Summer preview Jury service over, an afternoon visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where summer is rushing in fast. (Hampstead is that much further north?) Miki photographed plants, I studied WebFonts beneath an apple-tree and we played frisbee and fed stale bread to geese and ducks at the lake, where I got pan-handled by a heron for the first time in my life. Ol' reptile-brain furiously drove off the other birds, grappled unhappily with the hard little crumbs, then sulked and glowered as we fast-balled crumbs past him and out to the lake. No pleasing some animals.
A graceful apology on behalf of the BVMA committee from Professor Curtis Price of the Royal Academy of Music for “the appalling treatment that you and your guests from the Atelier Sakamoto received
”, as reported 15 April.
I am particularly dismayed by your report, because the festival and exhibition were in many other ways very successful. Your letter put a damper on the whole event for me.
The Atelier Sakamoto is closed until early May, when the principals return from Japan. No doubt I'll be able then to report a satisfactory conclusion to this.
Home at last Successfully moved 5jt.com to its new home, after months in temporary lodgings. Thanks to Bob Hoekstraand the boys at NovaWeb Hosting; every success with your new ventures. (5jt.com and Lambent's new clients are now esconced at Fasthosts. Thanks again to Jim Bell of the Kircudbright Community Website for the recommendation.)
To party, to party last night to celebrate the launch of Oojami's new album Urban Dervish. It was a typical Hubble Bubble event, with belly dancers and trapeze and Sufi dancers performing to the band's hypnotic "belly dancing breakbeat". Place was packed, but still ran into Asu Aksoy and madly-dancing sister Gulsen, Claire Dowsing, and Andrew from the late-lamented Barefoot Boogie. Just what I needed after a day spent in jury service.
Sour notes at the Royal Academy of Music. The weekend before Easter we welcomed guests Shinobu & Risa Sakamoto from the Atelier Sakamoto in Cremona, where they make violins in what I understand is the Silicon Valley of violin making. The Sakamotos were in town for the International Violin Festival, where they had entries in the 1st International BVMA Violin and Bow Making Competition.
This competition, a first for the British Violin Making Association, boasted several innovations. One was that instruments would be judged on their sound as well as on their appearance and construction, however surprising that might seem to us outsiders. Another was that visitors to the exhibition would have an opportunity to play the instruments. Violins such as these are valuable works of craft, so they were to be played "in practice rooms" under "strict supervision" of BVMA staff.
The quotes above are from the BVMA competition rules. Astonishingly, the BVMA appears not to have observed them. Members of the public were free to wander the exhibition hall, picking up violins and bows at will, observed from the corners of the hall by the organisers. Our guests told us that their and other exhibitors' instruments suffered minor damage requiring repairs before the instruments were again fit for sale. It seems to be a tribute to the visitors, not the BVMA, that no more serious damage was done.
Despite their limited English, the Sakamotos planned to discuss these and related issues with the organisers when they collected their instruments. Alarmingly, they were unable to do this at the scheduled time: the organisers weren't there. With a flight to catch the next morning, our guests appealed to us for help and assisted by the security staff we placed calls to the Academy's principal Curtis Price and other staff. 2-3 hours later we recovered the instruments and spoke to the organisers. I pointed out that by not having the instruments ready for collection, they had kept our guests waiing over two hours. "So what?" came the reply. One becomes used to dealing with people who value their time and respect others'; it's hard to know what to say to someone who doesn't.
We eventually established a minimum of civility and our guests were able to express their dissatisfaction, but without the experience of being taken seriously. The BVMA team repeatedly took comfort from recollecting that no one else had complained. Well, someone always has to be first. Will this irrelevant and discourteous remark always greet them?
Our guests got their instruments back, caught their flight and have repaired the damage to their instruments. They tell me that a number of ateliers in the Cremona region are writing to the BVMA. I wrote the next day to the chairman of the BVMA, with a copy to Professor Price, expressing my dismay at the way our guests were treated, and saying I hoped eventually to hear they have received a satisfactory reply to their complaint.
I've delayed posting here, but ten days later have seen neither acknowledgement nor reply. No doubt the Easter holiday has something to do with it. I hope to report a satisfactory conclusion soon, when I will place a link to it here.
» Apology from Prof. Price
» Conclusion (nothing yet from BVMA)
Ed to Joy When I lived in a religious cult in the mountains of South Korea, one of my many surprises was to meet a local fan of the poetry of Robert Burns. Deceived by the apparent 'foreignness' of Lallans (the Lowland Scots dialect of English that Scots inists is a distinct language) I had not appreciated how far the intimate voice of Burns travels.
Now Eddi Reader has done a lovely thing, and recorded The Songs of Robert Burns. This is the sunniest album I've heard since John James' 1969 Morning Brings The Light. Celtic music is traditionally long on wild melancholy; but Reader brings Burns' familiar lyrics alive with a fresh and radiant tenderness. Buy and play it often.
Litigator Advice to a friend who's training to become a litigating tax lawyer: You're looking for a firm to take you on and train you. You don't fit the mould of manageable 20-something women. You need to show up for your target firms as a potential litigator, someone who might make a valuable partner.
From my limited experience, litigation happens when negotiation breaks down. Conversely, the expectation of how litigation would end is a powerful factor in negotiation. A formidable litigator is also a formidable negotiator.
Your passion, energy and intelligence are manifest. You don't, however, occur for people as formidable; you don't manifest that quality. In finding the law firm that will train you, you will learn to manifest that.
How will you do that? From your Jungian training, you already respect the transformational power of mythology. Use that to empower yourself. Traditionally, you might study particular ancient myths or meditate on certain Tarot trumps; but, hey, you have the 21st century's vast array of story-telling aparatus at your command.
Try Ripley's character in Alien and Aliens. Or Dave Robicheaux in the novels of James Lee Burke; you'll find a few in the crime section of most public libraries. He is an avatar of the Wounded Healer, a hero with the Achilles heel of his alcoholism. Or — last night's discovery, a gift from Maurizio & Gabriella Iori, our guests a fortnight ago — director Sally Potter's own character in her wonderful film The Tango Lesson, in which the English diffidence of her manner mutes neither her passion nor her formidable ability to create a movie from her imagination.
Spring cleaning Spent Easter Monday at last installing the 54g wireless router I bought some months ago; about an 8-hour job before the three different Windows machines and (triumph) the new-chum Linux machine were all through to a DNS server and the wild, wild web. Desktop tower Max has been sharing the Net connection for so long: it's uncanny how quiet the office is without its fan running.
More spring cleaning. I and my clients have for the last few years been hosted by Easyspace, a UK hosting company. Last year we had two alarming incidents. In one of them, a small consulting firm lost its email service for a week. I eventually got the incident resolved, but only after downloading the board of directors from Companies House and telephoning one of them at home. Most disturbingly, when I phoned him on his unlisted number with a referral from his managing director, Easyspace's manager displayed no curiosity about why I was requesting support this way. I now firmly recommend against using Easyspace as a host.
I resolved to take my sites and clients where I could host everybody inside my own account, and provide formally the first-line support my clients ask me for anyway. Tried a small hosting company part-owned by a colleague (hey, I already have his home number) and was delighted by their helpfulness. How do they afford it? Turns out they can't, and are closing up shop after four years.
James Bell, webmaster for the Kirkcudbright Community Website I founded in 1998, recommended Fasthosts, where I now have a reseller account. Telephone support over the Easter weekend was knowledgeable and helpful. The websites are moving across; if all goes well, clients will follow.
Easter Sunday saw us at lunch with Nick Sowicz and his son Janos. I measure the success of my events by the time the last guest leaves: it was 8pm before Nick could get us out the door. Many thanks, mate.
Weapons of Mass Distraction Maria Wells writes:
Go to Google and search for "Weapons of Mass Destruction", but don't hit Search, hit I'm Feeling Lucky. Then read the error message you get. The tears are still running down my face.
» Bush's Crusade
» Support John Kerry for President
Another light A barker on Hampstead High St guided us in to a small charity jumble sale. Late in the afternoon, so the best was of course gone. Still it's always worth looking through what Hampstead people throw away. The sale was in aid of the Impersonal Enlightenment Fellowship, whose spiritual leader Andrew Cohen correctly points out that while we rich, educated First Worlders have the power to avert the various catastrophes threatening the human race, our fascination with the life of the ego — money, sex and status — effectively prevents us from doing so. What the world needs now is enlightened people, which means devoting our lives to realising our Authentic Selves. Of course he's right, but aren't we all just too mean and too stupid to do that? Not you, of course, but the rest of us. Possibly not: an opportunity next weekend to hear Cohen make his case.
Caring Hotel I occasionally get asked to recommend a decent, modestly-priced B&B hotel or guesthouse in central London. I always suggest the Caring Hotel in Bayswater, where members of our family stay when I've not been able to put them up.
How the Blackberry crumbles A visit last week from my sister Caroline Macdonald. She is a programme manager for an engineering firm and recently got Blackberries for her team. Blackberries are phones, PDAs, always-on email clients and — you guessed it — web browsers.
Media independence is a defining characteristic of HTML, the language in which web pages are written. HTML is designed to be displayed on a very wide range of devices, including screens that can't show graphics, and devices that read the page to the visually impaired. For a long time web design has been dominated by print-trained graphic designers who sacrificed media independence to a visual beauty based on 17" PC screens, a triumph of style over substance.
As display devices become more various, and the Web becomes primarily a fast source of information and medium of exchange, usability and media independence gain the upper hand. Designing for a very wide range of canvasses is a demanding discipline, and requires mastery of special tools such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the avoidance of such 'cheats' as using HTML tables to lay out a page. CSS designers give away nothing on æsthetics: you can see examples of their work at the CSS Zen Garden, where the same site content is refracted through different style sheets.
This site is 100% table-free, courtesy of CSS, and displays accurately on Internet Explorer 6, Navigator 7 and Opera 7. (I know of problems with how Safari handles inheritance, and haven't yet tackled em.) I'm pleased to say that even on the Blackberry's tiny screen, this site displays intelligibly, with the text links at the top, and the contents and images display accurately and in appropriate order. Might we all degrade so gracefully under stress.
Jolly Sooper Jilly Cooper wrote Class a generation ago. Part of my fascination with it is in reading about my formative influences decades after they influenced me. Actually, most of what Cooper wrote remains true today. The middle classes still think it rude to say What? and good manners to say (I beg your) pardon?; while the upper classes say What? and consider Pardon? a mark of vulgarity. Cooper also spots patterns I'd never noticed.
It seems insane, by the way, that all the lower middle and lower-class girls who come from Epping and Romford and the East End work in the City with upper and upper-middle class men, who wouldn't dream of marrying them; while all the upper- and upper middle-class girls who live in Knightsbridge, Fulham and Chelsea, can't face going any farther east than Mayfair on the tube, and therefore work with all the middle- and lower-middle class spiralists in advertising, whom they wouldn't dream of marrying either. [Punctuated and hyphenated as the book. I know: it drives me nuts too.]
Cooper uses stereotypes such as Harry Stow-Crat to make her points, which makes for a facetious book. Still I'm repeatedly shocked to find aspects of my upbringing, such as engraved silver napkin rings given as christening presents, singled out as typical of my class. (Upper class children apparently get engraved tankards.) So many attitudes and aspirations I had supposed my own are revealed to me as merely absorbed from my background.
Ultimately, it's a liberating read, as Cooper describes and lampoons the tactics that serve the fundamental strategies of the various classes — the upper classes to exclude and conserve; the middle to rise; the lower to endure. As a boy from the lower middle class my education at public expense at an English public school occurred to me as but part of the natural rise in rank I projected for myself. My first great romance was accordingly with the daughter of landed minor nobility. What a comedy. (And what a priggish and mean-spirited poem.)
Still it shakes me to reflect on how much of my life has been spent recoiling from what I saw as my fall off that ladder. A decade and a half, for example, in Australia, the Great Offstage.
I tried to be sui generis,
to march along different streets.
It's a shock to discover
the Different Drummer
is merely playing backbeats.
Life marches on.
That idiot Kinsella I was just thinking about Richard Neville while washing dishes today, and marveling at the changes that made Playpower a hit in the 70s and unpublishable today. 
Innocence was the first word that came to mind, but naïveté was what stuck. Stevan Apter draws my attention to Corrupting the Youth, in which UNSW mathematician Jim Franklin tells how Australian philosophers left their country's young without a moral compass, citing Neville and Germaine Greer as examples. Not even my beloved teacher David Armstrong escapes. "That idiot Kinsella was absolutely right," concluded David Stove. The cover shows the famous jacaranda tree outside the Department of Traditional & Modern Philosophy at Sydney University, and brings back happier memories than this.
The days of software as a product are numbered, writes the Angry Economist.
It's becoming obvious to more and more people that software is not scarce. The scarce good is people's time, and that is what commands the big bucks.
Our guests this weekend have been Sinobu and Risa Sakamoto, violinmakers from Cremona in Italy, in London to collect their entry from the violin-making competition at the Royal Academy of Music. They bore gifts: Novi chocolate and Sicilian lemon marmalade.
Last night we leaned out from the dizzying heights of the Upper Slips at the Royal Opera House to see
It's twenty years since I last saw this ballet danced, at the Sydney Opera House, and afterwards wrote Goodnight, Girl. This poem won me the highest praise: my sister Joanne Taylor, who does not as a rule read poetry, wrote to me that it had made her cry. "How did you know?" she wrote.
Was ever such a tale of woe?
As this of Juliet and her Romeo?
Miki's going to find a ballet school and resume the dancing she dropped after her motorcycle accident, years ago.
An exhibition of photography by Miki Yamanouchi opens at The Fox Reformed in Stoke Newington today.
Recent paintings by Davy Brown at the High St Gallery in Kirkcudbright show the area's beauty continues to inspire artists.
