Home

I'm sitting here listening to "Home" by Deep Blue Something, definitely one of my favourite songs. It contains the lyric "Home, where my friends are". It got me thinking about where I think Home really is. I gre up in Scotland, moved to England when I was 8, went off to Cambridge when I was 18, then down to London when I was 21. Six years later I'm still here, but none of them really feel like home. There was a time during and just after I left Cambridge that it really felt like home, but as friends slowly drifted away from that wonderful city, it now feels a little hollow.

That's not to say that the flat where we live doesn't feel like home - it does - but I don't feel integrated into the local community. For example there are about 50,000 people in my part of London. How many of them do I know? Not sure exactly, but it would be about five people outside of my work colleagues and their partners. Two of them are people from a local computer course I use to teach at for old people, and the other three are people who live in our block of flats. Yes, that's right even though there are six flats in our block, and a total of eight other people, I know just three, from two of the flats, and by know I mean know their names and could hold a conversation that consists of more than "Hi"....

I think that's London for you - as more and more people like Hazel and me arrive here it becomes less and less sociable. That's a strange thing to say because in some ways it's incredibly sociable - with many people meeting up with friends every night. However most people don't know their neighbours. I don't think it's that we're unfriendly (either us or the community), but people don't want to put their noses into others' business. A friend highlighted the situation perfectly - he held a street party at his house, and put invitations through the entire street's letterboxes. They waited and waited, but no one arrived. After a while somebody decided to go along, then suddenly everyone started turning up - his theory is that they'd all wanted to go but didn't want to be the first person who went along, or more importantly the only person. Once one person was there, everyone else took the chance to meet their neighbours. Apparently the person who knew most of them was a young boy who cycled around the area!

We went to see "Bewitched" yesterday - the new film with Nicole Kidman. It was pretty good, although I didn't like the male character in it (actor or the person he played). We were thinking of going to see "Pride and Prejudice" but Hazel decided she didn't fancy it! What sort of woman declines the opportunity to see P&P... surely such a famous romantic story is always worth seeing again?

Before that I'd gone out for a run to try to loosen up my back (27 and my back hurts!). I did one of my half hour runs, up and down some fairly nasty hills - certainly some of the nastier ones around here. I set out a little too fast and paid the price before long. It was one of the more painful runs I've done recently - my knees are still painful from the holiday last week and in particular the tendons were struggling to pull me up the hills. That coupled with being on the verge of getting a stitch several times meant it hurt quite a bit. Definitely one of the slower runs that I've done and particularly disappointing after my 22"30' 5k run that I did a couple of weeks ago at about 8% slower. However the main objectives were achieved - I loosened up my back and more importantly managed to finish the run. Also, it must be said that running through pain is a useful experience. If I'm ever to run the marathon (and I have a vague aim to do that at some point) then I'm going to have to learn to run through pain much worse than that - the kind of toenails falling off, nipples bleeding, legs seizing up kind of pain.

Later today I'll be playing Ultimate I hope - depending on whether my back (which is currently stiff again) feels OK. The evenings are closing in on us, so I think we're due to start at 4pm this time - it won't be long before the onset of Winter and the clock change result in us having to start at 1pm. The good thing there is that I can still do stuff later in the day. In the dark...

Starting Out...

Hmmm... so I've finally joined the blogging revolution, after several years of wondering why people do it. To be honest I'm still wondering why people do it, but what better way of finding out. I suspect it won't be more than a couple of weeks before I decide to give up and try out a new project, but in the meantime maybe I'll work out why so many people think it's such a good idea.

Currently I'm waiting for my wife to awaken - my habitual weekend morning pursuit - passing the time checking email, surfing the web and (in a few seconds at least) listening to some music. In her defence (and that's defence with a c because I'm British) she's much better than she used to be, and generally by around 9 or 10 she's up.

I'm feeling a bit at a loose end because I was going to go running this morning, but I hurt my back playing Ultimate (more about what that is later) on Tuesday and while I'm able to go about life pretty much as normal, sport seems like a bad idea. Worse still, I've completed all the urgent tasks on my to do list, so I'm really just treading water.

That's better - I've now got "Try Not to Breathe" by R.E.M. playing. I really should remember to play music while surfing the web. Since I pretty much stopped running (over a year ago to concentrate on Ultimate - don't worry you'll find out what that is soon enough) I don't get to listen to music very often. I find listening to music distracts me when doing something that requires almost any level of concentration, so I don't listen at work, and most of the rest of the time my wife (Hazel) is around, so I tend to talk to her instead. I do own an mp3 player, but I can never remember to take it with me, or change the songs (so difficult...).

This morning I've been looking at software for my phone (a Nokia 6600 - my first decent phone, although it's now almost a year old) with a little success. I try to do that every month or two to see what new stuff has arrived. I've also got a background task to look at Python (a programming language) in order to see whether I can do more with my phone - it's basically a small computer, so I really do some more programmy stuff on it. Nokia released Python a few months ago, much to my disappointment because there was also talk of support for Perl (which I already know from work and home CGI programming) but that's still in Beta. Ah well - an excuse to learn something new.

I think that's enough for now, expect future posts to tell you what Ultimate is, brush on programming (don't worry that's just my job, I'm unlikely to cover it much), talk about travel (the way I spend all the money I earn) and maybe contain a little Spanish (which I've now been learning for 18 months).

Hasta luego