I'm back

For the last three months I have been mostly reading Paradise Lost

"No one ever wished it longer than it is" (Samuel Johnson)

It's all because of Philip Pullman of course. That's the trouble with hero-worship: it starts innocently enough with the books, then comes the much-better-than-you-thought film; before long you're in the front row at obscure gigs, hanging on every word, and three weeks later you find yourself striding round the house like armoured bear shouting at the children Surely. At. Least. ONE. Of. You. Must. Have. Seen. My. New. Alethiometer.


It's not that my other project didn't work exactly, it's more that I didn't try: I managed just two posts. My sister read them. She told me they were good but, compared to greenideas, they made me seem a little embittered. I must have been in a jolly mood.

Anyway its 2008 and I'm back...with resolution (it's to weigh myself every Tuesday)

----//----

After Satan sets out on his mission to Earth to suborn (or enlighten?) mankind the other devils are left to their own devices. Some horse around, some form a choral society (really) and others, well...

Others apart sat on a Hill retir'd,
In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,
Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledg absolute,
And found no end, in wandring mazes lost.
[Book II, 557]

They invented the blogosphere! How could I stay away?

Smiles and Goodbyes

It's not often that Mrs Botogol and I go to the pub of a Friday evening, but last Friday we did: we found ourselves with a small window of time: after some oohing and aahing at a riverside firework display and some 'yes, butting' at John Humphrys In Search of a Decent Mic, and prior to collecting a Botogol child from a party (100 noisy teenagers crammed into a biggish suburban Victorian house, all texting their absent friends).

"D'you know what I fancy doing, Mrs B", I said, "in this snatched and precious child-free hour we find that we have together?"

"Scrabble, I suppose?" she said, not entirely unenthusiastically.

"Nope", I said , "well, actually, later on, yes, possibly, but nope: right now I fancy going down the pub, so fetch your coat".

An old joke, but a good one, and a cheap laugh is always worth a smack round the back of the head. That's what my Dad says, anyway.

So that's how, dear reader, we found ourselves sharing a jumbo packet of cheese and onion in the Twickenham Tup, snucked up hard against each other on a large leather sofa shared with two spotty teenagers, all of us watching the house band Cambio strum out their very own version of Babylon (yes, indeed: they made it their own)

I say 'band': it was actually two kids with guitars; and less Pet Shop Boys - more Flight of the Conchords.

To be frank I thought Their Good Riddance (Time of your Life) worked better than their Moonlight in Vermont but, at the end of day, I'm a sucker for live music of all sorts and as Mrs Botogol sagely observed: if they haven't ever rehearsed Mustang Sally they can't really be expected to play it for any random bloke in the pub just because he shouts loudly, now can they?

So it came to pass last Friday evening, while two unappreciative old men in a far corner of the cavernous suburban pub nursed their quiet pints of London Pride, unseeing, unhearing and while, behind the bar, three strappy-topped young barmaids danced and pranced, Mrs B and myself, on our leather sofa shared with two young texting teenagers, well: we rocked.

While we rocked our sofa-companions texted blurry camphone pictures to absent friends, and eventually I went off to the bar for two more glasses of Australian Pinot Grigio before the second set, then at 10.25 we had to put our coats on and left: no encores, no cheers, no vote of thanks, no epitaphs, we just slipped away.

I'd honour Cambio with a link, but they appear to be the only band in the Western Hemisphere without a page on MySpace

John Humphrys, since you ask, was rubbish. Well, for anyone who, perhaps, hadn't realised that Humphrys has met quite a few famous people, some of whom have been mildly funny, it would have been a revelation. But for the other 569 people in the building, the ones who had come to this Book Festival event hoping to hear about his book it was a tad disappointing. "Thank you very much Mr Humphrys", said the hapless MC sending Humphrys off into the deep, dark night with a few well chosen words, "for coming here to talk about your book. Although you didn't actually say much about it did you?"


We could hear the teenage party a good three roads before we got to it: music, voices and dancing, merged with the bleeps of incoming text messages and missed calls. In the shadows of the front garden our particular teenager answered her call, and we set off for home. What was the party like, we wondered "It promised a lot, Dad, but yielded little"

We took the short-cut home, over the railway station bridge, and it was there, high above the platforms and the electrified tracks, in the neon gloom of an autumn night that we spotted our S J Harvey's peculiar and poignant notice, and we paused, and we hurried on.

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There have been 107 green ideas since I started in Oct 2006, and it's been a lot fun.

I'm not stopping now, not exactly, but I have a new project in mind and I'm not sure I will have time to manage both. If the new thing works I'll be back in the new year, I reckon; if it doesn't - well perhaps next week. Or perhaps once a month.... or once a week :-)

Working 5 to 9

The Bachelor by Yankees Man.

This last fortnight I've been working like a dog.

Well, OK, not exactly like a dog: not rounding up sheep, sniffing out drugs, helping blind people cross the road or fetching dead birds in my mouth. Nope: for this dog it's mainly Powerpoint, for there's nothing like a change in management structure to raise the demand for slides.

I should write a book about it:

An introduction to Powerpoint in Business.

1. Content: how to judge the quality of the MIS by the layout of the slide.
2. Avoiding the complete sentence: how to write in bullets.
   
3. Advanced Formatting: how to fit the Executive Summary on one page without reducing the font size)
4. Powerpoint by Committee: the importance of versioning and the futility of style.
   

When one is working silly hours blogging sometimes feels like homework. Perhaps it would work better on a slide....

Dumbing Down

An American reader tells me my blog is too complicated for her friends to understand, and that I need to dumb it down.

"Don't tell me!" said I, smugly, "it's the irony and the cultural allusions right? Too much irony and too many cultural allusions." She told me no one likes a smartass, and did I imagine that The Simpsons was made in America solely for the benefit of Brits? Sometimes I feel very Old Europe.

I asked her to explain

Well, for one thing, she told me, you should start a story at the beginning and then go on to the middle before getting to the end. And stick to the subject; quit wondering off. And don't mention Tesco so often. Or Blue Peter. And sort out those long sentences and what's the 'lower remove' did you make that up? And, omigod, would you please, please just finish things off properly and not leave them dangling: I mean, dude, did you get to see the semi-final or not?

Perhaps I should have explained: my friend is a New Yorker. They don't talk like that in Colorado. No siree, Bob mcDandy they don't.

Actually I like New York - it's just like London. Only with more weather; and 40watt lightbulbs, and it has never palled that one of the perks of my indescribable job is that I regularly get to visit London's twin city.

Mind you, trips to mirrror-world are less rewarding since old Forbes sold his Fabergé egg collection in 2004 - nine eggs he had along with toy soldiers, and old monopoly sets, in a tiny dark gallery on 5th avenue where sometimes I'd be the only visitor, marvelling over painstaking exquisitry.

However, while Manhattan may have lost its Forbes' eggs I can still recommend it, as it's the venue for some fine margaritas; indeed perhaps the perfect margarita can be found in Dos Caminos, where they have 120 brands of Tequila and a basement full of Mexican wetbacks hand-squeezing the limes. And don't miss the weirdly unpromising but surprisingly excellent blood orange margarita in the louche and low, chic and charming, bad and baleful, Morgans Bar.


"So do you think?", I asked my friend, absently, for one part of my mind was back in that dim-dark bar, struggling to double the tax in my tequilia-swimming head, "So, do you think that if I DID dumb down my blog, would I get more comments?"

Education Special

On Friday evening Mrs Botogol and I had dinner with four teachers, all from the same school. Worryingly: three of them taught me when I was at the school myself, many years ago.

Frighteningly: the fourth is younger than I am but, just like the others, had taught at the school for more than twenty years.

With all of them so thoroughly steeped in the education system, and my mysterious incomprehensible job in the city, I had wondered if we would have anything in common but I needn't have worried: in an intriguing bout of role reversal, as the evening wore on I lectured the history teacher on the battle of Borodino and the economist on Idea Futures while they regaled me with stories about what it is like to own a racehorse. I guess we were all trying to impress.

Then on Saturday the Botogol family went en masse to the Cheltenham Literature festival. That's right: more school.

Well, that's what happens when you go and get educated: one moment you're throwing babyfood on the floor and tantrums in Tesco, the next you're in the third row of Cheltenham Town Hall listening carefully to Roy Hattersley's opinion of Stanley Baldwin and Britain in the interwar years. Or smuggling a sly syllepsis into an otherwise grammatically undistinguished blog. The first sign, I reckon, is watching Blue Peter: it's all down hill from there.

Anyway: the festival. In the end there wasn't any poetry at all, gay or otherwise: in the morning we all went together to DT and History; then after lunch (we were all hot dinners) we split up: while I'm not claiming that the education system is dumbed down or anything, let's just say that Mrs Botogol and I had Add. History followed by Comp. Lit, while the Lower Remove had a spare and went off early to watch to semi-final.

If truth be told I was a tiny bit jealous; but I quickly thought of a way to get my own back:

"Haven't you got any homework to do in half term?" I asked my youngest, "that you should be doing this afternoon?"
"No, Dad, I've just got one piece, I don't need to start today"
"Oh, what do you have to do?"
"I've got to write a play in two acts, about environmental issues"

Might as well leave it to next week, then.

I'm with Wayne Barnes

U11s run a lot faster than U10s and this season sometimes referees - even super-fit triathletes - find it hard to keep up. So, at two tries each, with three minutes to go, when the super-fast left wing was caught by the full back in the far corner, well I was just very glad I had a touch judge, and when his flag shot up it was a simple matter to call a line out 5m back.

"Line-out??" said the TJ indignantly, "Line out????? He wasn't out! That was a try!"

Now, I might not have the prestige of Wayne Barnes, but on my side I have many more years of experience, and I knew what I was doing:

"But..", said I, "...but you put your flag up!"

"Yes of course I did! I was signalling a try!"

There was a short pause, punctuated only by very troubled 11 year olds

"Ummm, yes,.. sorry about that, ref", he said, (delightfully sheepish, now) "I was, um, excited ... but it was a try"


I don't suppose this situation comes up very often for it's not mentioned in the Continuum. So I pondered for a moment, surrounded by 11yr olds with points of view, and it didn't take me long.

"Sorry boys, silly mix-up. Try given"

The boys were fine about it, I relaxed, problem solved.

Except for ....except for.... over on far, touchline a small group of parents were incensed "Oi Ref! But he put his flag up! Oi Ref, what are you doing? It's a line out, surely"

There are a great many hand signals available to the rugby referee, but they don't include anything for "Sorry, everyone, but the touch judge is a prat"

So I had to make one up. I'm altogether not certain it worked, but touch judge understood which, after all, was the important thing.

Simplifying My Life

I could kick myself.

Really: what's the point of having a World Cup Wall Chart if I don't read it? What an idiot.

In my defence: I never seriously thought England had a chance of making the semi-finals; but obviously I would have at least pencilled it in to the calendar, wouldn't I? You would think so, wouldn't you? A clue: 'no'.

So, at 8pm on Saturday England will play France in the semi-final of the World Cup..... and Mrs Botogol and I will be at a gay poetry reading.


Early this morning, thundering four abreast on our hardtails down the tow path at Ham, my friend announced he was simplifying his life. We were surprised, we said. On whole, we told him, he seemed pretty simple to us already. No, he said, by simplifying he meant he was jettisoning the unnecessary, the distracting, the inconsequential and the inessential in his life.

Well, we naturally assumed he was dumping us and we were a trifle miffed. "What, after all these years?", we asked, and I quickly mentioned the inner tube he still owes me.

But it turned out he didn't mean us at all. He meant... well.... So far as I could gather he meant he couldn't make the poker school at the Cabbage Patch of a Wednesday evening.

Simplify his life. And he's not even a Quaker (#41)

But maybe he has a point; maybe you CAN'T follow rugby AND go to gay poetry evenings.
Not in the long run.