A funny thing happened on the way to the office

Well my dears, here’s a strange to-do! The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that in my last post I included a photo of my legendary toothpick knitting challenge. To be fair I didn’t think many of you would look at it closely, but that just teaches me a lesson, good and proper.

It happened like this.

The day after I posted my whinge abut DPNs, I had to go across to Head Office for a Very Important Meeting. Naturally I sprang from my bed in the grey and chilly dawn, as eager as a squirrel after acorns, bright eyed and bushy tailed. I bustled in and out of hallways and showers and kitchens configuring breakfast, clothing and toiletries (not necessarily in that order). Within the hour I was booted, suited and ready to go, and so I went. Most importantly I took with me my briefcase  containing my knitting, along with some papers, tickets for the train and my phone.

The morning train to Leeds is a proper caution, packed with giggling schoolchildren from the kinds of families that can afford to send their children miles away to schools where the teachers may or may not have chins. Apparently commuting form the age of 11 makes a man of you; a very tired man, it must be said, but such is life. Then there are the grey-haired 30-somethings who toil in the industrial heartlands of York, wrangling whippets and wrestling puddings for a fiver a go. In addition the keen observer may note bespectacled academics heading for Leeds and the one and only EBL.

I found my seat and started to knit. There’s no mobile signal so emails and phone calls are out of the question. Knittingis the only answer, as in so many scenarios. The lack of signal doesn’t stop the kiddies trying, and we all enjoy being lulled by the endless rounds of “Benedict? Benedict? Can you hear me?” which punctuate the carriage air in tones of constant amazement, as if the Howardian Hills only arrived last night and the phones have always worked before.

The other thing punctuating the air that morning, or perhaps I should say glutinating (as in making it glutinous), was a perfume. Somebody, probably a female, was wearing a year’s supply of Rose Garden Extreme, and generously sharing it with the rest of us. I can only assume she, or possibly he, let us not make gendered assumptions, had had an unfortunate incident before leaving home and not had time to rectify the damage.

Anyway, I was breathing through my mouth and trying to think of fresh air and open skies, when a voice enquired hesitantly:

“Do you write that blog?”

I ignored it, obviously, because who would respond to that kind of a question at 7.32 in the morning? A nutter. That’s who.

The voice repeated its interrogation, adding “I saw your knitting. I recognised the wool marker and stitch counter.”

Well, that made it alright then.

I looked up to meet the eyes of a mousy individual in a dark wool coat and carrying a rather bedraggled back-pack. She leaned across the table and added “I really liked your post.”

Obviously an individual of sophistication and distinction was concealed by an outwardly anodyne appearance, and not the murderous serial killer I had initially assumed.

Apparently she lived not too far from me, and worked at one of the hotels just outside Leeds as a catering manager. I vaguely recognised her form other commuting days; the crowd is pretty much the same year in, year out. We had a very pleasant time swapping tales of stitches, websites and TV shows we both enjoyed, although I struggled to forgive her for “Call the Midwife” and I suspect she was confounded by my passion for “Waking the Dead”. We both agreed on the wonderful “Wolf Hall” though, as does anyone sane. It’s fiction, get over it.

It was rather strange meeting someone who effectively knew more about me than I did about them. I admit I felt a little vulnerable. I mean, I don’t use my birth-certified name here, in case you wondered, but I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to work it out if you wanted. Some of you do in fact know me in the human world anyway. Nevertheless I felt a ambushed, bamboozled, embarrassed and quite stressed.

In short my fanfollowerstalker and I chatted until we got to Garforth, when inexplicably my new found friend had to depart. Does anyone get off at Garforth when heading west? Really? Why?

That was when I knew I had fallen asleep and it was time to wake up and face the day. It was like that moment in “Dallas” – which I never watched, but even I have heard about.

It turned out I had no fanfollwerstalker after all. I felt some relief but also a little piece of my heart broke. How contrary!

Suppose you were suddenly famous (or else, remember the time just before you became famous). How would you cope when the first person come sup and asks for an autograph, metaphorically or literally?

Namaste.

WOTW: Bellman

I have suggested the occasional post about a lost word, in the hope of prompting some of you to join in the blogging goodness. Here we go again with another post  in the very occasional series of EBL’s Word of the Week.

It has to be said that the joys of sleep often elude me. I have been sleeping better lately but overall it’s not a pleasing picture, with long hours of gazing at the darkened ceiling. I have been cheered by the return of birdsong recently, emphasising the turning of the Wheel, and glad of some wakeful company while Sigoth slumbers on.

Back in the good old days – those days when the world was a better and kindlier place according to some, although I have my doubts – there was a band of men who wandered the streets at night calling out the hour and letting people know that they were safe. I can never decide whether I would appreciate that comfort, or find myself jolted awake just as I managed to nod off, heart pounding and hand reaching for the nearest defensive object.

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2014/05/23/john-thomas-smiths-old-london-cries/

These men were sometimes called Night Watchmen, and if like me you adore Terry Pratchett’s Discworld that will have all sorts of resonances with you. Another term for them was Bellmen.

Recently I came across a reference to them in my calendar of Forgotten English. Some of the words are not really forgotten in my opinion, just not commonly used; some probably should be forgotten; while the rest seem to have been overlooked by both Chambers and the Oxford English Dictionaries, so I remain sceptical as to their provenance. However, Bellman falls into the first category, by which I mean I have heard the term before with my very own ears, and apparently so has my computer spell-checker (although in that instance ears are not part of the equation).

What I hadn’t heard before was the rather endearing little poem by Robert Herrick (mid 17^th century) which he wrote as a kind of blessing to his friends to keep them safe at night. It’s a bit like the prayer regarding long-leggity beasties I think. Anyway, it’s called “The Bellman”, and here it is.

THE BELLMAN (Robert Herrick)

From noise of scare fires rest ye free,
From murders benedicitie;
From all mischances that may fright
Your pleasing slumbers in the night;
Mercie secure ye all, and keep
The goblin from ye, while ye sleep.
Past one o’clock, and almost two,
My masters all, ‘good day to you.’

Isn’t that sweet?

Tell me what helps you sleep: nightlights, the BBC World Service, hot milk and cinnamon, a teddy bear or hot water bottle, whisky, whatever… post a link to your blog in the comments below, and/or tag with EBLWords.

Sleep well, my dears, and ream of beautiful things.

Namaste.

Blocks

I have not been writing so much lately and I am not about to make excuses. I did that in another post recently so that’s all the excusifying you will be getting from me.

Calvin and Hobbes sum it up

I wanted to write, though. I still do. But I have a Thing in the way, a Monster under the keyboard, an air bubble blocking the free flow of water through my pipes. I will be draining my radiators in due course, and will tell you how it all turns out then, but in the meantime I just need to sit in a corner for a bit and grumble through the dark reaches of the night.

It’s generational I suspect. No matter that I have worked in IT, woman and girl, a quarter century or more under the silicon. No matter that before there was a web I was using bulletin boards to send messages to people around the world, hopping from server to server. No matter that in the human realm I enjoy holding forth and listening to the sound of my own voice. No matter that at times words issue forth like the flood that floated the Ark, although hopefully without drowning unicorns.

No matter, I say, that any of those things are true, and potentially even relevant. This old lady simply does not share on-line all the potential stumbles ahead. I don’t ask you to help me figure out what to do, although I may happily bore you death once it is all done. Anyway, I know what to do; I’m just waiting for it to be done.

I’m not trying to be mysterious – but the Block Monster did make me realise that so many of you share so much by publishing your blogs. I don’t. There’s nothing I write here I wouldn’t happily read out at work or in the pub. I assume it will all end up one day in the HR department being checked for subversiveness, or in the village newsletter for people to gossip about. So I stick to the past – what has been and can be reported – not the future, despite the fact that most of my time I worry about the future and what may be. Naturally I live very little in the present, because I am poor at mindfulness, but I am working on that and trying to extend my visits.

Of course, some days I publish very bad writing like this stream of consciousness. Am I bothered? Look at my face. Not bothered.

In addition to being elderly, I prefer to work things out in my head, not with people. I don’t do human very well. I am anti-social. My idea of a brilliant day is to spend it alone, reading, knitting, writing, practising calligraphy or music, or learning to crochet. If I want to push the boat out, I will watch a film. I have no idea why I like to write or publish to a blog, I just can’t help it.

Still, I managed to write something, so I’ll blow a raspberry at the Word-Eating Monster, and hope to resume normal service in due course. Probably about a month in fact.

Do you share or conceal or deflect? Do problems free you up to write more, or befuddle your fingers and tie up your tongue? And yes, I do realise that by definition not everyone will be able or willing to answer that.

Namaste.

 

Excuses

Did you miss me? I know, but I’m back now.

I’ll try and put up some posts soon-ish, but here’s a list of excuses for not posting recently:

• Too. Many. Birthdays.
• dealing with demented parent stuff
• moving an Offspring to new house
• working away from home
• holiday in Amsterdam (with some Brussels on the side)!
• knitting
• not being able to think of anything to write
• thinking of too many things to write
• reading
• watching too much Netflix
• watching Eurovision
• visiting friends in London

As you can see, much of it involved having a good time.

That about covers it for now.

What favourite excuses do you have?

Namaste.

 

Nordic knitting and inky fingers

Today I had a day off. I know, I know, I had all last week as well but that’s just the way of it. Today I used it for pottering about with creative projects. I haven’t provided a knitting update for a while either, and I know at least some of you are keen needlefolk.

Without further ado, this is the back of the jumper I am working on. The front is about a third done, and has grown much more quickly now I can see what I am doing after the laser treatment last week. Hurrah again for lasers!

However, this morning I have been trying to puzzle out the script used for Old English. Newer readers may not have cottoned on to the fact that I am trying to learn Old English, that is the language of Alfred the Great and so on. It sounds beautiful and actually I think it looks rather beautiful too. You can see proper pictures on the British Library website, but this is an example from there of the poem “Beowulf”.

from the British Library website

Some years ago I did a calligraphy workshop and learned modern uncial. It’s the kind of script that gets used to denote Celtic, whatever that is. Certainly Celtic wasn’t a word used by the people often referred to as Celts. But that’s a rant for another day and today I am feeling too mellow to indulge. I had been practising the uncial (unciallating?) and playing with different inks and paper to see what worked best. The first ink I tried simply soaked into the paper so I got a really splotchy effect.

Blotchy Modern Uncial

The lines are from the Battle of Maldon, a poem created to remember an actual battle which was probably the equivalent of the Spartan 300. Basically the local prince faced up to an invading Viking force with far fewer men behind him than he needed, then decided to let the foreigners have the advantage because that was more honourable and got slaughtered for his trouble. I may be being unfair to him, but if you are interested you can look it all up and decide for yourself. Meanwhile these lines were spoken as a rallying call by the prince’s aged retainer to the men after the prince was killed. They are about dying honourably in the face of overwhelming odds (which is of course what happened) and they are the lines that our teacher read to us when I was a mere sprig of a girl and they made me decide I wanted to learn Old English. Roughly translated they mean:

“Our courage shall be the greater, our hearts the stronger, our minds shall be the firmer, as our strength grows less.”

The problem I was having was that the uncial reference sheet I was given did not include the Old English characters for æ (a as in ash), þ (th as in thorn) or ð (th as in eth). Naturally I turned to the British Library to see how your actual Old English People wrote them and realised belatedly that the script was quite different. So then I spent the morning puzzling it out and by lunchtime I managed to produce the lines in something vaguely resembling the original script (with apologies to people who do know much more about this than me – it’s all a learning opportunity!).

reinvented Old English script courtesy of EBL

And that’s what I did this morning.

How is your day going? If you have returned to work, as most of us must, I hope it was not too traumatic.

Namaste.

Freshly Pressed

I am shocked to announce that I have been Freshly Pressed.

What? What just happened?

I don’t know. I don’t quite understand how posts are chosen, but chosen was one of mine and for that I am entirely unable to respond in a sensible or meaningful way. I have been babbling in a dark corner since I found out.

Anyway, thank you to WordPress, and welcome to any visitors – I am the Electronic Bag Lady (EBL for short). Please come on in and find a chair. People will shuffle up to make room. We’re a friendly bunch and very snuggly. The kettle is always on, and there are biscuits in the tin. Or fruit if that’s your poison. If it is, I’ll have a word with you later when things get quieter.

What is life like in EBL Towers? If you fancy any or all of the following you may want to come by more often:

• I try to post at least monthly in support of Bloggers for Peace organised by Kozo over at everydaygurus.com
• I tend to ramble meaninglessly about life as an IT Project Manager in the UK Public Sector
• I live in God’s Own County of North Yorkshire (northern England) so that will regularly appear in posts as well. Just so you know – you never ask if someone is from Yorkshire. If they are, they soon tell you; if they are not, there is no need to humiliate them.
• I suffer from depression so may appear a little dark and sombre at times. Be gentle. I hope one day to contribute to the Mental Health Awareness blog project but am not there yet.
• I care for a demented mother. I may have a moan about that now and then. I need to let it out.
• I acquired a partner (Sigoth) and Offspringses earlier in life and they have made living worthwhile.
• I also suffer from nostalgia so keep telling stories about my younger days. Often the same one repeatedly. I am currently 51 in case you care to put that into perspective.
• You will not then be surprised to learn that I also enjoy researching my family tree.
• I am participating in the Quaker Alphabet Project 2014, reflecting on life as a British Quaker in (you’ll never guess) 2014! What – you did guess? Great, I like smart people. They give me hope. Please stay.
• I knit, so the occasional knitted product is presented to my grateful audience – enjoy!
• I am teaching myself Old English, what was spoke by the likes of Alfred the Great and the Venerable Bede. Because I can, in case you ask.

So have a look around my other posts and see if you want to be friends. It would be great if you called by more often. Say hello in the comments and tell me a bit about you too.

Namaste.

Freestyle

Well my dears, you may have noticed that I have been a little more prolific than usual this week.

That is because I have been on holiday, trying to rest up from my shoulder operation and trying to recover from the stresses and strains of a hectic few weeks. I am amazed how tiring swinging my arms in circles has been. It may be doing wonders for the joints, but I am positively exhausted.

I wanted to try and get back into a writing routine while I was home, so I started doing the “Just 5 Minute” exercises in Joanne Klassen’s book. Today I did some freestyle writing.

“But, EBL!” I hear you cry. “Pretty much all your writing is freestyle writing!”

That is well-observed, my clever readers, but still not quite the same thing. It is true I tend to produce a stream-of-consciousness for the blog, but it is minimally edited for sense and spelling (mostly); meanwhile the freestyle writing was a timed exercise without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Well, maybe repetition.

What I find when I do freestyle exercises is that they are quite liberating. I can write what I want and know it is completely private. As a result it is possible that I express a thought that was not otherwise immediately obvious to my conscious brain.

Today my tremendous nugget of earth shattering consequence was simply that writing is my personal path to peace. Not all my writing, you will be relieved to learn, appears on this blog. Let me tell you, there are scribbled pages in notebooks and files in folders which will never go further, and that is as it should be. However, the strength of feeling I had about the value I place on being able to write most, if not every, day was a little unexpected. Really I should know by now!

So tell me, my dears, how does writing feed your soul? Does it soothe you, or energise you, or both, or neither. Is it your addiction or friend or demon in the night? Or all of them?

Namaste

 

What’s in a word?

Do the words we use matter?

In my world they do quite often because there are a number of technical terms which have to be used correctly or else Chaos Will Ensue. A recent example was a colleague who kept asking for a “radio buttons” on a web page. What she actually meant was just a plain button you click for “Next” but she had in her head the term. I don’t expect people to know all the technical lingo but it needed correcting before the developer got hold of it otherwise instead of this:

 

 

she would have got this:

and that would not have worked at all. Oh dear me, no, it was not what she was after.

Anyway, that’s how I earn my crust. I catch those kind of misunderstandings. I need to pay my mortgage.

Jargon has a role to play. It’s a valuable shorthand for people working in the same field (by which I do not mean agricultural labourers, or “ag labs,” as genealogists call them). It is useful and it only gets a bad reputation because people use it inappropriately, often to try and seem superior, or because they have no communication skills.

I work in IT and I use jargon when I am talking to technical people. I once made the mistake, some years ago , of doing it in front of someone from HR. I was going over a server issue with an engineer and we started talking about dirty cache buffers and hot fixes until my colleague spluttered a bit. So we took our dirty caching outside. Never wash your dirty caches in public.

Jargon has a special place and should be used correctly. For the rest of the time there’s just language.

Do we need to be careful of language? What I have in mind is the kind of language which doesn’t fit the rules but nevertheless communicates its meaning quite clearly, at least to those involved.

Teenagers are best at this. They invent new language all the time and I think it’s great. I love that language is squishy. In this I am quite schizophrenic. I am a complete grammar nazi about all kinds of things including the greengrocers’ apostrophe. I also enjoy the use of a good Oxford comma, which is a little controversial in some circles. Yet I love playing with language. If you understand me then it has achieved its purpose, and it really doesn’t matter if my sentences wobble all over the place like a drunken hen party at 2 am on a Friday night in the West End.

I write long and cumbersome sentences quite frequently. My brain just rambles on and my fingers scramble over the keyboard trying to keep up. I’m not great at editing, particularly for blog posts, so you are subjected to the end result without warning or immediate access to pain relief. I suspect anyone who visits regularly keeps their painkiller of choice close to hand. Admit it, the best way to read this stuff is after a large glug or several of vino or a couple of Mother’s Little Helpers, or both.

I admire compressed communication. It’s so efficient and clever. Again, teens are the experts here. Those coded grunts that teenage boys emit are incredible. You know the conversations I mean:

“A’right?”
“Gnnh. Urgh?”
“Eh.”

The girls achieve a similar level of data exchange in a slightly different format, let’s call it Venusian Chat. It’s a little more physical than Martian Grunt.

“Yeah, like.”
“Y’know?”
“Totes.”
“Eek.”
* eye roll *
* elbows *

If we could capture that level of data compression for IT we would be able to stream HD video over 14.4k modems. It’s absolutely awesome.

The Offspring process information so differently from me and Sigoth that it makes our brains ache. They work in multiple streams simultaneously with little attention to detail but an overall grasp of the whole that is utterly impressive. The problem is that I am culturally unprepared for this, so often it appears they are being rude because they split their attention across the streams. Well, EBL, what an old fogey you are and no mistake. Lawks.

Our means of communication across generations is unpredictable. Blogging can seem like a way of imprinting ourselves upon eternity, or at least upon the lifespan of collective human intelligence. Hello, future, lok at me! Yet we only have to read Shakespeare or Chaucer, or even Dickens or Hardy, to know that words and meanings are as fluid as the dunes of the Sahara, ceaselessly shifting in the winds of change. What then is the point of worrying about Oxford commas or misplaced apostrophes? I can only catch glimpses of meaning in Anglo-Saxon poetry, and even less in cave paintings. Broad concepts are possibly understood, but usually imposed by my own cultural and time-bound perspectives.

I am therefore determined to enjoy being present at the birth of new languages, celebrating new words (“Selfie,” anyone? Omnishambles? Simples?).
While language lives and evolves and flows into new meanings, we are also alive and evolving which gives me hope. The alternative: Orwell’s MiniTruth and the shrinking dictionary.

Words matter, more than I can say.

Namaste.

Leafy Shoes

Occasionally I like to participate in blog challenges, and sometimes I even post the result. This week I was drawn into the weekly DPChallenge because so many of the blogs I like to read seemed to be writing extraordinarily wonderful pieces for it, and I became intrigued. The challenge has been posted by Rara:

This week, we’re asking you to consider things from a different point of view — to walk a mile in someone’s shoes. 

Well, I thought, that sounds like a bit of a giggle. Let’s try it out.

In previous lives I have run a few IT Helpdesks. You know the ones: you call up and a spotty adolescent rolls his or her eyes and tells you to try switching it off and on again. Then you call back and they ask you to open the computer up and reinstall the hard drive without a safety net. I have to say this should never have happened on my watch, although I have indeed talked a customer through opening up a computer to remove a CD their colleague had pushed inside the case for some inexplicable reason. I may have used the phrase “It’s fine, it’s just like Lego” a little more than necessary but we all survived.

Naturally I planned to write something that I always try to instil in my technical support teams about getting into the customer’s shoes.

Then my sub-conscious mugged me.

I sat at the keyboard expectantly and imagined my voice droning on at the team about how no one is born knowing Command Line. God, I was boring. I have a new appreciation for the patience of technical support staff now, given they were able to put up with that and not hunt me down with pitchforks and torches; although what they get up to World of Warcraft is their business so long as it’s not on company time.

So my brain stared at me and I stared at the keyboard.

“OK, Brain,” I said. “What else then?”

And all of a sudden I saw a picture of a maple leaf fluttering to the ground. I blame it on the fact I have been watching “Due South” all week.

“On no,” I muttered. But Brain was relentless.

Back in the autumn I attended a creative writing workshop, and even wrote about the experience in this very blog. If you remember it, or read it again now (I’ll wait – OK, ready?), I was rather overwhelmed at the fact I read a piece of my imaginative writing out loud to real humans. Today the Brain has decreed I should take this further and share it with you.

So, with a deep breath, I will. Allow me caveats first – it was a 5 minute exercise, and no time to edit. If I could just ask that you keep the giggling to a minimum I would be grateful Thank you, as they say, kindly.

For the piece we were asked to write about an experience of autumn, I wrote about how I felt as a two year old when we visited my aunt and uncle in Canada, and I saw the beautiful Canadian Fall. It blew my little English mind and is one of my happiest memories. In it I am warm and snug, with the cold air nipping my nose and my uncle holding my hand and telling me about things called Maple Trees, and my eyes are having a party with the colours.

The reason I am including it for this challenge is that in my little girl noggin I wanted to be up in the treetops too, with those brightly coloured leaves which I think I confused with fairies.

Autumn leaf

I want to be an autumn leaf, high in the trees, brightening and crinkling in the frost and sunshine. I can see for miles across the tree tops and everywhere are other leaves as bright and shining as me. We are singing in the light and cold air, just waiting to leap from the tree into the wind, and dance down to earth in our millions. We twist and shiver in the wind but the tree won’t let us go. We cover her in glory. We have to move on.

Why not have a go at this challenge yourself, if you haven’t already done so? Getting into someone else’s shoes is like an out of body experience. Have fun!

Namaste

Five Years

I was thinking about updating the blog, just to let you all know I am still alive, when this popped into my notifications:

Well, knock me down with a feather! I have been lurking on WordPress for 5 years! I only started being more active about a year ago, when I decided to try out NaNoWriMo, and wrote up progress each day.

You see, I was thinking yesterday that now my major projects are nearing closure, I can get back to working on the work-life balance project. It’s the Big One for me, even more than OJEU tenders and new product developments.

So thank you to all who have flown with me (to coin WordPress’s phrase) and please now settle down as we continue to cruise, with possible turbulence at unpredicted intervals.

Here’s what I was doing rather than blogging or working.

Firstly I was making the Christmas cake. I make it in October and top it up with brandy regularly until Christmas so that by the time we cut it and eat it, it’s more a thick drink than a cake. In fact, designated drivers have to take their slice home in party bag. People like it. They tell me it’s very moist, usually giggling as they do so. I don’t allow seconds for at least an hour.

The other thing I was doing was knitting furiously. By which of course I mean “as fast and hard as I could”. I wasn’t cross at all, quite the contrary. I wanted to finish a couple of projects to tidy up my knitting pile. As any knitters out there know, they do build up a bit. So this weekend I finished a present for a friend, and moved onto the end game for the Danish wool scarf. I will post a picture when that is completed too because the wool is Gorgeous with a capital G.

That only leaves me with the Norwegian Rose sweater which is the practice sweater prior to knitting The Killing pattern. That has been two years waiting so it will now be prioritised rather than all the other knitting for friends and relations. Finally.

Now I’m off to help the Local Offspring with packing stuff into boxes to move into the new flat.  I hope you are happy and busy and bright (or calm and content and quiet if that is your preference). What I mean is – love to you all!

Namaste.

 

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