wendy house

An Italian, and American and a Wendy in a room together.

The American compliments the Italian.

The Wendy turns to the Italian, raises the flat of her hand into the air and smiles at him.

The Italian looks baffled, takes Wendy’s hand as if to shake it.

Wendy: High Five, slap my hand

American: Yo, High five man!

I really like the way USA people express compliments with this physical gesture. It will happen to people that I work with….

I had never heard of a Piñata when I moved to the USA. My manager was going out to buy one for a friend, I asked him what it was. He was gobsmacked that I didn’t know. How could I have lived a truly fulfilled life without knowing what a Piñata is? He explained that it was a colourful paper container, often shaped like a donkey, that is hung from a tree branch and people beat it with baseball bats until the sweeties it contains fall out.

wendy: so it essentially rewards people for being violent to something that looks like an animal?

manager:  yeeeeaarrh (he’s Texan)

wendy: Americans are strange people

I’ve noticed a trend in the restaurants, cafés and pubs who occasionally serve a meal to me. No plates. Popular alternatives are:

• plank of wood
• slate tile
• basket
• small bucket or mug (of chips or vegetables)

I’m hoping that it’s just a passing phase. I find it quite difficult to eat off a slate tile without simultaneously decorating the table.

The Education Act of 1895 made schooling free for all children. Hoorah!

Several schools near the Wendy House were built around this time. The nearest one is where I go to vote, on the Wokingham road. The Alfred Sutton primary school.

Alfred Sutton ran “Sutton and Sons” which was the world’s largest seed firms at the time. Alfred donated 20% of his substantial income to charitable causes. One of these causes was funding the creation of local schools.

Alfred Sutton Primary School opened as the “Wokingham Road School “ with just over 100 children attending the first day in 1902, it was renamed after Alfred Sutton in 1920 when there were 528 children attending – 50 in a class. The red brick building is not just functional, it really seems to celebrate children and education.

(superciliousness warning)

I’m one of the minority that voted in the Police commissioner elections. The Guardian reports the elections as having the worst turnout ever. It’s hardly surprising. Prior to normal local elections candidates will canvas voters, promote their positions  and encourage people to engage with the system.

In advance of this election I received an election card through the post. It didn’t contain any information about how to find out more about the candidates. What? I have to actually do my own research?!

Just providing the right type of information isn’t enough. A capitalistic society sells ideas, products, to its consumers. The candidates were not sold to the voters. This is totally counter to the expectations of the electorate.  How could anyone expect this system to work within a developed capitalist system? It’s hardly surprising there was such a low turn-out. It shouldn’t be news.

I’m very grateful for my ability, right, to vote. I will show my appreciation for this right by using it wisely. I did my research and found a succinct central information source that pointed to candidates own web pages, twitter feeds and provided a summary personal statement for each candidate. Really easy to find local candidates by entering my post-code. Excellent service. Research was easy and left me feeling adequately equipped to make an informed decision.

The low election turnout suggests that my belief in my social responsibility (to put thought and effort into exercising my vote) is not a common belief.

Trains are running 30 minutes late due to a fatality on the line.

The other commuters hasten their weaving around each other as-if the delay urgencifies their platform dash.

As a nation we give 2 minutes still, silence,  to the people who lost their lives in wars. Fatalities, deaths. Like this one they have an unattributed cause - Suicide or accident?

Was this fatality a person who’s life was

• so very painful that the thought of being smashed-into by a speeding train was a release from the pain of their life.  Suicide.
• ended unexpectedly. did they slip and fall? Accident.

I watch the faces of the commuters pushing me aside in their platform rush. Coats rustling and mumbling.

I’m alone in my stillness.  Taking a moments silence to mourn the fatality, person’s death,  is not part of the behavioural script ‘what we do’ for commuters and station staff.

It seems like it should be a time when we should be hugging each other, wiping away each others tears, expressing our helplessness and then slowly moving on. I hug myself, wipe away a tear and turn towards the platforms.

That evening I tried to find out about the 2 people who’d died in train fatalities that day. The news reported the delays to the trains, the things that affected most people’s everyday lives. Nothing about the people who died, not even a name. Sending condolences to strangers isn’t a part of the what we do nowadays. Kay’s recent blog post had a quote from John Donne which seemed most apt:

No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee….”

On November 15th they’ll have local Elections in the UK. The voting stations, normally schools, close for their normal purpose and are staffed with people to help the voters make their vote.

After work I’ll walk along to the local primary school “Alfred Sutton” walk up to a table that’s labelled with “H” for House, give them my voter card and they’ll use a pencil to cross my name of a paper list and point me to a little booth where I’ll go and put an ‘X’ next to the name of the person I want to vote for.

It’s all very quaint and has been the same since I started voting in the early 80′s.

Friends in Washington State (West coast USA) get to vote by dropping their papers in a large Ballot Box or the mail, it’s all postal vote for them. In this case, the family made a trip to the ballot box location and the children ceremoniously dropped their vote into the Ballot box.

They can also pick-up a report card that gives them a voting performance score based on their personal voting history and that of thier neighbourhood. Excellent!

On facebook I have some ‘friends’ that I barely know, I met them a few times and they seemed like nice people. They were friends of friends, and in that sense had a good pedigree.

One of these people is a professional woman, probably in her mid 30′s. I follow her status posts with fascination because I’m intrigued by the possible back-story, the things she doesn’t say.  These are some of the key focus points of the things she has said in the last 6 months

• Bought a new house
• Bought a flash convertable sports car
• Had a fabulous sailing holiday with friends – drinking, relaxing, sunbathing, partying
• Went to my first ever weekend music festival, camped, had a brilliant time
• Had a fabulous night out with the girls (photographs of happy people)
• Had a fantastic house party – photographs of people looking drunk and smiling.
• Has new 42″ plasma TV attached to the wall in her bedroom (updates facebook from bed – windows phone)

Somehow I read into these posts that she is an unhappy, lonely, person. Someone trying to convince either us or herself that she’s having a good life. By limiting her status posts to acquisition of socially significant items and engagement in ‘popular’ social activities she is only mentioning things that are cultrually defined as aspirational.

In my imaginary backstory she’s just got divorced, is painfully lonely and trying to fill the gap created by the pain of a failed intimate relationship and let her friends know she’s ok – don’t worry. Either that or she is as shallow and superficial as her facebook status convey at face value….

Am I bonkers?

Askimet provides the wendy house with an outstanding blog spam filtering service. Hoorah!

The service is much like an email spam filter, it puts all comments that it considers as spam in a place where I can review and delete them. Most of my blog spam is from people trying to sell loans

Every few months my blog spam folder contained a comment from a Blogger  hosted blog that was more than just Spam. It was promoting racial and gender hatred. I am suprised that since December 2010 the Google service Blogger, has been  prepared to host this blog that:

• Spam other blogs
• promotes hatred based on gender stereotyping (e.g. get a more obliging wife from India)
• promotes hatred based on racial characteristics (e.g. Philipino women are ok)

I’ve twice reported the blog, for abusing the Blogger behavioural code by spamming and hatred, using the Blogger ‘Report Abuse’   facitility. It’s still there.  My opinion of Google continues to dive while they continue to knowingly host a blog that the awesome Askimet recognises as a spam source and normal people recognise as promoting gender based hatred

Poor show Google

Maybe you’d like to let Blogger know how you feel about this blog, you can report it here

The toilets in the Fine Art department of Reading University are proudly green and probably original features of the one-storey utilitarian style brick building (circa 1930). The subtle differences in styling such as the 3 vertical panels on the womens’ door imply it may be newer (circa 1950) than the more utilitarian design of the mens’.

The addition of a paper sign to the womens’ door is a modern addition, an attempt to change behaviour using strong language “Important, Under no circumstances should…” clear identification  of the people who should attend to this notice “...fine arts students…” and their unacceptable behaviour “…clean their brushes in these toilets”

EWE!  I always use the sink to clean my brushes – easier and less whiffy.

“It’s a little-known fact that the world’s best chicken sexers come almost exclusively
from Japan”

For some reason psychologists and philosophers investigate chicken sexing. Psychologists lured me into reading obscure articles on chicken sexing because, amongst other things, it is a skilled human activity that cannot be articulated. Just one mention in my undergraduate course, carefully juxtapositioned with a reference to how wine tasting is a similarly non-articulatable skill.

Chicken sexing? Chicken sexing! Maybe the idea stayed with me so long and in preference to wine tasting because of the word sex. Maybe its that the act of labelling a chicken with a predicted sex is called ‘sexing’. From one comment in a 1985 class on cognitive psychology, I developed an interest in reading about chicken sexing. So it was, so it is.

“If I went for more than four days without chick sexing work I started to have ‘withdrawal symptoms”

 

Once upon a time, during an annual job performance review my manager suggested that I should be a little less efficient because it was making other staff feel bad.

I wasn’t living in the USA at the time. Quaint British ways.

I am now more adept at ensuring that I have work time allocated to allow me to be seen to be inefficient.

Lets think of it as my

• ‘unfit for purpose’ time
• extra tea-time breaks
• fermenting good ideas while going completely off-topic time
• employer funded socialisation time
• creative teamworking

This article published in the British Psychological Society’s Readers digest concludes that “Athletes are more skilled at crossing the road than non-athletes“ (when they can’t go backwards or sideways while crossing)

For me this article raised many more questions than it answered, for example

• Will local councils be sending pedestrians on athletics courses to reduce road traffic accident rates?
• Will crossing the road be introduced as a new Olympic sport?
• Did being unable to go side-ways or backwards during the crossing give the athletes an unfair advantage?
• Will road-crossing skills be used to identify the potential athletes of the future?
• Who funded this research? Is this a good use of their money?

Tyntesfield house has a bell-pull system to call servants. At the foot of the servant’s stairwell each bell is labelled with its location. I was surprised to see that nearly all the bells are the same size and shape.

They sound the same, they look the same.

Servants had to look at the bell moving then read the room description beneath to work out where they should go.

does that hurt?

It’s not what I was expecting. When you open the door to a stranger they normally introduce themselves or ask if some named person is in the house. We held each other’s gaze while I tried to work out what he was referring to, before moving us on

can I help you?

is Nicky in?      I meant your nose

Was my nose bleeding? I ran my forefinger under my nostrils then inspected my hand. No blood or snot.

NICKY! SOMEONE at the door FOR YOU

He wore blue jeans, a Pringle jumper and a padded anorak that could have been picked up in a Marks and Spencer’s sale. Short back and sides, clean shaven, the boy lacked visual charisma. He looked comfortably middle class, visually unoffensive. Then it dawned on me that my nose-piercing probably made me unique amongst the people he talked to. Nicky was conservative with both a big and little c. She had already given me the benefit of her expertise on the painfully clashing colours of my dress, my unsuitable hair and recommended that I drop my friends because they risked being unsuccessful in life. They could drag me down.

Life. If she didn’t have one, she couldn’t fail. She was on-track for a Pharmacy degree, a husband, car, kids and holidays abroad. It didn’t map to my idea of life then. It doesn’t now.

Only when the temperature drops below -5 degrees

This is my Butler sink. The Butler sink got its name from the role of the main user. The Butler of the household would use the Butler sink. As I talked to kitchen suppliers they all corrected me when I called this a Butler sink, no, its a Belfast sink. A quick online search tells me that Butler is the generic word for the sinks and Belfast describes more specific features, in this case a ‘wier’ style water overflow. This website describes how city names became associated with the design, and why different cities had different designs:

This is because, when butler sinks were first made in the late 17th century, each major city had a sanitation officer autonomously responsible for the ordering of pipes, basins, sinks, and decreeing sizes, styles etc. Different patterns were evolved and gave rise to specific types. Hence the Belfast butler sink was different from, say, the London butler sink.

Belfast, with access to plentiful water housed sinks with overflows, but London , built on clay where deep wells had to be drilled to reach water, discouraged water wastage and no overflows were accommodated. Therefore, the Belfast butler sink has what is known as a Weir overflow built into it, whereas a standard Butler Sink doesn’t

Why I love England #16:  red telephone boxes

Just around the corner from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden is this fabulous row of antique communication devices. Many people 20 and under will never ever have used these. Why would they need to? They carry their own phones with them. In the 80′s a row of phone boxes like this in a city centre would have a person in each box talking and maybe one or two people outside, checking the change in their purses, waiting for their turn to make a private call.

According to this history, in the 1980′s most homes didn’t have landline phones.

In 1987, the post office, who deployed and maintained them, systematically replaced these red boxes with a more modern design with more glass and open to the air that reduced the likelihood of the box being used as a urinal, or the subsequent pungent smell. Pew! I remember the smell!  Some villages protested against the replacement and managed to hold-on to this much loved older design. But sadly, most red boxes were removed.

I guess they are still useful to a few people for actually hosting a landline call, they are also useful for keeping warm, dry and quiet for making a mobile phone call. It’s wonderful that the local council, as many councils in tourist areas, have decided to leave them here and maintain them in such good condition. For the tourists, and people like me who can be heard bubbling

AWWWE How CUTE!

Recently the on-site health and safety police visited our work premises. They highlighted some of the more dangerous areas of our everyday practices. This device was cited as a potential risk due to an inadequate warning label.

They helped out by producing a temporary label, a post-it note:

This is often the first question that I’ll ask the wait-staff at the door of a restaurant* in England.  Many, probably most, English restaurants use a booking system where you phone the restaurant in advance and book a table for your party.  In my early adulthood, I came to understand that if a restaurant accepted walk-ins that meant it wasn’t good-enough to attract sufficient custom to warrant a booking system. A restaurant worth avoiding. Promoting scarcity is an established purchase persuasion technique, for example, think of how airlines will often say ‘only one seat left at this price’.

Restaurants that accept walk-ins are becoming more common in England, reflecting the more American style of first-come, first-served, or take a ticket and wait inline. When I first moved to the US I found the fact that you had to queue to get into many good quality restaurants a somewhat irritating pactice. I never really got used to it. I find fun in the notion of booking a good meal with the company of good friends, several weeks in advance, adds to the excitement and anticipation. Being able to walk straight into a restaurant knowing you are going to be seated and fed in a reasonable time is also a very pleasing experience. Both the restaurant and the customer are being respectful of each others resource management, as customer, this is a good use of my time.

* this use of the term restaurant excludes Pubs, Cafe’s and chain eateries with a substantial US presence such as Yo! Sushi, TGI Fridays, Wagamama…

Painted above the door of many old English pubs is a sign indicating that they are licenced to sell liquors. The licensing system was introduced in the mid 16th century.  Licensing for Beer and Wine was distinct from Liquor licensing. Normally coaching Inns, places attracting wealthier customers than the beer and ale houses, were licensed to sell Liquor.

I liked this sign because it specified that the selling was by retail, pressumably as opposed to wholesale. With the ability to take the Liquor off the premisis purchasers might be tempted to purchase for illegal resale or big parties, effectively wholesale.

In these cloak rooms

My secondary school used to have a cloak room, rows of hooks for coats, jackets and gym bags. No cloaks. But if we wore cloaks we would have been able to hang them there. Unlike the cloak room signed here. In these cloakrooms  there is a sink, toilet, towell and one of those plastic-bag lined bins.

A TOILET! I’m gradualy getting acclimated to the UK where toilet is not a naughty word. Love it!

When the wind blows the slates on the Wendy House roof rattle,   or could it be something else?

On a hot day the Wendy House roof timbers creak, or could it be something else?

Picture of a Glis Glis hosted on the Daily Mail website

According to an article in the Mail,   edible doormice are invading the home counties,   first introduced to Tring by the 2nd Baron Rothschild.

Luckily the Wendy House is out of the current glis glis play grounds and if they do come here I wont be spending a fortune on pest control services to remove them,   I’ll just put the fluff balls in the attic for a wee bit of fun every now and then.

We came. We Swooped. We are camping. is the slogan on the bottom of Robin Parr’s  ’climate camp’ blog post.    This Bank Holiday weekend there is a climate change protest in London.   It’s a very British form of protest.   Camping.    It’s a protest against capitalism.   From their site:

the Climate Exchange is the system’s European stock market – must be exposed for the dangerous global financial game which it is. Carbon trading has not and will not reduce emissions. It simply makes corporations richer and allows governments to put on a charade that they are doing something about climate change.

A blog post on the Guardian cites the ‘Whitechapel Anarchist Group’ as complaining about the event,   not because the cause is inappropriate but because the the protesters are inappropriate:

“many of the protesters at the camp are middle class students and graduates who are about as revolutionary as the Scouts“

I love that this form of protesting, camping-out, enables anyone to participate,   because everyone should have a voice.   With as many as 1 in 6 households    in Britian not containing anyone who is ‘working’,   there are plenty of people excluded by the capitalist system.

This week I passed a threshold.   The ‘in my day’ threshold.   In my day…

• Phones were connected by cables to walls in the hallways of homes or in red-boxes on the street.
• Televisions had a dial with 4 positions on it,   one for each of the known channels and one spare channel

And much much more or less

Hairdresser Business Owner (HBO): you’ve been in before haven’t you?

Wendy: yes,  only once  several months ago,   its grown a lot and kept a very good shape, it was a good cut

HBO: yes,   I remember. Lucia, the Phillipino lady, cut your hair really short.   She’s in the Phillipines as the moment,   she owns a bed and breakfast there and its their peak season,   its alright for some!

HBO: your scalp is a bit sensitive,   do you have a stressful job?

Wendy: (giggles) Sort of because…(unpublishable)

While the assistant washes my way-past-its-cut-by-date mop the HBO checks her records.  

HBO: you came in here  last September, no wonder its grown so much

Wendy: I’m impressed that you recognised me

We talked about her business,   she hasn’t been hit by the credit crisis because ‘everyone needs a haircut’   and her business has been established for over 9 years.   We both agreed that we liked Reading a lot because of the nice people we’ve met here.   She was born in Reading,   studied in London with Vidal Sassoon,   travelled the world then came back to Reading to set-up her business.  

It’s the best haircut I’ve had in over a decade.  

I’m a very happy bunny

to people relaying extremely sad stories,   such as the Samaritans  hear,  do you think I would:

1. use active listening skills?
2. tell people to stop whining and pull themselves together?
3. ask lots of rather silly, mispronounced, miss-spelt, jargon laden, incomprehensibubble questions?
4. laugh maniacally?
5. play with Excel and ignore the stories?
6. fall asleep?
7. all the above?
8. none of the above?
9. other, please specify…
10. wibble wibble wibble

I’m thinking about taking bets on this one,   what are the odds for each option based on your knowledge of my past performance?

The small ceremony of playing a vinyl Long Playing (LP) record has been temporarily lost from the Wendy House. Below are the Dr. Wendy recommended steps taken to play a vinyl LP*:

1. select the record, review the cover-art and song listing for each side.  
2. select a side to play based on personal taste or consultation with people in the room
3. Tip the album cover slightly with one hand to slide the LP from the cover into the other hand
4. Place the cover on a surface near the record deck
5. Slide the record from its protective sleeve taking particular care not to touch the grooves
6. Place the sleeve on top of the record cover
7. hold the LP up to the light and check there are no large visible scratches that might interfere with the quality of your listening experience
8. Place the LP on the turn-table with the side to be played facing the ceiling, the hole in the centre of the vinyl over the peg in the centre of the turntable
9. select the turntable speed by turning the switch to the slowest speed, 3rd position, 33rpm, the switch should make a pleasing clunking noise with any position change
10. Postion your body so that you have a good view of the position of the expensive diamond needle above the outside grooves of the record
11. Lift the record-player arm and move it towards the record edge it where it can gently drop onto the outside rim or the record, or between tracks if not playing the whole side
12. Pick-up the LP, album, cover and sleeve to review and admire their art work and content
13. Start bouncing around, waving your arms and singing
14. Laugh as any nearby cats run for cover

There is a risk that I may purchase a turntable this year in order to recapture this meditatively pleasurable ceremony wth my small collection of 200 or so pre-1986, rarely played, vinyls.

* Singles and 78’s both have subtle yet significant variations on the above ceremony.

At Darlington train station I walked up to a man stood by a driverless taxi

Wendy: Are you the Taxi driver?

Scottish Taxi Driver (STD): Yes, Flower

I’m still not used to these gender specific addresses, this one made me smile. He had a broad Scottish accent which my year of living in Scotland has taught me to understand. On our journey the Taxi driver tells me stories. Each story illustrated how ignorant, overly wealthy, and offensive American people are. Stories included being a Jungle warfare trainer based in Malaysia , training the young US troops before they went into Vietnam.

STD: …they had NO idea, they turned up with their scented soap, their radios…

In another story a US soldier was bossing him around in a bar, calling him ‘Boy’ and giving him orders as if the American was superior in some way. One of the orders was to take the Americans travellers cheque for $200 to a currency shop, cash it and return the cash to the American. Can you guess what happened? The cabbie took the cheque, cashed it and never returned to the bar. The cabbie was keen to reassure me that he was not normally a thief but that US soldier needed to be taught a lesson.

I don’t think he thought I had an American accent.

I’m now officially registered as a resident of the Wendy House in Reading Borough and entitled to vote.   Hoorah!

Next year I can re-register by text, free-phone or internet.   Very helpful.