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”.

“Doesn’t it piss you off when you are sitting in a pub telling people about a cracking cat you met that there isn’t an objective standard to gauge how good it is against another cat? People can rate hurricanes but not cats. That’s ridiculous, I see loads more cats than hurricanes. I intend to redress this imbalance by making a universal standard of cats.”

It was only a matter of time before Daz created Meowseley, a “cross between Warcraft and Top Trumps, but with cats”. Featuring the gorgeous Edward, of course.

In other news: a sad day for followers of loldeirdre. All the (copyrighted, to be fair) photos of Deirdre have sadly disappeared from flickr, leaving behind a couple of shiney peepl and a lonely Mullaney. Oh noes

I’m led to believe that this isn’t the end of the road, however, so keep an eye out in the usual places.

I’m hearing the phrase “ambient intimacy” a lot these days. Ambient intimacy is a term coined by Leisa Reichelt last year to describe the kind of relationships that the internet allows you to have with people. She describes it as “being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.”

I’ve been wondering how to describe these types of relationships for a couple of years now. I like “ambient intimacy” but I think it’s a bit of a mouthful. But there are people that I only know like this, so it’s becoming more necessary to find a phrase.

Take my relationship with Pete Ashton. Pete’s always been on a couple of the same local interest internet groups that I’m on, so his was one of the first blogs I knew about. When I first started reading peteashton.com regularly, though, it surprised me with its openness. He kept a record of not just interesting links he’d come across, but where he’d been, what he was up to and, more importantly, how he felt about things.

A short while later Pete and I became contacts on flickr - so I got to put faces to names. We met on a flickrmeet and commented on topics that we’d already discussed online elsewhere. After that, we became “friends” on facebook, even though we’d only actually met once.

Now that we follow each other on Twitter and mix in many of the same circles at work, there is a real sense of the ambient intimacy Leisa talks about.

I feel like I know Pete pretty well and yet, when I found myself next to him in a queue at a cafe one lunchtime, I had to look twice to be sure it was him. (Then, of course, I had to introduce myself as “editorialgirl” rather than Emma - which felt a bit silly, but elicited an “ohhhh!” and a big hug, which was lovely).

So I don’t think that having ambient intimacy with someone means that you know them. Pete knows a lot of people and I can guarantee he’s met them more times than he’s met me. If someone says “do you know Pete?” it feels slightly stalky to say yes and realise that I know what he’s listening to, what he’s working on and what he had for dinner. Because we don’t know each other.

So I need a phrase or a verb to describe a relationship that’s been formed almost entirely via the internet. “I know him, but only ambiently”? No.

Really; it’s getting tricky. I met my current boyfriend online. I read his website religiously and we chatted on various groups for a good six years before actually meeting up and gedding it awn. But when I tell people “we met on the internet”, people make assumptions of dating websites or seedy chatrooms. “I got to know him ambiently“, I want to explain. The truth is, I got to know him bit by bit, through websites and forums, comments and groups. But there isn’t an easy way to say that.

Perhaps it will become so commonplace that I won’t need to worry about it. Perhaps friendships like the one I have with Pete will become the norm and everyone else will meet their partners online, just like I met mine.

Last week I was at London’s ExCel for Grand Designs Live, the TV show, which was filmed alongside the exhibition of the same name. Obviously I was there for work; to get photos of The House That Kevin Built and any other exclusive content for the website that I could find.

It turned out that that included trying to get celebs to comment on property-related stuff. So when I wasn’t dolled up in hi-vis jacket, hard hat and steel toe capped boots, clambering around a building site with my camera, I was hanging out in the green room, getting shy around people off the telly. A very, very random week.

I’ve realised that I’m not very good at talking to celebrities for the same reason that I’m not very good at science fiction. I just can’t … pretend. I can’t call them “the talent” like other telly people do. I can’t join in with the conversations about how amaaazing people look (unless they really do). I suppose I should try harder, but I just want to treat them like normal people, even though most of them think they’re not.

So it makes sense, then, that I got on fine with Dave Gorman (who I do actually think is great) because I could giggle with him about the naming of the “flick off for Britain” campaign and what was on the telly, like I would with anyone. But I found it impossible to even look at Kim-from-Kim-and-Aggie, especially after hearing her tell someone “no dear, I don’t talk about my personal life. It’s very private to me”. This is the woman whose autobiography, “The Story of My Brutal Childhood” was serialised in the paper, for goodness sake.

Being around “the talent” on a daily basis was one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had. I saw Denise Van Outen’s bottom, for starters. I don’t make a habit of looking at other girls’ bottoms, but she had to get mic’ed up in front of me, and there it was. (It’s teeny tiny - like the rest of her - and absolutely perfectly formed.) I heard Paul from The Salon telling some people that he was responsible for inventing the phrase “back, sack and crack”. I went to the loo and found Debra Stephenson (ex Corrie) getting changed into the most fabulous dressing-up dress I’d ever seen. “It’s not mine,” she said. “I’m going to a ball”.

Phil and Kirstie were exactly like they are on the telly. Seriously. We interviewed them and they sat closely, agreeing on everything (”we’re going to get one of those for our house,” “oh yes, we’re so going to get one of those too…”) and finishing each other’s sentences. After the interview, he went shopping and she shouted jokey admonishments after him, giggling when he rolled his eyes in mock sufferance. They genuinely appeared to be best friends, which must quite a feat for two people who spend so much time working together in the public eye.

Finally: yes, The Beeny was pregnant. Really, really pregnant. And just to confuddle my brain even further, it’s apparently only her third.

Apart from a brief flirtation with Glasgow, I’ve lived in Birmingham all my life. Not all over Birmingham, you understand - just south Birmingham. In fact, for 31 of my 33 years I’ve lived within four miles of my birth. Meh - call me a homebody.

Despite this, I don’t have much of an accent (or so I’m told - although this is mainly by southerners who are probably expecting a “yam yam” black country drawl). I do apparently have a “hard G” (in other words, I pronounce the Gs in words like banging and singing), and the more I drink, the more I go down-then-up at the end of sentences… but I don’t strangulate my vowels, and I certainly don’t say “ar” instead of yes.

So, having been told on many occasions that I “must be a posh Brummie”, I’m regularly surprised to find that words I use all the time are actually West Midlands vernacular.

For example, when giving directions, I’ve always told people to, say, turn left, “at the next island”. Apparently most people only ever call them roundabouts. Who knew?

Likewise, I’ll stop at the garage (pronounced garridge, of course) rather than the petrol station on the way home from the pub. Why has it taken me 30-odd years to find out that “garage” in this context is unique to Midlanders? I’m still not convinced it is!

Some words and phrases are historical and I wonder if Brummies are just being old fashioned by continuing to use them. For example, when I was younger, the off licence at the bottom of the road was “the outdoor”. This dates back to the time when pubs had a separate entrance for off-site sales. But wasn’t that the same all over the country? Why do people in the Midlands still use the word?

Others are just unfathomable. “Wash your donnies”, my mom used to say before lunch. In an effort to make up for using such unbecoming slang, she would hurriedly follow this with “from the French, donner – to give…” She’s right, of course. But how on earth did that little channel-crossing gem happen?

Obviously I don’t want to turn this into a list of local dialect and slang – there are plenty of those around. I just enjoy being genuinely surprised, and wanted to share that. So I could go on (how do you pronounce “tooth”? Have you ever been deffed out, or dismissed as yampy? Does your chip shop sell potato scallops?)… but I won’t. And besides, as my dear departed Nanna used to say: I’m off to the larpom.