New Londoner :: 02:47 PM :: easyjetsetter

I made it. Considering I was doing so with 30 kilos of bags, only barely really. More soon, once I sort out the internet connection at the amazing flat (really, nicest place I ever lived) but suffice to say I have already had a proper bacon sandwich with lashings of ketchup.

There were no taxis to be had for love or money this morning so I paid a homeless guy to carry my bags to the Gare du Nord. Bugger charity, I like business.

But GACK, London's expensive! Everything SEEMS only slightly more than in Paris, and the you remember it's in pounds and it actually costs DOUBLE!

And I left my umbrella in the flat in Paris, and it was sunny a moment ago....

Less dog shit on the pavements, mind.

Pub Quiz Report #6 :: 09:01 PM :: easyjetsetter

My official going-away party was on saturday night (I left early, because I am a sad twat) and was very fine in its way, especially the goat's cheese and honey terrine, but the real send-off was definitely the peeb kwuzz. I came from dinner with a voiceless friend (54 rue des rosiers does the best falafel special, forget the horrific l'as du falafel...keep on walking and you'll find a MUCH nicer place that's not full of study abroad morons) to find the core group already at the Highlander. It was me, Adam, Audrey, Mandounette and Ass-Ray, and Annika.

The major plus point to leaving town is that everyone wants to buy you drinks, which I am always a fan of. Despite Annika's irresponsible urgings to the contrary, I did not risk the long island iced teas, considering the list of things I *needed* to get done before hauling two 15-kilo shoulder bags to the Gare du Nord at 9 am the next morning. No, I was very good. I got a gin fizz.

In honour of our dear departed friend, now in Aberdeen, we named the team "The Nearly Legless Nicks" which was a damn sight better than the imports from the Frog and Princess quiz who all had veerrry posh accents (unwelcome in the Highlander) and called themselves the "Norfolk 'n' Way" Say it faster and you'll see why Adam liked it.

The questions themselves were relatively easy, and all the old favourite features were there, the picture round, the song lyrics, the anagram, the "what links" question, as well as trivia about the planets, bordering nations, national languages and locomotives being required.

Well, needless to say, we won. Very much so, with 36 1/2 points, a possible record at the Highlander.

It was at this point, AFTER winning, that I went to give the promotional T-shirts to the chap behind the bar to hand out as prizes to next week's winning team, as I didn't much fancy having YET another one of our bloody t shirts, no matter how witty the tagline is. However, nearly legless adam, nearly legless ass ray and nearly legless audrey insisted on receiving them. Of course, everyone else in the bar wanted one, which negated the whole bloody point of taking them to the sodding Highlander.

Anyway, we got the champagne, we chinked, making sure to look in each other's eyes to avoid seven years of bad sex (what if you looked in each other's eyes via a broken mirror? Eh? EH?) and then they made my do a speech.

Now, for someone who pontificates on such a regular basis in a public manner, you may be surprised to learn that I suck at public speaking. I'm not afraid of it, I am just very very bad. I am too conversational, I go off on tangents, I wave my hands around, I talk too fast and too quietly. So I tried to delfect attention on Audrey by saying that she changed my life when she walked into it which made everyone around the table go "yes! she changed my life too!" and start crying to Audrey "speech! speech!"

The lesson, good children, is this: I took being bad at something and turned it into a situation which made me look generous and loving (I am neither, my teutonic friend calls me "woman of steel" and he doesn't mean my bottom, which is roughly the consistency of school-dinner blancmange) and everyone was secrely grateful they didn't have to listen to me witter on in a rambling useless fashion about how much I loved them and other such nauseating tosh.

I just whispered it real quiet and hoped they didn't catch it...

Blissful beginnings :: 10:31 PM :: easyjetsetter

I think I have died and gone to heaven. My new job pays me to read newspapers! Obviously, I am not going to talk a whole lot about the job here, privacy concerns and all, but I am sure it will be informing my writing in the future.

That's one blissful beginning. The other requires a bit more explaining. I'll probably not talk too much about it after this one post, again, for privacy reasons, but I can't imagine not articulating for my readers something that is becoming increasingly important in my life.

The weekend of June 17th was a bit of a life-changing couple of days, with two major consequences. I had my job interviews on the Friday, from which this new position here in London emerged, and then I met my Teutonic friend for the first time on the Saturday.

The first consequence was planned and prepared for, and constituted a step on a pre-imagined path in my life. The other came as a bit of a shock, and while it won't really affect any tangible part of my life (i.e. I am not moving to Germany any time soon) it has wrought rather surprising changes on the inside.

I'm not much of a girl. I genuinely dislike Valentine's Day, I think soft toys are for babies, and reckon romance has become so prescriptive as to be dead. I don't like weddings, I think babies are ugly, and woe betide you if you ever give me roses, especially red ones. I don't do the l-word. Nor do I have b**friends.

These things are all still true. And yet, every time I find myself participating in some godawful howling cliche with my Teutonic friend, such as hugging on the shore of a loch, I roll my eyes, sure, but I hold him a little tighter too.

I'm sorry, this is the most embarrassing, horrific nonsense. It comes from a part of the inner me that needs a good kicking and a few early morning runs followed by a cold shower.

Hopefully, if I say this next bit quickly and run away aftewards, nobody will notice and I can get back to being a cold-hearted woman of steel forthwith:

I never thought I could find such fulfillment in sitting quietly in bed, sipping coffee and reading the newspapers.

Well, he was quiet, I was mostly shouting at the newspaper. Which I now get paid to do, you know.

UPDATE: I'm sorry, in the cold steely light of dawn, this post makes me want to vomit. But blogging ethics demand it not be removed. I just wanted to apologise. And offer to pay for any computer keyboards that were damaged in the mass projectile retching.

Lunchblogging :: 01:28 PM :: easyjetsetter

Note to self: when phone rings and the person on the other end identifies self as secretary to the MP for Constituency X, be aware of which cabinet minister this is before asking your boss if he wishes to speak to the MP for Constituency X. Or you will feel like an ignorant and cretinous fool.

Lunchblogging :: 12:45 PM :: easyjetsetter

Overheard phone conversation (UPDATE: a colleague speaking to another office, just to clear up confusion):

"Wait, where do you get your funding, are you a quango? (brief pause) sorry, sorry, second-tier agency was what I meant to say."

On which note, go read this. Big boss taped a copy to everyone's workstations to remind us of what we are not.

UPDATE: Highly interesting. I got 7/10.

UPDATE 2: Silliest sentence ever, from the Guardian, surprise, surprise. Joseph Harker, talking witheringly and sensibly about Hazel Blears' double barrel plan for integration, describes a survey of racial minorities before the election, where it was found that a minority considered themselves "fully British":

"Interestingly, for all the current scare stories, the least-British group were not Asian, but Chinese"

Errrmm, what continent is China on then?

Wonking in secret :: 11:38 AM :: easyjetsetter

A commenter, ahem, commented, that I was slowing down my postings. It is not so much that I am working harder than I was before, it is that I was working from home and the commute to and from work now takes an hour each way. That was about the time I would spend reading and writing blogs. I need to readjust and get a new optimum time for working on my writing.

I am so excited about my job and want to tell you all about it, but of course, I can't. Suffice to say, I'm doing what I want to do full-time for the first time in my life and I am deliriously happy. I haven't been this happy in work since I was at the embassy in Washington, and that was what started this crazy idea that I could be in politics. Anyway, I was very gratified to get a 'fantastic' on some work I had done from my usually dour (though jolly) boss.

I lied to one of my bosses. I was, apropos of something I was working on, asking his opinion on blogging, and was generally championing the cause, and he asked me if I had a blog. "No sir" I said. Not necessarily because I am ashamed of blogging, or because I write anything that could get me fired, but because he is a lot smarter than me and a big cheese policy wonk and I don't particularly want to reveal QUITE how ignorant I am to him.

I've learnt a lot through blogging. People pointing me to articles that increase my breadth and knowledge, people telling me when I am wrong. But overall, I am still far far away from being as wonky as I would like. This is why I intend to go back to school. Give me three years and easyjetsetter will be reborn as something frightfully political and uppity.

As it is, my assignments over the last week have really opened my eyes about several policy areas that I had what we shall call 'headline' knowledge of. And I have learned one thing in particular: the Blair government isn't evil. I know, it comes as a surprise to most of you that I can say this and not make all the fairies die, but hear me out.

I still heartily dislike Blair and heartily dislike the New Labour project, in particular how they do things. But, and this is, like my own, a big but, I have realised that they honestly believe they are creating a better society. They really do think they know what's best for us.

That would be quite sweet if it didn't involve the erosion of civil liberties and creaming all the private wealth creation out there to be redistributed to lesbian outreach workers, but as it is, it's bloody petrifying. There's a saying, 'you can't argue someone into faith' and the same goes for arguing them out of it. There is no way that this government can listen, because that would equal doubt, and what is belief if it is susceptible to doubt eh?

Road to hell. Good intentions. All that other claptrap.

Oh, and has anyone noticed that david blunkett has gone utterly loony? I mean, more than usual. He's been saying things like, 'with tony away, I'm in charge around here' which is making John prescott understandably irate, and our john's a man whom any sane person would shy away from angering, he has a mean right hook. Blunkett's been making policy pronouncements left right and centre (well, mostly left, frankly) and any day now I expect him to show up in Westminster palace in slippers with loo roll stuck to the shaving cuts on his chin. Possibly with a duck on his head.

Further proof of my callous nature :: 09:47 AM :: easyjetsetter

This story elicited this response from me: what make was the plane? And how old was it? Watch the shit hit the jet engine everyone. The boeing airbus showdown just got interesting...

UPDATE: It appears that the airline is more to blame than the plane makers, although the BBC keep repeating the 'allegedly the safest plane ever' line. It seems that there are three layers of controls and back-ups systems that mean decompression in the cabin is not fatal: alarm, oxygen masks, back-up and, failing that, descend to a safe height.

However, if the back-up fails, and the pilots can't get down to 14,000 feet, then you die. It's -60 at cruising altitude. The last radio contact alluded to problems with the air conditioning. The chilling text message alludes to unconsciousness and freezing, and at that temperature, you would probably freeze too.

It is thought that the raid on the corporare HQ is part of a larger criminal investigation into this. Deadly, petrifying, fascinating stuff...

In related news, I enjoyed "lost" which just started on UK TV. In fiction, you get a chance at survival. It's difficult not to believe in the tao sometimes: one plane crash, nobody dies, another a fortnight later, everyone dies.

Teablogging :: 05:44 PM :: easyjetsetter

From the BBC:

"Research by the Office for National Statistics, commissioned by the National Reading Campaign in 2001, found a quarter of adults had not read a book in the previous 12 months. The figure rose to almost half among males aged 16-24."

And you're surprised WHY I date outside my age bracket?

It's possible that that won't make a difference, however, look at this fine gentleman:

"Rob Cox, 51, a technical manager for an oil industry environmental association, says...'I just find that life is better than fiction. I travel a lot, visiting so many places and meeting so many strange and interesting people that I find books a bit pedestrian.'"

Wanker. Abject blinkered wanker.

Take THAT ignorant British employers! :: 05:59 PM :: easyjetsetter

My university ranks ABOVE Tony Blair's alma mater, Bristol, number six in the UK, and ABOVE Paris II the second best university in France, acccording to the Shanghai Jiao Tong worldwide university rankings, the most authoritative of its kind.

Ranked at 55th in the world, Chapel Hill beats out some heavyweight, so-called 'world class' universities EASILY. Tuebingen, for example, is ranked 101st. I guess that means Chapel Hill is more 'world-class' than Tuebingen. Who'da thunk?

I'm sorry Mr. Interviewer, you've never heard of UNC-Chapel Hill? But it's ranked higher than Bristol. You've heard of Bristol, right? I suggest you start reading.

Also, Europe, please note, only two non-american (I mean that in the geographical sense) are in the top twenty. In fact, only two european universities are in the top twenty. And they're both in Britain. Put that up your social model and smoke it.

UPDATE: found the methodology. It's pretty whack. It's not based on teaching quality, or class sizes, or range of subjects, or graduation rates, or scholarship availability, or price or anything. It's based on awards and publications by faculty and alumni exclusively. Weird.

UPDATE 2: It seems that UNC deserves 55th, at least on their teaching of geography, or possibly just mathematics. Tokyo is not, of course, in america, and the top twenty actually includes 3 non-american universities.

Gripe :: 10:18 AM :: easyjetsetter

I was just rude. I'm kicking myself.

I'm normally very pleasant in a work environment. I have a special dulcet voice I use. However, those who know me know I am not able to cope with being treated like an idiot.

When you send an 'in progress' file to someone to check you're not building her contacts into your database, you explain in the email that it's a little rough and not to worry about the markings you've put all over the text as it's a work in progress.

So when that person comes over and asks if you've ever done mail merge before, and you reply, yes, and, you know, like I said, it's a bit rough, I've actually already fixed the things you're about to mention, and that person then continues to tell you what you've done wrong such as "some of them are in uppercase, you'll have to change that, and you'll have to split the headers into separate worksheets" and you say (quite nicely) "actually, I've already done that. Like I said, it's rough" and that person continues and says "well, there's a lot of work to do" in a patronising, fake-nice tone, I reckon I was realtively justified in turning away from her and saying, "Yes, I know"in my flat, dead, contemptuous voice.

I know, it's rude, but I am not going to be obsequious and thank someone for teaching me to suck eggs. Like I said before, I am not like the other interns here. I don't have a clear understanding of structure and policy. I do, however, have mad office skills, born through, like, um, you know, working? I understand that she may not be aware of this (she's not my overseer) but still. It doesn't stop me from getting irate at being brought up on something I am actually doing well. There's enough stuff I am screwing up on on the policy side.

North Carolina makes the news! :: 01:10 PM :: easyjetsetter

I mean, you're sitting there, reading the guardian on the wettest august day ever, and you see a report about the sunny, green state you were in this time last year. Ok, it's not frightfully interesting, Mike Easley's a bit crooked, big deal. But still, it's not often you see the old north state in the national news here in the UK. Even if it is on page 22.

How dare you choose where to live! :: 02:00 PM :: easyjetsetter

That's the opinion of the recently released Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on neighbourhood information websites anyway.

Apparently, web literary has given rise to a 'worrying' amount of personal research into crime statistics and school inspection results and what have you in the US and the UK, and the JRF reckons that this is contributing to an even wider social divide than ever before.

There's also been a bit of a furore over the 'Best and worst places to live in Britain' TV show that Kirstie and Phil of 'Location' fame presented a few weeks ago. Results tallied fairly closely with local authories' CPA scores.

Epsom and Ewell's council are smug that they created the fabulousness that made it the best place to live, while nottingham, hackney and Kingston upon Hull are all LIVID with Kirstie and Phil for naming and shaming them as the worst places to live in Britain.

An official from Nottingham said in response to Kirstie's assertion of gun crime being rife that "we've had not even nearly one gun-related incident for months."

I should say, I spoke on the phone to someone at Kingston upon Hull yesterday, and she didn't know what a think tank was. Worriesome. My definition was a bit woolly. I said "we come up with policy ideas" and she said "can't you get your own?"

Overall, my problem with the Rowntree report and those three councils' objections to their status according to kirstie and phil is that it is rather ridiculous to hope that there will be no stratification of communities.

It is mad to think that everywhere can be just as nice as everywhere else, and that people who can afford to live in nice areas are somehow contributing to social exclusion by researching which is the nicest.

Sorry, someone has to come last. And people have a perfect right to know which it is, and to choose not to live there.

Talk Human :: 12:50 PM :: easyjetsetter

Andrew Marr makes a point that I often do, that politicians need to "talk human." On the eve of his rebirth into British TV screens across the country, the former political editor at the BBC, poised to take the slot historically associated with Sir David Frost on Sunday mornings, looking uncommonly like Dobby the house-elf, Marr makes a case for speaking more like wot us common fowk do.

The problem with purporting to be an expert in something, of course, is that it often means knowing the jargon that surrounds it and using it liberally as 'proof'. Thus, you know I'm a linguist because I could tell you what an alveolar fricative is, and you know my teutonic friend (MTF) is a scientist because he uses phrases like "endodorsal ablation." However, the increasing specialisation and jargonisation of various fields means that information which the general public would find very interesting and useful is often unavailable to them, shrouded in an opaque garment of impenetrable verbage and lexicon by public figures.

Marr's larger point is that politicians need to be better on telly, but what he means is that they need to be more understandable to people whose primary information source is the telly. I don't think it's dumbing down to explain things in plain english, it just takes a little longer. So, concurrently, the TV needs to leave room for more than soundbites from public officials. I want to live in a country with a tradition of public debate that's nuanced and complex, but not linguistically so.

I am ashamed to say, however, that when I clicked through to page two and saw the examples of impenetrable politico double-speak, I noticed a quote that, until three weeks ago, I would have been as mystified by the rest of you at this:

"The index of multiple deprivation identifies social exclusion largely at the ward level. We are working on a new neighbourhood statistics programme which will be able to identify the sub-ward level which will be helpful in these circumstances."

I was looking at the IMD 2004 yesterday and thinking exactly the same thing.

I mused as to whether it would be helpful to use marketing technologies and taxonomies. I remarked to a colleague that official reports already use the ACORN system in addition to the IMD 2004. ACORN is a classification based on over 300-odd categories that specify the character of an area and its inhabitants down to postcode level, where postcodes cover 15 addresses on average. This is why SAGA magazine blights my letterbox.

Anyway, I am slack-jawed with disbelief that I both understand and, worse, agree with John Prescott.

PS There are many things, however, that I DO NOT understand about Britain. The enduring appeal of, in order of increasing national importance: sudoku, james blunt, big brother, and getting so drunk that you vomit in your pint and continue to drink it.

Current events :: 02:10 PM :: easyjetsetter

"Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him. We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands."
Pericles' Funeral Oration.

First Impressions :: 11:14 PM :: easyjetsetter

It has been eight years since I visited Germany. My overwhelming impression of Timmendorf and Luebeck from last time is a lingering taste of malt beer. Being a polite young thing, when offerred it on the first night, I drank it and smiled as I suppressed a gag reflex. Of course, this meant that every mealtime I was issued with yet another brown bottle of what seemed to be horse pee.

I'm sure I liked Germany then, not least because, as an exchange student, I was quite the success with the local boys, with four of them clamouring for my attention over the two weeks I was there. I had a 'boyfriend' at home though, so I had to be faithful (at all of 14 years old...)

This last weekend, aside from discovering that I am not, in fact, a language person (the words 'quickly' and 'already' appeared in my mind only in french), my worst suspicions were confirmed. What I thought was My Teutonic Friend's rather sweet fastidiousness (e.g. neatly folded napkin dabbed at mouth during meal) is, in fact, the result of a decade of living in Germany.

Moreover, he's been living among Germans, who are really into rules, where one can get points taken off your driving license for walking across the road and where as long as they don't cross the dividing line, to fetch a football, say, open air swimming pools let nudists gambol in front of their children. Rules are paramount, except for on the motorways, where anything goes.

They really don't eat vegetables. I'm serious, we went shopping in what MTF claimed was the nicest supermarket in the area (the area being the most expensive city in germany) and there were three kinds of lettuce, all wilted and yellow, and all the tomatoes were underripe and beefy.

We were in a biergarten on Sunday and I had a hankering for a salad. MTF warned me that 'wurstsalat' was not what I was hoping it was, but I was adamant and was duly issued with a plate of grated sausage meat, cheese, onions and gherkins. I looked from it to MTF dubiously and said 'is there somewhere else around here I could get a caesar salad?' at which he smiled and said 'aah, you are always making me laugh.'

And I know this is going to sound rude, but Germany reminds me of Britain fifteen years ago. I kept asking MTF 'this was part of WEST germany before 1989 right?' because people's haircuts and footwear was reminding me of why the fall of the soviet union was A Good Thing. I was, in comparison, wildly stylish, which I could get used to.

Because I had flown into an ex canadian air base that was an hour and a half from MTF's place*, as opposed to the international airport seven minutes away, he had very kindly hired a car for the weekend, enabling us to visit the town he first lived in when he came to Germany.

It is the Cambridge of Germany, pretty much, with a river especially dammed so that the fraternities can punt around the pretty girls and drink beer on lovely sunny days. There's an island shady with lime trees in the river where howling cliches like MTF and I litter the riverbank. It's a town that americans have in mind when they use the words 'quaint' and 'picturesque' and everyone rides bikes (with dutch frames and baskets on the front if they're foreign, with 81 gears and isotonic drink tanks from decathlon if they are German) and lives in a yellow house with half timbering and blue shutters. There are cobbles and fountains and trees and window boxes.

A Protestant university in the Catholic region, this town had a history of free thinking and liberalism, compared to the rest of germany, which all the students and inhabitants are very proud of. When he first came here MTF thought the town amazingly anal retentive and, yes, fastidious, but now he realises it was the perfect place in which to ease himself into life in germany because look, there, you can't see the sign that says 'don't lock your bikes up here' because it's hidden by bicycles. That counts as anarchy here in Germany.

Of course, there are a lot of rules that you have to follow if you want to be allowed to join the local chapter of the anarchists' society.

*I know this because there was someone in the passport queue behind me who informed me of this and was wearing a t-shirt that said 'not only am I perfect, I am canadian too.'