Category Archives: Ramblings

Is your font racist? Or is it shagging a dog?

Two interesting typeface stories have pricked up my ears this week:

Is your font racist?

Alongside the image was the legend STIR FRY KITS, in a cliche fake-brushstroke “oriental” typeface that reflexively causes many Asians to cringe. For good measure, FreshDirect also offered side dishes of DUMPLINGS, printed in a different variation of the same font.

A tall claim, but nowhere near the revelation in the troll bait titled story in which Martha Gill overlooks filial responsibility to remind us all that her relative and the creator of Gill Sans fell fast from grace in the 80s.

How Comic Sans got useful

he invented the typeface Gill Sans. It’s a sans-serif font and a British font – indeed, it would be hard to find a more British font. Its clean lines permeate the railways, the BBC, Penguin Books and the Church of England, and it has meshed itself with the establishment so deeply that it was a surprise to everyone to discover, in the late ’80s, that its inventor once shagged his dog.

Drawing a veil over that unpleasantness, now would be a good time to tell you about my favourite glyph from Gill Sans, which is the lower case t.

t-gillsans

Isn’t it beautiful?

I particularly like the sneaky right angled triangle that is the upper left of the letter, and I always look out for it when I see Gill Sans in the wild.

Do, please, use the comments to post your favourite glyphs and why!

Style guides

In my ill-advised post about off-colour jokes in the staffroom (which bizarrely came up almost the following day as an interview question – the theme in general, not that I had blogged it) I found myself on the thorny issue of capitalisation – Leaning Tower of Pisa or leaning tower?

I had tried the Guardian Style Guide online but not found anything substantive to help me out. Given the Guardian’s love of lower case letters for almost everything (pope, prime minister, parliamentary select committee, french windows, yorkshire pudding) I suspected they would plump for the lower case version of leaning tower of Pisa.

(Just checking their guide for capitalisations, at least three things made me laugh: “The difference between narrowboat and barge is important, particularly if you don’t want to get stuck in a narrow lock somewhere outside Birmingham”, the long section on Caesar, and “call girl: like “vice girl”, an old-fashioned term encountered only in the tabloids, where it is always the 1950s”)

A few days later, joy of joys, I discovered they had a twitter account. And not only that, they take requests and give answers! Despite me not having any standing to ask for help, they happily provide.

Which just leaves the question – is this the sort of issue on which I want to be guided by the Guardian?

Losing and gaining weight

In 2010, I successfully lost a bit of weight with Diet Chef – so much so that when I bought a tailored suit for getting married in, I confidently told the tailor I would lose more weight. At my thinnest, I was 94kg. I stopped with the diet with a months worth of food left uneaten, as poor motivation took over. The suit didn’t fit great at the wedding.

By the start of 2012, I was over 100kg. The suit was a struggle to do up.

Somehow, during teaching practice, fourteen weeks from January to May this year, not counting the school holidays, I got down to 92kg, the lowest I have been in some considerable time. (My target weight is 75kg, the weight I was in 1999, which felt fat at the time.) My prompt for getting back on the scales was putting the suit back on for an interview and discovering the waistband was ridiculously loose. Ten kilos off translated to 8cm off my belly.

I lost weight on TP in the following ways, I think: leaving the house so early in the morning I was not ready for breakfast; sometimes being too nervous to eat for most of the day; and once, having to stop the car to be sick on the way to work. More positively, eating packed lunches every day and mostly making them very healthy: a graze box, 2 or three pieces of fruit and a sandwich made from 2 pieces of bread.

That last bit sounds vaguely healthy – but it also led to being ravenously hungry by 4 or 5pm and many nights stopping for desperately unhealthy fast food on the way home. So quite how that all added up to ten kilos of weight loss is a bit of a mystery.

I reweighed this evening and the weight is coming back on. The current phase of teacher training is less nerve racking than actually teaching every day, and there are too many opportunities for biscuits and cake in the staffroom. The same packed lunch that was too much food on TP is now not really seeing me through till morning break.

Dietchef had positives and negatives. On the bad side: it was expensive. I didn’t really like the food. What came in what they had the cheek to call a “hamper” was not all you eat as it needed supplementing with salad and other fruit and veg. The meals were odd. Essentially it was porridge or cereal for breakfast, soup for lunch and something sloppy like a casserole or pasta and sauce for tea. There were various fake chocolate, fake biscuit and fake other things for additional snacks and milkshakes as well.

Tomorrow's misery pouches

I got into the habit of calling them misery pouches. Although a few were quite nice, it was a real struggle to eat them and not find almost anything else to eat instead.

I think what it gave me most of all was a better understanding of calorie counting. Because you had to eat both the pouches and regular food, you had to count quite carefully. So I do now know for certain that if I can stick to 1500 calories a day for a few weeks I do lose weight.

Some of the surprises with counting was pasta, potatoes and bread. You really do not need much to get up to staggering quantities of calories. My standard day used to be two pieces of toast with butter and jam, and two pieces of bread at lunchtime as a sandwich. But if each piece of bread is the best part of 100 calories, 4 of them is almost a third of your daily allowance. Best cut one lot out.

It does seem though that if you eat a sensible amount of porridge for breakfast, with no syrup or cream, and base your lunch around soup – any soup – and fruit you will be eating healthily and constraining your calories without trying too much. There’s no need for them to be expensive special diet porridge or diet soup as almost all porridge and soup is low calorie.

This understanding is still very much theoretical, of course, I haven’t actually put the knowledge to use consciously to lose weight.

Another weird and annoying part of the Dietchef régime was that it was set up for women who have a lower calorie requirement – so the basic Dietchef day was a 1200 calorie diet. Men and those who have more weight to lose – and I was in both categories – get more. So they suggest you have a 200 calorie milkshake and then 200 more calories to find yourself. I have to say that the milkshake just seemed to me to be a complete waste of calories. Milkshakes do not normally play any part in my diet, least of all manky UHT box horrid bleirgh milkshakes. If I have to get 200 calories from a drink, what’s wrong with beer?

At the time, living off ready meals was a hardship. Perhaps I ought to reconsider using that approach next term when I might again be too busy to cook properly?

(At least) three things that are wrong on so many levels

1) Theft in multi-storey car parks ((c) Tim Vine)

2) The leaning tower of Pisa (*) (@facesake)

3) Farting in lifts.

Also, getting caught telling filthy dyslexia jokes in the staffroom by the headteacher as he washes out his mug.

For the record, a student colleague kicked us off with the notion that DNA stands for National Dyslexic Association. And so I chipped in with my series of similar spelling jokes recorded over the years. The are as follows:

Dyslexic pimp – bought a warehouse
Dyslexic devil worshipper – sold his soul to Santa
Dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac – stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog (Jasper Carrott)

(Which also leads to the necrophiliac sadistic guy into bestiality who wondered if he was flogging a dead horse)

I also forgot the fabled slogan of the DNA – Dyslexics of the world – untie! – but I did get in the joke stolen from @Pundamentalism just this morning – his filthy reimagining of the old standard cheesy chatup line “If I could rearrange the alphabet I’d put DNA inside U.”

Fourteen years ago, I caused a bit of offence on Usenet with a series of schizophrenic jokes not hugely dissimilar from the ones above. Worryingly, the text of what I wrote on the Archers newsgroup fourteen years ago is still easily findable and I have just been rereading the subsequent exchange. In a way, I don’t know what’s more disturbing – that I can recall the exchange fourteen years later, or that it’s so easy to find throwaway conversations after such a long time. I rest assured that anyone going for dirt on me would have an awful lot to dig through.

And the substantive point, made by Simon Townley so well, still remains: outsider jokes like the schizophrenic and dyslexic ones are funny, but also have masses of capacity to offend those directly affected. They are almost always completely inaccurate in their characterization of the nature of the other. And so my conclusion: I will probably carry on telling these jokes, but they are almost certainly better placed in the pub than the staffroom. I have no idea what sort of sense of humour my present headteacher has.

(*) I have been consulting style guides to work out capitalization, but Guardian and Wikipedia silent thereon.

May posts over the years

A whole bunch of blogs I read have been trawling their archives for the last few weeks, and since substantive posts here are few and far between, I though I’d join in the archive unearthing.

Come September, I will have been blogging eight years, and there is an awful lot of writing hidden away in these pages. Some days I think I should pull the plug given my career change. But I am generally too proud of what I have written over the years.

It’s coming harder and harder to give a rationale for this blog. No one person would want to follow the mish mash of politics, cooking, cats and lately education. But I still like having a place I can write things.

Looking back to May 17ths past…

In 2011, I was improvising cherry cheesecakes out of store cupboard ingredients, and making good use out of a bag of frozen cherries. I’d lost my seat a few days before, and wrote some helpful tips for successors after that.

In 2010, I live tweeted from the Lib Dem Special Conference that discussed the coalition agreement.

2009 saw me giggling at swearwords on Countdown. I also brought you this photoessay from a recent walk I had undertaken around Nottingham’s Guildhall.

In 2008, I was enjoying my work.

Similarly in 2007, I had just had the fascinating opportunity to tour a power plant in Lincolnshire.

We got our cats in 2006 and it pleases me no end to see the comment from Rob there when in the last few days I’ve been able to reciprocate on his post about getting a puppy.

I rewarded myself in 2005, after a gruelling election campaign, with a six week holiday under canvas in France, and one of the first posts from the multi-thousand-mile road trip can be found that month.

So, there you have it. Travel, animals, francophonie, politics. A reasonably typical mix of posts from Niles’s blog.

My experience hosting a supperclub

(File this one under “things I should have blogged months ago!”)

In November last year, just over a year after I opened our doors for CDWM, we hosted a supper club in our house.

We weren’t cooking, we were hosting for my vegan chef friend who used to blog here but is presently on hiatus.

I think it was a good evening. We had an interesting blend of people, who enjoyed our chef’s food. Our guests were a mix of vegans and not. For an evening, we had a house full of people who had never been here before.

In order to get the house ready we had spent about a week tidying clutter away, and I spent the Saturday hoovering, dusting and laying tables. Our guests didn’t seem disgusted by the state of our house, but then, as we learned on Come Dine With Me, they don’t usually express their disgust to your face! (And they weren’t allowed in as many rooms as the CDWM guys!)

Some things I learned:

* if I borrow a table and six chairs, I can easily seat 16 people for dinner in our house.

* We already have enough cutlery, crockery, glassware, candles, table linen without borrowing any more (!)

* in November, we need to run the heating all day to get the house tolerably warm

* if you deadbolt the kitchen door and put a camping table up against it you can get an extra prep surface. But it will be uncomfortably low down.

Some things that were hiccoughs along the way:

Boiling enough water to feed gnocchi to 16 people takes a looong time. They had to be cooked in separate batches because some of them were gluten free, so we needed two pans of boiling water. The gnocchi had been made ahead and frozen and needed to be plunged into large pans of boiling water. Getting 20l of water to the boil in a domestic kitchen is a time consuming challenge.

The second thing that held us up was plate warming. This is all the more important in our house because our kitchen is unheated and the cupboards fix directly to the walls. In winter, some of our cupboards are colder than our fridge. Our plates are often icy. There’s no point getting the food good and warm if you then By the time we needed warm plates, the oven was very hot cooking puff pastry, and the sink was full of used pots and pans. We actually warmed plates in the end by wetting them and microwaving them, all the while worrying this might break them.

Two of our guests were the hosts of North Nott’s Clarkies Supperclub (last few spaces remaining at their April event!). We had been worried they might be hostile to competition, but that wasn’t the case at all. It seems there is plenty of market share available for another supper club in the Nottingham neck of the woods – in fact there doesn’t appear to be any other one currently running anywhere in the East Midlands. The Clarkies have said they are keen for others to set up just so they have an opportunity to go and eat out instead of hosting for a change.

They had suggestions for the platewarming problem – buy a hostess trolley. They’re pricey new, but there does seem to be a steady supply of really cheap ones on eBay.

Which leads me to my conclusion. Would I do this again? Is it worth buying a hostess trolley off eBay? So far, I only have experience of hosting and not cooking. At our last event, our chef partner did all the cooking, devised the menu, and did all the publicity, mostly through the very obliging Nottingham Vegan website. I’m not sure I could cook as well as our chef, nor present the food as well, nor work out such an interesting menu.

Certainly working as a teacher I could not run an event in term time, as the prep and publicity would take too long. Do I want to spend half terms hosting a restaurant in my house?

If you do it regularly, it does seem to take over your house a little. In her book, Kerstin Rodgers confesses she’s had to move her entire life into the bedroom of her flat as her sitting room is dominated now by tables and chairs. In conversation with the Clarkies, it seems they have had to give over a spare bedroom to holding the folding chairs, tables, extra dinner services and linen they need.

Do you ever make any money from it? We were on a profit share basis with our chef partner and at the end of the evening divvied up the takings. And we got a nice handful of tenners in return for our efforts. We had incurred some cost – heating, and professional help in cleaning up ready for our guests – so we comfortably broke even. But the temptation to buy ever more things to make the evening go better – cooking kit, serving kit, must mean if you do it regularly, you incur costs. Would it ever get to the point where you made money? I doubt it. I guess most people who do it, do it for the love of food and the interesting times you end up with.

Will we do it again? I have not ruled it out forever, but I am sure as heck going to try and get teaching a bit more sorted out before I have another go myself. So certainly ruling it out for PGCE year and (hopefully) NQT year to summer 2013.

Apostates for Evensong

Some interesting things have been happening on the Facebook group for fans of Choral Evensong in the last few days.

Firstly, people from some fairly major cathedrals have been highlighting when they have spare days for visiting choirs – and there has even been some suggestion of setting up a Facebook Scratch Choir. Which would be hugely fun, even if only to get some po-faced precentor to thank the Facebook Singers at the end of evensong.

Secondly, there was this rather good article from an Australian atheist called Apostates for Evensong that ticks rather a lot of boxes for things I have been pondering lately.

I’m fairly ambivalent about things Godly these days, but I maintain pretty strong links with the church through bellringing. Somehow I’m more into that than now than I have been for years and even my Sunday morning attendance – for ringing if not for services – is now hugely more than it has been for years.

How do you square a fairly strong agnostic position on the whole God front and still turn up week after week to ring the bells? I think bellringing and choral singing, especially evensong, are huge parts of the English cultural heritage. It may be that the church has the monopoly on all the equipment and costumes, but it’s culturally important that evensong and bellringing continue, whether or not it’s to do it just because it’s beautiful or to the glory of God. If God is there and listening, then it’s an expression of human worship. But there’s a purely humanist dimension as well. Hearing the bells and the choirs as an expression of human skill and talent, with no spiritual dimension, is just as uplifting.

I spend a week every year singing choral evensong with a touring choir, and every year think to myself I should a) sing routinely and not just in August and b) I should make a greater effort to go and hear other choirs singing evensong. Heck, on at least two nights a month I ring for evensong in St Peters but never stay for the service. St Peters and St Marys in Nottingham both have strong choirs and it’s not that far from Southwell Minster, which has a choral foundation. And yet in almost every year since I started singing over the summer, thirteen years this year, I don’t think I’ve been to evensong for the rest of the year more than once or twice. (I do remember one particular year taking P to evensong at St Mary’s, only to get lumbered with a Surprise Eucharist, and overly keen meeters and greeters on the door who wouldn’t let us leave afterwards…)

Half term film festival

Yes, it’s the half term holiday, and unlike the autumn half term where we had to go back to university for at least some of the week, this half term, we actually get to ourselves.

The week has been looming for all of the last few weeks in school, and I imagine everyone in education has been making mental lists of the things they should finish off, start, and how not to waste the time the system affords us all.

Half term film festival

In particular, I’ve not been to the cinema for weeks, and thought that I could use my neglected subscription to Cineworld to spend all day every day at the flicks, enjoying a half term film festival. Only we’re more than halfway through the week already and I haven’t even looked at the film times. And… it’s half term, so there’s suddenly a rash of kids movies and a whole bunch of things I wanted to see are long gone. And getting diaries lined up with P to go and see the Muppets has been tricky.

Half term beer and wine festival

OK, I have had time to do this – indulge in the luxury of drinking in the week. I’ve really had to cut back on alcohol on school nights because I simply can’t face the idea of ever going into school with a hangover. Not least because the alarm rings at 6am and I have to be able safely to drive by 7am. It’s enough of a struggle to fit in enough sleep to be right enough with the world to get behind the wheel every morning.

Half term festival of housework

Well, yes, obviously, I ought to be doing this. The house is a tip, my bits of it especially, I’ve a laundry and ironing mountain to reckon with, but how depressing to use holiday to catch up with ineffective weekday routines?

Half term festival of lie-ins and Radio 4

Oh, yes, am definitely indulging that. Since I am not car sharing to work at the moment, I can get an earful of Today and PM on my drives in and back, but I haven’t heard WATO or Woman’s Hour for months! And choosing for myself when to turn in and when to get up is great. Although this holiday I am being careful not to allow myself to revert to my nocturnal habits too fully, as I did that over Christmas and getting back into the diurnal swing of things was a real struggle.

Half term festival of catching up with audiobook recording

Oh dear.

Half term festival of applying for jobs and polishing CV

This, definitely, I should be doing. It does feel a little nuts. We are now almost exactly halfway through the course which ends in June, and we all want to line up a proper full-time teaching job for September. But I’m really not sure I feel enough of a teacher yet to be attempting interviews yet! The ads are just beginning to appear, and I have quite specific requirements: I don’t want to move house or drive too far to work; I can only teach French and German, so have to overlook any of the French and Spanish ads that come up. Whilst it has amazed me just how many dozens of secondary schools there are within ten miles of my house, there is still a finite number, and I should be going for any and all that come up. There is a sensational one that just pinged up on the TES job search for an outstanding school and one that would pay for further valuable training as well as help with the NQT year. Really should have been writing the application for that today…

Half term festival of lesson planning

I also have to be ready to return to work on Monday and make sure I can share lesson plans before the weekend with colleagues at the school. So far I have not managed to do more than plan the day ahead, despite ample opportunities to do so. If I can plan 3 days ahead, there will be time to use the school repro system instead of queueing to do my own photocopying at 8am, and also time to run the plans past colleagues for improvement suggestions rather than just getting the feedback after the lesson. Yay, lesson planning.

Satisfied customer of T M Lewin

I’m a bit of a shirt addict. I buy shirts in the way some women buy shoes, and I have a wardrobe with.. 60? 80? shirts in it, many of which only fit if I am planning to wear them with the collars open.

When it came to getting married a last year, I knew I had to get a nice shirt as part of my outfit, and started scanning the high street. I’d never been into Curtis and Hawkes before, so I started there. They have sample shirts for you to try on to work out which size fits you and then you can take your pick of the styles, patterns and stripes they offer. Except, as it turned out, they simply don’t sell a size of shirt that fits me. At all. So, sod that. F You Curtis and Hawkes!

I’m not enormous, but one of the things that tells me that I shall have to get to grips with my weight and size sooner rather than later is that I am different size every two years or so, and that most shops I visit do not have larger sizes than the ones I am currently wearing.

So after the embarrassment of C&H, I went on round the corner to T M Lewin to see if they sold anything that would stretch around my 18″ neck.

They did.

Not only did they have a shirt that went around my neck, they also suggested I try their “slim fit” 18″ shirt. I initially poo-pooed the idea that slim fit anything would go around my not insignificant girth, but tried it on, and it was actually a good fit. They have a good range of interesting shirts, they fit, they look nice. They are slightly fancy, with double cuffs that need cufflinks, no shirt pocket, and extra long tails which means they almost never come untucked (except when bellringing, which would untuck thermal undies.)

I ultimately got married wearing Paul Smith. But that was a frankly stupid amount of money to spend on a shirt that is now discounted to an annoyingly low amount.

But T M Lewin are now providing most of my work wear, as, for pretty much the first time in my life, I have to wear a tie every day, so it’s important I have shirts that go all the way around my neck.

US President trivia

Liberal England has the news that it’s been confirmed that US President John Taylor, who was in office from 1841-1845, still has living grandchildren.

It’s one of those strange and unlikely sounding facts, and it brings to mind two further pieces of trivia.

The first is that there is a photograph of Mozart’s wife, which I blogged about here. (It’s also a little bit strange and unlikely that I can have a) blogged something six years ago and b) still remember it!)

The second is a great trivia question that came up as part of my car-share to Mordor last year: which is the only US president to have worn Nazi uniform? The answer is Continue reading →