Sogger’s Blog

I’ve not had a good weekend; in fact, I’ve not had a good week - I’m thoroughly ticked-off (in the American sense). We have to deliver a big project next week and there are still some serious bugs remaining. In fact, if you look at the simplest measure in the bug database, there are 35 open “must-fix” bugs. The big-boss uses only this number as the measure of quality, and therefore asked me “formally” to inform my team that they were to come to the office to work this weekend in order to make sure that the number falls to zero for the shipping date (”otherwise, you and I will have some serious issues to discuss”, he said with what he obviously thought was a disarming smile). The problem with his request was that this involved asking two new guys to work this weekend, one of whom has been with us for only 3 weeks and has his child for the weekend only, and therefore would have to ask him to spend a sunny Saturday kicking his heels in an air-conditioned soulless office - a good preparation for later life maybe? The other unfortunate aspect of this is that I had to “formally” decline to come to the office, which made me feel even worse, and my boss even angrier, giving me a good ticking-off (in the British sense)

We planned to go to Beaune this weekend to leave the kids with Papi for the last week of the school holidays. I always enjoy these trips (see some of my first posts), as they are often accompanied by a purple haze of burgundy-red. To be honest, I could just have easily have sent my wife and sat in the office, presumably looking perplexedly at the list of bugs and writing a variation on this post, but what the hell, sorry guys, I’ve done the grind in the past, family and alcohol come first (not necessarily in that order).

Another reason not to work this weekend is that the hunting season starts next week, so the forests become off-limits to sane people for six months. This means that it is the last chance I will get to go mushrooming, it being a particularly good period, as the Girolles are in abundance (or so I thought). Saturday afternoon, after a long lunch, a siesta and a suitably concerned-sounding call to the office, we set off to the forest, armed with knives and bags for the kilos and kilos that we would undoubtedly be bringing back for dinner that evening.

French forests (the ones around Beaune anyway), are dense, dark, sprawling, and, at this time of year, damp underfoot. As you step on the fallen branches, they crumple like paper into a deep, shag-pile carpet of dead leaves. Girolles are orange mushrooms. Unfortunately, French slugs are orange too, as are dead leaves. In the past, when I have been looking for Girolles, you can put up with bending to pick up a slug, as you will always find clumps of mushrooms to make up for the disappointment. This time was different though. I saw nothing; clambering over the fallen branches, picking the spider’s webs from my hair and mouth,  slipping down embankments for an hour or so with not a single sniff of fungus soon ticked me off. The only bright moments were seeing an adder glide off the path into the undergrowth - the first time I have seen a wild snake in Europe - and son 2 picking a toad out of a puddle and putting it inside son 1’s Wellington boot, much to everyone except son 1s’ amusement. As time wore on however, I began to feel more and more guilty about not staying in the office to give moral support, and thinking that I would never get back in time to call the big-boss with a status update (as if that would change anything).

Believe it or not, as we got back through the door, my phone was ringing and it was the big boss. This left me on the horns of a dilemma - answer and tell him that I didn’t know what the status was, or don’t answer, call a team member, and then call him back pretending that I didn’t know he had already called. I’ll let you guess which option I chose…

In fact, things had moved on surprisingly well in terms of the product quality. In terms of the bug count, however, things weren’t so good, falling only by about 5 or 6. My attempts to explain that a pure bug-count is not necessarily the best way to measure things fell on stony ground. Big-boss, once again, ticked off. Software team; tired and ticked-off. Me; ticked-off by the big-boss. Bugger it, let’s get a bottle, off with its cork and back into a purple haze.

So now it’s Sunday afternoon; the guilt of not being in work has worn off with the wine from Sunday lunch, and the apprehension of going back to work tomorrow has not yet settled in. Good news though - they are showing Wigan Athle-tick versus Chelski on TV. Small comfort, but you take it where you can. I settle back on the sofa, arms behind my head, and my wife says, “what’s that black spot in your armpit?”. I twist to look, thinking that maybe it’s a previously undiscovered mole, but this black spot is surrounded by a red ring.

A closer look, and it turns out that the only thing I brought back from the forest yesterday was a tick, a small burrowing insect that gets under your skin, gorges itself on your blood over several days, leaving you with Lyme disease, a particularly nasty infection that needs treating with antibiotics, otherwise you end up with arthritis and heart failure. Tweezers out, tick - OFF!

So, as the weekend ticks to a close, I’ll take a break, and wait until later to post about a hospital visit during the week that was possibly the worst since I was diagnosed as an epilep-tick…

There is an art exhibition in Lyon at the moment. It shows graphic anatomical details of corpses, often depicted in everyday poses like riding a bicycle. If there is one thing you can say about it, it’s that opinion, like the corpses, is divided: everybody who has heard of it has something to say about its artistic and educational value. Personally, I will be soon be going to visit, possibly with the kids (whether to take children along is another of the raging debates).

When I do go, it won’t be the first time I have seen such an “exhibition”. In fact, a few years ago, I was treated to a private showing of a similar exhibition…In a previous professional incarnation, I did a PhD at Manchester University (where I met Kenny). My area of study was computer vision - “teaching” computers to make sense of objects in images, in this case, recognising cartilage in MRI images of people’s knees. To do this involved putting people in scanners to get the images. However, at one point, we decided it would be interesting to take some pictures of knees from immobile subjects: post mortem in fact. No need to dig up any fresh corpses in this case, as we were working in the Medical School: corpses were everywhere (and I’m not talking about the lecturers). In fact, corpses were not necessary; all that we needed were a few amputated knees. “Just go up to the 4th floor and ask for Doctor Moriarty. He’ll see you right”. Actually, thinking back, Moriarty may not have been his name.

So I took the lift up to the 4th floor, and arrived at the ominously-but-unofficially-named, “Anatomy Room”. I pushed at the door, expecting it to be locked (it was around lunchtime), but it swung back (sorry to say, without a creak or any background music in a minor chord) and I stepped in. The room was large, windowless and brightly lit with fluorescent lighting. It was also devoid of living creatures (the experimental rats were on the 5th floor). However, if there were no living bodies, their numbers were compensated for by the multitude of corpses, each of them naked, with an orange pallor, and laid out on flat metal tables. There were approximately 30 tables, each with a body, laid out in a regular grid. They were, for the most-part, old corpses, the males, in particular, overweight. I guess they must have “donated their bodies to medical science” in their wills.

Doctor Moriarty was there, but his office was at the back of the room, behind the sea of bodies and their shrivelled members. This meant of course that I had to pick my way between them to get there. What a sight - one that is undoubtedly banal for people confronted with death on a daily basis (librarians for example), but not for me! Each of them had undergone some kind of invasive examination. The most graphic was a fat man whose throat had been cut open, the skin peeled back and pinned to a plastic tray (not unlike a Tupperware chopping board) on each side of his neck. The throat, I now know, is an incredibly complex thing. The multitude of bits and pieces in full view was stunning, but my stomach didn’t allow me to tarry.

Doctor Moriarty was an extremely friendly person, and was happy to help. In fact, he had a ready supply of post-mortem knees to hand (sic.). “Step this way” (sic.) he said, leading me to a ceiling-to-floor cupboard. He swung back the large, metal double-doors (sadly, still with no ominous music) to reveal the contents. This time however, there was a horror-movie moment, as an amputated hand fell to the floor. He placed it back in the cupboard (with, I thought, a lack of respect for the dead), and reached for what I was looking for - a large plastic bag, full of knees. There must have been a dozen or so in there, and he was happy to sign them over to me. Thinking back, I could have done anything with the knees - no end of practical jokes of dubious taste.

However, the sad thing is that they were of no use whatsoever. It seems that you can only get any meaningful measurements from in-vivo subjects - once they are dead, the fluid drains and the fluid is what keeps the cartilage inflated with its shock-absorption qualities. I confirmed this later when, in probably the lowest moment in the 3-year study, I went to an abattoir in Oldham on a rainy day to collect a cow’s knee (that we amusingly named Daisy in the official records). I will leave the details of what I saw therein to another post, but I can tell you that the cow did not willingly “donate its body to medical science”.

The French don’t seem to be as avid as the British when it comes to reading newspapers (in my, albeit, limited experience). One of the things I genuinely miss about the UK is receiving the Sunday newspaper; the thud as it drops onto the carpet and reading it over a Sunday breakfast cup of tea. To fill this gap, I have the Guardian Weekly delivered every Saturday. It’s a mish-mash of articles from the Guardian, The Washington Post, Le Monde and the Observer and it generally keeps me happy for a few hours. When I say “happy”, it’s rarely in a smile-as-you-read happiness. In fact, reading it is often quite a depressing experience, as it condenses a week of human suffering, war, current and pending ecological disasters and general doom and gloom into 40 pages.

So imagine my pleasure when this week I actually did have a smile-as-you-read moment. It happened as I was reading the “This week in Britain” section, which generally celebrates the dottiness of its subjects.

Posh People at Harrods

The article in question was about a pointless, only-in-the-UK competition, “Britain’s Best High Street”. It is not entirely clear what are the criteria for winning the competition, but it seems that this year’s finalists are Kensington High Street (home to Harrods etc), Portobello Road (wacky, hippy-type market if I remember well) and, err, Skipton High Street.

You need to know that we lived in Skipton for 3 years before leaving to come to France so I can say with confidence that I’m not sure what it is that qualifies Skipton for this prize. Could it be the wall-to-wall charity shops (I remember local uproar a few years ago when a bus company advertised day trips to Skipton from Liverpool, describing it as “the charity shop capital of the UK”)? All the usual national branches of Next, Boots etc. - maybe it’s because they are housed in relatively old buildings?

Hippies at Portobello Road Market

In fact, it seems that the street market and a pie shop are the clinching factors. The market does seem to have some attraction - even now, my parents will drive 70 miles for a day out just to walk down the high street, invariably returning with a roll of kitchen foil while they are there (”everything £1″).

Skipton Market

However, being objective, Skipton High Street is rather impressive, with its pristine castle and church at the top end, and the bottom bending round towards the canal. I wish them luck and hope that the Guardian Weekly sees fit to deliver the result to my door in France.

After 6 years in France, I feel that I am fairly well assimilated into the culture, and am extremely happy to be here. However, sometimes something happens that makes you realise that, in fact, you are a foreigner in a foreign land. Such an event is happening right now outside…

As I drove through town this morning, I pulled into the traffic at the same moment as a beat-up, bright yellow Renault van from at most 1960 pulled in behind me. I had heard loudspeakers from a distance, and now they started again from behind me; from, in fact, the said yellow van. What he was blaring out was that the circus was in town! Excitement from the kids in the back of the car, “Can we go? Please, please, go on dad”.

I’ve never been to a circus, but have been tempted in the past by such things as Cirque du Soleil. However, as we turned the corner and the van blared its way onward, we got to see into a second bright yellow lorry following behind. The back of this lorry had beened turned into a cage. In the cage, looking as forlorn as any decrepit animal that I have ever seen in any run-down zoo, was a lion. This lion was obviously past caring. It didn’t move and stared without seeing at the passers-by, unable to escape the sound of the loudspeakers proclaiming the wonders of the African savannah, right there in front of your eyes.

I am no animal rights activist (I did have a vegetarian phase, brought on mostly by economic realities, fear of mad cow disease and a crush on a vegetarian girl at university), but I was appalled at the sight. I am certain that such a scene would not be tolerated in Britain (and surely by most other countries). It was truly something that I thought (and hoped) belonged to another age. This is obviously tolerated in France, as I can still hear the guy blaring, and the town hall has let them take over the town centre for the event. How can they let this happen? Shame on you France! I am intrigued to know whether it is my anglo-saxon roots that have made me feel this way or if I am just a big old prude. I will run a survey at work next week and let you know the results.

As I am sat here writing, I am fighting the unachievable urge to go out and let the lion out in the hope that it would jump out and turn on the guy. However, I am sure the drugs mean that it has no energy and it would look at me wondering what the hell I was doing before swiping me with its paw with its claws removed. Being a coward, instead, I take out my animosity on the keyboard. Thank you blog.

…falls mainly on Barcelona it seems.

Two months ago, I organised a surprise weekend away with my wife for her birthday. I chose Barcelona because I figured that you could fairly much guarantee sunshine in mid-May. Or so I thought. You would not believe the planning that went into it - I shipped the kids off for the weekend, even engineering an “unexpected family event” to get the kids out of school for the Friday (hey parents, don’t you ever try this, it could have lasting detrimental effects on your child’s well-being. Maybe).

We flew off on Friday afternoon in glorious sunshine. We were a little surprised when the pilot announced that the weather was “not so good on the ground, with a light drizzle and temperatures of 16°C”. When we got off the plane, we were greated with driving rain and were soaked before we even got into the airport terminal…

…and so it continued…for 2 days…non-stop. I have never been so wet in my life. You couldn’t even marvel at the unfinished Gaudi-inspired cathedral because you couldn’t see the top, whether it be for the rain or the unbroken sea of umbrellas.

To top it all, we were in a bit of a rush to get back to the airport for the flight back, so asked the helpful staff at the train station which platform we needed to go to. Without hesitation he said “9″. In fact he was totally correct. We arrived at the platform and jumped on the train as the doors were closing. As we made our way to the airport, we recognised all the landmarks that we had seen on the way in - a piece of graffiti here, a discarded shopping trolley there. However, just as quickly as the airport loomed into view, it loomed out of it again as the train continued. And continued. In fact, it continued for another 40 minutes. In fact, we didn’t check that there were two different trains alternating from platform 9. Guess what - we chose the wrong one. The upside is that we got to see some nice bits of Spanish coastline as we headed down towards Portugal!

When it finally stopped, we managed to get back onto a train heading back to Barcelona straight-away and somehow back to the airport with minutes to spare, only to be confronted by a massive queue to get through airport security. Having none of that, my wife cut through the crowd, heading straight for the front, with me in tow, timidly apologising and humphing along the lines of “what can you do? She’s French and hasn’t grasped the concept of queuing”.

When I was 23, I headed off round the world on my own with a rucksack for company. I think that person is long gone.