Blessings

Sometimes it seems to me, that the life of a well-educated single woman, with a decent job, a good salary but not enough to make her fortune, with no children, in good health, approaching middle age, in a reasonably orderly liberal democracy, in the first or second decade of the twenty-first century as they are commonly counted these days, is possibly the most enviable life that there has ever been for a human in the world. And perhaps the most enviable life that there ever will be (I've always been the sort to feel disaster is just around the corner, even as a little girl).

I am so glad that this young woman looks like she might be OK.

[Although a pile of free money is always good in theory, in practice it's hard to show how it could reliably make me much happier, at least for long. In moderation it does have advantages, but they are not all that easy to make use of.]

Unrecommended books

There are such things as books about how I.T. ('Information Technology') ought to be done in ordinary companies. This genre is known as "ITIL", and you don't need to care what that stands for. I have even attempted to read one or two: as a genre, they are inane, with diagrams worse than the text.

It came into my head today that one of them, to which I had been foolish enough to refer after reading the title, was so entirely useless and unrelated to how anything actually happens, that it seemed to have been written by someone from Mars.

But no; this is nonsense. A person from the planet Mars would have written a much better book, because they couldn't have based it on anything but observation of reality.

Anyway, I'm off now for another long weekend, and very happy to be out of the office. I had one colleague - a database administrator - who wrote his out of office message in the form of a rhyming couplet. I didn't manage that today.

Smirking survey

CALLER 

Hello, I'm Linda from T.N.T. Research, we're doing a survey about smirking and brand awareness, would you be able to answer a few questions? 

HEDGEHOG

... From what, sorry?

LINDA

I'm from T.N.T. Research. We're doing a small survey about smirking, and brand awareness?

HEDEGHOG

Smirking? As in ... a small smile? And what, sorry?

LINDA 

Er, smirking, as in smirking cigarettes. 

HEDGEHOG
Oh! Smoking. Er - I don't smoke, I'm sorry.

LINDA 

Is there anyone in the household who smirks?

HEDGEHOG 

Er, no, sorry. No, thank you. [Puts phone down].

I don't even know anyone who smokes, any more! Extra points if you can tell me where Linda was from. And I honestly wasn't taking the piss out of her accent - my brain was a bit tired, and without any context I just couldn't rearrange the sounds into anything I recognised from life.

People in my ipod - Noelia Hurtado

Recently, I worked out (with a couple of false starts) how to download videos from YouTube and put them in my ipod to watch on the train. So I put in, among other things, some dancing people that I just like to watch.


I love Noelia Hurtado. She's so, so into it, she's such an animal. Her feet stick to the floor, and release, as though with a magnetism created by the varying electric current that crackles through her in the musical field. I feel like, if Carlitos put his arm all the way round, he might get a minor shock.


Even when she whips her feet up, which does happen, it never seems like the strained and artificial showing-off that it normally does, even from some of the best. It seems like a direct, uncontrolled expression of joy, wonder, even of exhaustion. I also feel like she's not afraid to make mistakes.


And, watching her with Carlitos is just exciting, like watching a classic Test Match. Warne vs Pietersen. Imran Khan vs Viv Richards. Ian McKellen v Christopher Lee. Two "beings of similar power", testing each other's limits in what is fundamentally a cooperative endeavour for their own mutual entertainment and everyone else's, striking off sparks, making something sublime. I spend half the time just giggling when I watch this stuff. (I totally understand if you hate the music in this last one - I love it, for some reason).


That said, I'd probably watch Noelia shear sheep. Watching her makes me braver and more confident in my dance. And she dances with her mouth open, so there.

Andalusia

I was in Andalusia. The tapas were a bit ordinary, but I liked the sherry, and I quite liked the chocolate con churros. I also liked the street art.

Here's my favourite Andalusian street message.

As far as I can tell, it reads "Freedom is wriggling in the guts of time".

This little chap was all over the place, but this was the only example I saw with a caption. I would translate it "Sieze the street, sieze the square, sieze your life!".

(Not 'take' because I think that would be a really bad translation of the last part - the normal meaning of 'take your life' would be 'commit suicide' and I don't think that sense exists in the Spanish, as far as I know. It wouldn't make a lot of sense in context, anyway.)

I think this is my second favourite. The entire wall of a building, where its neighbour had been knocked down, was painted in this bright ochre. This was just one corner.

The wall, door-frame and door of an art school are painted like this:

Nearby is a puzzled little cloud, the only cloud I saw during my stay, apart from a few wisps of cirrus.

Luxury

You know what my favourite thing about having a smartphone is so far? The ability to read John Hempton in bed. Or watch Periodic Videos. Both jobs it does better than my laptop - silently and coolly, without annoying interruptions.

Out of Office Message

I'm going on two short holidays in quick succession. Back the week after next, and briefly in between. I have a smartphone now, so it's not impossible that I'll post while I'm away; usually, though, I try to do something else, and I almost certainly won't get round to moderating the comments, sorry.