So, like, I said: I spent New Year in Glasgow. Very pleasant it was, too; a longish period of time with just two of us, living normally, in our own space. Lovely. Being a holiday period (especially so up here in Scotchland), most of our time was spent idly, either watching dramatic moving pictures or eating because, well, eating is good. I also, as espoused below, discovered the joys of free wireless. Anyhow, I wanted to start posting more frequently to this thing, and there’s so much to say about this wonderful holiday… but not in full. So, like countless other webloggers, I’m using a big fat list post to substitute for any real content.

What we saw:

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Zoolander
Heist
American Psycho
Half of The Rules of Attraction (bad)
Half of The Breakfast Club (good)
Eddie Izzard’s Circle
Almost Famous
Minority Report
Wonder Boys
American Splendour

What we ate:

Pizza.
Turkey Dhanya & homemade Naan bread.
Turkey Enchiladas.
Tom’s Expansive Spaghetti Bolognese.
Lamb in Black Bean and Green Pepper sauce.
Lots of breakfasts; spiced scrambled eggs, fried eggs, sausages, hash browns, etcetera.
Chicken breasts marinaded in white wine and ginger, in a mushroom and peppercorn sauce, served with basil-seasoned Penne and a caramelised-red-onion-and-pepper garnish. (My own concoction).
The best steak of our lives, along with duck pate, feta and spinach salad, raspberry cranakin and lemon and ginger tarte.
Lots of beer.

What we did:

Went to the cinema a lot.
Went out to drink a fair bit, and found the Glasgow bar that I’d be happy to call home (that wasn’t Nicensleazy).
Went shopping for each other in the sales.
Read the books we gave each other for Christmas.
Cooked for one another, with another, in the nearest we could make to a home when you’re living out of suitcases.
Went out for a marvellous dinner on New Year’s Eve, saw 2004 in standing in a busy lane with one or two hundred other happy people, all out for the evening in a secluded little lane.
Lusted after white goods. And clothing, for that matter.
Slept, dozed, lay in. Slept in the most comfortable sofabed ever, a bed that lay in a bay window, with fairy lights above it.
Visited a record shop that can only be described as Championship Vinyl (and nabbed a Jose Feliciano LP for a quid).

Some pictures to illustrate:
(poor quality down to digital camera not having much battery and so having to use cameraphone)

I’m sitting in a cafe in Glasgow, wirelessly hooked up for free via my Powerbook, and I think I’m in the future. Really. The future; I sit down, buy my Coke, open the laptop and the world is at my fingertips. I couldn’t have dreamed of this three years ago, let alone ten.

New Year was fantastic. Dinner with a loved one, all sorts of culinary experiments, and watching the King return. My camera was low on batteries, but my t610 wasn’t, so I have lots of grimy mophos that might scatter my New Year post.

Life is good. Now that I am unemployed again, I have a big list of things to do, all of which I am going to try and acheive. I’ll explain them in more detail when I’m home. One of them is to get into the habit of posting again, and I’m going to, as it will make sure I get on with the plans in hand. They involve music, writing, teaching, making. Getting my hands in gear again.

Like I said: life is good. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch for a while, world; I don’t know if anyone reads this thing, and I never have. When I redesigned and moved to this new domain, I promised I would make infovore something worthwhile, interesting. I’m not sure I’ve fulfilled that, but I’m beginning to understand more about the way I write, the way I think, and the ways to turn this into something exciting.

And that’s before I mention the nefarious, top-secret plans…

That was a lovely long weekend away from work, then; three days off, and the lovely presence of the girlfriend to boot. We ate tons, drank too, went to the cinema (Love Actually is 50% of a really good movie, and 50% of a terrible one; Aurelia was the bomb, though), played a lot of backgammon (wonderful game), failed to teach her to play Halo (wonderful game too, but requires lots of thumb co-ordination; still, a valiant effort was made), and went for a walk.

And what a lovely walk it was; smallish photos here – if you want it larger, I might oblige later.

I am still here, I promise. There’s a bit of linking going on in that sidebar, and I’m working on other projects. I haven’t flown away anywhere:

But work tires me out, and spare time is consumed with job applications and books and other people and having fun. I’m doing quite well, really; enjoying the time I have. I’ve just bought a lovely bike (bargain, too) and am now getting out and about, thus helping Project: Fitness and also Project: Mental Health. It’s lovely to ride a bike that isn’t a rusty gate but something akin to precision engineering, whisper-quiet as it purrs up and down hills, paths and roads. It’s hopefully going to see some pleasant weekend use, this year. When I was out on Sunday, there was a plane overhead making beautiful vapour trails. By the time I had the camera out, it had passed a little and wasn’t so hot, but you get the idea. Sunday was, as the photo shows, a glorious day.

Anyhow, there are things afoot, and I shall have something worthwhile to post soon, I hope. I’ve kind-of lost track of what to put in this big column; coming up with short pieces is no trouble, it seems.

Christmas lights in Glasgow, just outside the Museum of Modern Art. At night, they look like a sea of stars above one’s head; when they ripple, it’s like being underwater, and the stars are bobbing on the surface.

Christmas lights in Green Street, Cambridge:

Time appears to be catching up with me already. Today, I gave a talk to some final-year-sixthformers about the Cambridge interview process. They’ll be being interviewed in mid-December. It doesn’t seem so long ago (even if it was four years ago) that I was interviewed by my future Director of Studies. I can still remember it very clearly, and passed on any advice that I could.

Tomorrow, I’m off for a weekend to Cambridge, because one of my best friends from home is having a shindig because he’s engaged.

Engaged.

Not taking calls. . Suddenly, rather than the horror that is University seeming to be coming to a crashing end, all around me, everything seems to be about to explode into life. Which is all very good indeed. The chance to catch up with old friends and the like is also an added bonus, which I shall not be passing up.

I’ve been busy, basically. Applying for jobs, waiting to hear about said jobs, doing some covering work in the meantime to fill my coffers; that sort of thing. And it’s all quite tiring, getting back into the swing of half seven starts again, but I’ve got something approaching regular income now, and that leads to trips to Cambridge and Glasgow, and to buying an Xbox (and thus spending many a minute snowboarding and shooting Covenant scum), as well as being immersed in The Corrections, and going back to some studio work and…

it’s not quite all go, but there’s just been enough happening to stop me being able to blog, mainly because I don’t feel right blogging from work in the slightest, and my headspace has needed clearing. So this has been on pause. A new Omnivore from Luke went up yesterday, and very fine it is to.

I’ll hopefully find stuff to write about, or time to write it, soon. As it is, infovore sits here, begging for content, and I want to give it content… but I just can’t. I’m a bad father, really.

Sometimes, things just slip my mind. I’ve been awfully busy of late, though not in any serious way, just enough to make me stressful and fretty, but not enough to seriously consume my time.

So I haven’t been weblogging, or reading, or making music, or doing fun things. Job applications and other whatnot have been taking precedence in my head, and so the weblog is the first thing to go. I’m off to my alma mater for the weekend, to see old friends and celebrate things. I shall soon be able to catch up and write again. And do not fear; there will be a new Omnivore on Monday, this time from the marvellous MacDara.

There’s a problem with long-running serial texts: where do you begin when you’re a new reader? If you’re writing comics, self-contained story arcs with constant reference to explain why things as they are might be one way (as well as, of course, introducing characters slowly and having a large cast to choose from but only featuring several at a time).

Peter Lindberg decided the way to do this with his weblog was in a summary page. The interesting (but when you think about it entirely obvious) thing about this is that it’s written entirely by hand; no automatically-generated-by-Moveable-Type here. Lindberg has sat down and gone over his posts and links. It’s in part interesting because of what Lindberg himself seems to be discovering about his writing/thoughtprocesses and the way they emerge over long periods of time (as opposed to the shot space of the individual blog post). It may be a time-consuming process for the weblogger, but it’s the most effective and certainly the most literary way of generating context I can think of for a text-based medium.