Morris In

I am so annoyed at myself for not taking my camera with me last night. We (in the morris sense) were dancing out at a couple of pubs in the market town on Faringdon. I was in two minds as to whether to go or not because of the combination of distance (not that great, but a bit of a drive) and inclement weather (it had been persisting down all day). But turn out I did, and met up with a bunch more of the team at The Bell, a nice old coaching inn on the market square.

The rain didn't stop much, so we danced for a while underneath the quaint C17th town hall, which was a challenge in itself, trying to avoid the pillars and steps around the edge of the rather restricted space. We had an audience of a few passing teenagers huddled under umbrellas and some smokers (and a big black dog) outside the various nearby pubs, but who cares about audiences?

After a good few dances and a quick "bagging" (administrative) session, we made the short walk up the gentle hill to the next pub, The Folly, under the power of melodeon, harmonica and bells, to be greeted by a shout of "You're late, sod off!" from the landlord, who then went on to say it was good to see us and that the drinks were on the house.

The rain had stopped by this point, so we set up in the street and performed one dance which did a great job of summoning the rain back again, so we gave up and went indoors.

Of course, we didn't want to abuse the landlord's hospitality without putting on a show, so someone had the idea of performing the Upton On Severn Cocktail Stirrer Dance (more often performed with sticks than cocktail stirrers, but sometimes you have to improvise). So there were six of us laying into each other with short lengths of coloured plastic in the corner of a small bar, just in front of the darts board, which made our previous dancing venue seem positively spacious.

Over the following hour we performed a whole heap more dances in ludicrously cramped conditions, which was a lot of fun for us (though very hot and sweaty) and I think the locals enjoyed themselves. Then it was the rest of the evening spend singing songs and playing tunes. I bailed out far too early, but it was a trip home and I needed to be up for work in the morning.

Cracking evening, and very silly indeed.

Babies

For some reason this has some resonance...

Asylum Seekers

This one is particularly aimed at my father-in-law. Radio 4 has a weekly program for kids, Go4It, which often tackles some pretty serious issues in a way that does its best to really engage with its audience in a productive way. This week they had a big feature on asylum seekers, which involved quite a challenging bit of roleplay where the kids had to take on the roles of a family being forced to flee their home and had some very tough decisions to make which would affect what happened to them later. We had to stop what we were doing and listen to this compelling radio. It's available to listen again until Sunday. (Hopefully it can be listened to in the RoI.)

Wimbledon, here we come...

I got myself a new camera the other day, the excuse being so that I can send pictures of the Youngling to <3 while she is away (as now). It's only a bog standard snappy camera, but it's nice and easy to use. I'm really pleased with this pic of the Youngling getting in preparation to compete for a Wimbledon singles title some time around 2022 or so.

The Bells, The Bells...

I reckon it's now official: I am a morris man! Saturday saw my first real dance out, first at a local museum and afterwards at a pub in one of the nearby villages.

Somewhere on this page you should see photographic proof of this, as you see part of the set that was dancing the Ring o' Bells from Litchfield. I'm the one on the right with the serious face as I realise that with not one but two sticks, a cock-up here could be quite spectacular. Next to me you see the face of the guy who faced me in the sticking routines and has his eyes shut as he tries to shut out the terror of trying to avoid having his knuckles smashed by the novice opposite him.

You'll be pleased to know that we both survived and later on I actually started to relax and enjoy myself a bit.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Hadron

I finally got home from Geneva at about midnight on Friday, after an OK trip — once again BA didn't lose my luggage at T5, although for a while it looks like it had. Just as I was about to go to the enquiries desk, there appeared my little case packed with dirty clothes.

The week was interesting, though a lot of the content of the meetings went over my head. Probably the most useful aspect was getting to meet and chat with a load of the UK grid people (including several who work at the same site as me) who I will be working with over the coming months and years.

We ate well too, including a stonking steak at Cafe de l'Aviation, a veal saute thingie at a great little bistro in a back street, a proper Italian-style pizza laden with fish, and my first ever steak tartare, which was really very nice. Unfortunately no fondue this time though.

As pretty much expected I didn't get to have a proper look around CERN. It would have been great to look into one of the experiment caverns, but them's the breaks. They've already started to cool the ring down (it'll get below 2K over the next few weeks, so darn cold!) and are planning to fireup the first beams later in the summer, so I think the chances of getting a real look are diminishing now. It's all very exciting stuff though. I expect we'll be seeing a lot of press coverage later in the year, though it'll be some time before the LHC is running at full power.

Terminals and Hostels

So, here am I, sitting in a pleasant enough little room in one of the on-site hostels at CERN, the partical physics lab on the edge of Geneva. I've got a week of meetings, seminars and workshops on the grid computing system that is being built to support the Large Hadron Collider when it is turned on later this year. It's quite a big event this, with over 200 of the great and the good from the grid community from around the world. I feel like a very small fish.

I've not seen much of CERN yet (and may not get the chance to, really) but what I can report on is that the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow is actually pretty good. It may be partly because people are steering clear for the moment given recent hassles (and they aren't running long haul flights from there yet as far as I know), but it was all very smooth and one of the easiest trips through an airport that I have experienced. Our baggage even arrived correctly! (I had taken the precaution of keeping enough kit to keep me going in my hand luggage, but I'm glad to have all my things here anyway.)

Caecilius in horto sedet

This week's Doctor Who was enjoyable for many reasons, not least of which the fact that I actually got a fairly obscure in-joke. At least I assume it was an in-joke as otherwise it would be too much of a coincidence. You see, when I was about 12 or 13 I had some classics lessons at school, which comprised some very basic Latin lessons and a load of "how the Romans lived" stuff, all through the medium of a series of booklets following the exploits of a Pompeiian merchant named Caecilius and his family, which included a wife named Metella and a son named Quintus. I am pleased to have predicted the character names in advance. I expect that is the last such flash of insight I will have this year.

Anglos and Ales

Fun over the last few days...

On Saturday I had my first trip out with the morris side to the Icknield Ale. Basically, an ale is a get-together for morris dancers, where there is much dancing, eating, singing and, of course, drinking of ale. Many morris teams host one, generally during the "off-season" and this was the one we hosted. There were nearly 100 men from something over a dozen teams and it was a cracking night. I even ended up dancing sets from a tradition I had not even heard of before, let alone danced. I'm still recovering.

Then on Monday, the Youngling and I went to Oxford and I bought myself a new toy: a Rochelle 30-key, C/G Anglo concertina. So far I haven't had much time playing it, but I'm managing to get a few hesitant tunes out of it. I've been eyeing up this type of concertina for some time (it is widely reckoned to be the best beginner Anglo available, and probably would be at double the price), but finally took the plunge and made the purchase after receiving some money courtesy of my recently departed (and much missed) grandfather, along with the instructions to spend some of it frivolously. I'm not sure that buying a musical instrument is the most frivolous thing I could have done, but from now on the instrument will always be a reminder of Gramp, and should give years of enjoyment, which I think is in the appropriate spirit.

Virtually Starting

So, I have been in my new job (as a Linux system administrator) for almost a month now, but due to holidays, sickness, and continuing to do my previous job part time, I am only slowly getting up to speed. So far so good, though, and as of next week almost all of my time will be dedicated to the new job.

It is looking like one of my new specialities is going to be virtualisation, which is one of those buzzwords that gets spouted by management types who don't really know what it is all about other than leveraging core competancies in order to effectively monetarise creativity and increase shareholder value. Or something. Anyway, I don't know much about it either yet, but I do have a laptop running Windows with Ubuntu Linux sitting very happily inside a virtual machine, and I also have a test server which, as of today, has an operating system configured to allow me to run virtual machines on it, which will be a task for next week. Still early days but it is looking like fun.