On study days

Today I was on a full-day study day for work. Other than saying that it was better than I was expecting I’m not going to talk about the contents of the day, for I have more weighty (literally) matters to discuss.

I was amused that, just like when I was a health visitor in London, colleagues’ estimation of study days always seem to revolve round food. When I mentioned to one of my colleagues yesterday that I was going on this study day today, she asked where it was, and when I told her her first reply was “oh I’ve been on a study day there, they’ve got a great cafe!” (which I am delighted to report is true. They also served biscuits and pastries mid-morning and mid-afternoon which was a definite bonus). I remember in the past when we were asked to attend some boring meeting or other, the first question was almost never “how will this improve my practice/the service/etc” but instead almost always “will there be biscuits?”

It’s like I’ve been saying to my new colleagues. Health visiting is health visiting, wherever in the country you happen to do it

[In academia it was generally the 2nd topic of discussion. They did usually manage to say "interesting lecture" or somesuch before commenting on the standard of catering].

My poor neglected thesis

I haven’t written much about the student experience (after all, the main point of this blog) recently. There is a good reason for this.

(excuse me while I cower with guilt at the thought of my poor neglected thesis).

I had a long conversation (well, one-sided ramble if I’m honest) with HD today about how I feel my job is exhausting me to the point that the last thing in the world I want to do is my thesis (even though if I’m honest, really the last thing I want to do is actually my day job). I have set myself a few mini-targets to get me through being at work – end of this week we have a holiday (YAY), end of Feb I will have done enough hours to be able to reregister as a health visitor when my registration next comes up for renewal (not for over 2 years, but it’s good as a first short-term goal), mid-June the OU course finishes so I’ll have one less thing to take up my time away from the thesis, end of June I will have been in the job the same amount of time as my first health visiting job after I qualified so if I can stay longer it will be better for my CV, end of July I have a conference to attend so moving job before that would be too stressful, same sort of time I’m aiming to submit my thesis (eeeeeeeek) so likewise it’s silly to be jobhunting/changing before then. Of course if HD gets a permanent job somewhere else in the meantime then all this will be academic as I will have an excuse to leave earlier, but in the meantime giving myself these short-term goals will hopefully make life a bit more bearable.

It doesn’t change the fact though that I am spending far too little time on my thesis. I know I was a world champion procrastinator the 4 years I was at uni actually being paid to do the thing, but now I’m too tired to procrastinate.

Which is a shame as this evening I discovered an opportunity to procrastinate in a way that would actually look good on the academic side of my CV, but I don’t think I’m ever going to have the time. I might make a discreet enquiry (it involves blogging) but I probably need to be realistic and manage the plates I’m already juggling rather than taking on anything else.

Castle Semple Loch

Today HD and I made the most of the clear, bright, dry day (though we won’t talk about the temperature, brrrrr!) and went for a walk around Castle Semple Loch in Ayrshire, which is near the village of Lochwinning, about a 40 minute drive away (I wasn’t really paying attention to how long the journey was but it was less than an hour!). It was a very gentle walk, but really lovely, as you can hopefully see from these pictures:

HD was very patient with me stopping every 5 seconds to take pictures. Well it’s still a new camera to me, so I had to play, didn’t I! Typically though, I finally thought enough was enough as we got back to the lake’s edge at the car park, took a couple of swan pictures, then put my camera back in my rucksack. Literally about 10 seconds after zipping up the rucksack, two of the swans started a courtship dance right in front of me (you know where they do that beautiful dance and with their necks), but by the time I’d got my camera out again the moment was over – not helped by someone nearby throwing bread in the water and proving once and for all that swans are more interested in food than sex, they swam off just as I was ready to take a picture of them forming the heart shape. I guess it just goes to show that however many photos you take, there is always another waiting to be taken so DON’T PUT THE CAMERA AWAY! (I’ve already apologised in advance to HD, I’m sure when we go on holiday soon I am going to be unbearable. I bet I get some cracking photos though!).

More Celtic Connections

Last night we went to our final gig of this year’s Celtic Connections festival. And a very fine gig it was too – Le Vent du Nord (‘The North Wind’) whom we also saw last year (supporting La Bottine Souriante) and a Scottish band called Breabach (whose website doesn’t seem to be working at the minute sadly). They did a lot of stuff together in both halves of the show, and we liked them a lot. Definitely worth catching if you can.

As an aside, and nothing to do with anything really, Breabach’s fiddle player Patsy *really* reminded me of Maddie.

Getting in on the act

Seeing as everyone else has been posting their versions of the David Cameron campaign posters, I thought I would post this photo (warning for those who are sensitive about this sort of thing: language) which made me smile.

Hackney’s response. [Thanks to Tim for the link, not that Tim knows this blog exists, but still, credit where it's due]

Identity

I can’t remember if I’ve blogged about this before, or if I’ve just always meant to and never got round to it. Actually I vaguely remember some comments so I probably have already. But reading this post from World Without End yesterday and then reading this article by Eliza Carthy just over a week after seeing her and the Imagined Village at Celtic Connections got me thinking about it again. Added to a really interesting Ship of Fools discussion about roots, no wonder I’m pondering and musing again.

Although I am English through and through, since moving north of the border I have felt more ‘at home’ and ‘rooted’ than I think I ever really have in England. I listen to lots of Scottish traditional music and love it, there’s something in it that just touches my soul, and I think I have written before about feeling quite envious of many of the Scottish people who seem to have such a sense of identity and connection to their homeland (I know this isn’t a universal thing, of course, but it is much more noticeable than down south, I have found). If I had my way, I would stay in Scotland forever (with forays into other aspects of my ’soul roots’ like Romania every so often, and extended trips down south to see my folks of course!). I think though that I have felt a bit apologetic and also inferior that I am ‘only’ English, and I don’t think that has necessarily been a positive thing entirely. So when I saw the Imagined Village the other week, I felt really challenged and – for the first time in a long long time – also proud that I have a heritage and that being English is something that can be celebrated as well as something I am vaguely embarrassed about. And I can be proud of being English whilst also echoing (actually not echoing, shouting from the rooftops more like) Eliza Carthy’s most profound “Bollocks to Nick Griffin”. That’s very liberating.

I’d still choose to end up here though – even if we have to move away for a while (depending on work etc). I don’t know that I’d stay in the city, probably not if I had my way. But like there’s a bit of my soul in Romania, there’s a big bit of my soul that just soars here.

Burns Night vegetable dilemma

Are ‘neeps’ swedes or turnips?

I have no idea. I only live here.

For those of a praying disposition …

I can’t find my passport.

Those who know me will be unsurprised to know I am flapping a bit. Argh.

[I know, I know, this is no better than a "find me a parking space" prayer. I'll retract it when I'm calmer]

Celtic Connections 2010

I’ve managed to get to a few Celtic Connections gigs this year – and I’ve been playing with my new camera at the same time. I think I need to pluck up the courage to try the zoom lens, as all these pictures were just taken with the standard lens which has a bit of a zoom but not much.

Anyway, the concerts I/we have been to so far are The Imagined Village at the Fruitmarket, which was the first night of their tour promoting their second CD. We’ve had the first CD on pretty much constant play in the car since HD’s birthday last year (I did a random search on “folk” on Amazon when I was looking for a birthday present for my dad – when I looked at the playlist and artists involved I decided my dad would hate it but we’d love it, and I was right!). This 2nd CD is much more ‘pared down’, it doesn’t have all the guest artists the first one did, but is more of the same reworkings of old folk songs (along with the odd surprise – folky cover of Cum on Feel the Noize anyone?!). The band features (amongst others) Martin and Eliza Carthy, Chris Wood, Simon Emmerson and Johnny Kalsi, plus a guy doing live electronica and theremin, a fabulous sitar player called Sheema Mukherjee, and various others. The show was fabulous, and definitely recommended if you get the chance to catch this tour (info on their Myspace page here. The support act (Jackie Oates) was brilliant as well, and she joined the Imagined Village for a song in their set too.

The next day we were back at the Fruitmarket for Balkanarama – a Balkan night (well obviously!) which was headlined by a band called Besh o droM from Hungary whom we’d wanted to see at WOMAD last year but didn’t quite manage to. When we got there there were a couple of musicians and a dancer in the audience space, and then a group of musicians set themselves up, also in the audience space, and pretty much jammed for an hour. This sounded great, but unfortunately as they weren’t on stage, unless you were right by them it was impossible to see anything at all so it was quite hard to get into. After this there was a group of 3 girls (I think from Serbia) singing a capella (sometimes joined by an amazing beatboxer), then a drumming group accompanying a belly dancer (we weren’t so keen on this group). The penultimate band was called Black Cat whom we really liked – they were pretty loud and frenzied, but in a good way

Finally Besh o droM came on, they were also excellent – quite jazzy as well as Balkan in style, and likewise very very loud! They were still going strong at 1am when we eventually left.

A couple of nights ago I went up by myself (it was midweek so HD was still down south) to the Royal Concert Hall to see an evening called “Legendary Gypsy Queens and Kings”. It was the most fabulous night – there were two house bands, one from France called Kaloome who sounded like the Gypsy Kings, and a Romanian band called Mahala Rai Banda who were absolutely brilliant – very like Fanfara Ciocarlia whom I’d seen before (at Celtic Connections and when I was in Sibiu a few years back), mainly brass but with a brilliant violin player too. They did a fair bit of their own stuff, but also accompanied a couple of dancers (Aurelia Sandu and Tantzica Ionita), Romanian singer Florentina Sandu (fantastic voice, and really beautiful – I’m not jealous), Bulgarian singer Jony Iliev (who made me think of Ozzy Osbourne, but who also had the most incredible voice) and the Macedonian singer whom I saw with Fanfara Ciocarlia in Sibiu, Esma Redzepova. She was the reason I really wanted to go to this show, and certainly didn’t disappoint, but the rest of the show was also just extraordinary, I was absolutely buzzing when I came out.

We’re off to another concert this week coming – I’ll blog about that after the event.

We’re so lucky living here. This festival is absolutely brilliant.

[Click on any of the thumbnails to see a bigger pic]

Moscow’s strays

While I’m on a bit of an article-posting roll, this is a much less depressing article about Moscow’s stray dogs which I found via a tweet from wiblogger World Without End. I was really interested in the observation about how the strays all looked the same, it got me thinking to Romania where I think that’s also true.

Here’s a picture of the stray that attached itself to the little block where I stayed in Sibiu – you could see his cousins all over town, and very very rarely saw stray dogs that looked different:

He barked like mad every time I came back to the flat for about a week, then when he knew I was there to stay he stopped barking and deigned to allow me in. He started again when HD came to stay though! (I bet our neighbours loved us when we arrived in Sibiu in the small hours. He was a great burglar deterrent though, for a little dog he had serious vocal chords!). The little old lady next door who kept staring at me while I had breakfast until I got blinds for the kitchen used to feed him scraps (despite the protests of the downstairs neighbour who didn’t want to encourage him). I used to see him wandering along Str. Balcescu with the tourists and locals, but he always came back to our yard without fail. I think he was a cross between a “guard dog” (his primary trait I think) and “beggars” of the article.