Oh, Meg’s post today made me smile. My favourite, because it annoys me every morning: “It’s the people who try to get on the train before others have a chance to get off”.
I am selling my copy of Douglas Chirnside’s excellent Vanity Case on Amazon now. Click to buy.
This morning the postman knocked more than once. PY, who always jumps out of bed for parcels and post, decided to answer the door, where he discovered a large parcel from Out – my lovely black fleece had arrived (from OutOnTheStreets to be precise). This event, and Tom’s post (which I highlighted the other day and started out as a response to this), set me thinking about notions of community.
Now Out is an online community of (mainly) gay men from around the world – although at the moment it’s predominantly UK-based. It’s a great place to be and very unlike many of the other commercial gay sites. It’s all about social interactions and not about sex (like some) nor about profit (like others). It funds itself through a non-compulsory licence fee and sells merchandise to supplement that. It encourages real-world events and traditional social interaction.
Now, I have never attended one of the events, and I don’t log on every day (like some). I don’t count many of my friends (online or otherwise) as being members, and I can’t say I have made any lasting friendships on Out – although many have.
However, it is still a community, and I am still part of it. I choose to contribute financially, and I should do more in real life. There are many issues raised by Out that I shall discuss in more detail at some point soon (paying for online content; the concept of zero exploitation and the concept of online communities), but at this point all I want to say is that I feel similarly about blogging. I do it primarily for my own record/entertainment/amusement. As a by-product, I get to tell the world how I feel about things and strike up some interesting discussions and relationships along the way. It’s a place for me to express myself and, most importantly, it’s another community that I belong to. Again, I’m not the most active member of this community, but I certainly feel it is a community and one I am happy to be part of.
I am about to embark on a Friday night out in Clapham. More specifically, a colleague (we’ve worked together now and previously) and I are off to meet two ex-workmates (from our last job) for Friday night drinks. I think I am turning into some kind of hermit because I want to stay in the whole time, so although I know I will have a great time (and possibly one too many drinks), I would rather catch the 19:07 home. A bit sad, isn’t it?
plasticbag.org has a great new item about the community of UK webloggers – plasticbag.org | files | Who’s afraid of community participation?
I do consider myself a member of a community of UK webloggers. And I feel that way because we all have something in common – a shared experience maybe, or a desire to learn from one another, an interest in other people who validate our ‘hobbies’ or maybe it’s just because what matters to one of us is more likely to matter to other ones of us. I don’t share my politics or my sexuality with many of these people. Nor my gender, many of my interests, my ethnicity or my obsession with Buffy.
I’m too tired – as it’s too early/late – to comment, so go read it!
I think it’s about time that I launched the new-look version of this site. Not all the content has been migrated yet, but it’s a start.
Tim Smit provides insight into the group vision that resulted in one of the more successful Millennium projects – Eden. And the fact that it is the work of a committed “group” of people is not lost on the reader. Smit regularly repeats the mantra that Eden was only developed thanks to the work of a wide range of individuals, from contractors to councils, and not forgetting the plant-men.
If you want to understand some details behind the way such projects are developed, then this is a book you should read. When the project was floundering, while all the funding partners came together, Tim Smit was there, and he relives it in the book. Sometimes you wonder how it all came together.
On the other hand, if you are a plant-lover, gardener or horticulturalist, then this is also a book you should read. Smit tells the fascinating story of the development of the biome concepts and the plants they chose to grow. More importantly, he discusses the relationship between man and the natural surroundings we inhabit, debating our fragile relationship with a range of environments along the way.
However, what you take from this book is a mixture of all of the above. Landscaping, plant husbandry and environmental considerations sit alongside planning, funding, road building and visitor education projects. It’s one man’s personal account rather than a definitive history, and the cast of characters seems endless and, sometimes, confusing. However, the determination and vision that drove the project; the commitment and enthusiasm of all the people; and the role Eden believes it should be playing on the world stage are all presented in an accessible, very readable account of what seems to have been a long but successful process. If this book doesn’t inspire you to aim higher and better, then nothing will.
My trusted Palm Vx – from which sprang the Listen To Musak blog (why just write stuff for my own reading when I can bore everybody else?) – contains many useful freeware/shareware and fully paid-up pieces of software that didn’t come pre-installed. The most useful is DateMate. DateMate is a simple little program that stores birthdays, anniversaries, and events, and can populate the Palm Date Book with updated information so that I can always recall how old somebody is and how many years they have been married. If you own a Palm, I would wholeheartedly recommend you look at it.
Sadly, however, I have done two silly things in the past months:
Ah well, maybe it would be easier to maintain a paper diary but it wouldn’t be as much fun, would it?
I feel very strange about this Monday morning. You see I didn’t do any of the things I wish I had done over the last weekend. I had great plans to spend the time decorating the exterior of my house before the windows fall out due to the winter rains and frosts. Then I thought I might finally finish clearing the back garden so that some form of order is visible (again, before the winter frosts come). No. I couldn’t do any of this because I went to sleep.
Instead of going out late at night drinking after seeing Taboo on Friday night, PY and I came home because I was exhausted (I don’t think anybody else really wanted a long drinking session either, but that is not the point). I slept late, got up, had breakfast and started a few general household chores. Then I thought I would have forty winks. Unfortunately, I slept until 5pm and then realised that Saturday was gone. A whole weekend had then to be squashed into Sunday (where I stayed in bed late again), and I wasn’t very enthusiastic. I also had to have a late-Sunday brunch-style event in Notting Hill with some friends over from Australia. That was great (and seeing people who live outside London always makes me crave space and forget the advantages of this great city), but I can’t believe I didn’t do much around the house. I had such great plans.
So, that’s why I am now somewhat deflated. The weekend – which I look forward to like every other office-bound individual – turned out to be a letdown. And now I’m facing another full working week before I get some time off. To cap it all, I will then have to do all last week’s little jobs, as well as any new ones I come up with. I hate days like this and weekends like that! And I resent the fact that it is all my fault.
I went to see Boy George’s Taboo last Friday and have been contemplating the blog entry ever since. I have to say that I thought that it was fabulous and I want to see it again (I even ordered the soundtrack last night!). It’s a fictional account of a lot of real people, but most of the plot must be based on Boy George’s own life story, as I recognised many of the characters and plot lines from his book Take It Like A Man. Obviously, he is a key (though not the central) character. I would thoroughly recommend this to anybody visiting London, regardless of the way you feel about Boy George. It’s a strange time capsule of a musical, and his songs are great – although several of them are old (some of which are taken from the underrated album Cheapness and Beauty, which I regard as one of the best of all time). The story is tender, the performances top-rate, and the whole thing is laugh-out-loud funny (especially Julian Clary). Lastmiunte.com often has cut-price tickets a few days before a show. Go see it. Often.
[Links: BBC News – George breaks 80s Taboo | BBC News – Matt Lucas’s comic extremes | Guardian – We were so naughty | I Love the 80s]
I also posted a review to the gay boy musical fan group at Yahoo! This is what I wrote:
I thought Taboo was fantastic – and I wasn’t sure what to really expect. I think I had envisaged it as something akin to Closer To Heaven, but it wasn’t really like that at all. I loved the fact that The Venue is quite small and quite intimate, which made you feel closer to the stage (and the audience bits help) and, of course, it brought memories flooding back (although I was watching events in the early ’80s from the safety of the north).
I am a big fan of Boy George’s more recent albums – Cheapness and Beauty is one of my all-time favourites. When I heard some of the songs were being reworked for the show, I was worried. Luckily, few have been re-penned, and those that have been re-done are still as good as they are on the CD (although different). I was stunned by how much the mannerisms of the Boy George character seem to be like the Boy George we see on TV, etc. It was a remarkable performance. Duncan Bennett as Billy was superb (was he really in the band Point Break? I don’t remember him) as well as being some appealing eye candy 😉 It was a thoroughly entertaining night out, and I would recommend it to anybody.
Julian Clary was superb and, of course, looked stunning in those Leigh costumes. I would be interested to see how other people play the part, as he put his own stamp on it without it seeming to be too Julian Clary.
I’ve ordered the CD – the cheapest I could find it was £10.99 at Play247 – although it was on back order, I noticed tonight that they have posted it to me. I’m sure the CD doesn’t do the show justice (they rarely do), but I hope it will be brilliant anyway! Lastminute.com always seems to have discounts on top-price tickets. I bought the cheaper seats directly from the box office and, to be honest, I think my view was as good as anybody with the more expensive ones (the theatre isn’t really large enough for it to make a difference). However, Lastminute’s discount seats are even cheaper, and I shall certainly be going again.