Month: January 2003

Categories
Blog

Careful what you wish for

Saturday, January 25, 2003

Big news in Mooro Towers. The first book is currently technically not quite a book. It’s an 80,000 word Word and .pdf document (although I’m proud to say it was written in BBEdit), and it’s been shopped around agents and publishers in London and Dublin for some months now. Some were interested, some took over a year to reply, and some kept their opinions to themselves.

But that might all be about to change – it’s all still up in the air, which makes me nervous, but it’s looking like I’ve found a publisher. And not a bad one either.  I’ll not say more till I have a contract in my hand, but it does mean the Canada trip is now subject to change if I’m working on rewrites and edits. A good problem to have, but it’s making it hard to get down to work on anything until I know for sure.

On the bike front, I’m been comparing the putative Carpe Diem with a Cannondale T2000. I’d say both are great bikes, but the wheelset options on the CD don’t include any 36-spokers, which seem to be a good idea for real touring. And the Cannondale gets great reviews and is not a cyclocross/touring hybrid, but a pure-bred tourer (albeit with an alu frame). Maybe I get the CD with the spec I want, and get some chunky touring wheels elsewhere.

British military endeavours in 1812? You’re thinking Napoleon, right? So was I until I discovered the young republic of the USA invaded British North America from Detroit in that year, eventually burning York (later named Toronto). The struggle went back and forth, with a British fleet eventually arriving in Chesapeake Bay and torching Washington. The Treaty of Ghent returned the borders to the way they’d been before, and everyone went home. But the strange set of differences and similarities between North Americans on both sides of the border is perhaps encapsulated in this war – there was nobody more like a proto-Canadian than his cousin across the border, but they still went to war (with the native Americans on the British side, the US receiving French support, and most British subjects in the area being Francophone). How what was to become Canada went from a sparsely-populated set of provinces with little clout to the most powerful of all the dominions by mid-late C19 is a story I’m interested in hearing. If only I could be bothered to do any work.

Posted by David in
Permalink
Categories
Blog

Commerce and sponsorship

Thursday, January 23, 2003

Got to love the ease with which you can buy things online in the US. Just received a mouse to make my laptop computing more straightforward. Who knew right-mouse clicks worked in Apple OS 10.2?

Yet to hear back from the other bike manufacturers I contacted about sponsorship for the Canada trip, but a big hand for Airborne (http://www.airborne.net) for their speedy offer of a big discount on a Carpe Diem. There don’t look to be many roads in Newfoundland – maybe I need something chunkier?

Posted by David in
Permalink
Categories
Blog

Welcome to the blog

Wednesday, January 22, 2003

It’s bright and sunny in Santa Fe, New Mexico as I write this, a welcome to my blog. I’m staying here in a lovely house while the weather in Dublin is miserable, and I’m planning the big bike expedition in Canada, scheduled for May. More random thoughts as I have them, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Posted by David in
Permalink
Categories
Articles Square Eyes Television

Going to the Life Laundry

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

DIY and interior design shows purport to improve your life by improving your environment – but do any of them actually work?

You can get the Homefront team to do your kitchen for you, or call for DIY SOS when you’ve made a hames of things yourself. The Changing Rooms posse will let your neighbours loose in your living room, and The Property Ladder shows you how to turn a profit from getting your hands dirty.

Interior desecrating is everywhere, but when the film crew has left, are you really better off?

You’re going to pile all the same old shite you had before back onto the shelves and carry on regardless – like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. If you’re miserable before, you’ll be miserable afterwards.

Unless you’ve been to The Life Laundry, which takes an innovative look at how people relate to their stuff.

The premise of the programme is simple – arrive at a frighteningly cluttered house, dump all the contents into the back garden, and force the homeowners to shred, sell, or give away almost all of it. Shift the remainder back inside, where the decorators have been busy, and voila, a brighter and less cluttered environment.

Some of the houses visited are so shocking even Carol Smillie would lose her grin. Junk strewn everywhere, baked bean tins from two decades ago in the kitchen cupboards, several years’ worth of unopened mail in a plastic bag halfway up the stairs.

You’d think that making an improvement in cases like this would be straightforward, but it can be very hard to persuade the homeowners they’re better off without this crap.

These houses are clogged with baggage in more ways than one. People seem to surround themselves with stuff as a result of important personal issues – bereavement, loneliness, childhood trauma.

Most episodes have a defining moment in which the chief hoarder in the household is driven to tears by host Dawna Walter’s insistence that a particular item has to go. The detritus is a physical manifestation of some emotional obstacle that they’re often unwilling to face.

It might be just a green scarf to you, but to the hoarder it’s something much more, and through sensitive handling of the situation, the show allows its subjects to do a mental spring cleaning that’s as valuable as the physical one. A new kind of interior decoration.

Most of us aren’t in the extreme positions of the people on the show, but in a small way, The Life Laundry shows how important it is to get our stuff together. And it’s not about rag rolling your walls or putting in a dado rail.