Get bugging!

This post is later than I intended but is still just in time to let you know about Big Over-hearing Day tomorrow.

Promoted by Bugged, it is a mass 'happening' for writers in the UK. On July 1st they are asking you to eavesdrop, wherever you are - on the train, in the pub, at the checkout. What you overhear becomes the starting point for your writing. 

It's a great exercise in observation for writers - which of us can say we haven't caught snippets of real gems in passing from random strangers? When coming up with characters it's so important to give them different voices, and what better way to get a feel for different ways of expressing yourself than listening - really listening - to other people.

I shall be positioning myself in one or more likely locations and will post again about it if I come up with something juicy - hope you join me! The intention is to build a piece of writing based on these 'eavesdroppings' but they're often beauties in themselves:

Stressed mother to small child on Merseyrail near Bootle: 'You do tha' again an' Bob the Builder's goin' in the bin!' 

Bugged is also on here on Facebook and is organised by Glastonbury Poet-in-Residence Jo Bell.

p.s. does anyone like my new broken biro? I broke it myself.

Call for Random Facts

This is just a quickie - but do pass the idea on if you enjoy it.

Maria Zanini (currently stranded in Texas and in need of entertainment) asked her followers to post in the comments one random thing about themselves... and then carry the torch to our own blogs, list six more about themselves, and invite their own followers to do the same. The weirder the better. 

(Karen has something similar in Get on With It having been served with some kind of 'Honesty award'... some kind of ASBO I understand)

So here goes:

1. I can recite Hamlet's soliloquy from memory (for no good reason) - which is why I am so rarely invited to parties
2. I was once 'second reserve' on Who Wants to be a Millionaire... but nobody died
3. I was a virgin bride in 1985 (used to be Catholic but alright now... well, I say 'alright...')
4. I have never been arrested, but I have arrested someone ... that's another story for another time
5. I was filing my books, CDs, DVDs, poems, herbs and spices into alphabetical order LONG before I started the library job (but not the clothes - that would be silly. They go in colour order of course!)
6. I'm chronically indecisive, often paralyzed by indecision - I can also see both sides of every coin/ argument. 
7. I'm a born-again gardener - grow loads of veggies, fruit and pretty stuff - but I've never successfully grown a gazebo from seed.

There we go - I've shown you mine, now show me yours on your own blogs - and drop a note in the comments box when you have!

Dogs, (no) Dinners and the Dead

Have a look at this picture: a romantic scene of young(ish) love? 

It's in the local tourism brochure - but who are the people pictured? In this case J and J - the council's graphic designers, forced to pose for the latest publicity-fest. And they REALLY don't get on! 

She's probably piercing his foot with her stilletto and he probably had something VERY garlicky for dinner to make it doubly unpleasant if they insist on a snogging shot. (They wouldn't dare).

The picture IS taken in Wirral - but I've eaten on the patio of Sheldrakes Restaurant, overlooking the Dee Estuary, so I KNOW they are freezing their tits off too. And they won't have got their dinner. That's water in the glasses.

When I worked for the council's PR team we discontinued using filed shots of the public after I inadvertently put some dead people on the front of the Council Tax demand. I don't mean they were dead in the picture (in a 'pay up or you're next' sort of way). That would have just been wrong. But they had popped their clogs since the picture was taken and the family were upset when it arrived in the post. That was when we started only using staff. They were on tap and they didn't cost anything.

I was on the Wirral Events Guide in 2009 and they wouldn't even let us pop the champagne... we had to look like we were just about to pop it.  

I'm just getting involved in Wirral Bookfest again, this time fighting in the libraries' corner and not PR's.

Here are some of the silly wittily ironic pics referencing great books that we did for the first one in 2008.

...these are all people I worked with and begged, bribed or threatened to take part... 

The beer, on this occasion was real beer on account of the fact that (a) it is difficult to replicate and (b) see 'bribe' above.

The boy with the guitar was the 'face of recycling' for years because of a picture his mum (you guessed - another PR person) took at a bottle bank when he was 5! 

J was left to his own devices while I was away last year and tried to convince everyone that a picture of someone on the loo reading 'Gone With the Wind' was a great idea! *sighs*

The hardest one was getting the dog (Fizz!) to look like she was reading. There was another dog - Goober - but he wanted his own trailer and hairdresser.

So look again at publicity shots and ask yourselves: is one arm twisted behind their back? Is that cute kid now a stroppy teen? Are they even still alive?

p.s. What do you think about the new header / layout?  I've been tinkering and I'm not so sure.

Austerity Measures

Times of austerity are here, they tell us – a reigning in (of wild horses?), the tightening of belts, the empty larder, the gathering clouds, the doom, the gloom.

But which of us can say, hand on heart, that we don't have too much stuff, that we could get by without the lava lamp, the novelty egg timer or the impulse-bought 'must-have' espadrilles crafted by the tiny grubby fingers of child labourers? (insert your own foibles here)

The aesthete would say that a life of simplicity is the ideal - just enough to eat, no worldly distractions, self-sufficiency. A loaf of bread, a cup of wine, and thou...sands of books at your local library - for now (though they wouldn't dare trying to close Wirral Libraries after what happened last time.)

If Osbourne wants a list of which services to cut back on, here are 10 suggestions of what should be first up against the wall:

• Public sector award dinners
• 50% of all meetings
• Bankers' bonuses
• 'Think-tanks'
• Tank tanks
• 75% of public sector PR and marketing
• Local authorities sponsoring football teams
• Subsidies to farmers not to grow stuff
• The space programme
• ...oh, and the war, the weapons, the bombs, the missiles

But don't panic! There are plenty of things we can all do to 'pull in our horns' (that's one for the Inky Fool), save money and make our own lives more sustainable: 

• Re-use and repair old jokes
• Shop around for cut-price air – it's just as good as full-fat
• Only eat second hand food
• Get rid of the dog and buy a bargain-basement budgie... some of them really go cheap!
• Sell your soul on eBay - top prices paid
• Use your library - spend your days sitting near the thrillers smelling of wee
• Save water costs! Share a bath with a neighbour
• Turn off your brain at the mains when you're not using it
• Repair any broken promises or hearts (you might need a 'handy man' to do this)
• Become a 'friend of the preserving pan' (pictured)

Next week:  How to grow your own gazebo from seed  

Related post: Time of the Signs - more amusing political posters

Twitter - 7 Steps to Getting Started

And now, in a change to our normal blog, this is a How to Get Started in Twitter post inspired by Maria Zanini - read her post about it here. Normal service will be resumed after this messages.

I'm going to run through some basics to help other people get to grips with Twitter - if they choose to do so. 

Be aware: it can be addictive and It's Not My Fault*

Step one: Open an account.

• Sign up at www.twitter.com. Your username will be @yourchoice (mine's @ClareKirwan) so when you see an @ symbol it's another person.
• Only use your real name if you are saying mostly nice things, in your own time and don't mind who knows it.
• You can have more than one identity so if you're not sure about all this Twitter nonsense, you could try a made-up name first until you're comfortable launching your real self. 

Step two: Have a look around

• Like Facebook you have a 'profile' page where people can see anything you've 'tweeted' publicly, and a 'home' page where you can see what the people you follow have been saying.
• From the home page you can also access your Direct Messages (private messages which can be sent between two people who follow each other) and see it you've been retweeted or mentioned. This is all in the future for now.
• It's not cool to send plaintive messages into the ether like: 'So here I am on Twitter then' and 'Is anybody there?' but we all do it. No-one will answer.

Step three: Following

• You can follow anyone unless they block you. They don't have to follow back.
• Follow celebs if you must (yawn), but don't expect replies. Everyone follows @stephenfry, but spoof @mrsstephenfry is funnier. You'll soon find the popular celebs - they just follow each other.
• Good ways to start: search for people you know, reply to people writing on trending topics, browse amongst  people your friends follow to see who you like the sound of
• Two people who follow each other are 'friends' and can send DM's (direct messages) which aren't visible to others.
• You can organise people you follow into lists like 'people-i-actually-know-in-real-life,' 'celebs' and 'wierdos' and select to just look at activity by people on a specific list at a time. 
• Here are someone else's 7 ways to gain followers on Twitter
  

Step four: Trending topics/ hashtags/ memes

• Bottom right on your home page are 'hot' trending topics or 'memes', but there are loads more. Click on one and you'll get a feed comprised of tweets on these topics.
• You'll see the hashtag (#) quite a bit in tweets. These are also memes. e.g. if I had wanted to comment on the general election, I'd have tweeted: 'One Green MP, no BNP ones. People voted for the lettuce, not the slug. #GE10'  ...and anyone following GE10 (the tag for the General Election 2010) would have seen it. 
• Hashtags can be for world events, favourite telly programmes (e.g. #cdwm when Come DIne With Me is on - i.e. all the time) or silly word games like #starwarssongs or #plantmusic 

(See an earlier post for a fine example of hashtag madness and some great people worth following imho (in my honest opinion... there's a whole language. You don't have to use it.) LOL.

Step five: But what do I tweet about?

• Don't be boring and don't over-do it.
• I follow people with witty, interesting, off-the-wall things to say and hope to be the same: something funny I heard, a quote I like, a response to something I'm watching or reading, banter with people I follow.
• I've had an occasionally whinge and been cheered with support and good advice from other tweeps. It's like a virtual office complete with silly jokes, interesting facts, gossip, news snippets, tea and sympathy. Without the tea.
• You can also tweet links to your blog, YouTube, webpages, pictures, news articles, etc. 
  

Step six: Manners please!

• It's good manners to follow people back if they follow you (unless they're obviously 'selling' something) but not compulsory.
• Other nice things you can do for your friends is to retweet them when you enjoy something they've tweeted, or 'mention' them (use their @name in a message). 
• There's also customs like 'Follow Friday' where you mention your favourite tweeps and the tag #FF to encourage your other followers to follow them too. (Also #WritersWednesday - same thing for writers. I tried a #WirralThursday but it didn't take off. *sigh*  
• It's also good manners to thank someone if they #FF you or retweet one of your tweets.

Step seven: Tweetdeck

• With Twitter it gets hard to keep track of your friends quite quickly. Free, downloadable programmes like Tweetdeck enable you to view several columns (your choice of  lists, hashtags, mentions, direct messages), update Facebook status and generally Do More Stuff. There are others but I've only used Tweetdeck and it works for me in ways Twitter on it's own just didn't.
  

Read more: Twitter's help pages should explain the terminology, or you could check out Blogging Bits' Twitter Glossary or, for the more advanced Seed the Web's Twittonary. I'll add one here eventually, but... did someone mention tea?

Image used is from this site about Libraries using Twitter

* If you've ever used an Apple Mac (and this might just have been the old ones) an American voice used to come out of it saying this when certain errors occurred. It never said anything else. Weird huh?

Library Assistant - Week 2

In case you're wondering how my first two weeks as a library assistant went, here are some highlights and thoughts:

1. Not in those shoes! (left)
2. I was actually given the job of cleaning the sticky books - a job made more repellent thanks to this story on an earlier blog. 
3. I even heard a worse story - about a lady who brought books back which had been in the same carrier bag as a dirty nappy. The lady had to clean those books herself. 
4. When a large number of overdue Doctor Who books were returned (which would presumably never happen to a real Timelord) I failed to find a shelf bigger on the outside than the inside to put them back on.
5. The whole 'shelves bigger on the inside than outside' spiel is best not gone into with people who have only just met me. Some fall on stony ground.
6. The same goes for listing my previously harvested list of hysterically funny songs about librarians. They're just not ready for that yet.
7. Everyone in my library is shorter than me. It is possible I was hired to dust the top shelves. (I'm no giant by the way - standard 5foot4)
8. Talking of going back in time (yes we were - keep up!) it's like going back to the 1980's when I worked in a bank - days spent in protracted silences with the distant artillery of date-stamps, sorting things into alphabetical and/or numerical order. And nobody comes running at you with a health and safety manual if you try and remove staples from a wooden board with a tin opener. We even get proper tea breaks and an hour for lunch. The pay's about the same too. 
9. There's a lady who has worked in my branch since 1974. Say it again. 1974.
10. Oh, and...
11. ...it is really very pleasant and we have LOTS of GREAT books! Hurray for libraries!

The End of the World

"It's not the end of the world." So easily said, so often true.

This time last year it was the end of the world for me.

I was in Ushuaia - the southernmost* city in the world. It's in the far south of Argentinian Patagonia on the island of Tierra del Fuego - all the place names around there are evocative, the Beagle Channel (no sightings of beagles, but plenty of seals, sealions and cormorants), the Magellan Straits, and further south again, Cape Horn.  They call it 'El Fin del Mundo.' It's quite a selling point for the tourist industry, I suppose.

It's not the first time I've dabbled with the apocalypse. 

I once explored the clammy tunnels under Har Megiddo in northern Israel. You might have heard of it as Armageddon. No sign of Gog or Magog but I did get a snog. That's a whole other story. If it was the end of the world it's kind of the way I'd want to go.

The thing about the end of the world, like so many other things, is that it seems really humungous - something you cannot even grasp the idea of, let alone the reality. It seems completely implausible that you would find yourself at it.

I mean how do you even get there? And do they have a B&B?

As it happens, you simply take the bus - 3am from El Calafate to Rio Gallegos, across the border into Chile by ferry across the Straits of Magellan, back into Argentina, arrive in time for a tea tenedore libre in Ushuaia town centre. I say 'tea.' I also say 'simply'. I mean one thing just leads to another.

It's a bit like real life. Coming events, tasks or goals can seem impossibly daunting and unattainable. But break them down into smaller steps, each one taking you nearer, and even mammoth tasks are achievable. The trick is not looking at the end point - just the next step.

Some religions - notably the Baha'i faith - believe we are already in the end of days. And the Zoroastrians must be wondering too, having prophesised, among many other abominations, that men will: "... become more deceitful and more given to vile practices."  The Mayans think it's going to happen in 2012. Pretty well everyone agrees it will feature a panoply of natural disasters - earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, the sun rising in the west etc.

But it is most likely that people are generally right when they say: 'It's not the end of the world.' Mostly they say this during moments when you are in great personal distress - as if it would somehow make you feel better. It so rarely does. 

And even if it is the end of the world, it might not be as bad as you think it's going to be. As long as you have a bus ticket and the right outfit.

* Pop quiz. If Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world, can you tell me without looking what the equivalent northern latitude would be? Guess which city in Europe? 

Related post: We apologise for the eruption of normal services