Month: January 2004

Now we are One

With the impending first anniversary of my blog on Tuesday, and this being my 200th post (yes, really), I thought it would be appropriate to pause for a moment of gentle reflection.

In February 2003 (the earliest month for which I still have statistics for the pastemagazine.org domain), we were getting a daily average of 28 visits* a month. This has risen steadily over the course of the year to a current daily average of 87 visits. In terms of pure hits*, we’ve gone from a monthly total of around 4 000 to nearly 15 000 last month. Sure, it’s not going anywhere close to the bandwidth limit, and a fair few of those hits and visits are just the Google bots relentlessly crawling over the pages on an almost daily basis, but it’s still a nice rise, and it would be fair to say that the blogs are largely responsible for that increase (given that the rest of the site is mostly unchanged from a year ago).

If you stumbled across the site and/or blogs and stayed, then hello to you. Perhaps you searched on in via “brain surgeon’s salary“, or “bmg copy control” (Psst: Just click Cancel or hold the SHIFT key when you insert the CD… It’s that easy! I probably should keep quiet about that, or I presume my lawsuit will be in the post now that the BPI plans to start suing downloading grannies et al.), or maybe one of the more unsavoury search queries I discover from time to time nestling in the log files along with your IP address (if you ever thought that the Internet is an anonymous medium, then you couldn’t be more wrong), although if that is the case, I suspect that you didn’t stay for long. Or maybe you’re an old college friend/lurking reader, ex-housemate, work colleague, or Australian. In any case, if you like (or dislike) what you read, do leave a comment. It’s nice to know there’s someone out there, at least.

* dull explanation of terms: “hits” means the total number of page requests sent to the server, so if you come to the site and click on 5 different pages, which include 3 images somewhere on them, that counts as 8 hits; “visit” collates together all the pages you click on within a 30 minute period, so those 5 pages and images count as 1 visit.

“I don’t climb poles, and you won’t find another engineer who does…”

At the second time of asking, BT finally managed to connect a small piece of wire from the box in the downstairs hallway in our flat to the very large telegraph pole outside, thus providing us with a working telephone service. You’d think this would be a reasonably simple exercise, but apparently it’s not–it takes almost three hours, and requires any number of BT employees to turn up in the street outside. Every time I looked outside to see what was going on, and just when I thought they might nearly be finished, it seemed that someone else had turned up with some even more elaborate piece of equipment. At one point I counted 4 different BT vans parked outside in our small street, along with a gaggle? jobsworth? (I dunno, what’s the collective noun?) of BT staff.

Last week’s engineer had refused to go anywhere near the pole outside, but today’s chap was all too happy to climb up his ladder to get to the top and fiddle about for a while. Naively, I presumed that that might be it, but a short while later one of those cherry picker things turned up to send a different bloke up there to actually connect up the wire. But, finally, some three hours after they first arrived, we had a dial tone. It’s a small victory.

Last night we visited our local, the Hemingford Arms, for the first time, ably assisted by Dave and Pete, who were over to visit. I’ve never really had a local before–the Kensington on Stanley Road in Redland would be the closest thing, I suppose, but it was always just that bit too far from my student accommodation to qualify (notwithstanding our consistent pub quiz successes), so I was rather pleased to find that the pub within stumbling distance of the flat is surprisingly good, actually. Something of a “local pub for local people”, (with one of those American Werewolf in London moments when we opened the door), but it does have a good selection of beers on tap and very good cheap Thai food. I think I might be back.

ILTEOTS

Exploring our new neighbourhood on Saturday afternoon, I was reminded of a classic Simpsons moment. It’s a literal visual gag of the kind at which the show’s writers excel, in an episode where Bart runs away–you see him walking along the street and gradually getting further and further away from home. Eventually he crosses some railway tracks, and by the time he has reached the other side of the tracks (the wrong side, presumably), his surroundings have changed completely, as an apparently respectable neighbourhood becomes a rundown slum. I’ve always found this kind of juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, when you see it literally played out on the streets of London, as Ralph McTell might have it, to be one of the capital’s consistently shocking but fascinating traits, and it was illustrated perfectly by our quick wander around the neighbourhood at the weekend.

We had always previously gone left at the end of our street, towards the quiet gentrification of Upper Street, with its abundance of cafes, bars, and shops selling entirely non-practical goods (it’s the kind of street that can support 3 branches of Starbucks under a mile apart). On Saturday, we decided to turn right instead, towards the Caledonian Road, and, ultimately, if we’d really felt like walking all that way, Kings Cross. As you’ve probably already guessed, the difference is somewhat startling.

A few streets, or a world away, from the Georgian terraces of Islington, depending on your perspective, we wandered along the road for a little while, wondering how one street could support so many corner shops, in much the same way as we might wonder about Upper Street’s coffee shops. We also strolled up to HM Pentonville Prison to wonder about some of our more disreputable neighbours. [In his excellent Monopoly board-themed London history, Do Not Pass Go, Tim Moore describes a visit to the prison he makes by way of covering the “Go to Jail” square on the board. Apparently it’s very much “a local nick for local people”, holding as it does mostly local men in their 40s or 50s, most of whom are there on theft or drugs offences.] You can’t really see much from the outside, though, just the not-as-high-as-I’d-have-thought, suprisingly graffiti-covered but otherwise white concrete walls, and the grim, grey, Victorian buildings that rise above them inside. Historical curiosity aside, however, I think that’s probably as close as I’d like to get.

All I can hear is people typing around me, even above the sound of REM on my MP3 player, but I’m not sure I can find the motivation on this drab Friday afternoon to explain in better English why you need to read the fantastically dull Protocols Porting Guide I’m writing. Is it really only the end of the first week back after the New Year? It seems like I’ve never been away. Even worse, I was just listening to Orange Crush, and I can remember exactly where I was, and the exact moment when I heard that song last. Shortly after it finished, we got out of the car on the other side of the world to go and see the lighthouse where they filmed Round The Twist. It was sunny. I wish I was there now. Or maybe anywhere but here. I think I need another holiday.

Unconnected events

Two recent, but unconnected events, that have been troubling me recently.

The first one happened at Rob’s excellent New Year’s Eve do (a party where, I’m afraid to report, this happened). The first words I heard, on being introduced to Rob’s friend Alex, a man I’d never met before, were “ah! the blogger”, as he shook my hand. Proceeding then to chat to someone I hadn’t met before who knew so much about me was certainly an odd experience–had we moved into the flat yet? had I met Dido yet? (the answer’s still no, unfortunately).

Then, earlier this week, I had an email out of the blue from one of my fellow Bristol English graduates, someone I hadn’t heard of or from for 3 years, who had stumbled across the site while doing “some research” at work (yes, that’s my excuse too) and read and (sharp intakes of breath all round) apparently enjoyed it.

I might have said this before, but it’s rather odd realising that there are actually people out there who read this thing–maybe even people I don’t know. At first its rather flattering. Of course my main reason for blogging has always been to break from work and to try to encourage myself to write properly outside of work, but it’s always nice to find out that there are people out there actually reading this and, perhaps, even enjoying it, especially people I don’t know (even if in this case it’s only because Rob doesn’t update as often as I do, although I think there’s a quality vs quantity debate there that I’m not going to go into now).

But the more I think about it, this realisation creates a kind of pressure. If there are actually people reading out there, then what if I post a really rubbish entry? What if I don’t post often enough? Will you go away and not come back?

What if I just want to link to Richard Herring’s piece on Google referral stats (although I think everyone has written one of those at one time or another), because it’s funny, but I haven’t got time to write a proper entry? Will you all leave me for him because he’s funnier and updates every day with really long and witty entries?

What if nothing funny happens to me for me to talk about here? Now that I have my shorter commute, I don’t even have the Metro letters page to point to and laugh at with righteous sarcasm…

What if I’m not good enough? Don’t leave, please…

Schadenfreude-tastic

Ah. Nothing wards away the back-to-work winter blues like finding out that your old company is being delisted from the Nasdaq after its failure to file its accounts this week and its decision to launch an enquiry into its expense accounting over the last four years. [According to this report, assisting them in their investigation will be “forensic accountants” from Deloitte & Touche. Wow! Forensic accountants! Do they like take fingerprints of old documents, and look for strands of DNA in hair and stuff? Sounds exciting, although I’m not sure I remember the episode of CSI where they go audit four years worth of corporate expenses…]

Enduring Love, Actually

It occurred to me, watching the closing credits of Richard Curtis’s latest steaming turd of a movie on Saturday night, that it was rather ironic, actually, that a film whose central message was that, hey, love is all around, actually, guys, in fact filled me with a sense of bilious hatred the like of which I haven’t experienced in some time.

I’m not sure what it was I hated most about the film, actually. Was it the fact that it lacked anything resembling a plot or a character developed beyond the most trite cliche? Perhaps it was the way the sheer number of big name actors made it actually seem more like a series of cameos than anything resembling a story? Or was it the way everyone kept saying “actually”? (see, it’s annoying, isn’t it, actually?) Or perhaps it was the fact that most of the “storylines”, such as they were, were actually borrowed from other films or stories. I can’t have been the only person to notice, amongst others, the shameless lift of the climactic concert scene from Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, the general rehash of every other Curtis film, or the theft of the central metaphor–oh, doesn’t the arrivals hall at Heathrow show us how we’re all really the same after all–from Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love.

Not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, actually, but it’s got to be pretty close.