Category: raves

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raves

Summertown is getting a Starbucks!

Summertown is getting a Starbucks!Originally uploaded by mgharris

Forgive the excitement but it seems that the charming yet overpriced, much-missed Bakehouse is to be replaced with a Starbucks!!!

M&S food, Costa coffee and starbucks…the anti-glob hand-wringers might get in a tizzy but I predict that like Costa, the place will be full all day from day one.

Summertown has a lot of caffeine-hungry people! There’s all the year 11s and older from Cherwell, the mums-with-babies, the big-haired lads and lasses from Teddy’s, the Oxfam and Oxford Uni employees.

Not to mention the itinerant authors with wayyy too much time on their hands.

I hear that JK Rowling has been spotted writing in cafés again. Good onya, Jo. Get cracking. I don’t see why being a squillionaire should get anyone off the hook, when there’s a hungry audience waiting for the next fix from a creative mind.
Emailed from my BlackBerry®

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raves

Books for readers aged 5-8: Amelia Bedelia

We have a 6-year old daughter and therefore are engaged in the struggle to find the right books for this age group.

It’s no surprise that it’s difficult. It’s an age where the reader’s appetite for story usually outstrips their ability to read or even understand the material themselves. They love books like “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” or “The Hobbit” but can’t possibly read them alone. But you also have to give them books they might be able to read alone, or else they might be content forever to listen to audiobooks or watch TV and skip the whole reading thing until it becomes unavoidable.

The age at which children learn to read, believe it or not, is the subject of great debate amongst those concerned with primary education. Some blame the UK system, in which children start school aged four, as the reason for lower literacy rates than some European counterparts. It seems that in countries where children don’t start proper structured schooling until age seven, they learn to read much faster and without the angst that some UK primary kids suffer.

Our older daughter, although finally a keen reader aged fifteen, fell into the read-it-to-me camp. Looking through her selection of books for 5-8, I can see why. It’s all classic fairy tales and Narnia, the odd Dr Seuss and several gorgeous picture books (mostly gifted by my lovely friend Dr. Ann Vernallis, whom we refer to affectionately as American-Ann). Very few books that she could hope to read alone, since she wasn’t one of those little Precocias who have a reading age 3 years above their age.

So for Daughter #2 we are making a more concerted effort. I have stacked her shelves with even more Dr Seuss. Another good one is Frog and Toad.

 

The latest triumphant discovery is the wonderful Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish. A Christmas gift from fellow parent Jessica at the primary school, Amelia Bedelia is a brilliant character that our daughter absolutely adored from the first reading. She’s a very literally-minded housekeeper, whose misunderstanding of instructions causes all sorts of trouble. But she is forgiven everything on account of her amazing baking skills.

Well, I never had an upset that I couldn’t resolve by baking the injured party a pie myself, so I know from experience that this woman is on to something. Nor could I remain angry at someone who baked me a yummy pie…sadly I’m the only baker in the family so far.

People think baking is easy. But it’s a love-thing. You have to devote hours and hours to the craft. As a teenager, every Sunday I’d…

But that’s another story. (It’s a good thing I have this blog. If I start a sentence with ‘when I was your age…’ my teenage daughter is out of the door yawning before I reach the end.)

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raves

Hello world…

Being a writer of fiction I find that my natural propensity to daydream has now become a completely justifiable way to spend my time. I even get to give it diary time:

Daydream over a primo soy milk mocha in Summertown Costa.

I don’t read newspapers or print media much: to quote Comic Book Guy from a Simpson’s episode I recently glimpsed, “I get my news from the Internet, like any normal person.”  I don’t watch mainstream TV since we got SkyPlus – we program everything and then watch, often 3/4 episodes at a time, months after they were aired. (I haven’t seen the last 6 episodes of Life on Mars or Doctor Who yet…)…and I certainly don’t watch the news on TV. For us, SkyPlus has completed removed any notion of watching TV at a certain time (i.e. when your show is on, or when the news is actually on).

YouTube and blogs have eroded my attention span whilst on the computer, so that I am now addicted to short entertainment breaks during the working day.

I read The Spectator once a week, but skip the book reviews of very intellectual books that I’m unlikely to read, of art exhibitions I’m unlikely to attend, of operas and plays I’m almost certainly not going to see. And the bridge column… And since the Speccie stopped doing the one page review of the week’s news, I have only the vaguest notion of what is going on in the world.

Really I’m no different to when I was a scientist. I had my head down in science then, like most scientists. It’s a very intensive life; no matter how hard you work at it you’re forever behind in your reading. And I don’t mean about the real world. Forget that – who has the time? I mean the tiny field of your expertise. If you’re lucky it’s a matter of reading 5 or 6 high-impact papers per month. If you’re in some mega-trendy field that could be more like 20.

Once in a while I plug back into the world and it’s a revelation.

This week I watched BBC1 for a whole evening. I read a whole Saturday supplement of a broadsheet. I read Cosmopolitan cover to cover. The things I saw, heard and read! Pop music and the US elections and all the Big Ideas of 2007…fashion, makeup…and so much more.

I had this sudden flash of insight. For a few seconds the world made a brilliant kind of sense. I felt engaged – maybe once again – to the world that I normally wander through in a bewildered daze. I began to formulate ideas, felt the incipient scratchings of understanding…

And then it vanished, all of it, every scrap of connectedness.

Italo Calvino wrote a short story about this feeling. So I guess it’s not just me. Maybe we all wander around in this haze of awareness.

So who are all those people who walk around so confidently, who seem to know exactly what’s going on, how this all works and where to go for this’n’that and the other?

Is there maybe some podcast I can download that’ll scrape everything essential together; a quick guide for the bewildered, for fantasists like me?

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raves videos

Believe It Or Not…

I’m considering changing my phone message to our own version of George Costanza’s (of Seinfeld) Believe It Or Not.

We did this a few years ago and it was great – it annoyed everyone who called us. I particularly remember hearing my mother-in-law tutting and clucking with annoyance. In those days I occasionally got phone calls from friends, but nowadays most people realise that I don’t like the phone and they write me emails or send texts.

So all that’s left are the telemarketers…

For those who don’t know and love Seinfeld, here’s the clip:

(my favourite bit comes when George is listening to it second time round, hears the line ‘where could I be?’ and shrugs, askance…)

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raves

Foxboro Hot Tubs – are they Green Day?

 

Foxboro Hot Tubs – another Green Day experimental outing, like ‘The Network’? 

So everyone’s wondering about whether the new, free EP by mystery band Foxboro Hot Tubs is really by those US punk pop boys, Green Day. I just downloaded it listened to the whole thing twice.

“Ruby Room” is very similar in sound and structure to “Hitchin’ A Ride”, that’s for sure.

Billy Joe Armstrong has a versatile voice, pretty distinctive too. There’s a slight difference – Foxboro’s singer sounds a little milder, softer than recent Billie Joe. But it’s hard to disguise that tenor twang of Billie Joe’s. The song “Mother Mary” really does sound a heckuva lot like him.

Tre Cool, the Green Day drummer is extremely proficient. I saw him play at Milton Keynes in 2005 – awesome rock drummer! If Foxboro have a rookie drummer then he’s darn good…

Finally, Mike Dirnt the bass player…Green Day tracks are notorious for their heavy, leading bass line. “Red Tide” has the right sort of feel for a Mike Dirnt bass line.

My verdict? Yeah, go on. I’m totally taken in. And I think I like “Mother Mary” best, so far.

You can download the songs and judge for yourself…

I like this kind of stealth&viral marketing. It’s yummy.