlando’s owner only lives just across the road, so she came straight over with his cat box to take him home. She was really lovely, just like her cat, and we had a bit of a chat. Apparently I was right to think that he had some Siamese in him - his miaow gives that away. He also has a half-sister (same mother, different father), who has been pining for him. He went missing on Monday, so when I saw him Tuesday I was right to think he was looking distressed and lost (I nearly took him in there and then, actually, and now wish I had - we might have had a speedier resolution to it all).
It was so nice to be able to reunite Orlando with his owner. I was so pleased - I know how awful it is when your cat goes missing, and I know how much I’d worry about my kitties if they didn’t come home at night. On the other hand, I fell in love with him pretty much immediately. He is such a gorgeous cat, with a fabulous personality, something which I think comes from having a caring owner, which she clearly is. He would snuggle up with me all day on the sofa as I worked, follow me around the flat wherever I went, and curl up on the bed with Kevin and I when we went to sleep.
Even though we only had Orlando for three days, I do miss him something awful. So I’m both sad and happy. Sad he’s gone, happy that he’s gone home to someone who clearly adores him.
Late last night, I heard a very loud miaowing from outside. Fearing it was a cat in trouble, we went outside and there was a ginger tom (less his stabilisers), looking very lost. I saw him the day before yesterday too, meowing loudly further up the road, and looking distressed. Our road is a really busy major road, and very very dangerous to kitties, so we took him in.
Kev ran down to the corner shop and got some cat food and litter, and we improvised a litter tray out of one of the lids of the recycling boxes. Poor kitty was really hungry, and although he’s a little bit thin, he’s in very good condition. He has an old injury to his toe which seems to be healing fine, but he does have a bit of a sneeze.
Today I’m going to ring the local vets, flyer the neighbourhood and generally ask around. Someone somewhere is likely very worried that their lovely kitty is missing. He’s so beautiful, and very, very friendly. Last night he snuggled up to us, although he did let that fog-horn miaow of his get a bit out of hand, so we didn’t get much sleep. But that did inspire a temporary name for him - Foggle.
Much as I adore him, I do hope we can find his real owners soon.
A little unashamed pimping and cross-posting…
Over the last few months I’ve working hard on the Creative Business in the Digital Era research project (hence my quietude here), which is examining the way in which businesses are using open intellectual property as a central pillar of their business model.
The project culminates in three free seminars in central London during March - a full day on 17th March, and two evening seminars on 18th/19th (with roughly the same content in each) - during which we’ll talk about what we’ve discovered about open IP businesses, and talk to people who are actually giving stuff away whilst also making money from it. We’ve managed to recruit three fabulous guest speakers:
The seminar is aimed at people within the creative industry - e.g. music, publishing, film, TV, radio, visual arts, photography - and from any size of company, whether they are freelances or a C-level exec. The course materials are all being prepped out in the open, under CC licence.
As mentioned, the seminar is free to attend - if you are interested, all you need to do is to fill in our application form.
If you’re interested yourself, please do apply! If you have a blog, podcast or Twitter account and would like to mention our seminar, please do. And if you know of anyone who might be interested in coming, feel free to tell them about it.
Our deadline for applications is 15th February, so apply now!
Sorry to everyone who has left a comment here only for it not to show up - quite a lot of comments got caught in by Akismet, but the notification emails then got caught up in my Gmail spam trap, so I didn’t realise that there were so many comments awaiting moderation.
If you’ve left a comment and it’s still not shown up, please do let me know.
Oh, and I just want to say… I will delete comments that are irrelevant, blatantly plugging your site/blog/podcast/product, written in all caps with no punctuation and poor spelling, or just plain mean.
I wrote this post yesterday afternoon with the intention of posting it on Strange Attractor, but technical problems have stopped me from being able to post it there at all. Horizon was, by the way, fab.
Whilst Kev and I were at the gym this morning, we caught an interview with Dr Brian Cox on BBC Breakfast, talking to Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams about an episode of Horizon, What on Earth is wrong with gravity. I’m looking forward to seeing the programme tonight, having already seen a number of outtakes on Brian’s partner Gia’s blog. Thankfully, Gia has grabbed the interview and put it up on YouTube:
Now, gravity is tricky. It’s the sort of thing, like mass, that seem pretty obvious. You drop a pencil, as Bill did, and it falls until it hits a surface that stops it falling any further. We all know what gravity does. What’s less clear is what gravity is, how it works, what makes gravity pull things together. It’s actually a pretty difficult subject to tackle in a six minute segment.
Unfortunately, Bill and Sian - and whomever produced and researched the program - didn’t prepare any decent questions. Gravity is one of those subjects where seemingly simple questions have horrendously complex answers, if they have answers at all. Bill and Sian went for the simple questions, but Brian had only a few minutes - if that, given that they showed two clips of the programme - to try to answer.
Now, to my mind, the job of the presenter in these situations is to act as a proxy for the audience and to ask the questions that the audience want answered. The question that I suspect the audience most want answered about an episode of Horizon is: “Why should I watch this programme?” That was a question that Bill and Sian spectacularly failed to address, even indirectly, because they were focused on small but unanswerable questions instead.
Bill concentrated on dropping his pencil and asking querulously, “Why is it so complicated?” and then giggling like a schoolboy, I suspect because he felt a little out of his element. “I thought it was dead simple myself,” he says.
Brian has some great stories to illustrate his point. Most surprisingly, he talks about how if we didn’t correct for the way that time passes differently in orbit to on earth, our satnav systems would drift by 11km per day. But he’s forced to talk about spacetime without being able to fully explain what spacetime is and, frankly, anyone would be forgiven for struggling with that.
Sian then says, “I’m still not sure what causes gravity.” Well, you and the rest of the physics world. That’s not a smart question to ask, because there’s no answer, and the lack of an answer is going to flummox people. The point of this six minute segment is not to solve one of the universe’s greatest riddles, but to spark a little curiosity in people’s minds. And I can pretty much guarantee that no one woke up this morning and asked, “What causes gravity?”
Indeed, I did a straw poll of my friend son Twitter and Seesmic, and asked, “If I was an omniscient being, what scientific question would you like answered?”
From Twitter:
jrnoded: @suw why 42?
michaelocc: @Suw Is faster than light travel possible?
adamamyl: @Suw: why, on taking government office do incumbents forget they have principles/spines? Or, why int a resignation, a resignation, thesedays
zeroinfluencer: @Suw: How to make an affordable Holy Grail (Assorted Colours)
londonfilmgeek: @Suw Can i haz an Aperture Science Portal gun, kthanxbai
The_Shed: @Suw Are we even close to knowing the truth about anything?
johnbreslin: @Suw: Is this like “does anything eat wasps?” how about, where does all the time go (inspired by the Time Snails in “Captain Bluebear”)?
aidg: @Suw Science q for the omniscient: How the universe was created or the story of creation from primordial soup to multicellular organisms.
meriwilliams: @Suw Why is life?
tara_kelly: @Suw Dear omniscient being: is time really as linear as we like to think it is?
From Seesmic, my question:
An amazing question from DeekDeekster, that I personally would love the answer to:
Jeff Hinz echoes MichaelOOC, but from the opposite angle:
Christian Payne takes the Prince Charles line:
Dave Shannon asks the hardest question:
You’ll notice that no one, not one single person, asked “What is gravity?”.
Then towards the end of the Breakfast interview, they bring up the entirely spurious issue of the asteroid that missed hitting the Earth by 334,000 miles at 8;33am this morning. Cue the stupidest question of the morning: “If gravity is such a big deal, how come that asteroid that Carol told us about didn’t crash into Earth?” That’s like saying, if the sky is blue, how come grass is green?
To add insult to injury, Sian ends up by saying, “See, that’s why he has a PhD and we haven’t, because he can understand these sorts of things and we’re still bamboozled” and Bill finishes up with, “You’d managed a major achievement this morning, which is that you’ve managed to explain something to all of us and made us both feel really thick.”
Poor Brian didn’t stand a chance. How can you manage to extract even a shred of dignity from that? How can you pull back from that and say something that will encourage people to watch your programme?
If the Breakfast team had thought for a moment and actually talked to Brian before the interview about what questions would make for an entertaining and interesting interview, ruling out questions that no physicist alive can answer, and including ones that perhaps the audience actually want to know the answer to, then I suspect things would have gone much better.
But to me, this is indicative of the attitude of the media towards science and technology: “Oh, look at those weirdos over there with their white coats and strange ways of talking. They’re not like us. They’re Boffins.” It’s an attitude based in ignorance and fear, and nurtured by the unnecessarily divisive split between science/tech and the humanities at school and then university.
Yet at times like this, the “I’m too dumb to understand you boffins” attitude is counterproductive. All Bill and Sian have done is put off people who might otherwise have watched Horizon, and pissed off the people who definitely will. Which is foolish, given that they are working for the very same organisation that commissioned Brian’s programme.
Just before 8pm this evening, it started again. Out came the angle grinders, the pneumatic drills, the machines that rip up the tarmac, and the lorries to take it away. God knows how long it’s going to go on for tonight.
I rang Islington council this morning to complain. A very polite chap took notes of my call, and promised to pass it on to the Highways Department, and that someone would get back to me. Someone did. A very nice lady called me back to let me know that this particular road is not the responsibility of Islington Council, but of Transport for London and someone from there would call me.
Well, I guess the chances of anyone ringing me back from Transport for London are nil, but the nice lady from Islington Council gave me their phone number, so tomorrow I will call them.
It’s not just the noise that upsets me, it’s the total lack of communication. No one has let us know that our lives are going to be disrupted. We have no idea what the hours of work are. We have no idea how many nights our sleep is going to be disrupted. And the worst thing is that there seems to be no reason for this work to be carried out during the night at all. Only a few weeks ago they had two lanes closed during the day so that they could do roadworks, and the traffic tailbacks didn’t seem to bother them then. So why is this different? Why is it so important that drivers not be inconvenienced that they are willing to ruin our sleep?
I made a point of going to Boots this afternoon to buy ear plugs. I got two different sorts, and I hope that one of them is comfortable enough to fall asleep in, and that they work well enough to cut out the noise - which is a lot louder tonight than it was last night. But I shouldn’t have to buy earplugs to get to sleep in my own, otherwise relatively quiet bedroom. I shouldn’t have to deal with the stress and tension caused by this. There’s just no good reason for it.
Kevin and I are both getting progressively more and more exhausted as we burn the candle at both ends, trying to get the wedding sorted, and get all the work done that we must before the Big Day. Getting a full night’s sleep - preferably eight or nine hours - is essential, but difficult.
Last night, it was all but impossible. I saw a huge transport lorry lurking outside mid-evening, and started to worry a bit. By 9pm, they had everything unloaded, and proceeded to dig up the road. They had jackhammers, and one of those machines that tears up the tarmac. The noise could be heard from our bedroom, even with all doors shut. The bass rumble just cuts through the walls like a hot knife through butter.
Kevin and I had wanted an early night, so we were in bed by 10pm, reading. I was hoping the roadworks would be done by 11pm, but no… instead, our downstairs neighbour put on some music with what I believe is termed “thumping bass”. Great. Thankfully that didn’t last too long, but it set my teeth on edge.
We carried on reading til 11.20pm, and I took a Nytol because I knew I’d never get to sleep without one. Midnight came, roadworks still going. I eventually drifted off, but woke up again at 1.30am… roadworks still going. Pound pound pound. Thump thump thump. 2am, still going. 3am, not entirely sure. Hard to separate pounding outside from pounding in my head. 3.30am, I think it’s still going. 4am, ok, now it’s quiet. 6.30am, central heating turns on, radiator sounds like Niagara Falls.
*sigh*
I do not understand why they have to do really loud and noisy roadworks in a residential area through the night. It’s absurd and stupid. And I’m knackered. I’m desperately hoping that they don’t come back tonight, because that would just be intolerable.
I think I’m going to need a nap this afternoon, just to get through the day.
At last, applications for the Creative Business seminar that I’ve been working on, examining new business models based around giving away creative works, are open!
how about, where does all the time go (inspired by the Time Snails in “Captain Bluebear”)?