It’s been a quiet but busy start to the year. Somehow we’re already two weeks in – three weeks from Christmas – and half a page through the calendar.
It’s been bitterly cold. The hosepipe is frozen solid, and when you unhook it from the reel it stands up in mid-air with the spray on the end, like a cobra ready to pounce. Entertaining, but not much use when you want to clean out the chickens.
They don’t seem to have noticed it at all. We’re still averaging two eggs a day, which is a slight disappointment after we were briefly getting three a time. Gerry’s the lazy girl. We get one pink egg from here for every four or five brown and cream ones from the other two.
The trains, needless to say, haven’t enjoyed the cold. A breakdown or delay almost every day have made riding to work and back no fun at all. It wouldn’t be so bad if they told the radio, but the travel reports talk of gloriously empty and smooth-running lines every morning.
Not so.
Tags: Work
Posted in Journal, Work | 1 Comment »
It’s been something of a record this week. It took a good two hours to get into work one day on a journey that as the crow flies is a mere 35 miles. That was nothing compared to today. Rich got to the station and they were turning everyone back at the gates. The points had failed and there were no trains going anywhere.
So he came home and we worked from here.
Working at home is a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand you don’t have any of the distractions you get in the office – no ringing phones, nobody wandering up to your desk, no half-heard conversations going on at other desks. It means you get a lot done, and since eight this morning I’ve popped out 3,840 words, including most of a feature for the next issue.
So that’s all good.
But on the other hand you have to try and keep up with your other jobs, do your emails through a browser rather than a proper client and sit by a window looking out on the garden where you’d rather be pulling up carrots or harvesting this year’s beetroot or playing with the chickens, who have been standing at the front of their run looking up at the study window waiting for someone to come down with some corn for them to peck at.
You also end up working much longer as there are no defined ends to the day. I’m just packing up now, at gone 7pm, having not spotted that the end of the day – technically 6 – passed an hour ago.
So, let’s keep our fingers crossed for better trains tomorrow. For one thing it’ll get us away from the fermenter. We’re brewing wine this week, and its air lock is sputtering out a vaguely winey gas at regular intervals from where it sits in a corner of the kitchen. The cat’s not too keen on the noise and I can’t say I’m too enamoured with the smell. I’m sure we must have the whiff of a wino whenever we leave the house.
Tags: train, trains, wine, Work, working
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Before the awards: the empty stage, and the graphics being tweaked
Last night was our awards for this year. Today, the expo. They always coincide.
The Awards came back to central London – we took over the Ballroom at the Grosvenor House Hotel – from the Hurlingham Club where we’ve been for the last few years. The food was excellent, the comedy very funny (Stephen K Amos – I’d not seen him before, but the demo we picked him from was great) and the ambience pretty spot on. I didn’t get to bet until four this morning and even then there was still a good crowd in the bar, which inevitably meant there were some very tired faces at the expo today.
Perhaps the fact the expo was so small this year was a blessing in disguise. We were the only magazine with hospitality which meant we had an almost constant stream of visitors, giving us an excellent excuse to break up the trips around the show floor with plentiful teas and coffees with the other exhibitors back on our comfy chairs.
The most interesting conversation of the two events, though, wasn’t one I had with anyone at the expo, but with the woman who looked after the awards. I asked her what she did when she wasn’t being a trophy hander (or trophy girl as she put it). She said she was a singer, model and advert actor and gets a lot of work from DFS. Why? Because she’s short, and they like to use short people because it makes their sofas look big.
Tags: awards, expo, Work
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Hardraw Force
It’s been a bit quiet around here of late. Things have been busy, but most importantly we had a week away. Volkswagen lent us a car from its press pool and we took it to Yorkshire with the rest of the family to buzz around the Dales, drinking tea and eating scones in the little hillside villages (below) in between treks up muddy paths to take photos of the waterfalls (above).
We’ve been watching All Creatures Great and Small, so naturally we hunted out the spots that had featured in the show – tiny little Langthwaite, for example, where Seigfried and James could be seen driving over the humpy bridge in the show’s opening credits, and to Askrigg, which was the setting for the surgery at the fictional Skeldale House, and then to Bolton Castle where James – in the series, not real life – proposed to Helen, and she said yes. One day we drove out of the Dales to the real surgery in Thirsk and visited the World of James Herriot, which turned out to be an excellent little hands-on museum, and where we discovered that he wasn’t really called James Herriot at all, but Alf Wight (he wasn’t allowed to use his real name as it would have counted as advertising).
One day we visited the Black Sheep Brewery and came out smelling of hops and yeast from the vats of beer that put our own brewing efforts to shame.
And eventually, of course, we had to come home and back to day to day life. The cat was very glad to see us.
And day to day life is quite full right now, which is the real reason why the blogging has been so quiet. The proofs of the book, which comes out in either September or November, depending on who you listen to, have just come back from the publisher and so needed reading and correcting while we were away. I’m working my way through those connections now, ready to send back at the end of the week. It’s already sold over 1000 copies in the US on pre-orders, and looking Amazon’s UK listings it’s apparently the 61st best-selling digital photography guide.
The second edition of the Independent Guide to the iPhone has just been published, after several weeks of re-writing and editing. And we’ve all just finished working on the Independent Guide to the Mac.
So it’s been a busy time, which means blogging has taken a bit of a back seat, both here and over at Blagger.
Hopefully, as things settle down, that should all change. Typing fingers crossed.
Low Row
Tags: bookazines, holiday, Work, yorkshire
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