Pete Hindle

Pictures and stuff from a guy who likes coffee.

Category: Regular

June 7, 2010

Magic Butt-Money

Wondering how it’s going with my health and general welfare? Here’s the important news in a nutshell:

I will not be given any money from the benefits agency and I will have to pay to go back to university.

I got these two pieces of news today, when I seem to be suffering from one of the worst bouts of fatigue in a long time. Funny thing about fatigue: it sort of sneaks up on you. You can think you’re fine, until you try and make sense of the wardrobe options in B&Q, and then you realise that you’re too tired to move properly and end up in a Cafe Nero in St Neots, licking chocolate tortina from off the wrapper because it’s half term and the manager is at home looking after the kids so some sixth-formers who work there forgot to put anything in the chiller.

Unless I suddenly start to be able to pull money out of my butt, it looks like I’ll be staying in Bedfordshire for a little while longer. Actually, pulling money out of my butt sounds like an updating of fairy gold (or, possibly, a term used in the porn industry). I think we can all guess what magic butt-money turns into at sunrise.

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June 6, 2010

Countryside Invites

It is now officially summer. And with summer, there comes the dreaded “Countryside Invite”. That’s my term for those parties that are held in the middle of nowhere, but that you have to attend. It’s usually a not-too-interesting event – a relatives birthday, an engagement party, or some sort of art event – but it’s the sort of invite that it’s very hard to turn down owing to emotional blackmailing.

It’ll usually be somewhere really hard to get to, making it doubly unappetising because you don’t really want to be there in the first place, but you have to go somewhere that the Daily Mail is regarded as being too liberal. Maybe you can cadge a lift, or perhaps there will be some sort of rudimentary public transport system that will take you to the village hall you need to be at, but don’t expect to be able to rely on that transportation in order to get home.

The event itself isn’t usually fun, because you are far from home, with people who you hardly know, and that’s a recipe for awkwardness. And then, at the end of the party, you’ll have to leave.

It’s at this point the true horror of the Countryside Invite makes itself known. Your reason for being in the countryside is now over, and you now face a journey back to civilisation that will form the backbone of your conversations with friends for the next few weeks.

I personally have jumped over rivers, slept on air-beds in the middle of nowhere, and walked home through fields of sleeping cows after these events. But this year, finding myself single and about 250 miles away from my friends, I think I’ll be able to dodge any of this seasons Countryside Invites. Thankfully.

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May 26, 2010

It’s Not Good to be Back

I lay in bed on Monday night, feeling pretty weird. I’d been back in Newcastle for four days, which is the longest I’d been away from home since I got sick. Unlike before, I’d taken it pretty easy, and restrained my impulse to schedule a dozen meetings for coffee every day.  In fact, by most standards, yesterday had been great – I’d seen my girlfriend, went for a walk in the park, hung out with my flatmates, been to a cafe for lunch, and packed in a few other things too. So why was I feeling so weird?

Six months ago, my Dad had driven to Newcastle to pick me up and take me back to my parents house in Biggleswade. I’d just got out of hospital, but I was far from well; I had a mysterious rash that covered my entire body, I was weak, and parts of me were swollen with arthritis. We all thought that these would go away (and I mean everyone, from doctors to parents to friends, right down the line to me) but three weeks later I was so sick I got dragged into hospital again*.

Somewhere around the 7th of December, I woke up on a hospital ward in Bedford and then had a massive rectal bleed. That mysterious rash that I mentioned earlier was the start of my vascular system shutting down, and when it became unable to pump blood around my internal organs, it started draining out the quickest way possible. Luckily, doctors were able to save my life, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this now.

I’ve spent the entire year so far recovering from that event. I’m a lot better now, but there’s still some lingering side effects – like fatigue, meaning that I get worn out from doing the simplest things. I’m not strong enough or well enough to live in my flat at the minute, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be well enough for another few months, by which time the lease on my flat will be over.

If I’m not well enough to live in my flat, you can bet I’m not well enough to work. As I was technically still a student when I got sick, I can’t have any welfare from the government – but I’ve obviously still got bills to pay. It looks like the only place I’ll be able to afford to live for a while is my parents house.

So, that night when I was lying in bed, it felt like I was moving out of Newcastle. Usually when you move it’s because you make a choice, and because you want to go somewhere new. This isn’t like that, and my reception on getting off the train at Biggleswade Station (nearly getting into a fight the very moment I stepped off the train) confirmed how I felt: I’m here, but I don’t want to be here.

* I don’t know why, but I always seem to get taken into hospital on a Friday. It’s really annoying – I assume that I’ll be fighting my way through an emergency room full of booze-damaged drunks.

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May 19, 2010

London Trip

Yesterday I took a trip into London by myself. I’d arranged to met up with Jock Mooney, who made this video:

We spent a few hours catching up, and then I set off for Camden’s juggling shop, Oddballs.

I’m not really into Camden. Maybe I’m too old, or maybe I’m just not sold on the commercial aspects of the area, but it felt like I was walking into a permanent half-term. Coming up to street level I was looking at the folk heading down into the tube, and by my reckoning it was a ratio of roughly three kids to one tramp. Once I reached the surface I couldn’t work out how to split my ratio between kids, hipsters, tramps and aging punks, so I set off to the juggling shop by walking half a mile in the wrong direction.

After figuring this out the hard way, I turned back and eventually made it into London’s only juggling shop. It’s tiny, and I had to dodge not only somebody flinging some pink fluffy poi around, but a white guy with dreds and a black eye demonstrating the basics of 423. Juggling might be something I do as a hobby, but it really does attract the “skeezy geezer” type. I made my purchases and beat a hasty exit.

This means I now own a total of eighteen juggling balls. Five regular balls, three bouncy balls (one of which has disappeared), four large thuds and my six new regular thuds. Thuds are slightly squishy bean-bags which are named after the noise they make when they hit the ground. Unlike regular balls they don’t roll away, making them easier to find.

Of course, I can’t juggle 18 balls at once. On the Dancey juggling index, 18 balls in two hands has a difficulty of 8.5263. This is determined by the equation

d=b/(h + h/b)

where d is difficulty, b is the amount of balls, and h is the number of hands doing the juggling.

Using this equation, throwing a ball from one hand to the other has a difficulty index of 0.25. Therefore, anybody who learns to juggle 18 balls at once would be some sort of ubermensch of juggling. Anyone smarter than me who wishes to test my maths on this could check out Jack Kalvan’s paper on the subject, but everybody else could just check out this amazing example of teamwork:

After about five hours of being in London I was physically and mentally shattered. I’m still in recovery, and I know the price for this short trip is going to be spending the next few days resting on the couch, despite the fact I did very little whilst in the city. This makes me feel like mild-mannered Clark Kent, only without the interesting day job at the Daily Planet.

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May 2, 2010

State

Wednesday was a bad day for me. I’d been carrying around a broken tooth, and leapt out of bed to make an emergency dental appointment. I then fixed breakfast and was just starting to gingerly chew my toast when I got a call from the benefits agency who told me that I wouldn’t be getting any money from them.

It took them a while to explain this to me, and when they were done my toast was cold. I hate cold toast.

The problem is that I made the mistake of getting ill when I was studying at university. I’m still ill, in fact – still in recovery from something that took me within a few hours of dying, six months ago.

I’ve put off making this post because I’m angry about it, and I don’t think I’m going to stop being angry about it. Because I was a student I don’t deserve help? I expect that attitude from bigoted chavs, not the government of the country I live in.

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April 14, 2010

Quantum Leap’s Samuel Beckett

Famous Irish playwright Samuel Beckett has a science-fiction namesake: Doctor Sam Beckett, who leaps through time to set right what went wrong.

The above video is a joke about these two Samuel Becketts. In his later career, the playwright Beckett made some awesomely post-modern offbeat works, including a play that lasts for three seconds, and consists of a giant mouth sighing.

Every episode of Quantum Leap starts with Sam Beckett “leaping” into a new dramatic scene, where he says “oh boy” (such is the non-offensive nature of the show, even when faced with near-certain death Sam does not drop an f-bomb).

The video is a mere few seconds of a Samuel Beckett, wearily saying “oh boy”, and then roll credits. The humour comes from knowing that there are two Samuel Beckett’s being referred to in this video, leaving me with the problem that it’s a very obscure joke… I believe that it’s so obscure, I can depict the people who will find this funny using a venn diagram:

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April 3, 2010

New Who: Probably Not as Good as That Other Who

I get unstuck when people say that they think the new Doctor Who is good. The TV program itself is a fairly mediocre production, which lurches from set piece to set piece with some spectacularly bad character development. I think people are so attached to it because it’s one of the few programs that are exist today that you are allowed to be a fan of – you’d look a bit silly in an Eastenders t-shirt, and there isn’t a lot of PM merchandising available at the BBC store. No matter how many letters I write asking for a “Team Eddie” badge set.

This new Doctor Who is guilty of one of the worst things about contemporary TV; it talks down to it’s audience. Whereas really old Who episodes had an educational feel about them, any educational content in new Who is about as didactic as you can get. This isn’t to say that I like old Who a huge amount either; it’s super-clunky and very often boring. What I like about Doctor Who are the things that stray off the accepted TV path.

In the 1960′s, in the first burst of Doctor Who’s existence, the program was very popular. This led to two Doctor Who movies staring Peter Cushing, because there was a common movement of British TV shows being turned into films around that time. The films don’t really follow the accepted story, but all the right elements are there, and I find them amazingly fun to watch.

After the cancellation of the show in the late eighties, the novelisations continued. As there were no new adventures of Doctor Who, writers were allowed to make up their own adventures for the character, which eventually gave birth to one of my favourite ideas in SF: Faction Paradox, an evil time-travelling organisation, who lived in a dimension split off from ours in the spare days caused by the shift to the Gregorian Calendar… complicated? You bet. This is one of those times that even reading the wiki page won’t give you a full rundown.

But that’s what this new Who won’t have: the guts to make things complicated. It doesn’t have the background of Star Trek, or the building of mythology that we saw within Buffy… instead, every episode has a few cursory nods to the in-show history before producing this weeks nifty explosion.

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March 31, 2010

I went to Newcastle and all I got was this lousy fatigue-based medical issue

Last Thursday I went back to Newcastle for the first time since November. I spent a short weekend back, celebrating a close friend’s birthday and gathering some of my possessions (because I’ve been living out of a backpack for the past five months).

Although I thought I was ready to start getting out again, I’ve found myself completely flattened by the experience. I guess I have to be a lot fitter – a lot healthier – then I am now, before I can pick up my old life. The only way I can explain it is like when you’re tired after some hard exercise. Except I don’t pick up after resting. This is my third day of resting up after my trip, and I’m still very weary.

Which really sucks, because the last thing I want to do is be stuck on the couch.

I might put a few posts up explaining what happened to me, as my medical crisis was both hilarious and gory. So when I can unstick myself from the couch, where I’m watching my way through these Star Trek box sets I brought back, I’ll update my blog with something a little more exciting than a post about shoes.

Addendum: I’m not actually that happy with this entry (hey – no links and no pictures?! Does this still qualify as a blog post?) but I’m just so knackered right now that it’ll have to do. It’s not like I can improve it with a picture of my couch.

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March 6, 2010

Slint and Swainston’s Fourlands

Slint are a seminal alternate guitar-rock band from the 1990s. I first came across them on the soundtrack to Larry Clark’s Kids, which was one of those albums which promised that the film would be a-fucking-mazing. Instead it was a bit of a bummer, but the majesty of Slint’s “Good Morning Captain”…

Steph Swainston’s Fourlands is the setting for her novels, which are part of the New Weird, an extension to the fantasy genre that allows authors to escape the sword-and-sorcery crap that they’ve been stuck with by certain best-selling authors. Where fantasy had become reliant upon pastiche and re-invention of Tolkein-esque themes, writers operating within the New Weird allowed themselves to create truly new worlds.

Swainston’s books are set in a world ruled by immortals, who fight an endless war against giant insects. There is no orcish horde to defeat, but instead an unknowable enemy who seems to only operate by instinct – something we can all understand, especially if you’ve ever found a cockroach in your kitchen. Familiarity doesn’t end there though, as despite living in a feudal world, her characters wear jeans and t-shirts, know what serial numbers are, and are generally as badly behaved as us in the modern world.

Slint’s work came at a time when Grunge defined what rock was, but they weren’t working alone. Shellac and Helmet released albums around the same time, opening up rock music to a wider range of textures than the pop-orientated sounds that were prevalent within Grunge. The influence that these bands had opened up the sound of rock music in a post-modern sense, meaning that not only could things be heavier but that they could also sound different.

The New Weird is a similar movement in fantasy writing. Swainston’s work, and that of others who accept the genre, are swimming against the idea of fantasy as ‘epic’, or the introduction of vampire mythology into the humdrum present day (such as the Sookie Stackhouse series). It’s a reinvention that enlivens a creative discipline, and while both Slint and Swainston share a common theme of narrative and flawed characters, the best link between them is to see how revolutionary they are.

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March 2, 2010

Favourite Shoes

Some ShoesI love these shoes! They’re my favourite ever trainers, and I say this as a thirty-one year old man who has owned one pair of ‘proper shoes’ since leaving school. That is a lot of trainers, running the entire gamut of casual foot-covering styles, from skateboard pretentiousness to faux-classy leatherette things. What makes these shoes so good is the fact that they have a layer of goretex built into them, stopping rain from soaking my feet.

It’s that layer of goretex that makes these shoes worth buying. And I’ve brought two pairs of them, so I should know. I originally brought a pair after a rainy spring, where it seemed like everywhere I went involved getting soaked. It’s no fun going to the pub dripping wet, or leafing through books at the library in your own personal puddle, so I changed the way I dressed and started buying things that used modern fabrics. From that period, I’ve got a few things that suck, a few things that are ok, and a few things that stand out because they are excellent. These shoes stand out.

That’s the deal with using new materials and new technologies. Sometimes, taking a little bit of something new and adding it to the familiar creates excellence. The word for this is ‘progress’, and it’s given us things like dry feet, iPhones, and liquorice allsorts. You might not like everything that comes out of the relentless march of progress, but you’ll have to admit to finding some of it useful.

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