Category Archives: being me

being me, personal projects

A to Z of needlepoint

Most people who know me very well know that one of my hobbies, at certain times of the year is tapestry. I love the large canvases, the coloured thread and basically doing colouring in using a needle and thread instead of in a colouring book. The patterns on tapestry canvases suit me better.

While I was wandering around the city centre, I wound up in WH Smiths, downstairs in Arnotts and came across a book called the A to Z of Needlepoint. Needlepoint is that term which encompasses tapestry and a bunch of other similar habits like counted cross stitch.

I questioned seriously whether I wanted another book but in the 10 years plus I have been doing tapestry, it’s safe to say that I had never actually seen a stitch dictionary for needlepoint in general. Mostly, if you want to do this stuff in Ireland, your choice is counted cross stitch, tapestry or general embroidery. So I picked it up and looked through it.

It is an utterly inspiring book. It has 65 different stitches of which I use.knew about just one, the half cross stitch. But it opened up so many ideas for me. I could not leave it behind.

I have a bunch of stitch dictionaries and am slowly coming to the conclusion that social media is worse for me than needlework is and the tapestry gets picked up more and more often lately.

I have ideas for this book, ideas which I don’t know how I am going to implement yet but, I’ll figure it out. It is one of the few books I have ever picked up and thought “this belongs with me”.

annoyances, being me, Europe

Nice is news

Late last night before I went to bed I saw a worrying headline in my social media feeds to suggest some sort of tragedy had happened in Nice. I like Nice. I’ve been there on holidays a couple of times. Some gorgeous buildings. The city is colourful. Not a big fan of the somewhat stony beach mind, but the prom is lovely.

And today it is in mourning because someone decided to drive a truck through a crowd. There is no valid justification for doing any such thing deliberately, no matter what your political stance is, no matter what your purported religious faith is. It’s a stupid, ungodly, evil thing to do.

I cannot watch the news and I don’t want to see the papers. Far too often I’m waking up of a morning and the world is a little bit stranger than it used to be the night before when I went to bed.

art and related, being me, life in general, on the web

How to draw dragons

I drew a dragon yesterday evening and you can see her here:

 

#dragon #coloredpencils #dailysketch #carandache #pablopencils #craftpaper.

A photo posted by Me (@wnbpaints) on

It has shown me two things 1) I have gotten better at drawing in the last 2 years or so, and 2) I’ve a bit to learn about coloured pencils. Either way, I am not here to talk about how to draw dragons directly, but more…metaphorically.

Most days when I am talking to people, we talk about stuff with a small s and Stuff with a big S. Rarely, however, do I get a 10 minute speech from any friend along the lines of “You have to listen to this for 10 minutes because It Will Change Your Life”. But lots of my friends post such screeds to me. Yesterday, I had some time tossing up between doing housework and drawing dragons. I find drawing challenging. I wasn’t really taught how to do it properly as a child and we tend to assume the ability to draw is innate rather than a teachable skill. I can only hope this is changing. Anyway, the net result is that I’m often wanting to draw something but too terrified to start. Every time I lift a pencil or pen, it takes an enormous amount of motivation. I liken it to the motivation required to starting to get exercise.

Since I started doing this, and since I started summoning up the courage required to try and, probably fail at something, I have seriously started to question the reasons why certain things go viral, why many of the advice pieces on making your living blogging and related items seem to focus not on creating something, or even teaching someone to create, but on telling someone how to live their lives, and to explain to them, they’re really not happy.

I’m really not happy about a lot of things but a ten minute video exhorting me to think about someone else isn’t the solution. This morning’s one – before I bailed on it (it helpfully had subtitles so I did not have to listen to it) went on about being caught by your dreams and risking all for it. Like many of these things, it ignores circumstance and has an unspoken message of if you’re unhappy, it’s your fault.

In a way, it’s part of the trend we have of over simplifying life. This guy was prancing around some nice landscapy place and the overwhelming message I was getting was that we were sheeple who hadn’t seen truth the way he had, and frankly, we should all be living our dreams. It is the sort of message that I look at and think, you know, this guy has no idea how privileged he is. I used to use the word “lucky” there but I’m not sure how much luck has to do with it in the end.

The thing is, the dragon turned out (in my opinion) quite a lot better than I expected. It’s not getting loads of social media love but I’m coming to the conclusion that’s not why I do this anyway. The key point is that while it is far from perfect, it is far less of a failure than it might have been 12 or 18 months ago. I’m not in favour of the try/fail paradigm of making progress particularly as it frequently doesn’t include the bit that goes try/fail/learn. In the tech work, the whole try/failure thing is often presented as a success in itself. It becomes party of the myth and narrative of successful founders.

I find that just a little bit toxic. The whole try/fail thing really doesn’t work unless it’s try/fail/learn and I suspect any founder who eventually makes it would probably agree.

Anyway, back with the dragon. I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s art, and especially, decomposing what they do into lines because I can draw lines and the whole problem for me is drawing lines together successfully. Sometimes, I wonder, if we do take enough time to decompose what other people are doing, when they are doing something we want to do. The whole

  1. idea
  2. ??
  3. profit thing

really does not work with drawing dragons. But I will say this. It’s a metric tonne easier if you have a battery operated eraser for dealing with those little slip ups.

I suppose the lesson I’m hoping to give away for free here is “use the best tools you can get, and use them properly”.

For my next trick, there will be more lighthouses.

 

art and related, being me

Facets

The sound track to the film Amélie – I am never really sure what the exact title is, but everyone of an age knows which film it is – is on in the background. It conveys an interesting atmosphere in my life – the noon soon is starting to breakthrough the clouds and it may be a lovely afternoon. I have a painting started, and I am waiting for a yellow wash to dry before I start painting buildings of Paris on on top of it. It is purely coincidental but here we are.

I have never worked out how much of the thoughts that go through my head are linked to the fact that I am me, or the fact that I am getting older. I remember telling a friend once that everyone had midlife crises all the time, except no one called a decision to change jobs completely at the age of 27 a midlife crisis but once you were 10 years older…oh boy. But the thing that strikes me most is that living has changed completely since I was 27, probably more profoundly than it did for previous generations. This morning, again, I saw another piece of advertising blurb designed to remind people they weren’t good enough.

I have no doubt that the person who wrote it would hide behind the theory that they are advising people to maximise their potential. But no one’s potential lies solely in doing stuff for their professional potential. Is it so reasonable to spend hours learning to write some Javascript when what this means is that for the rest of your life, you will be spending hours learning the next de facto standard, and those standards change every five minutes? I somehow doubt it. Is someone’s potential maximised if they put all their spare time into learning Google Analytics when perhaps, they should be outside tending plants because gardening is what gives them headspace?

I believe people need to be in charge of their potential, and not slaves only to one aspect of it. Work, job, career, is not the holy all of everything. It is at best a part of everything and it supports everything. But it shouldn’t govern everything.

In the meantime, if you’re writing puff blog pieces for a commercial entity about maximising your potential and you are talking about learning 3 technical skills, you are not really advising people to maximise their potential. You’re narrowing their potential remarkably.

I’d argue that a lot of people would be better off reading more, drawing more, doing stuff which has an indeterminate return on investment in terms of money but which has returns in terms of perspective. You can learn to code all you like but it is unlikely to give you any sense of your place in the world, and somehow, without that sense of their place…no one reaches their full potential.

being me, life in general, living in ireland, things of beauty

Small pleasures

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I do not know what time sunrise is these days but as I left the house at 6 this morning, it was to face the sun coming over the roofs of the house across from my own.

It was truly beautiful.

I woke at 5 this morning, which might seem awfully early but for someone who regularly wakes with a view to getting up at six (with varying degrees of success), it is only an hour in the difference. I read some, mostly about SpaceX this morning. I realised sometime ago that a lot of what I read in bed in the morning was so utterly meaningless that I had forgotten what it was, by the time I got to breakfast, cursing my tardiness in the morning.

Today, however, I don’t have to be anywhere at 8, but I was still awake, and failed to talk myself out of going for a walk. It wasn’t a long walk, and it took me around the estate I live in. However, it was far more than I tend to get. In an ideal world, those 15 minutes would happen every morning but they haven’t been.

I love the early morning. There’s something utterly peaceful about it and one of the things which has made my life feel very stressful is the disconnect I have had from enjoying the peace of the early morning. The world looks very different and you hear sounds very differently as well. There is not the constant sound track of traffic. This morning, I am not hearing the aircraft taking off either. It is utterly gorgeous as a feeling.

Working in the city has a major downside and that is trying to negotiate the thorny question of “how long will it take me to get to work”. In Dublin this is not a question with a consistent answer.

The thing about it is, if you get up in the morning generally feeling good, it sets a tone for the day. It is not yet 7am and I have been for a walk, I have done some needlework. I have done some reading about SpaceX. I have coffee beside me and shortly, there will be breakfast.

A lot of what comes into my inbox lately is exhorting me to be better. To be more successful. To do this. To do that. I don’t read very much of it, and I cleared down some of the bossier elements of it lately. I sometimes wonder if we know what better and more successful is. Whether we have a superficial view of what life should be like. Much of our discussion in that area is by comparison to someone else.

I am not in favour of exhorting the rest of the world to get up early and go for a walk. The beauty and solitude I enjoyed this morning would be destroyed if 800 people leaving around me all decided to go for a walk at 6am just to get some fresh-ish air. What I am in favour of is people identifying the small pleasures that put some shine on their days. There’s an article somewhere on the web – I did not save the link – but it includes a list of 10 things to make your day better or some such. Maybe 11 because it’s being hip and edgy. The underlying idea, I like. Make small pleasures through your day so that even when things are hard, you have a something small to look forward to. And make them a part of life rather than a reward for life. They do not have to come from a blog list and I’m not in the business of telling anyone else what those small things should be. Some people might call it “being kind to yourself”. If it is something as simple as blocking accounts on twitter whose primary objective is to make you feel outraged about something, so be it. If it is fifteen minutes with a newspaper, so be it.  If it is an early morning walk in the dawnlight, so be it.

For me, the small pleasures are a small cup of coffee in the morning. A non-rushed, non-piecemeal breakfast. Fresh bread from Marks & Spencers. Time to myself. I wrote last week about how I struggled with the fact that I just didn’t have time to do all the things I wanted to. I still don’t. I have to set priorities. And my primary priority is to try and set aside time that is sacrosanct to me and which doesn’t include the remotest possibility that the word “should” in terms of “you’re not good enough and you should…” gets to get in the way.

It seems to be hard, sometimes, to take time out for ourselves. So much so that the world appears to have decided that we need loads of advice to do so.

There is a section of the film Le Vrai Destin d’Amelie Poulain where the narrator talks about how Amelie likes the simple things in life. Skimming stones at the canal, the sound a spoon makes as it cracks through the caramelised sugar on a creme brulée. It is very evisceral as a sequence.

I like getting up early. I like the possibilities the morning gives me. I like the way that sometimes, I might do nothing between 8am and 5pm on a Saturday, but what I did between 7am and 8am has made the day massively more productive than it might have been if I had stayed in bed until 9am. I have never, ever regretted getting up early. I have always regretted getting up late.

And this morning, that bought me a little bit of sunlight that made the world of a north Dublin suburb look beautiful.

 

being me, Europe, life in general, travel

Places in my time line

Most days, I listen to the radio on the way to work in the car, like most people. I don’t much like driving in Dublin but for all that, it’s ten thousand times better than getting the bus was. Out of ecological collective responsibility grounds I tried that for 4 months. It was not good.

But I have between 30 and 60 minutes in the car most mornings, depending on what time I leave home, and I listen to the radio because I can’t read, and I can’t do study, and I can’t do other things I might do with an hour free. For one thing, there are cyclists and for another there are Audi drivers. I maximise the use I get out of that time by listening to foreign language radio. I start off with NDR from Germany, and usually, around half way through the journey, or when the sports news comes on, I switch to France Info. Sometimes, on the way home I listen to RTBF. RTBF is the Belgian/French language equivalent of RTE and I listen to it because I used to live in Brussels. I don’t often care too much about the content of the news, but I value the fact that it forces me to keep a level of foreign language comprehension skills active. Switching between them is good for me too.

On Monday evening this week, I was listening to RTBF and for various reasons, in a rush, RTBF was what remained on the radio at twenty past seven on Tuesday morning. I never listen to it in the morning – my default is always NDR for the morning – so it was pure chance that I tuned in just as reports were starting to break about the explosions at the airport in Brussels. I can remember my blood running cold…I can remember the presenters frantically trying telling people not to go to the airport, that all access was closed, frantically trying to find out what had happened. They had no reporters on the ground at the airport and this was less than 30 minutes, I guess, after the first bomb had gone off. They had so little information at that point in time that they weren’t sure where in the airport the two bombs had gone off. Initially, there was a report that one might have gone off on the tarmac. I worked at an airport for more than 10 years of my life. How on earth, I wondered, in shock, could an explosion happen on the tarmac?

I drove to work not hearing the words “gas explosion” or “accident” but “people are being very careful not to identify the cause of these explosions”. I also learned that both explosions appeared to take place in the check in hall in the terminal building.

By the time I got to work, scant reports about Maalbeek were starting to come out and on that, it seemed clear that the odds of finding a benign – for want of a suitable term – cause of the incident at the airport – were growing much, much longer. Smoke pouring out of underground stations is not generally a good thing.

I’ve been over and back to Brussels a lot in the last 24 months. The last couple of times I had cause to stay overnight there, it’s been at the Thon Hotel in the EU quarter. It’s about 20 metres from Maalbeek. On Tuesday, its lobby became an A&E incident room for the casualties from the explosion below.  I lived 2 metro stops along the same line so pretty much everywhere I went by metro in Brussels when I was living there took me through Maalbeek. TBH, this felt awfully close to a person I used to be.

One of the running themes in the Vimes collection of Discworld books by Terry Pratchett talks about how, in staying alive in the face of an attractive bounty on his head for the Assassin’s Guild, he needs to be lucky every single day. The would be assassin only has to be lucky once. That’s the balance of luck between us, the public, and anyone who wants to cause chaos. And no matter how much work we do to minimise risk in the face of attacks like this, it’s still the case: terrorist only has to be lucky once, we have to be lucky all the time. No matter how much we balance the odds in our favour, they have to be lucky once.

I rail against calling them terrorists, as it happens. That gives them the status they are looking for. They are mass murdering criminals, and it is as criminals we should be treating them, not some special snowflakes.

Brussels is an extraordinary city. I loved it for the fact that pretty much anything I wanted to do, I could. I came home for family reasons in the end, but there are a lot of days – particularly sitting in the car watching yet another Audi A6 driver trying to whip off the front of my car – where I wish Dublin was more like Brussels. In the way of public transport, for example, in the way of shopping. It has a lot of the pluses of living somewhere like Paris without too many of the minuses, like scale. There are days I truly miss the smell of fresh bread from the bakery that was near my apartment.  I love that it has giant comicbook murals. I love some of its street art. I love the architecture of the buildings. And I love the shops.

I am immensely pissed off that anyone would bomb it. And I am heartbroken that the families of more than 30 people are coming to terms with a life less ordinary and that for 300 more people and their families, yesterday was a lot different to how all the tomorrows will be.

For all my friends in Belgium #brussels #bruxelles #brussel #lifeboat #friendship #birdsofaclef

A photo posted by Me (@wnbpaints) on

being me

7am, Sunday morning

It’s the last day of January and, also, I’ve been awake since 4.30. I’m not sure how I managed this but it probably has something to do with the utterly bizarre dream I had which involved driving a Ford Fiesta down a trainline in Finland and being chased by boys who were interested in stealing the code I had written for some top secret machine learning something or other. I’m not sure this is indicative of a rested mind but it’s probably better than the one about plane trips to somewhere that sounds like it should be in China (but it doesn’t exist) but which apparently was near somewhere that sounds like it should be in Japan, be a shrine but also probably does not exist. In my defence, my most recent reading material has included Prisoners of Geography, about the geopolitical realities caused by geographical physical features. It’s a terrific book and it is buy Tim Marshall. It is the best book I have read in 2016 so far. n=4 and all that, but it does out play Terry Pratchett’s last book which surprised me.

I’m just in a geopolitical kind of mood at the moment.

Anyway, amongst the piles of clickbaitish “how to be Mark Zuckerberg” type advice drivel that either arrives in my inbox via one or two subscriptions that I occasionally think about cancelling, and the passive aggressive advice columns that have a half life of years on Facebook are many variants of Habits of Successful people. During the week, I had an interesting one on Don’t get the habits of unsuccessful people. It was quite interesting in a way.

One of the key issues I have with all the “How to be Mega Successful Advice” is that none of them seem to include the words “First have a ground breaking idea”. I’m pretty sure that Mark Zuckerberg could have gotten up at 5am all he liked but if he didn’t have the idea for Facebook first, all he’d be is totally exhausted. I get weary of the “First get up early every day blah blah” advice.

It’s like this. Humans need a certain amount of sleep. I’d suggest people should decide when they are going to get it. I prefer going to bed early and getting up early. The price of getting up at 5.30am is being asleep by 10pm. You can’t operate on a lack of sleep for long.

The idea is basically that you have more creative time. I do not know that it always works.

I was up at around 10 past 6 this morning. In part that was because I woke at 4.30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. I could have done with another couple of hours but sometimes you have to cut your losses. This morning, then, I have already whinged about viral posts on Facebook. Now I am going to mention that any magazine that advises you to get up early every morning because [Array.Of.Rich.Tech.Execs] get up at outlandish times is being negligent if they don’t also tell you what time [Array.Of.Rich.Tech.Execs] goes to bed.

7am on a Sunday morning, even when it is pitch dark outside, is a lovely time of the day. I’m not saying this to be sanctimonious. The day is full of possibilities.

I know people for whom the day is still full of possibilities at 10pm at night. I’m asleep then.

 

being me, travel

Bucket lists and dreams

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IMG_4659A while ago, I realised that my life was going by and it was about time I started doing things rather than thinking about doing them. As a result, I spent the last week in Switzerland, primarily doing the Glacier Express train trip.

There were mountains. High mountains with big lots of trees and snow on them. It was wonderful.

There was also the Caran d’Ache shops in Geneva and Zurich. I have loved and adored Caran d’Ache writing instruments since I was 15 years old. The only place that really sells them in Dublin is the Pen Corner, and while they have accommodated me with special orders once in a while, they don’t do the art side of things. Kennedy have some of the pencils, but nowhere near to all of the pencils.

As a result, the Caran d’Ache shop in Geneva was the ultimate shop in the world for someone like me. Lots of limited edition fine writing implements, the sort with near annual income salary level pricing (there must be a lot of very, very wealthy people in Geneva). I bought two Paul Smith 849s which I wanted and which have the benefit of not being expensive, but not being cheap plastic either.

I like the 849 pens – I have about half a dozen at this stage and they are a nice weight in my hand. They are, perhaps, not as nice as the Ecridors themselves (130E if you’re buying – I was not on this occasion although I have a shopping list of 3 that I want – it never ends). And of course, there were the pencils.

All those Museum Aquarelles which I can’t get in Ireland, and the Luminance pencils, which I can’t get in Ireland. I had a dozen Aquarelles, and I picked up another half dozen colours which I like a lot, plus I picked up two or three Luminance pencils just to try them.

Plus there were a few Swiss Wood pencils, and series five of the woods of the world collections. I could have spent a lot of money in the Caran d’Ache shop just on art pencils. The truth is I was somewhat limited by the whole lugging thing – my holiday consisted of five days of travelling basically – so I was able to resist full boxes of their neocolor IIs and other water solubles.

I did buy a couple of brushes because they were the equivalent of 2 euro less expensive than they are here and brushes are always handy. In theory, I’m not really needing to buy pencils as I binge bought a bunch of Faber Castell Sparkles not so long ago (they tended to be very hard to get here for a while although since I stocked up, both Easons and the Art and Hobby Store have got in copious supplies).

But I found it very hard to say no to the Caran d’Ache Swiss wood basic HBs. Basic isn’t a great word – they are probably twice the price of the sparkles and you can’t get them here. I have five of them which should keep me going for a while. They have a most beautiful smell of wood.

Outside the shopping in Caran d’Ache’s shops, I spent time in Zermatt, Saint Moritz, Lugano, and especially, I spent time in Swiss trains. The Glacier Express is a 9 hour train journey which basically goes from Zermatt to Saint Moritz or vice versa. I was hoping to see the Matterhorn: IMG_20151019_185311

But it was covered in clouds/fog/hidingtypeweather for the day I was in Zermatt. This was regrettable.

The journey across Switzerland was amazing – we don’t do scenery like it and we certainly don’t do weather like it. The Glacier Express is certainly worth doing in the winter, and they will lay on lunch for you for a consideration – it’s around thirty francs and it is definitely worth doing it.

Saint Moritz was where I bought some non-Caran d’Ache writing tools, and had a walk around. It’s a lovely town, for what I saw of it, although it could be a very expensive place to be shopping given that the shops tend to the high income level brands rather than your average high street store.

From there, I took the scenic train back down to Chur, which I was hoping would be brighter than it had been the evening before but the fog never lifted. It was very atmospheric, but not very conducive to photographs.

I then took the long way to Lugano, via Zurich, which is a lovely train journey even in one of the high speed Intercity Express trains which run all the way to Hamburg.

Zurich is a lovely town. It took has a Caran d’Ache shop. The buildings are beautiful and the train station is especially beautiful as train stations go. It’s also really well located for shopping.

Lugano is beautifully situated on hills around a lake. Again, I wasn’t there for long as I was going onto Como and Lake Como which is a gorgeous, gorgeous town in Northern Italy. From there, I finished up in Milan.

In short, I did a lot of travelling on trains in the week and saw an awful lot of Switzerland plus a bit of Italy.

 

being me

Journalling and related comments

My assorted feeds and social media platforms are giving me the annual binge of life changing advice. It’s ongoing through the year of course, but around end December, start of January, it tends to be on a scale equivalent to the Pacific Ocean. This year, journalling is in. In particular, a remarkable number of advice sites for men trying to make their way in this world are advising journaling as a, let me see, cornerstone habit.

I started journaling in about March 1993. I used an ordinary notebook which was a little bit bigger than A6. I’m not a fan of using dated diaries for this: they are a bit arbitrary and dictatorial. If you use an ordinary notebook, you can write as much, or as little, as you like. I’ve used A5 notebooks almost constantly since 1994 and my preferred choice, although not possible to get in Ireland, are Clairefontaine clothbound notebooks, preferably gridded, and the biggest number of pages I can find. Most stationery stores in France or Belgium help in this front, although in Belgium, they used come with margins. I’d like, sometimes, to move up to A4 but they don’t fit in my handbag. A5 is a 20 year habit now. Other notebook manufacturers exist and I have happily used Paperblanks A5 which are beautiful notebooks, although I don’t like the paper as much as I like the Clairefontaine paper.

So I approve of writing a journal, or a diary, as we used to call it in my time.

The thing is, courtesy of the internet, journaling is a whole industry, resulting in loads of stuff showing up in my social media and news feeds. I had not realised that bible journaling was a thing, and the whole art side of things regrettably passed me by for most of my life. There are journaling prompts to beat the band all over pinterest. I have not worked out how much of this is born of the fact that people can be overwhelmed with stuff and information. One which turns up regularly is bullet journaling which I don’t personally consider as journaling per se, but as organisation/management. Planning, per se. There are many systems.

I started writing a diary at the age of 19 because I had fallen in love with someone from whom I wound up moving for practical work related reasons at the time and I wanted to coral memories of days that made me feel happy. I’m not sure I would have succeeded in it if I’d done it for the purposes of getting richer.

 

being me, life in general

Progress in Finnish

So, I’m slightly behind schedule on the Finnish vocab heist. I am not going to beat around the bush; this is slightly disappointing because it means I am unlikely to hit my target of completing the fully 3000 words by the time my birthday rolls around in a month’s time.

However, I am currently at 1510 words which there are now fewer words to learn than I have already learned. In other words, I have beaten the half way mark. Psychologically, this is seriously important. I am very happy about that.

This brings with it interesting progress. Reading the news in Easy Finnish on the YLE website is getting easier and easier every day. I’ve reached a stage where very often, I can work out what a word means from context. If you learn languages at all, reaching that point is phenomenal because it means that it is getting easier all the time. I am really, really happy about that. Also, it isn’t just the news in Easy Finnish, it is the stream of headlines from Helsingin Sanomat on Facebook, and other Finnish sites which I have “liked”.

So although I will most likely miss my November target, I’m not unhappy. I am a lot further on in terms of reading than I was the last time and this is great.