Some facts aren't.

On my visit to London Today I bought a couple of cheap animated Batman DVDs. Inside one of them was a postcard-sized advert warning me against DVD piracy. Now I don't support or condone piracy but something struck me about this bit of propaganda. It states boldly "90%* of all pre-release pirate DVDs are filmed from the back of a cinema with a camcorder". Now leaving aside the question how they can possibly know this, there is the question of that little asterisk by the quoted figure. At the bottom of the page it says. *Source:FACT: The federation against copyright theft.

Who produced this document? Glad you asked. The Federation Against Copyright Theft, of course. So they quote a doubtful figure and then cite themselves as the source. I've long been annoyed by the pointless and misleading adverts that used to appear at the start of videos and now appear in an unskippable form at the start of many DVDs (and get shown before movies in cinemas), but this method of quoting statistics is sheer duplicity. You can take my word for it, a massive 94.6% of people agree with me.*

*Source Bob Hale Invented-On-The-Spot Statistics Limited.

Maybe when I win the lottery. (wistful sigh)

There is one edition of Alice in Wonderland that I would love, above all others, to own – the Salvador Dali Illustrated edition. I have seen it on the internet and am familiar with all the pictures in it but as there were only 2000 ever produced I never expected to even see one.
Today I made one of my occasional visits to “The Children’s Bookshop” which is off Charing Cross Road. Whenever I’m in London, I pop in and spend half an hour or so looking at things that I can’t possibly justify buying, sigh and go about my business. Today though, the window display stopped me dead. Spread out in all its glory filling the whole window was the Dali edition. I looked at a lot of books inside (ranging from £25 to over £250 but somehow my heart wasn’t in it. So I went back outside to look at the window again. And then back inside to find out (for curiosity’s sake only) how much it would cost. It turned out to be an absolute steal at £4,500. I don’t expect it will be there long at that price.
If anyone is looking for a present for me I can pass on the address of the shop.
At least I can now say that I have seen a copy. Bloody marvellous it was too.

(You can find copies of the illustrations by scrolling down here.)

A curious sense of time not passing

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to have another blog that died from lack of attention. One of the entries that I put on it was about a Mensa* party that I went to that turned out to be uncannily similar to the same party the year before. I titled the entry “A curious sense of time not passing”.
The sharper-eyed among you will notice that this entry shares the title. In fact it applies even more aptly to how I spend my summers than it did to the party.
When I first passed my CELTA – literally on the day the course ended – I was immediately offered a summer school post at Harrow. The result was that I found myself, only one day later, standing up for the first time to teach in earnest and facing a class of mixed nationality teenagers who were expecting to have a professional teacher in front of them. After all, it’s what their parents had paid for. Somehow I muddled through and I must have done a decent job because I was asked if I’d like to come back the following year.
I’m in my eighth year here now and each time I return I’m seized by that same sense of time not passing. I see many of the same faces in the staff room, similar (and in some cases identical) faces in the classroom, the same faces in administration, on the activities staff, in the dining room and around and about on the hill.
By and large I get the same level classes and teach similar lessons in similar ways. I make the same conversation with the same people and go at the same times to the same pubs. This year I even have the same room with the same curtains, the same square of torn poster too high on the wall to remove and the same inexplicable red marks on the ceiling.
Time not passing, indeed.

Right now on the radio there is the mournful and melancholic Lord of the Rings theme that so perfectly evokes the towering grandeur of the mountains, the immense open sky, the bone-deep ancient knowledge that the world is vast and that you are too tiny to even be noticed.
But I am in a room in Harrow, a student’s room with a bed, a chair, a wardrobe, a desk and a shelf and the world doesn’t feel vast. It feels tiny – collapsed to this single point in time and space; into this sense of time not passing.

Strangely though it is accompanied by a simultaneous sense that time has passed. That great sections of my future have raced past me with the irresistible force and destructive effect of an avalanche. I had passed forty when I first came here. I’d already had one life as a computer programmer and systems analyst. Now I’ve passed fifty – but that isn’t time passing, it’s time passed; time gone; time vanished. And I find myself at a loss to work out what happened to it all because though eight years have clearly come and gone there is still only that sense, that curious sense, of time not passing.

*I'm not actually a member of Mensa, I was there as a guest of a friend who is.

Souvenirs

This time around, a pictures only (well more or less) blog. Whenever I travel I bring souvenirs home. Mostly they are recently made imitations of traditional crafts. They are almost always things I can hang on the wall, occasionally things to stand on the shelf and very occasional items that you can't really stand anywhere. Anyway here are a few of them.

Let's start off with a native American sand painting. I could have bought a dream catcher but this appealed to me rather more.

This evil looking set of knives was purchased in Malawi. It's actually a lot more flimsy than it looks.


Paintings on camel bone. Or so the man in the shop in Iran told me.



A bit of a cheat. This piece of decorative upholstery wasn't bought by me. It was bought for me as a present from a friend who lives in Singapore.



One of a number of African masks, or at least African looking masks. This one was actually purchased in Malaysia.


But this one was purchased in Africa - Malawi to be precise.


This dragon was smashed to pieces in the hold of the aeroplane on the way back from Thailand. I spent a long time restoring it and it now looks a lot better than it ever did when I bought it.


The table was from a roadside stall in Zambia, the metal pot from Tunisia. Note the cunning construction of the table legs. They have been carved from a single piece of wood and can be folded back together to see how it was done.


A present from Tunisia.



A painting on a feather from Costa Rica. I don't know if this is traditional or not but I saw it in a shop and thought it was great.



This painting comes from china. I watched the artist creating them so I know just how modern it is. I love it for the vibrant colours.



A rather marvellous painting that I paid a rather exhorbitant price for in Finland.



A couple of trinket baskets from Madagascar.


Carvings from Peru. They are actually carved from soft stone and, as the smell will attest, subsequently blackened with boot polish.


My favourite ever souvenir - an Iranian chess set. The picture doesn't really give you a good enough idea of how intricate the decoration really is.


A couple of "trick pots" from Peru again. Turned upside down you can fill them with water. Turned the right way up again no water falls out, but you can then pour the water from the spout.



And finally a picture of pressed flowers on paper bought, if memory serves, in Malawi.

That's it for now. I hope you enjoyed this brief respite from my writing to glance at a few souvenirs. Next time, back to the writing.