Encouraging thought from Steinbeck

"It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again."

(Rockpooling in Log from the Sea of Cortez)

Open plan offices: a more friendly environment?

Why do we assume that open plan offices foster more friendliness and openness just because they are laid out like that? In fact I think that open plan offices are more likely to encourage the opposite behaviour because they allow people to hide in anonymity.

If you work in a small office, and your fellow colleagues give a cheery "hello" in the mornings, it is just downright unfriendly if you do not acknowledge them and wish them a "good morning" too. But the scale of open-plan offices is such that people can just keep their heads down and not reply.

Not having barriers is artificial because one cannot have a conversation without everyone, however unintentionally, listening in. Later on, when the subject is brought up again, for the sake of politeness you must pretend not to have heard already and greet the news with fresh interest.

Sad for the lost railings

As I walk to work I pass many house flanked by walls pitted by sad little dimples, a reminder of iron railings salvaged during the Second World War and largely never replaced.

The thing is I always wonder quite how this salvage was carried out. Was it a compulsory thing with a glorified rag & bone man from the home guard clearing a whole street of its railings at once? Did people object? Was it a more voluntary thing where you would donate your railings to the war effort? Would neighbours frown if you were sentimentally attached to your railings? Would they excuse you if a couple of your sons were off fighting the war?

Some of the surviving railings near where I live are fantastic. It makes me sad that there are so few Victorian railings left, especially as it appears that a huge number were never used and just went to waste. Although its true to say that the dimples that remain are a reminder of the history of the war effort and that remarkable collective sacrifice that we can't imagine today.




Links
BBC war memories archive Brief remark on this site suggests that the railings were collected in an organised way.
Some old duffer who sensibly hid his gates down a well

A modern tragedy

A week ago last Wednesday I came across a colleague in need of comfort. She'd had her bag nicked the previous weekend, losing her Oyster card and boyfriend's iPod. She was clearly very upset and I tried to reach out to her but she flinched in a "No, its too raw, please don't be nice to me" kind of way. "At least no-one got hurt," I said, deferring to a comfortable platitude. She shrugged, as if the damage had been at least that bad. She was wearing black.

This Wednesday I saw the boyfriend who also bemoaned the loss of the aforementionned iPod. "I'd always been really careful with it. I've had friends go through three or four iPods over that time, but not me. It was one of the first models, I got it before they were so popular. It [significant pause] could have been a collector's item [gulp]."

Its horrible having your bag nicked - granted - but while I was genuinely sympathetic during my encounters with the bereft couple but afterwards I found myself getting more and more indignant. More than a week in bereavement over an MP3 player! Its easy when you're feeling a bit self-righteous to counter this suburban overeaction with genuine day to day tradegies you've seen and experienced - death and illness, relationship break downs, unhappiness, depression - but honestly, get over it. Only having your stuff robbed once in five years of London life seems like a pretty good record.

As for the holy grail of having a genuine "collector's item", give me a break. Consumerism transformed with a higher purpose. That said, I've got a rare red vinyl 7" of Get Ready by the band Ash that I would part with at the right price. Anyone?

Idle thoughts and white noise of the brain

My brain throws me random images from time to time. By random images I mean a perfect picture of some scene or other I've encountered at some point. Never very exciting they range from the high street in Abagavenny to my mate's road in Crowthorne, Berkshire. Its like a polaroid of an instant. One is the back garden of a house in North Wales where I stayed when I was little. Its just after the rain, droplets running off the green green plants, snails and fat orange-fringed slugs are creeping across the steep steps, which are made of earth held in place by planks. The memory of the smell of wet earth and smoke from coal fires accompanies this one. I can feel the drops of rain brush off on my face and clothes as I walk past the shrubs.

There's no real narrative, these scenes are a glance through a window or the flash of an instant. None of the "scenes" hold any particular significance, but are coupled with a mundane activity like washing up or sharpening a pencil. They are on the periphery of my conciousnes and I hardly notice them. But sometimes I'm struck by the weirdness of this funny brain filing. Does this happen to everyone?

Slightly more concious, but also a consequence of this white noise of the brain are recurring obsessions which absorb me on the way to work, but then evaporate. I idly obsess about all the iron railings that were taken down and melted during the second World War, more of which later. But my top idle obsession of the moment relates to the poster for the new Merrill Streep film, "The Devil Wears Prada". It features a picture of a high heeled shoe, with the heel substituted for a diabolical trident. But I can't help looking at the ad, from the bus or wherever, and consider the praticaticalities of wearing such a shoe. It really bothers me.

The little tridents would mean you'd get stuck in the mud and have to walk around with grassy clods stuck to the bottom of each heel. But more troubling, the tridents couldn't bear the weight and would snap off! Its wrong and makes me feel itchy.

Once again I'm startled at the genius of Dickens

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously."

The first paragraph of David Copperfield