Had a fun Sign class today. Our tutor Terry is witty and always tries to illustrate his lessons with a few anecdotes, such as today's one, where he told us about driving from work on Monday, struggling to control his motorike against 60mph winds on the flyover, then getting home, driving his bike through the garage doors and being knocked off by the gate blowing shut and tipping him and the bike over. Six months ago, I wouldn't have got half of that. 'Motorbike' and 'wind' probably.
We've been learning direction verbs - that's verbs that change slightly to indicate different things, such as showing action to or from someone [I ask you / you ask me], an action that's distributed in various directions [ask upstairs / ask everyone], or repetition [keep on asking - ask, ask, ask] - all using the same hand-sign but changing the direction or position of it.
I need to practice more than I do, but it's good to have something to look forward to each week, and they're a nice bunch of people who all seem keen. I've signed up for the advanced course, so I hope I don't get out of my depth, but I seem to be coping okay so far.
18 March marks the fourth anniversary of the recognition of British Sign Language as a proper language with its own idioms and structure. Princess Diana did a lot of work to promote BSL, as its patron, but it took a long time for BSL to get any proper recognition.
I've just found this video on YouTube. As with most vids, there's no guarantee it'll be up for long, but the gist of it is that this guy is encouraging everyone who can speak BSL to celebrate the anniversary of it's transition into a 'proper' language.
I asked my pal Neil, who writes 'I Love London... Honest', why he learned to sign. One of his reasons was that more people should know how to, which works for me. We're both hearing, but Neil's very confident and articulate in signing, and he's been very encouraging to me.
Here's another YouTube video. This time, it's a very straightforward and patient guide to fingerspelling - the BSL alphabet, in other words. At the very least, I think everybody should know this:
That's enough about me... tell me something about yourself.
Nah, only joking.
So - more downloading of music. Thanks to a certain honestly-legal source (yeah, really!), I now have every single album by the Electric Light Orchestra. No, don't tut like that - they're the nearest thing to an officially-sanctioned Beatles tribute act who writes their own material. And thanks to Russell T Davies having his finger on the knob of the zeitgeist (or whatever), loads of people seem rather willing to admit that ELO were quite good actually.
Thanks to someone I've been chatting to / up recently, I've also discovered Sigur Ros, which is doubly strange because I was chatting to my pal Sam today about having only just discovered them, and he asked me if I'd noticed he'd been wearing a Sigur Ros sweatshirt all week, which he'd been given by muso friends of is who'd played with the band.
Sam does this a lot - becomes another degree of connection to whatever I'm obsessing about. Last year, I'd decided to try to collect as many of the stock music tracks used in early Doctor Who as I could. One piece of Musique concrete, which is just a pile of springs being played at different speeds, came from an album called Music of the Future' by Desmond Leslie. Now, as I began to read up on Desmond Leslie, I learned loads of fun facts about him, and proceeded to explain this to Sam one afternoon, just after he'd finished a quick phone call in the office. Apparently, the TV show The Sky at Night came out of a one-off show in which Patrick Moore and Desmond Leslie squared off in a debate about aliens and space. One of them got their own TV show, the other started writing for Fortean Times.
DesLes next wrote the soundtrack for a film called First Man Into Space . which starred Roger Delgado - the man who later played the first Master in Doctor Who, and it's his soundtrack that provided that track used in the Doctor Who episode 'Edge of Destruction' and also pops up in 'The Moonbase' and a few other places, including an episode of Out of the Unknown called 'Counterfeit Man'. Phew!
Anyway, for most TV buffs, DesLes is also famous for being the bloke who tried to punch Bernard Levin during a live edition of That Was the Week That Was:
Isn't he just lovely? So polite and erudite. None of this Jerry Springer nonsense. Just decent, gentlemanly and - ooof! There ya go! All this was over a review Levin had written about an unfavourable play his then wife Agnes Bernelle had starred in. Agnes Bernelle later collaborated with, among others, Marc Almond (on his Stars We Are album).
So... I'm telling Sam about this rambling list of connections that I'm slowly becoming obsessed with. Sam listens patiently, then blinks and says 'Desmond leslie? Did he live in Castle Leslie, in Ireland?' 'I dunno,' I says. 'Why?' 'Oh, I've stayed at his house. I'm a friend of his daughter, Camilla.'
Gasp.
Camilla is his daughter from DesLes's second marriage.
'In fact... that was Camilla I was on the phone to just before.'
Such a spooky coincidence deserves a plug. Sam's website can be found at www.samsemple.com. He's a singer-songwriter and even though he's a mate, I genuinely rate his music. There are downloads for you to listen to yourself.
So, of course he knew someone who'd played with the band I'd only heard of a week before. Cos he's Sam, and he's brilliant.
And thanks to Sam, I'm only two degrees of separation from Desmond Leslie.
DesLes's soundtrack to that film, by the way, is hideous if you don't like Musique Concrete. Really unlistenable. But dig those springs!
So, my new job involves working with archive material. I started on 2 January and I'm with a very lovely team of people who all want to work hard and do their best. It's amazing how being placed on a project with funding, purpose, future direction and a lot of love can do wonders for the sense of self-worth. I still get very down about the usual relationship issues but generally my work-mood has been up-up-UP!
Except...
We've discovered something that's a teensy bit upsetting about the past. See, people were racist - openly so - none of your coded could-be-just-institutional-racism that we saw in recent weeks with Big Brother. No, this is open sneering from a travelogue reporter about the locals. It's marginalised stereotyping. It's..
BLACKING UP!
I'm old enough to remember The Black & White Minstrel Show from the 1970s, just before Bill Cotton took it off, and to be honest, I was more concerned by how boring it was, and I still am. Still, it's history and as Spike Lee's film Bamboozled shows, there's still a lot of talent involved in those minstrel shows, even if the stereotypes we saw weren't hardworking 'Negro' entertainers but fat Welshmen with sponge wigs and cole-face makeup.
But some of my colleagues do get very worried by the fact that archive TV can be seen as 'A History of People Blacking Up', and it's easy to see why. It's partly guilt that our forefathers let this kind of thing happen for so long, it's partly because anything naughty can trigger inappropriate giggles in ourslves and it's partly because the Great British Public likes nothing better than a good moan at our expense. Moan because we show this kind of stuff. Moan because we don't show it at all any more. Moan because there are too many repeats. Moan because the TV's not as good as it used to be.
We're taking the approach that this is how TV was and that such material will receive suitable warnings before it's made available to the public, but we're still on edge.
And then yesterday, I watched a programme starring a much-loved fox-shaped puppet. First gag - 'What has 22 yellow legs and four wings? - A Chinese football team.
That's the text that woke me up at 3.57am on 6 February. My comedy flatmate - the one who looks like me but shorter. Poor luv's a clumsy sod anyway due to a combination of previous foot-related accidents and a deaf ear throwing him off balance. But this one was nasty - he tripped over by Trafalgar Square and broke his tibia. Prior to 6th Feb 2007 I doubt I could have pointed to a tibia with any accuracy but now the flatmate has a huge plaster bandage to show me roughly where it is.
I told him if it isn't healed within 14 days I'm having him shot. No good to me if he can't go out to market and come back with a full cart.
It's terrifying to see just how immobile he's become though. Because his other foot - the one that's now supporting his weight - has only just recovered from a knock at Christmas, he's in agony every time he has to walk to the bathroom and his weekly tips to hospital leave him in a lot of distress.
Luckily, there's a lot of nice people at work who've come over with emergency entertainment packages for him. DVDs and books to borrow, a gorgeously heartfelt card and some home-made cake.
In the meantime, I get to be sole cook and bottle-washer in our kitchen. It's nice to be fed by someone else every now and then, but I'm enjoying the challenge of thinking up new meals each day rather than sticking with the same recipes and arrangements.
Still, it's going to be a Chinese tonight and I think he's paying. Hurrah!
I'm rubbish at this blogging because I still have too much embarrassment dragging me back. Plus I'm on a couple of mailing lists with friends and I tend to just post thoughts there instead of here.
Oh, and I spent the last month without my own internet connection. TalkTalk were typically rubbish about the entire thing and I had to phone them up to tell them to back off after they suggested they might bill me for the remainder of my contract. SOD OFF YOU EVIL BASTARDS!!
All the while, BT politely chuckled along with my rants and were, on the whole lovely. I received a bill from them yesterday for £80 and I was a bit narked at their cheek until I phoned them up and they confirmed that it wasn't a bill but a recredit. Yarooh!
I've not quite got the hang of daily posting. I tend to do a few in one go when the urge takes me. Today's going to see at least four. Is that rubbish?
This is a way of helping me work out who I am and how I feel about that. It's also, occasionally, about me making monsters.
Sometimes I'm Charlie Brown, sometimes Linus, sometimes Lucy. Good grief, etc...
I'm either an optimist who's regularly disappointed or a grumpy old sod who should stop being such a mizzo.
Oh, and this has absolutely nothing to do with my employer and all opinions are my own.
