Of good news and cuteness

So I met with my line manager, and she has said that I can move to 4 days a week from May. Thank you for your supportive messages, I appreciated them all very much.

A friend posted this on facebook and I just had to share, I challenge you to watch it and not smile:

More Tory madness

This story in today’s Times is yet one more reason (I’ve lost count, I think I might be nearly at 5 figures now) why despite every other party’s considerable inadequacy you won’t see me voting Tory this year (or, er, ever). Actually I’m waiting for Tractor Girl’s much more sensible and incisive comment on the article, given that it is about her field rather than mine (ie education). For now, all I have to say is:

Carol Vorderman – one of the greatest minds in Britain???????!!!!!! Good grief, whatever next, they’ll be asking Gillian McKeith to write university curricula for medicine.

These guys are seriously scary, God help us all if they get in.

Guilt

Today I went into uni rather than work (this has been planned for a while, using up some annual leave). I had a good chat with a fellow PhD writer-upper, who reminded me (this was a rehash of a regular conversation we had, but I’d not seen her for a few months) how the PhD process seems to be as infused with guilt as any religion. However much work you do, you’re convinced you haven’t done enough. However much work you do, everyone else seems to have done more. However interesting and original your research is, it’s contrived and unoriginal compared with everyone else. “Good enough” is never good enough. No wonder it’s stressful.

In other, utterly unrelated news, after only a few days off the chocolate and alcohol I have so many zits I look horrific! If you see someone driving round Glasgow tomorrow with a paper bag over their head, you’ll know who it is.

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.

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]

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.

My WISE gift

Thank you very much to the lovely farli who sent me these lovely wooden tree decorations (plus a stick of rock as a clue, although I already had guessed my secret Santa’s identity from the postmark!). Rather embarrassingly we appear to have lost our Christmas tree (and with it all the previous decorations, including Miss Lisa’s decoration from last year’s WISE and some decorations from birdie as well from a ship secret Santa from a few years ago). It is in storage somewhere, but we couldn’t find it so I’m afraid we did without. However hopefully next year we’ll be more organised (and hopefully will be somewhere bigger where we don’t need the storage unit any more) and will have found the tree, so I’ll be able to show them in situ doing what they were created for.

Thanks again farli, the decorations are beautiful.

Happy New Year

A few days late, but I am now back in Glasgow after a lovely week away down south visiting family, and gearing up to returning to work tomorrow (today is a bank holiday this side of the border, but before you jump up and down, we don’t get the August bank holiday – I think with the various changes it still all works out the same over the year).

After a quiet but lovely Christmas we headed down south on Boxing Day and spent a couple of nights at my parents’ place. I managed to do the bulk of my chapter 3 (which will later become chapter 4 as I rejig things) revision, and we had a walk through a park I used to play in as a child which was a bit bracing but nice to have a few minutes out. Then we headed slightly further south and spent a couple of nights at HD’s parents (where his sister, brother-in-law and nieces were also staying, so it was a bit noisier there). I used their broadband to email off the chapter revisions, and then was able to relax a bit. We went to the Milton Keynes shopping centre as I was after a new camera, this turned out to be a big mistake (MK shopping centre is HUGE, but has no specialist camera shop! Outrageous! Plus the rest of the county and beyond had the same idea, and it was absolutely heaving there). Anyway after all that we headed off to Herefordshire to stay with HD’s sister and family (the same lot who were at the outlaws – it was great to be able to spend so much time with them). Very excitingly, we went into Hereford on New Year’s Eve and I managed to buy a camera from a specialist (rather than a chain) and beat the VAT rise, and so I am now the proud owner of a second-hand one of these. It’s very shiny! (and was a bargain)

For new year we all piled down to Somerset, and spent the night at some friends of HD’s sister’s family (whom HD also knew though they’d not seen each other since we got married so it was the first time I’d met them). We played Wii Samba which was fun, I played with the camera, and we had a lovely time. After returning we just chilled out, built a wardrobe, chilled out some more, and then we headed back up north yesterday. HD is now back in his digs and back to work today (his contract has been extended until the end-ish of March, which is good from the work/money point of view though not ideal from the living-in-the-same-place-as-his-wife-ie-me point of view), and I finally got home about 7.30 yesterday evening. It is very cold here, and icy, so I’m a bit nervous about driving to work tomorrow. We’ll see.

Rather upsettingly, when I got home I found that my key to the front (communal) door didn’t fit the lock, so I thought that it had been changed. The neighbour let me in, and it turns out that it is the same lock, but someone broke in last week by picking the lock and it is now really difficult to use – it’s always been a bit stiff, but I can now only get my key about half-way in. Even worse, they had broken into my neighbour’s place by pretty much kicking the door in, and had stolen quite a lot of stuff. The rest of the flats weren’t touched, but it is still worrying. Hopefully seeing the burglar alarm put them off. And in the meantime, we are finding it really hard to get in, and relying on neighbours who are already in to buzz us in. This morning I was woken up hearing someone trying unsuccessfully to open the door, it was absolutely freezing out there so I couldn’t ignore it so I let my upstairs neighbour in (at 7am – the poor guy looked frozen solid!), and we will have to phone the factors (management company) tomorrow when they get back to work as I think it will have to have a new lock. So I have to say I’m feeling rather Daily Mail-ish about whoever it was who did it, and it’s brought back some not-at-all pleasant memories of the two burglaries I had in London.

I have new year resolution-type-things to think about and other stuff, but it’s 1pm so I probably ought to get out of bed (if it’s any consolation, despite being in bed and the heating on, my fingers are still blue from the cold – according to the BBC weather, the daytime maximum temperature in Glasgow today will be -1, and at night the minimum temperature will be -8. Looks like the scraper will be getting plenty of use! Anyway – happy new year to you all, and I hope 2010 is happy, healthy and generally good to you.

Happy Christmas to all

It’s just a few more hours till Midnight Mass, so it’s as good a time as ever to wish all my blog readers a very happy Christmas. I hope you have safe travels, good times with people you care about, and hope and joy throughout the holiday.