editorialgirl

Last April’s 4am Project was a bit of a washout for me. I didn’t plan anything and didn’t even give the idea of leaving the house a second thought. Instead, I woke up at about twenty to five, stumbled to the window, took a blurry shot of the street and went straight back to bed.

This time, though, was different.

I went to bed at about ten o’clock last night; set the alarm for two forty-five and actually managed to get up and out of the house by three. Nick Lockey drove us down to Balsall Heath where we picked up Matt Murtagh - and then we set off for the Lickey Hills.

Turns out Birmingham’s pretty busy at twenty past three on a Saturday night. The fast food restaurants were still serving and we saw lots of people zig-zagging their way home from all sorts of nights out. It wasn’t until we reached the city boundaries and the time crept nearer to four o’clock that we started to feel a bit more like we were doing something out of the ordinary.

As we passed the site of the former Rover Works at Longbridge - now an empty site surrounded by hoardings - I got a sense of what Karen must have had in mind when she first came up with the idea for the 4am Project. Seeing rows of diggers silently lined up in the gloom where the massive factory used to be was eerie, and the jaunty marketing notices on the site’s advertising boards seemed… well, a bit apocalyptic, quite honestly, without the bustle of the Bristol Road’s daytime traffic to give them some context.

At the Lickeys we left the car just outside the visitors’ centre car park (which is locked at night) and walked up the path to a vantage point that we’d already researched as suitable, because it faces East. We’d brought torches, but didn’t really need them - it was light enough to see where we were going.

By four o’clock we had set up our tripods and started taking photos - mostly of the city spread out below us (and of course, a few of each other, taking photos). Nick took some long exposures of himself swinging torches around and made some cool spun-sugar-esque light trail photos. We didn’t really talk - we were just enjoying the feeling that Karen writes about in her description of her inspiration for the project: “The city was asleep and it felt like I had it all to myself.”

At first, the only sounds were the odd chirrup of birdsong and the faint rustling of the bushes and trees - but within ten minutes, the birdsong had escalated into a full dawn chorus. Blackbirds sang in the trees above our heads, flitted around the undergrowth and perched on benches in the murky light. It was lovely.

At half past four, we heard voices - a couple had come to the same spot to enjoy the sunrise. They said a cheery “morning!” but then stood quietly watching the sky brighten in front of us.

Although it had been a dry night, the sun itself didn’t really appear until it had gone five - but when it did, through a thin horizontal gap in the clouds, it was magical. The couple who’d come to watch were delighted too. The man said, “here she is!” and I realised that they weren’t just enjoying a daily constitutional; they were here for the solstice.

To our surprise, on seeing the sun for the first time, our new companion produced a cow horn and blew it three times, like a bugle. He went for a fourth, but fumbled it and made a noise like a dying duck - but it didn’t matter. We knew what he meant.

As the sun rose higher the world began to feel normal again. The couple left us (”see you next year!”), we sipped tea from a flask (thanks, Nick!), then we packed up and wandered back to the car. The city was just as we’d left it - busy - but with joggers in the place of wandering drunks. I got home just after six and went to bed - then slept for a few hours and woke wondering if it had all been a dream.

So that was my 4am Project. Although I didn’t get many good pictures, I’m really glad I made it out this time - mostly thanks to Nick and his infectious enthusiasm for just about everything. And despite my cynicism for most things spiritual, I’m glad I saw the sun rise on the solstice and shared it with the mystery horn-blowing man, for whom it obviously meant a lot.

See more of my 4am photos
Nick’s 4am photos
Matt’s 4am photos

Prompted by this tweet from Chris Hart, I’ve been a bit nostalgic this week, thinking about the jobs I was doing ten years ago and how they got me to where I am today.

The two jobs I had between 1997 and 2003 were both life changing in complete opposite ways. The first was probably the most awful job I’ve ever had, but it taught me everything I needed to know about writing copy - and unwittingly gave me the confidence boost I had been needing since school. I left it walking on air. The second job - the one Chris is talking about - was probably the best job I’ve ever had (besides my current one, of course). It gave me friends for life and taught me everything I needed to know about the web and how people use it, which has shaped the rest of my career - but by the time I left I was a pretty broken person.

So this post is about the first one. Bad job come good.

In 1997, after leaving school with two poor A level grades and spending four years bumbling around, opening and then closing a small shop selling secondhand clothes(!) and finally doing a bit of freelance proof reading to earn some intermittent cash (I was great at the proof reading bit but not so great at the freelance bit), it was time to bite the bullet and look for some real work. My then-boyfriend dragged me to the jobcentre where, miracle of miracles, we found a small piece of card on the “no specialist skills required” part of the Jobs Wall headlined, simply, “Writer”. The jobcentre person phoned them. I went for an interview, spent half an hour there writing a feature about double glazing - and got the job.

So, from 1997 to 1999 I worked for a publishing company, writing copy for five newspapers. This sounds quite good for a “first proper job”, doesn’t it? In fact what these free “news”papers were full of was not news, but pure, steaming bull shit.

It’s known as “support advertising”. A feature about a company - the feature itself being of no interest whatsoever to the publisher - is surrounded by paid adverts from the featured company’s suppliers; the purpose being to make guilt money. If no suppliers lists are forthcoming, the money has to be extorted out of the featured company itself, even when they’ve been told they won’t have to pay.

You can imagine the kind of aggressive sales techniques that the sales teams used. Any number of awards, certificates, even new newspaper titles were invented, used and dropped in the name of money-making, loophole-exploiting, probably-given-their-own-archive-room-in-the-trading-standards-office, bad business. But at the end of every day, the sales teams hit their targets, the writers got another few published article for our portfolios… and the papers? The papers got stored and then pulped, as far as we ever knew. Job done.

The turnover of staff was immense. Sales staff came and went daily; some with slanging matches, some without. The number of times our “writers’ office” door was slung open by angry young boys in oversized polyester suits saying “I need to write a resignation letter NOW! Er, can you show me how to use the computer?” was, in hindsight, hilarious. My co-writers didn’t think so and by 1998 I was the only writer left.

In 1999 the “Directors” of the Birmingham office - a husband and wife team - decided that even they couldn’t bear it any more and left. A new Director came in - a short man from the Head Office in Derby, no less - and told me that he would no longer be able to pay me the salary I had been on. I could accept a pay cut of more than forty per cent (this would have taken my already laughable salary to £7,000 per annum) - or I could leave, so that they could get someone else in on the lower wage. Now, of course, I realise that this isn’t even legal - but at the time I didn’t know any better, so I simply refused the pay cut and made plans to leave.

But what happened next was strange - and rather cool. Having become used to this fast paced job - watching the very worst of human life argue amongst themselves every day and finding myself treated as slave one minute, IT guru the next - the anger I should have felt simply manifested itself as… energy. I was wired. I gathered my things, stored up some goodies on the PC (a rather impolite “scrolling marquee” screensaver, as well as a few read-me files telling whichever poor writer came to use it next what was in store for them) and left. The buzz that had been building up inside me since the morning’s conversation was amazing and I suddenly had the feeling I could do anything at all. I was so much better than any of these people I had met in the big wide world of work so far - and now, absolutely nothing could stand in my way.

The feeling didn’t go away, either. Over the next few months, I stayed wired. I made new friends like they were going out of fashion. I applied for - and succeeded in getting - a job I’d never have dreamt of having the confidence to apply for before, in an area I was interested in but had no experience or even real knowledge of (books about web programming).

Yes, this “publishing” company had actually done me a favour and prepared me in a way no degree or training course could have done: as well as boost my confidence through the roof and even show me - the girl who goes red at the slightest fib - how to blag a little, it had taught me how to write. How to write about anything at all, from any amount of information, to a strict wordcount and an even stricter deadline. The best grounding for my line of work - editing, subbing, writing for the web - that I could ever have hoped for.

Birmingham what what what event?

For a while now I’ve been involved in Birmingham Photospace, a voluntary group dedicated to finding a permanent space for photography in the city.

It’s crazy that there are so many photographers in Brum, but no central space dedicated to photography. So, prompted by a post on flickr last year from Patrick Willcocks, a group of us have been meeting regularly to try and make it happen. The idea is that a Birmingham Photospace would provide exhibition and gallery space as well as potentially educational, studio and technical facilities. (And of course a cafe. Every good gallery needs a cafe.)

To this end, the Birmingham Photospace group are holding our first awareness-raising evening next month: a “flash” - as in “now you see it, now you don’t” - photo exhibition.

What? Where? When?

Photographers of all abilities are invited to bring their work along to exhibit at a spontaneous, free event at the Custard Factory on Saturday 21 March. But there’s a twist. Everything exhibited can be offered as a swap.

Whether your photo has been created lovingly in the darkroom, digitally manipulated or just snapped on the run, everyone who brings a print will have the opportunity to swap their work for that of another photographer. It’s a great chance to show your work off to an appreciative audience, as publicly or anonymously as you like - and to pick up some unique, locally produced art for yourself.

How Does It Work?

Simple. For every print you bring to give away, you will be able to take another from the exhibition in return.

To take part, bring your images to the Vaad Gallery in the Custard Factory (next to the Medicine Bar), between 11am and 4pm on Saturday 21 March. Your prints will be exhibited in the Gallery for the whole of Saturday, when you’ll get the chance to meet other photographers and choose a print for yourself. At 5pm we’ll have an official launch - we’ll tell you a bit more about what we’re doing to try and make a Photospace happen; you’ll get a free drink! - and then from 7pm you can take your new piece of artwork home.

If you’re just interested in supporting the idea of a Birmingham Photospace, but don’t want to swap prints, do come along to see the exhibition anyway and show your support.

And if you can’t make it to the Flash Swap, but still want to help, follow the Birmingham Photospace blog and spread the word about a permanent space for photography in Birmingham. If you can help us to find funding, or have any other bright ideas for ways to make it happen, all the better!

It was Christmas day with the family and I was telling my mum what I’ve been up to over the last couple of months. After covering “the cat”, “work” and “having two colds”, I was struggling. Then I remembered. Of course! The most exciting event to happen for months - and it had only happened a couple of days before Christmas. How could I forget?

“I was in a pantomime!”

As the words left my mouth, I realised it was a mistake. Don’t get me wrong; I was in a pantomime, but not one it would ever be easy to explain to my officially pensionable mother.

The fact is, I played Dandini in the first ever Twitpanto. The brainchild of Jon Bounds (whose brain, to be fair, has a lot of children), the Twitpanto took place on - where else? - Twitter, with a cast that included MP Tom Watson and Guardian writer Jemima Kiss, as well as the usual Brum Twitter suspects. See the full cast list here. (I told you it was exciting, didn’t I? Dandini is Prince Charming’s right hand man, no less!)

So how did it work? First you need to understand what Twitter is and how it works, which is where the idea of telling my mum all about it fell down somewhat. I’ll take it as read you at least understand the principles, because Twitter is notoriously difficult to explain, even to those who have “given it a go”.

Cast members were given an outline of our character (our “motivation”, if you will) and a script to follow - and we all followed a private Twitter account set up by Jon, where he could act as director and prompt without being seen by the audience. “As far as I know it’s the first time someone has attempted live drama on the microblogging service” said Jon on his blog “…and it might fail spectacularly (it’s very much an experiment).”

Those who wanted to watch the pantomime could follow Twitpanto in a number of ways, with varying degrees of success. You could just follow all the cast and then try and pick out the panto from amongst your Twitterstream, for example, or you could use Twitter’s search facility to look for #Twitpanto and keep refreshing.

Another tool, roomatic, did the job a lot better, allowing us to follow everything tagged with #twitpanto in real time and in reading order. But because of the sheer number of people using the tag, it was still very difficult to separate the cast - saying lines from the panto - from the huge amount of audience chatter and participation. This was solved when Matthew Somerville (Dracos) hacked the roomatic script and created a version with all the cast members highlighted in blue. It made it loads easier for everyone and you can read a final transcript on Matthew’s site.

As I sat watching the pandemonium unfold (or rather, scroll) on my screen, waiting for my cues amongst the rowdy #twitpanto stream, and trying to cut and paste my lines in time to keep the flow going, I did experience a strange, mild form of stage fright. Given that roomatic crashed a couple of times and I had to resort to following the panto by refreshing the #twitpanto search page, I found it nigh on impossible to improvise. It didn’t help that several of my colleagues were also following, watching my fingers hover over the ctrl+V keys and saying “are you on soon?”

So, did it “fail spectacularly”, as Jon feared it might? Of course not. Like every good pantomime should be, it was silly, chaotic, funny, rowdy and … well, tiring. It involved lots of audience participation - oh, yes it did! - and even made page 11 of the Birmingham Post (nothing to do with the Editor playing the part of Cinderella’s coachman, of course).

Being the last day at work, it was a great way to get into the Christmas spirit and, ludicrous though it sounds, I felt like I’d really been part of something big. I may not have been able to explain it to my mum (in fact I resorted to mumbling “it was on the internet” which turned out to be enough) but she gave me a hug and said “wow, well done!” anyway. And surely that’s what Christmas is all about.

I wrote this on Sunday 2nd November and I’m buggered if I’m going to let a silly hosting problem stop me from publishing it again. Big thanks to Jon Bounds, who found the original in his Google reader archive. Lesson learned for me: back up, back up, back up…

Reading today’s Observer, I became worried for a moment that we’d had the wrong paper delivered. Christmas is axed in Oxford, read the outraged headline.

“Council leaders in Oxford have decided to ban the word Christmas from this year’s festive celebrations to make them more ‘inclusive’,” the article says. “But the decision to rename the series of events the ‘Winter Light Festival’ has been criticised by religious leaders and locals said it was ‘ludicrous’.”

Sound familiar? Yes, it’s exactly the same kind of moral outrage that put Birmingham into the spotlight ten years ago, when our Council decided to brand three months of winter celebrations and events - from bonfire night to New Year’s Eve - into one marketable festival: Winterval. Despite lights across New Street reading “Happy Christmas” and council-sponsored carol services taking place across the city, the tabloid press had a field day. The Bishop of Birmingham was quoted as saying Winterval was “a way of not talking about Christmas” and more than one commentator told us it was “political correctness gone mad”.

But no-one “banned the word Christmas” then, and no-one’s banning it now. In the very same Observer article that says Oxford’s Winter Light festival has “axed Christmas”, writer Rowan Walker quotes Tei Williams, press officer for the Winter Light Festival, as saying: “Winter Light … is a whole festival spanning two months. Within that will be Christmas carol services.” So, no-one’s axed anything, then.

I do find it strange that the Observer, of all papers, has jumped on this bandwagon, especially when these “anti-Christmas” fallacies are now so widely disproved. Even the Guardian - the Observer’s sister paper - published a feature two years ago explaining that the War on Christmas is no more than a myth.

But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. This week, in an article that called bloggers like me “winterval deniers”(!), The Birmingham Post’s Paul Dale says it’s all about perception. Whether these councils are right or wrong to use catch-all names like Winterval or Winter Light, it’s the fact that people perceive them as anti-Christmas that matters, he says.

He might have had a point if he hadn’t perpetuated the myth himself in the first paragraph. “Ten years after Birmingham City Council invited ridicule by airbrushing out the word Christmas from its official celebrations…” he wrote, ignoring the fact that this just isn’t true.

Paul goes on to admit that “the best explanation was that winterval represented a collective name for the events held from mid-November through to the first week in January” - this is true - but then continues, “to most of us, that’s Christmas.”

Is it? To me, the fireworks that we hear every night at the end of October and beginning of November are to do with Diwali and Bonfire night, not Christmas. The week after Christmas, going into January, is New Year’s Eve and the start of the new year… not Christmas. If the council wants to bring all of these events together and give them a catch-all name for marketing purposes, then “Christmas” is really not the right one.

(And besides, as Claire White was so right to point out to the Post, “you say Christmas is the right word for a season that lasts for weeks - and yet you, the mainstream media, moan every year about Christmas being too long or starting too early…”!)

So, is the Observer article just the beginning? Will the Winter Light Festival ensure that Oxford too will become a byword for anti-Christmas political correctness, or is Birmingham alone in having this nonsense thrown at us year after year? Put it his way: I’m pretty sure that in ten years time, Oxford will still be famous for its dreaming spires.

Well, knickers. My web hosts apparently had a “hardware failure” - some problem with their MySQL server - which resulted in all of our websites going down for a couple of days.

When they came back up, a week or two’s worth of data had been lost, so my last post disappeared and Meowseley lost two reviews and an obituary.

Luckily, Google had cached Meowseley just after the last post on there, so Daz got it back, but my Winterval post is lost. I had saved a draft locally, so I’m going to try and rewrite it, but the comments - alas - are gone for good. Sorry, Cat, Jenny and Peter (and was there another one? I can’t remember).

Yes, I’m grumpy.

Tilt shift lens + timelapse film = really cute fake miniature video. (Wish I could embed it here, but you’ll just have to click through…)

I guess the reason I’ve not seen this done before is that it would be really difficult to add the miniaturisation effect to a video in post production. Instead of using photoshop to blur images in (hopefully) all the right places, Keith Loutit does it “properly”, using tilt shift lenses and a 35mm adapter. The result, together with the timelapse and very well chosen music, made me squeak with joy. (And if you like that one, don’t miss the links to the other two, on the right hand side of Keith’s vimeo page. Stunning.)

Meanwhile, despite those amazing videos making me feel rather small (arf), I’m pressing on with my photoshopped fake miniatures, because - well, they’re just such fun to do. My latest three were taken on holiday in Fuerteventura, from the hotel roof. The full set is on flickr, here. Yay for getting on roofs! (Er, they did a proper tour, by the way; I didn’t just scramble up there.)

Back in May, a woman named Rhonda was travelling on the West Coast of Scotland when she found a camera. Like any good citizen, she handed it into the police.

Three months on, the camera hadn’t been claimed and Rhonda got it back. It was a nice camera - an Olympus digital point and shoot, worth about £200.

Story over? Finders keepers? Well, no.

There were loads of photos on the camera’s memory card. Taken over the second half of last year, the photos included a wedding and lots of touristy pictures of a young couple in various locations around Europe.

Rhonda worried that she’d found someone’s honeymoon snaps.

…Which is where Flickr came in. Rhonda posted a note in the Flickr help forum. The Flickr community jumped on the idea. Yes, it was okay to share the photos in the name of investigation, so she posted the whole lot onto her photostream - and amateur detectives all over the world started to get to work.

The main focus of sleuthing was a house which looked like the couple’s base for part of their trip. Was it a holiday home? Their own home, even?

Someone from the help forum spotted a car number plate with a Birmingham prefix outside the house, so Rhonda joined the Birmingham Flickr group and started a new discussion topic. “Does anyone recognise the road, she asked, “or even the people?”

A breakthrough. A man on the Birmingham group, known as Capo2, recognised the house as being typical of the area where he’d spent the first few years of his life. Not Birmingham, though. Aberdeen.

So Capo2 posted a new topic on Flickr’s Aberdeen group, with a link to the photos, asking for confirmation of his hunch. Meanwhile Rhonda posted on the Scotland group and she and others began contacting newspapers across Scotland.

It was on the Scotland Flickr group that things got really interesting, really quickly. Flickr member Greg recognised the road and, the next day, drove down it to make sure. Amazingly, he was able to pinpoint the house in the photograph and gave out the address in the thread. Another Flickrite, Andrew, googled the address and found a planning application for replacement windows on the local council’s website. (I know. Isn’t it mad?) It gave a phone number for the council member dealing with the application.

From this - presumably through phoning the council - Rhonda was able to contact the owner and landlord of the property and gave them a description of the people in the photo (and their dog!). The landlord recognised the couple straight away and passed on Rhonda’s number.

Less than a couple of hours later, a message has appeared in the Scotland thread: “Hello everyone! I’m the guy who lost the camera!!!!!”

And that’s why I love Flickr.

Being a fully fledged Twitterer (Tweeter? Twit?), there’s only really one reason I go on Facebook these days and that’s to play Scrabulous. But it looks like the threats of removal have finally been carried out.

At least, I think they have…

Hasbro, who own the rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada, had asked the makers of the game to pull the Scrabulous application from Facebook in those two countries; but as far as I’d read, there was no word from Mattel, who own the rights in the UK.

So I was surprised when, at around 11pm last night, the app had totally disappeared from Facebook in the UK. There were no links to it from homepages or profile pages and going directly to http://apps.facebook.com/scrabulous brought up an error page.

However, this morning, all seems okay again. The application is back (together with the games I was in the middle of playing, which is a relief). Was this a mistake, or were Scrabulous just pre-empting being asked to take it down? I haven’t found out yet, but I guess it will become clear soon enough.

It certainly looks like the future of the Scrabulous app is in doubt, not least because two replacements have popped up over the last couple of days.

Hasbro (or is it Mattel?) have added a new application: Live Scrabble but it’s not popular with users at all. It’s got an average of 1.6 out of 5 stars. “Nasty” music which plays by default and no ability to play with users in the US or Canada are just two of the main gripes.

Meanwhile, the groups and forums are awash with talk of a “new” game, Wordscraper, designed by the same guys who made Scrabulous. It has a board that is suspiciously familiar and apparently allows you to make up your own rules - Scrabble, anyone? - which neatly gets round any potential copyright problems.

I’m sticking to the Scrabulous application while it’s still there - I am winning my current games, after all - but it will be interesting to see whether any of the new versions hold my interest when it does finally go.

If not, then - sorry, Facebook: I’m afraid it might be the end of a beautiful friendship.

The other day I noticed something strange in my blog stats - I was getting referrals from the Birmingham Mail website. Turns out my old pal Victoria Farncombe, journalist, new mum, blogger and all round nice girl, had linked to me in one of those “answer these questions and pass it on” posts. A pleasant surprise, considering I had no idea she even knew about my blog, never mind read it.

In all honesty, I don’t normally like these sort of things, but for the last couple of days I’ve been off work, sick. (I don’t mean feeling-a-bit-poorly type sick, I mean actual-physical-pukey sick. Horrible-moany-want-my-mommy sick.) I’ve no idea what it was, but I’m very glad that it appears to be over, and today I’m just moping around trying to get my strength back. And I’m bored, bored, bored.

So here we go.

What were you doing five years ago?

Oh. Actually this isn’t as cheery as I was hoping. Five years ago, I’d just been made redundant. It wouldn’t have been as bad if circumstances were different, but a year or so before, I’d moved to Glasgow with my job and even bought a flat there. I’d yet to make many friends and suddenly being out of work made everything a whole lot trickier.

So five years ago I was temping - doing admin at a company that makes deodorant and fly spray - and wondering what to do next. It would be another six lonely and confusing months before I decided I wasn’t going to make it work up there and managed to sell up and move back to Brum. In hindsight, my move to Glasgow triggered the biggest bout of depression I’ve ever suffered (it lasted for about four years). No offence to Glasgow - it’s a fantastic city and I miss it in many ways - but I’m very glad I came home.

Right. I’m sure that wasn’t really what Vic had in mind when she tagged me. Let’s hope the rest of these questions are a bit more lighthearted…

What are five things on your to-do list for today?

Being poorly (did I mention I’m poorly?) my to-do list for today is fairly laid-back:
Replenish my fluids. I’ve had two pints of water and three cups of tea, which I’m sure isn’t enough, but it’s better than yesterday.
Eat something. Yep, I managed some scrambled egg on toast for lunch and I’m getting hungry again now, so that’s all good.
Tickle the cat. Check.
Read the popbitch and b3ta newsletters. That’s my reward for when I finish this.
Try not to get jealous knowing that all my friends are in the pub. Hmm… not so easy, but I think I’ll cope.

What are five snacks you enjoy?

Snacks? As opposed to food in general? Ooh, I dunno. Crisps and sweets don’t really do it for me. Don’t get me wrong, I eat loads, but usually at set meal times. So the only two I can think of are:
Peanut butter and jam on toast. Free at work! God love my employers and their feeder ways. And
Giant pots of Greek yoghurt with honey. Nom nom nom.

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?

I’m afraid I can’t agree with Vicky, who said she wanted to “end world peace”. (Hormone-addled brain, you say?) Yes, I think creating world peace might be better all round. Saying that, I’m not sure how my being a billionaire could have any sort of an effect on world peace, so I’ll stick to:
Buying nice houses for everyone I know. Does that count as one thing?
Employing the services of a cleaner. I could have done with that today. It’s funny how you don’t think about cleaning the bath until you really need a bath, and you only really need a bath when you’re too poorly to stand up in the shower, never mind clean the bath.
Private healthcare. Am I getting old? And did I mention I’m poorly?

I can’t think of any more. I’m actually really bad at spending money. Hey, there you go - that can be another one:
Employing the services of a personal shopper. Or two.

What are five of your bad habits?

Now, I thought I would be able to answer this quite easily but it turns out to be quite difficult. Maybe it’s because I’m quite happy with my lot at the moment.

I’ve just quit biting my nails, so that’s one gone. I don’t smoke any more. And I quite like drinking beer, so I don’t count that as a bad habit. (Apart from giving me a bit of a beer belly it doesn’t seem to have any adverse effects.) I speak to my parents every week and I’m quite good at remembering birthdays (thanks to Facebook, mostly, but who’s checking?)

I’m sure if I had been at work, I’d have had a few ideas from my colleagues. I talk too much, I hum tunes that get stuck in people’s heads, I tell the same old stories… But I’m not at work, I’m stuck at home, tickling the cat and drinking alka seltzer.

Whilst pondering this question last night, I asked my boyfriend. “You don’t have any,” he said. Oh, come on. “You can’t just be nice because I’m ill,” I pointed out. “It must be annoying when I sing along to that advert.” (You know, the one for the bank. With the cartoon train and the singer with a very high voice.) “Nope,” he said, “that’s endearing”. Really? “You can be honest with me, I promise. Anything. Anything at all.”

There was a pause.

“Well…” he said, “you do use a lot of towels.”

What are five places where you have lived?

Glasgow, Kilwinning (don’t ask - I needed somewhere to stay when I first moved up north, and this seemed to be the only option at the time), Chicago (for a month - does that count?) ermmm… Kings Heath, Moseley…

What are five jobs you’ve had?

Apart from owning a vintage clothes shop for a short time when I was twenty, and the year of temping I mentioned above, I’ve had a fairly straight career path: proofreader –> editor (for print) –> editor (for web), so all my jobs have been along the same lines.

Funny, really. If writing for the web had been a career option when I was at school, it would have been just what I wanted to do when I grew up. If only I’d known, I might have been a better student.

…………..

Well there you go. Done. Now, apparently, I have to tag five other bloggers to do the same. (This is “tag” in the schoolyard sense, not in the keyword/metadata sense.)

Who should I pick? I figured they should be (a) people I’ve actually met, if only once, and (b) as varied a bunch as possible. And boy is this bunch varied.

So, apologies to (in no particular order):

Amin, TWM Driver, Julia, Kris and Andy

…but “you’re it”.