Day 1.

Greeted by boss R, shown my hot-desk and laptop. I am required to read over 20 official NHS policies before I can start anything else. Ethical Activities policy; Financial Standards and Standing Orders policy; Policy on Driving While Using Mobile Phones (summary: Bad); Information Quality Policy; Smoking Policy (summary: Bad); Fraud and Probity Policy(summary: Fraud Bad).

There's a rather sweet Website Development Policy tacked on the end, but you can tell it's a fake, it has none of the appendices or version-control notation of the real policies.

Boss R tours me around the Institute website with that sad, world-weary project-manager air which I recognise instantly, the rare bird calling to rare bird across silent acres of jungle. The website one is responsible for is desperately inadequate - and yet - the struggle to get it as good as this has been so hard - "You must think I'm very despondent" he says mournfully.

Later Geoff takes me through current projects, and I exclaim out loud when I see the budget figures the developing company is charging. Geoff looks me in the eye and says, "You're a contractor too, right? Well, I stay out of internal politics".

Back to my tiny student cell, to eat cold M & S pasta salad and watch the final episode of David Tennant as Dr Who, on BBC iplayer. Pretty good! That Master, always a sexy bit of rough. It's still only 6.30. At 8.30 I head off to the campus arts centre to watch "An Education", beautifully done, set in 1961 and filled with the china, fabric patterns, furniture which I distantly remember from childhood. There's a shot of a wooden table with a red formica top which almost makes me choke up with sudden tears.

Brighton 2009, the "barbecue summer". The sun beats down. Our garden plants are fat and juicy looking; laundry dries in minutes with a lovely linen scent. Even seagulls are torpid, weakened from the lack of black bin-bags of food to scavenge.

Everyone is back from a not very wet and therefore news-wise boring Glastonbury; Mandleson has just decided that no-one will buy the Post Office now, so he's reversed that decision to sell it off. Good thing too, as the National Express company has just "handed back" its contract to run the super-profitable London-Edinburgh line, as they can't make money out of it.

Martin hands me a pint of Pimms. Cheers, everyone.

Blog rediscovered......! can't remember much of the previous 12 months, so this is as good a place to start as any.

And another fun offer on Freecycle. You have hope for a sort of psychological enlightenment going on here.

37446 Helena 11.41 am
offered peacehaven 2 black bags of material;

37447 Helena 11:44 am
wanted peacehaven- uv material for clothes making project cheers helena...

A list of objects offered by some anonymous citizen, for free on the Brighton Freecycle group, which makes a little artwork all by itself.

OFFER - Various stuff -

Bag of plastic snakes (some glow in the dark - woohoo)
Plastic golden roman goblet
Plastic fruit (orange, apple, lemon, banana, bunch grapes)
Jesus Last Supper fold out magnetic address book/card. (Two pictures hologram like effect)
3 pairs plastic kids sunglasses
Carnival costume parts found in Trinidad
Poster - Multi Faith Spiral Calendar Of Festivals (including Jain,Rastafarian, Shinto, Zoroastrians.)
Nils Udo images from calendar
14 x Hippo Water Saver Bags for loo cisterns
Pram frame ­ Old Fashioned ­ sprung - Works lovely as trolley, ideal forstreet theatre piece? one missing tyre.

I've had a horrible cold, in its final revenge it's given me a faceful of spots. I stand in front of the mirror pulling my face into scary shapes and whingeing about how horrible the spots look. But Martin comes up to me and looks me straight in the face and says in his best innocent voice, "I don't see no spots. I just see the totality of wonderfulness that is my darling" and gives me a huge wet suckery kiss on the nose.

That feels better.

Great fun reading the Loom blog and its debates on the nuttiness of "inteligent design" versus science. Lots of entertaining outrage that the Loom author Carl Zimmer has to spend precious minutes to spell out patiently the hilarious flaws in an attack by a mad creationist called Luskin, and then, ..er, this comment.....


As a native Chinese, I feel extremely confused why there will be such peoples like Luskin existing in America who pay so huge effort to advocate for an obviously false ideas, and there will be so many who do believe them. And further more - they attack science! What is the benefit behind all these? In China, we also have lots of people believing in God or Buddha, but they do not attack science. If they do the government will arrest them. Therefore science is pretty safe here. I think it is necessary to be so. Please arrest Luskin for attacking evolutionism!
Posted by: Andrew Sun November 14, 2006 03:25 AM

To a Girl Geek dinner in a pub in Brighton, dark and chatty and very busy.

The organisers were quite academic- all out of the COGs set up at Sussex, many of them nurtured by my old mate Ian. But the attendees were much more business minded, very much a networking event. Quite a lot of young women from small agencies around Brighton, interesting to find out just how many agencies there are.

With the possible exception of the main speaker Rosie, I was the oldest person there ( I put that down to lack of family commitments, not being 10 years behind in this new internet-thingy career. How I wish I had taken the advice all those years ago and learned this new fangled HTML coding back in 1995).

Anyway - Rosie took us through her project working on "portable electronic slates" for under 8 year olds; looks like fun, but SO far away way off anything commercially applicable that it clearly baffled some of the agency business-women. Wait till the 8 year olds are all 12, and then all homework will be done collectively via vast MySpace 8.0 group-think hives.

I complained to my companions that all the women speaking seemed to continually *apologise* for using the technology, "0h dear, this is the first time we've done this" "please bear with us .... er, which button do I press? "silly me, used to using a Mac.." but was countered by the argument that as women, the speakers felt relaxed in a group of other women, so didn't feel the pressure to be super-performing macho male-apers. Which is a good argument. Sank a pint of Budvar and went home.