Tag: year two
there is a road that meets the road that goes to my house
Census collecting is pretty damn hard work.
It’s certainly proper healthy outdoorsy stuff, walking and talking in the sun; I go to bed genuinely tired, and my neck is tanned beneath the too-long mop I really need to cut off* (well, the neck is burned actually, but I can pretend it’s tanned); my arms would be too if I ever stopped wearing my one-colour long-sleeved shirts, though I never will.
I’m being paid £9/hour, which would be a pretty good rate for being a sort of reverse door-to-door salesman, except that there is no real way an hour of census collecting is going to take one hour of my time. As an example, a batch of sixty-something addresses has been calculated to be worth four of the government’s hours; a shade under 4 minutes per house sounds just about reasonable, given that while sometimes I’m just knocking, waiting and sliding a “please return your census bro” leaflet in, and sometimes going through the laborious purpose of addressing and barcoding a new form for them (so far nobody has required me to actually fill their form in for them… so far). But I’m not going down streets, but picking on sometimes extremely poor route maps (it would help if they gave us actual street paths rather than a hideously broad and poorly delineated AO map), and there’s usually a minute or two of travel time between them; and I’m expected to visit all these houses two or three times.
Plus there’s travel time to the AO – I’ve been lucky so far that most of it’s been ten-fifteen minutes’ bike ride away (though up some steep hills, carrying a *lot* of census paperwork – again, HEALTHY! But also sweaty and tiring) – which I don’t get paid for; and then the followup paperwork of double-checking my stuff, filling in the dummy forms, making sure my forms all conform; and my one hour of census collecting might have taken an hour and three quarters by the time I’m done. So it’s still good solid work, but not so competitively paid as it sounds, and I’m not enjoying the fundamental discord between expectations vs what’s actually possible – but Dad informs me that this sort of employee abuse is pretty much par for this sort of work, and you do what you can.
But it is definitely not boring. I can’t tell specific stories, sadly; they fall under the century-long statute of limitations applying to all census data. (The awesome bloke who did our classroom training,** when I asked if I was allowed to tell census anecdotes in a hundred years’ time, said “not only can you tell them, you can tell people I said you can tell them.”) But I have learned that places which look deceptively nice from Google Maps – even Streetview level – are often still quite shitty, unpleasant and run-down when your boots are actually on the glass-scattered, miscellaneously stained ground; and I have also learned that even in places that could have been backdrops to The Wire, I have so far not felt threatened, and there seems to be no correlation between the “niceness” of a neighbourhood and the actual niceness and friendliness of the people. Some people are shit. Most people are actually pretty cool daddio.
I’m very much on my own out there, and self-discipline is pretty nice – but it comes with a) going into scary buildings with no backup and b) having no help except the giant book of regs and the seemingly-rather-divorced-from-reality classroom training. We’ve not been given enough of the replacement H1 forms, and several times I have been terribly embarrassed by having to stop and fumble through my paperwork; and I have resorted to using my proper backpack to hold my folder and backup forms rather than the bespoke, census-branded bag because I simply can’t take that damn thing on a bike (also, it doesn’t hold my thermos.) I am sure that after a week or two I’ll have this all down to a fine craft, but at the moment it’s all a bit of a mess – the sort of pressure and uncertainty that I normally thrive on, and would be massively enjoying if my house wasn’t going to shit.
*It doesn’t even look that bad objectively,*** just fuck the Young Tory look.
** The training session was at a travel inn at the absolute arse-end of nowhere. I’m not sure if this is a calculated trick to test our census-collector-intrepidity, or just plain government incompetence and inability to find a good venue.
*** Alright, so it looks awful. 
command what is tried, what is true
The second term of second year disappeared into Easter with barely a ripple.
The Redbrick AGM was a heartbreaker: far too many very good candidates for far too few positions, meaning lots of good people getting disappointed. It also, as a result of all the candidates and their speeches and questions, took forever and a day, and I… somehow ended up helping to take the minutes. (Last online typing speed test I tried gave me 111WPM and perfect accuracy, so maybe this is a good thing to be doing.) Both the new Editor and Online Editor are excellent, and people I know pretty well, so there will hopefully be plenty for me to do in the office next year.
I saw Sucker Punch with Jon H and his housemate Greg (Jony bailed on us; apparently he has a GIRLFRIEND now or something. Pfaugh.) Having seen the trailer and the first five minutes, and knowing who Zack Snyder is, there was no way I could in good conscience pay actual money to see it on my own, but going with friends turns it into a social experience and thus perfectly reasonable (and I had an amusing war-related chat with the proprietor of a fried chicken joint while buying supper along the way.) It was exactly what we were expecting: beautifully overwrought CGI battles featuring young ladies showing a lot of thigh blowing up a lot of lovingly detailed enemies in utter war porn, all tied together by the most wretched and nonsensical incoherent trainwreck of an excuse plot you can imagine. Fun for the eyes. Horrible on the brain.
Bill came round at the weekend, and we ate delicious food and saw Baader Meinhof Komplex and listened to lots of Wir Sind Helden. We Did Cosford at long last (pictures here & here), a field trip that has been planned for ages but always stymied by some illness or circumstance or other. This trip was achieved due, this time, to ignoring the illness/circumstance: true to form, I developed a horrifying and unexplained rash which, for two consecutive days, spread all over my body in fiercely itchy ripples before fading, but disappeared shortly after Bill did. I really hope I’m not becoming allergic to bromance…
we both go down together
(I have an awful lot of “something learned” posts built up over the last few months; the drafts all sit together in neat rows in my dropbox, forgotten or badly timed. Releasing them all at once would turn this blog into Nothing But Warwank, which is imperfectly desirable. But they’re going to come out some day.)
Nukes were It, right? After their invention, there couldn’t really be war between nuclear-armed nations; armies were obsolete and irrelevant, war was a matter of brinkmanship, with the end of mankind a scatter of warheads a way.
Well, obviously untrue in detail, but something that I hadn’t thought about came up in our Op Art lecture about nuclear strategy: how, for a while – possibly the most dangerous while the world had seen – nuclear weapons weren’t the be-all and end-all, and thus stood a much more terrifying chance of actually being used. (Asked Peter Gray, who really knows this topic, about this, and he confirmed it.)
In the early Cold War days, before both sides had an arsenal that could murder the planet (and the delivery systems to effectively use it), they were really just another weapon; generals’ bluntest instruments, rather than politicians’ final sanction. Another bomb, just one that could light up entire cities. The French honestly considered using nukes at Dien Bien Phu but decided against it because of how it would have fucked everything up forever; now, because they didn’t, we study the Vietnam War, rather than the French Indochina War, and the number of atomics used in anger stands at a mere two too many.
And to counter the Warsaw Pact’s numberless armies, and the deep-battle capability that unravelled the Japanese Empire in eleven days flat, NATO put nuclear warheads in damn near everything: nuclear artillery shells, nuclear landmines, nuclear depth charges, nuclear air-to-air rockets, shoulder-fired recoilless guns with nuclear warheads. Which, looking back, was utterly insane: but the concept of a “limited nuclear exchange,” whose limitations would almost certainly have been purely technical, somehow prevailed in the minds of planners.
Then came ICBMs and MIRVed-up citykillers by the thousands, and mutually assured annihilation. And in a nuclear total war, if you have the capability, everything is a target. Everything. Military, infrastructure, communications, agriculture, population. And that was so utterly, unconscionably insane that it made the world almost safe. For the first time ever, the idea that this weapon would be so horrific that nobody would dare use it – which builders of better weapons have been saying, wrongly, more or less since day one – was true.
But they weren’t the instant game-changer it’s too easy to believe. (For all the Soviet-downplaying postwar press, it wasn’t even the atomics which brought Japan down – look up Operation August Storm sometime.) For a few dark years, the game was the same; just got more fierce.
the ampersand renaissance
The train journey down to London last Saturday morning, on a Pendolino bearing the rather unfortunate nameplate “Virgin Invader” wasn’t bad, the hour ambling vaguely around Euston to Victoria oddly wonderful. As my lawyerly ambitions gravitate gradually towards the capital, and as living in Birmingham most days further breaks down the still-odd idea of Bristol as home (I’m pretty certain that Brum, for all that’s good about it, will never be “home”), my old love for London seems to be resurgent. Home is where the heart is, and with every visit I’m more convinced mine belongs to the big city.
Then it was another train out to Redhill, the old apparatus of the post-station and the latticed silhouette of a distant bridge bringing back a jolt of surprised memory more than a decade old, and down on the steps I met Mum, Olly, Nick, a radiant-looking Cousin Steph, a suave-looking Cousin Mike and their associated young men. We got taxis out to Jennifer and Dick’s place out in the sticks, which was a bit embarrassing; Mum’s expectations of taxis are grounded in London black-cab competence, ie “a bloke who knows every damn street for thirty miles better than the back of his hand.” The cost-cutting realities of provincial radio-cab firms, ie “a car, a dude with just about enough English to get by, and a phone with GPS,” chafed somewhat… particularly as she didn’t know the postcode. But we made it to the Winny place in the Wilds of Dorking eventually.
And so we went to Cousin Jonathan’s wedding/welcome-back party, as he and his lovely Australian bride celebrated coming back from California (where they got married) and their new child. The party was half full of awesome cousins I haven’t spoken to in far too long (plus their awesome spouses I haven’t spoken to in far too long, and their ever-growing assortment of small adorable children) and half full of people they knew from work – ie big-shot City lawyers. My kind of crowd. So I did what’s referred to so cynically and clinically as “networking”: chatting, reminiscing and seeking thoughts, coming away with lots of good advice and a few useful contacts. The boat race, with most of my extended family divided one way or another between Oxford and Cambridge, was a particularly entertaining moment, and with a sack of useful law stuff from Cousin Katherine (who’s on a similar path to me, a couple of years ahead) I rolled off to Bristol on the train, with bros. Mum went back with Paul instead; she was going down to Dover, to scatter Pearl’s ashes.
In the Sunday morning at some aggressively early hour, Dad woke me up and we got in the car and cruised down to Dartmoor, where he was doing musical things; and he dropped me off at the house of the one, the only, the incomparable Philip Reeve. Where I had a Grand Day Out, ruminatin’ on tech and the world, ripping up brambles with wild and gay abandon, watching a few episodes of the utterly charming Noggin the Nog, and as the day drew to a close making a huge bonfire from our Manly Labours. I found a butter-knife buried among the thorns and took it as a trophy. When all was said and done I was absolutely shattered, covered in shallow cuts and thorn splinters, dirty and sweaty enough to warrant a shower then and there, and stinking of woodsmoke. These are all signs of a very good day. More of this over Easter, I hope.
The car journey back, through the swiftly gathering darkness, turned fun quickly as Olly and I, in constant text contact, realised I might be able to get on a much earlier train, if we looped around the city and went to Parkway rather than going straight into it to Temple Meads. Issue: Dad had never driven to Parkway from the M5. So the last three quarters of an hour of the journey were me whipping out atlases and A-Zs and trying to plan routes by the car light, working through the rubbish map software on my phone, plotting routes and having Olly doing my fact-finding at home like some Matrix operator; by text we wandered through constantly updating train times, junction numbers, computer-calculated ETAs and quick navigation decisions. Dad dropped me at the station with seven minutes to spare; I found the train, and on it a very friendly and erudite BCU student (doing a degree in… hospitality, I think?), and we chatted the evening away as the sodium-lit Midlands rolled past, and I got off at Selly Oak to fill my belly with cheap Big John’s chicken nuggets and stagger off home.
looks, brains & everything
Holy hell, I have a lot of stuff to catch up on. But! Term is over and all my friends are disappearing home, so I’ll have nothing to do except Mass Effect, introspection, census collecting and self-absorbed blogging.
Law & Societies.
As previously namedropped, I have fallen in totally with the new and very professional Law for Non-Law Society. One of their few-but-excellent events so far was a Commercial Awareness Workshop, inviting a couple of cool people from Bond Pearce; it was really genuinely interesting, as well as confirming (again) that this recently-chosen law path is one that I’ll enjoy. More on that and the BBC in another post for (hurr) posterity. Having not embarrassed myself too much there (I think…) and having got to know a couple of members of the outgoing committee and offered to build and run a website for them, I was encouraged to apply for a committee position in the AGM; while the website thing was my main aim, this sounded a great idea, as I really want to help the outfit in any way I can. Initially applied for newsletter admin, then changed to treasurer at last minute, as I’m already treasurer of Warsoc and know what I’m doing there. So, after elections for many positions (Sam Lear lost President to Derrina, but, despite his belief that you never win VP after losing Prez, did in fact get to be VP. Which I think is about the best result possible, as they were both fantastic candidates and choosing between the two was not fun.) Eventually, Treasurer, against a chap called Scott who seemed much like me. I went outside and he gave a speech; and then he went outside and I gave a totally off-the-cuff speech having agonised over one for hours and then thrown it away. Then we both got absolutely grilled in front of the society, far more questions than any other position; friends who got to see both speeches said this was because we were both clearly awesome and there seemed to be so little between us. My answers were characterised more by cockiness than consideration, as I was on a massive sleep-debt high and barely coherent. Turns out that competence > cockiness, and he won. I then went for newsletter admin, against four other people, but I didn’t care nearly as much and it showed; that went to Lauren, who I vaguely knew from a History module last year, and will definitely do a good job.
I had prepared vast trays of flapjack, but in the end decided to hold them off until after all votes on me had been passed, as if I got any positions I wanted them to be a result of my treasurin’ (or, well, electioneering) skills rather than my baking skills. Possibly a mistake. But the flapjack went down very well in the aftermath.
Genuinely not unhappy with the results; best man probably won in all cases. I’ve talked to the new president, and my services in site building/maintaining will still be available, just no thankless (yet official!) paper-pushing. So I’ll definitely call that a win, and well done to the new committee – and in particular Derrina and Sam, our new Prez and VP; may their reign be glorious, and may death come swiftly to their enemies.
Vietnam.
I attended, at one day’s notice, a VIETNAM MASTERCLASS with a Major-General (retd.) Zabecki. This man did three tours in Vietnam, starting off as an actual nineteen-year-old grunt rifleman and working his way up through the ranks (which for those not aware of military matters, is seriously rare; most high-ranking officers start as low-ranking officers, not grunts), retiring as a two-star general and deputy Chief of Staff. He is now a highly respected military historian and editor of Vietnam Magazine. Before the lecture started I went up and asked him some questions (shouting a little, as you have to with a man who’s spent years in the artillery.) He told me about buckshot rounds in his M79 at Tet, of his reaction on being issued an M16 after being trained on M14s, and of being one of the first soldiers issued the XM148 – which was such a pain to use that his apparently ended up getting accidentally run over by an APC. His lecture led off with “The most cherished beliefs about the Vietnam war ain’t so,” and, informative right through, mockingly derided crap books, with hilarious quotes: “‘The door gunner of an AH-1G gunship scans the ground for a target.’ AH-1G. That’s a Cobra. Cobras don’t have door guns. Hell, Cobras don’t even have doors.” It was fun throughout, and Peter Gray told me that I’d have Zabecki’s help for my dissertation, if I so desired. If this is a department attempt to placate me, it’s working (though given my complaining made it to the front page of the final issue of Redbrick, they might not see it that way.)
My dissertation; thanks to much in depth Q&A with Rob, rather than the department’s literature or general emails being any help to anyone, I think I really do understand what’s meant of me. However, I’m not doing great at proving it: my dissprep essay, due to time miscalculations and hubris, given how much well previous work-under-pressure essays have gone, was not quite up to snuff when I handed it in after the usual adrenaline-high caffeine bender. Good enough that I think – hope – it still ought to be worth something in the low-to-mid-60s, and good enough that it probably wasn’t worth taking the 5% hit in order to polish it off and hand it in a day late. I’m not worrying too much. Fortunately, I do have enough good marks banked to be pretty much assured a First this year, unless something goes hideously wrong; it’s mostly annoying because I’ve never handed anything quite worth a First (several past essays have been tantalisingly close) to Rob, and of all my academics, he’s the one I most want to impress and probably the one I’m doing the worst job of doing so.
there are power lines in our bloodlines
Let me just set the record straight: The Dreyse needle gun was a bad weapon.
Yes, it introduced quick breech-loading fire to the battlefield and was one of the most important early steps in the development of bolt actions. Yes, the Prussians used it to very impressive effect against the Austrians in ’66, especially at Königgrätz. But it was a fatally flawed gun.
The needle system that gave it its name, based on having a primer inside the cartridge rather at one end (that was struck by a needle penetrating the cartridge) was inherently incredibly flimsy, and the needle broke all the time; the muzzle velocity (and thus range) was miserably bad; the obturation seal on the bolt was flawed, so that after a few rounds it spat hot gas into the the face of the user and set him firing from the hip, turning a nineteenth-century rifleman with a bolt-action masterpiece of fine engineering and mass production into a blindly flailing seventeenth-century musketeer.
It was a Bad Gun, never mind that it could briefly, occasionally do what nobody else could, and that such a device got standardised knowing its massive flaws says things that aren’t really surprising about how much the Prussians really cared for their men. The Chassepot left it, deservedly, in the dust.
None of you will ever have heard of the Dreyse needle rifle, but I need to get this off my chest. Now, back to Ian Hogg’s superbly written illustrated history of ammunition (aka The Big Book of Wargasms.)
a wolf in a sheepskin coat
Addenda! These are things I meant to say last time but didn’t because a) it would make the previous post apocalyptically long, b) I forgot.
– History department foolishness, in apparent response to my unnecessarily tetchy email to Lynne Brydon (if you’re stalking my blog now, hi! I’m still not convinced!) has reached new heights for second year, combining miserable self-contradicting stupidity in paper returns (I got my ROMW essay back; the following day everyone else couldn’t, and then couldn’t for a week), mislaid papers (the model essays for Group Research, which were going to be pretty much my only salvation; the exam scripts from LAST YEAR which I’ve given up on ever seeing) and levels of spam that they barely reached last year. In order to get to the latest few pieces of meaningless, inconsequential crap that the office is spamming us with, I had to scroll past 888 email addresses, either because the office’s clunkily ancient software is incapable of BCCing or because the department itself is. THIS IS 2011, HOW IS THIS SORT OF IDIOCY EVEN POSSIBLE. <3 having programmed "end" onto one of the buttons on my fancy gamer mouse.
– I have been locking my bike on the outside of the totally unfit-for-purpose increasingly-frayed wooden porch support beam in order to avoid accidentally crushing the daffodils/narcissi that have poked their heads above the ground of late. However, I now have to put it back in the flowers' faces, to avoid Alex accidentally crushing my bike, as he ever-so-excitingly has a NEW CAR. Sorry, daffodils! Your lot in life was to end up the punchline of a lame ham-handed joke about technology and the environment.
– I went to a Birmingham GDL Open Day, and while the first two people were miserably bad at making either the subject sound good or Birmingham a nice place to do it, the third launched into an impromptu lecture on contract law which was – seriously – enthralling. More certain than ever that this is a subject I am suited for and will enjoy. Pursuant to this, am getting involved with the excellent new "Law for Non-Law Society" (created because the Law Society hates potential GDL students as outsiders, and apparently the first of its kind in the country). May be going for a committee position at the AGM soon; may not.
– I hate Group Research. This has been my catchphrase pretty much since we started Group Research, but I hate Group Research. Presentation is, surprisingly, going okay (mostly), but I can't help but feel doomed about both it and the attendant essay, because it's been hideously badly explained to us. What is it? Academic essay requiring academic references? Original research claiming salience and significance? "we went here and dun this" travelogue… thing? What even is the style for referencing "random bits of paper found in a box at the archives"? They didn't cover this at the library inductions. Stuart has told us that he will give us plenty of leeway. He has also told us that there will be a second marker. I'm so glad I have a lot of good marks banked for this year already, because I don't see any way anyone is coming out of this well.
underneath the open sky 