Tag: life

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raves

Now that is book…

According to that repository of urban hipness, The Spectator, New York street lingo for ‘cool’ is now ‘book’. It comes from predictive text of the T9 type, which often offers ‘book’ when you type in 2665 (which also spells ‘cool’).

No, I didn’t believe it either, because, hello, Speccie telling me something about street life as opposed which boutique hotel in Estonia I should be staying at or whether to buy dresses of the Diane Von Furstenberg or ISSA variety, or telling me how to manage the diplomatic fallout caused by an as-yet-unwritten thank you letter for a lunch six months ago…?

But I checked it out on Google and it seems to be true.

Steve Jobs reckons that nobody reads books anymore, or so I heard. But if the word ‘book’ itself is, yanno, book, then that itself is pretty book… innit?

Categories
nostalgia

Fin de ano in Summertown Costa

Fin de ano in Summertown CostaOriginally uploaded by mgharris


It’s usually more crowded than this…

If we’d got our act together and organised a babysitter we could be looking forward to a sizzling New Year’s Eve party tonight, at Vauxhall’s Club Colosseum, chez Salsa Republic.

But…pfahhh…London. Who’s got the energy?

So it’s a quiet night in with our youngest whilst Teenage Daughter stays up all night with her mates.

We’re going to close Costa…they’re trying to grab the chairs from under us.

Happy New Year, y’all. Hope I get to meet some of you in 2008.

MG
XXX
Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Categories
raves

Hello world…

Being a writer of fiction I find that my natural propensity to daydream has now become a completely justifiable way to spend my time. I even get to give it diary time:

Daydream over a primo soy milk mocha in Summertown Costa.

I don’t read newspapers or print media much: to quote Comic Book Guy from a Simpson’s episode I recently glimpsed, “I get my news from the Internet, like any normal person.”  I don’t watch mainstream TV since we got SkyPlus – we program everything and then watch, often 3/4 episodes at a time, months after they were aired. (I haven’t seen the last 6 episodes of Life on Mars or Doctor Who yet…)…and I certainly don’t watch the news on TV. For us, SkyPlus has completed removed any notion of watching TV at a certain time (i.e. when your show is on, or when the news is actually on).

YouTube and blogs have eroded my attention span whilst on the computer, so that I am now addicted to short entertainment breaks during the working day.

I read The Spectator once a week, but skip the book reviews of very intellectual books that I’m unlikely to read, of art exhibitions I’m unlikely to attend, of operas and plays I’m almost certainly not going to see. And the bridge column… And since the Speccie stopped doing the one page review of the week’s news, I have only the vaguest notion of what is going on in the world.

Really I’m no different to when I was a scientist. I had my head down in science then, like most scientists. It’s a very intensive life; no matter how hard you work at it you’re forever behind in your reading. And I don’t mean about the real world. Forget that – who has the time? I mean the tiny field of your expertise. If you’re lucky it’s a matter of reading 5 or 6 high-impact papers per month. If you’re in some mega-trendy field that could be more like 20.

Once in a while I plug back into the world and it’s a revelation.

This week I watched BBC1 for a whole evening. I read a whole Saturday supplement of a broadsheet. I read Cosmopolitan cover to cover. The things I saw, heard and read! Pop music and the US elections and all the Big Ideas of 2007…fashion, makeup…and so much more.

I had this sudden flash of insight. For a few seconds the world made a brilliant kind of sense. I felt engaged – maybe once again – to the world that I normally wander through in a bewildered daze. I began to formulate ideas, felt the incipient scratchings of understanding…

And then it vanished, all of it, every scrap of connectedness.

Italo Calvino wrote a short story about this feeling. So I guess it’s not just me. Maybe we all wander around in this haze of awareness.

So who are all those people who walk around so confidently, who seem to know exactly what’s going on, how this all works and where to go for this’n’that and the other?

Is there maybe some podcast I can download that’ll scrape everything essential together; a quick guide for the bewildered, for fantasists like me?

Categories
raves

Gorgeous Things

Jane Sehmi of Sehmi Precious Jewels

Out on the town with my BlackBerry again, I dropped in on my good pal Jane Sehmi (pictured above). We’ve been friends for ages, since learning how to do drug-free childbirth down at the local NCT. Well, giggling and drinking coffee more like…

Jane went and splashed out one day on some gorgeous gorgeous beads and her high-powered IT executive husband took one look at the (allegedly extravagant) haul and shrewdly suggested she start a business making and selling handmade jewellery…

So she did! It’s called Sehmi Precious Jewellry and if you’re one of Jane’s mates you get the occasional invite to her lovely home, treated to tea or coffee and a viewing of the jewels.

I went over to inspect the goods and catch up with Jane, with whom I like to compare and contrast adventures of our too-fabulous-for-their-own-good teenage daughters.

The news is that they are both still far too fabulous and not quite the earnest, studious girls we hoped to raise, being far too glamorous to be seen in the company of their sad old parents, at least that’s my daughter. Jane’s may be more merciful than mine…

Meanwhile Jane displayed her jewellery in some truly imaginative and stylish ways – see photos below. I was going to buy presents for friends, but couldn’t resist. I’m keeping every single thing I bought for myself.

Lookee here…

Categories
raves

The Brilliance of Professor Pete Simpson

When I’m privileged enough to hook up with my late Mummy’s old flame and good pal Pete Simpson, moral philosopher, Aristotelophile and Monty Python fan, I like to play Devil’s Advocate and ask him all those tricky questions that the brightest of my atheist friends ask me when we’re up late drinking and they start on at me about believing in God.

Here’s Peter’s answer to this old bugbear:

But how can any religion be true if each one says it’s the one true religion?

Well, that rather depends on whether truth is important in religion.

If you believe that religion is simply a cultural phenomenon, that we are chosen for any religion simply because of our circumstances and ethnic background, then whether any one is more true than another does not matter; religion, in this scenario, is merely a preference, like a cultural preference for vanilla ice cream. And so what does it matter? Why get involved, why comment, why bother, if the truth of any religion doesn’t actually matter?

But if you believe that truth IS important, well then you have a problem because you can’t simply dismiss any religion; before you dismiss it you have to work through the evidence, the historical and other claims made for each religion.

Contrary to popular belief, most believers don’t dismiss other religions. The truth has been revealed in many ways, to different people all over the world, has been understood in different ways but there is a huge area of commonality, the greatest one is probably this: we are answerable to something higher than ourselves for our conduct during our lives. Afterlife or no afterlife (and religions certainly don’t agree about the nature or existence of afterlife) – there will be reckoning.

I’m always amazed when atheists accuse the religious of using belief as a comfort. I’d take more comfort in knowing that I could misbehave ad infinitum with eternal impunity! And that’s another thing that amazes me about atheists. How come so many of them are so darn well-behaved, altruistic and generally lovely? (I wouldn’t be, I’m sure I’d be ever so wicked…)

As my Mexican grandfather, Agustin Reyes Ponce used to say, “Sea por Dios” (It’ll be God’s doing…)