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When I ordered my 12” PowerBook, I decided that I might as well max out the RAM¹, but I had to wait because the extra 1 GB stick was back-ordered. I got it today, and I’m revelling in the most RAM I’ve ever had installed on a computer. The laptop felt pretty fast before, but now it’s really snappy. I do have a legitimate reason for needing all this computing grunt—I’m going to be using digital video pretty extensively in my work, and I know from experience that applications like Final Cut Pro need as much RAM as you can throw at them. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it…

¹ You should probably mentally append, “…because I wasn’t paying for it.” to that sentence.

One of the few things I really miss from Oxford (apart from my friends and the lovely buildings) is the availability of great independent cinemas. The Phoenix and the UPP screened a wonderful range of independent and foreign films; around here there only seems to be the usual glut of Odeons and UCIs showing the standard releases. So Mr. Bsag and I are thinking about subscribing to one of the DVD-rental-by-post services. I think we’ve got it narrowed down to either the Guardian’s Movietrak service or LOVEFiLM.com. My problem is that I can’t check out the range available from LOVEFiLM; they say that they have almost every DVD released in the UK, but do I believe them? And do they have a decent range of independent and foreign films? If anyone has had experience of either of these services (or any other good ones I might have missed, provided that they deliver in the UK), I would love to know how you find them.

I’ve been pretty busy just reinstalling all the applications and utilities I used to have on my old TiBook on to the new 12” PowerBook, but now that I’ve finished that, I’m looking around again for some new things to install on my shiny new toy invaluable work tool. I’ve just come across CocoaSuite, and I’m rather impressed by it. Some time ago, I used CocoaGestures—a free utility by the same author, which allowed you to draw shapes with the mouse (while holding down a configurable key) to trigger any menu command. I found it extremely useful, so I’m surprised that I haven’t picked up on CocoaSuite before now. This bundles the Gestures in with a number of other useful tools. ‘Mnemonics’ allow you to hit a hotkey to bring up a text entry field (F12 by default, but you can change it), into which you type a mnemonic which triggers a menu command. So if you can’t remember the built-in hotkey for ‘File:Save As…’ you could use ‘sa’ as a mnemonic. In fact, you can trigger any menu command with a hotkey, with a mnemonic, or with a gesture. Menu commands can also include contextual menus (the ones which appear when you control-click or right-click something). This is brilliant for using a gesture to open a link on a web page in a new tab; the engine is clever enough to figure out that you want to trigger a contextual menu if you start the gesture over a link. It’s a lot quicker than opening the menu the usual way and selecting one of the commands.

Other goodies include Text Snippets, which automatically type bits of frequently used text for you. You can either choose them from the menu or assign a hotkey, gesture or mnemonic to trigger them. I’ve used TypeIt4Me to do this for a while, but if you don’t use this wonderful utility, it’s nice to have a similar thing bundled in with the gestures, and to have more flexibility about how the snippet is triggered. There’s also a great feature for laptop owners, which allows you to use the trackpad as either a jog dial or scroll wheel for scrolling windows. It works pretty nicely, and even though I use an external mouse most of the time, it’s good to have the facility for those times when it’s impractical to use a mouse. All of the hotkeys, gestures and mnemonics can be made global or local to a particular application, which effectively increases the number of different permutations you can use, and stops you triggering inappropriate commands accidentally. It seems to work very smoothly, but I’ll be giving it a thorough workout over the trial period to see if I think it’s worth my hard-earned cash.

I’ve never been particularly interested in local newspapers, but since I’m in a new area now, I thought I would glance at the local free-sheet that popped through the door. Little did I suspect that I was living in an area where thrilling and mysterious events occur. It seems that the local park (which is actually quite a large Country Park, rather than the typical bandstands and flowerbeds type of thing) is inhabited by a wild man. This man is referred to as ‘Barkfoot’—a hilarious¹ play on ‘Bigfoot’, but it also refers to his home-made bark footwear and bark cowboy hat. He apparently also wears a long coat woven out of reeds and grasses, and adores sausages—all of the encounters people have had with him have involved sausage-related incidents of one kind or another.

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I’ve lived in a lot of different places. At one point (as a PhD student) I was moving on average once a year. In the last few years I’ve settled down a bit, and stayed in one place for a while, but still none of these properties felt entirely like home. That’s partly because they were all rented, and consequently I had to put up with other people’s choice of decor and furniture. But I’m also starting to think that none of them felt like home because they didn’t make me feel like a Proper Adult.

In contrast, the house we’ve just moved in to is a Proper Adult House. It’s a typical semi-detatched suburban home dating from the 1920s or 30s. They’re not exactly in fashion now, which is a great shame as they are comfortable, spacious homes. After all, they were built in a time of increasing prosperity, when newly well-off shop-keepers and small business people started to move out of the city into quieter, cleaner, more rural areas, while still being close to their place of work. Perhaps people see that as being a bit smug and ‘Middle England’ now, but having come from a series of slightly grim flats in run-down areas, I see smug and Middle England as a bit of a step up. Some features of the house strike me as being particularly adult:

• Stairs inside the house. I haven’t lived anywhere with both an upstairs and a downstairs part since I left home in 1988, so for me stairs are the height of sophistication. True, it is unexpectedly tiring when you’re used to a flat, and you are constantly finding that the thing you want is on the wrong floor, but it’s good exercise, and I love going upstairs to sleep.
• A garden. The garden isn’t particularly big or beautiful, but it has plants, a small lawn and a patio. Before the weather took a turn for the worse, it was lovely to have our lunch or a cup of tea outside, scrunching our bare toes in the cool grass.
• A washing line. You can’t beat the smell of laundry dried outside in the sun. There aren’t many household chores I actively enjoy, but pegging out washing on the line is certainly one. My mum tells a story about how she asked me to put the washing out on the line when I was little. There were already a few items on the line that she had pegged out herself, and as she watched from the window, she saw me studying how the T-shirts and trousers had been hung up and copying the method exactly, with a look of great seriousness and concentration on my face. I’ve loved hanging out the washing ever since.
• A cupboard under the stairs. Everyone needs one of these. When you’re not using it to oppress teenaged wizards, it’s handy for all that junk which has to accumulate somewhere. Ours is empty at the moment, but I’m willing to bet that within a few months it will be full of mismatched shoes, plastic carrier bags, and bottles of exploding home-brew beer. Perfect.

As I mentioned here, we went to the Stanley Spencer Gallery the day before we moved house. We both love his paintings, with their curious mix of the utterly commonplace and the spiritual. He had a number of quite distinctly different styles, from highly detailed sharp landscapes, through the scenes of groups of people with rounded bodies and huge, curving limbs, to his ultra-realistic intimate portraits which remind me a bit of Lucien Freud’s work. He was very firmly rooted in the village he was born in—Cookham in Berkshire—and many of his paintings feature scenes and people from the village. The most striking painting on display in the gallery is a huge work depicting Christ giving a sermon at the Cookham regatta. He’s sitting in a punt (complete with a grey straw boater on his head), and holding forth to an audience of small children who are sitting in the bow of the boat. All around hordes of people in their Sunday finest and larking around in boats, some listening and looking at him, and others pre-occupied with their own affairs. Stanley Spencer also painted a famous series on the Resurrection, showing people emerging from their graves in Cookham churchyard. It’s one of the most moving paintings I’ve seen on the subject because it’s so down-to-earth. Wives brush the dust off the shoulders of their husband’s jackets affectionately as they both rise from the grave, and mothers embrace their long-lost children. Other people are just draped contentedly over their headstones, apparently watching the goings-on with pleasure and amusement.

There was also a rather unconventional Last Supper in the gallery, with the bare feet of the disciples poking out from under the table cloth. They all have huge, hobbit-ish feet, and they are crossed at the ankles. This looks cosy and comfortable, but perhaps it is also supposed to echo the position of Jesus on the cross. His paintings weren’t all religiously inspired; I love the series he did of the steelworkers in the shipyards of Glasgow. You really get a sense of the scale, the noise and the confusion of the place, and it’s nice to see working people treated with respect and reverence for the tough and dangerous job they do.

There were some great photographs of Stanley at work in the village, with small boys peering intently at his canvas while he tried to ignore them. There’s even a polite notice he used to pin up as he worked, explaining that he really wanted to finish the painting, and asking visitors to avoid disturbing him. I can’t imagine that it worked very well—he was the kind of person who would probably attract a lot of insatiable curiosity, both for his work and himself.

I was on the point of writing a post about how odd I’m finding it to be surrounded by people with regional accents (I should say, people with the same regional accent¹), when I spotted a post on Birmingham accents by David, which in turn was commenting on a post at Language Log. There is a native Oxford accent (which most people would be able to identify as broadly ‘rural’), but it is increasingly rare with so much of the population of Oxford composed of students or academics from across the world, tourists and London commuters.

The Brummie (an affectionate term for natives of Birmingham, for non-UK readers) accent does get a very bad press; the stupid/irritating/boring character in dramas is often given a Brummie accent. I’m not sure whether this is a cause or an effect of the negative attitude towards the accent. Unlike David, I rather like it, and find it sing-song and musical, somewhat like Welsh in the intonation. Part of the problem is that the accent given the the characters in dramas isn’t real Brummie at all. As discussed on Language Log, the intonation is rising rather than falling in tone in general, and I for one don’t find it depressing². It’s lovable, interesting and lilting. It helps that Birmingham people are very down-to-earth, and have a robust and dry sense of humour, even though they are often the butt of jokes—indeed, they are often the first to make fun of themselves.

Yowm awlroight, chick? Bosting!³. See, I’m picking it up already.

¹ And of course I should further clarify, the same regional accent, but different from my own.

² I would like to add that this has nothing to do with the fact that Brummies are currently responsible for the correct functioning of my new bathroom.

³ Before any pedants comment, I know this is strictly speaking a Black Country dialect, not a Birmingham one, but the accent itself is difficult to express in the written word as it’s all in the intonation.