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Over the course of the time that we’ve been looking after M, my parents’ cat, one thing I’ve noticed is how whole-heartedly cats do physical things. They might spend 90% of their day sleeping, but when they stretch, they really go for it. They arch their backs (the inspiration for the cat pose in yoga, of course) and seem to stretch out every single muscle fibre in a shuddering, eye and ear scrunching movement. And that’s it, back to sleep—-job done. Likewise, cats don’t have any truck with the politely-smothered yawn. They crack their jaws open, bare their teeth, stick out their tongue and really yawn.

It does you good just watching it, but it also reminds me that doing anything with conviction and commitment is a good thing. Yoga practice teaches the same thing, and the idea that you should always be conscious of your breath and every part of your body encourages you to experience the moment fully, rather than being half there and half not. Of course, it applies equally to any endeavour. When we are children, we tend to be very focussed on and absorbed by whatever we’re doing at the time, even if that focus doesn’t linger very long on any one thing, but as adults, our minds seem to be perpetually somewhere else, skipping ahead to the next thing.

So my Spring Resolution (I dislike making resolutions at the New Year because it’s so hard to keep them then) is to be more child/cat-like in my attention. If I’m doing something, I should be doing it, not half doing it.

I’ve been trying to find a really comfortable office chair for ages. I used to use one of those kneeling chairs, but found that the pressure on my knees was too much after a short period, even though the chair kept my back in a comfortable and natural position. Since we moved, I’ve been using our landlord’s standard office chair, but I don’t find it comfortable and my shoulders and back are beginning to suffer.

I came across the Bambach Saddle Seat, and really liked the idea. I used to ride when I was younger (with an enjoyable return to the saddle in Brazil), and I always found sitting in a saddle very comfortable and natural. I seem to automatically sit up straight in a saddle, with my shoulders relaxed and pushed back rather than rounded forwards. Of course, it could just be a conditioned response to all those years of my slightly frightening riding teacher barking “Sit up straight! Shoulders back! Chest out!” at me like a Drill Sergeant. So the Saddle Seat looked ideal, but I really didn’t have £400-plus that it costs.

Then I saw the T2000 Saddle Stool at Natural Living: it seemed to be a very similar design, lacking some of the adjustability of the Bambach Seat, and perhaps slightly less high quality in finish, but only £99 including delivery and VAT. I got some money for my birthday, so I ordered one; we’ll need a new office seat when/if we move house anyway. I’ve been really pleased with it. I felt immediately at home on it, and I find working on the computer so much more comfortable and natural. My shoulders and lower back in particular don’t complain now, and because of the way that you sit astride the stool, it doesn’t restrict the circulation at the back of your knees the way that standard office chairs do. Because there’s no back on the chair, your upper body is much more mobile, and I find myself twisting around to reach things behind me, which must be a good thing for the mobility of my back. It even seems to have improved my typing accuracy!

Above all, it’s just fun to mount your saddle when you get down to work. When I’m reading from the screen without typing, I’ve taken to resting my hands on the ‘pommel’ of the saddle, as if I’m surveying the herd out on the plains. If no-one’s around, I might even ‘gallop’ my saddle stool across the laminate yelling “Giddyup!”. I just wish I could get one for work too.

I was speaking at a conference in Bristol for the first part of last week, and I was reminded once again what a wonderful city Bristol is. As long-time readers may remember, I was an undergraduate in Bristol, and I retain a great affection for the place. If you combined the excitement and urban grittiness of Birmingham, and the physical beauty and quirkiness of Oxford, and you’d get something rather like Bristol. Add one of Britain’s most spectacular bridges (Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge), and you’ve got a winning formula.

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Today had our under-the-asking-price offer accepted on a house we really want to buy, which was simultaneously exciting and terrifying. I don’t want to get too excited at this stage because there are about a gazillion things that could go wrong with the sale (though there’s no chain at all, which does simplify things a bit). But somehow I can’t help getting excited. Eep!

Travelling on the same train each day to work means that I generally encounter more or less the same group of commuters. So when I got an earlier train one day, I was surprised and rather delighted by the travelling knitting circle I encountered. There was a group of six women who were already on the train when I boarded, and were occupying the six facing seats on one side of the carriage. Evidently ultra-fluffy or hairy wool is in right now, as each of them was knitting feather-boa-like scarves in bright colours like purple, red or sunny orange.

As they knitted, they chatted and laughed (itself a lamentably rare thing on a commuter train), barely looking at their work and letting their fingers follow a well-practiced routine. I noticed that their work tended to punctuate the conversation, so that changing needles would coincide with a pause in conversation, and they would speed up their stitches as they laughed at someone’s joke.

I felt slightly jealous of their easy camaraderie, and they reminded me of old photographs of groups of women cleaning fish, waulking cloth or doing other repetitive but social manual jobs that leave you free to talk. I’m one of those sad people who travels wearing listening to an iPod and with my nose in a book, but only because I can’t bear to be exposed to the 90% advertising drivel from the on-board TVs that get foisted on us by Central Trains. Now I’m half tempted to take up knitting again and shyly try to join the travelling knitting circle.

We have a furry house guest for about 7 weeks. My parents are going to Australia and New Zealand on holiday, so we’re looking after their cat, M, so that she doesn’t have to go into a cattery for the duration. M was a rescue cat and spent some time on the streets, but she’s also very fond of human company, and didn’t get on at all well when she had a short stay in a cattery once before. She’s not the kind of cat who is all over you, but she just likes to know that you’re around. My Dad works at home, and every day, she follows him up to the office in the morning, parks herself on the sofa, then follows him down to lunch like a little shadow.

The folks weren’t looking forward to the three-hour drive to our house in the car with her—-like most cats, she associates going in the cat basket in the car with men in white coats who do painful things and undignified things to you—-but she was actually very good once she’d settled down. It was funny watching her exploring the house, checking out every nook and cranny and marking every conceivable cat-head-height upright with her cheek scent glands.

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About a month ago, I mentioned that I’d made some customisations to TextMate to help me with the plain text journal file I keep to jot things down on a day-to-day basis, and a couple of people expressed an interest in me releasing a bundle with the modifications. It almost didn’t seem worth doing because what I’d mostly done was to add minor things to the Markdown bundle. However, I thought that people might be able to add to it and improve it, so I decided to bundle it up.

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I don’t want to give the impression that I make a habit of eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, but there are a few people whose loud conversations in quiet places make me want to get out a red editorial pencil and make lots of those proof-reading deletion marks. I’m no Dorothy Parker, but I try to keep my mouth shut if I’ve got nothing interesting to say (obviously, my blog is exempt from this rule, and I blether on about all kinds of nonsense). However, I’ve noticed a tendency for some people to report very dull events in excruciating detail.

I had the dubious pleasure of overhearing a conversation like this on the train. The events in question could have been summed up as follows: “My washing machine broke down at the weekend, so I phoned my Mum and she offered to wash my laundry for me.” A fairly straightforward story, you might think. But no, in the mouth of a ‘conversation extender’ it can be made to last for at least 15 minutes¹ by relating every word of the conversation in real time. “So I said, ‘Really?’, and she said, ‘Yeah’, and I said, ‘OK then’…”. In other words, it was the three-hour Director’s Cut of the event.

As I got up to get off I couldn’t resist sneaking a look at her (suspiciously quiet) interlocutor, to see if she had literally died of boredom. She hadn’t, but she did have a distinctly glazed look about her.

¹ She was still going as I got off the train, so it could have been a lot longer for all I know. ↑

When I was a kid, I used to go swimming every week at our local swimming baths (as we called it then, rather than ‘swimming pool’). It was a lovely Victorian building¹, with the original tiles, a cast iron turnstile that could stop a charging rhino (handy for all those occasions on which a rhino is desperate to get in for a swim without paying), but rather short on modern conveniences like footbaths or a metric length. I loved swimming. I wasn’t fast or particularly stylish, but I could plod up and down for hours very happily. In fact, I spent most of the time swimming underwater, loving the feeling of exploring another world.

I’ve got quite long eyelashes, and the water on my lashes generated rainbows from the lights whenever I blinked. And I must be the only person in the world who actually likes the smell and taste of chlorine. This is a slightly shameful confession, but after I’d been swimming, I used to secretly lick my own arm, because I liked the faint residual taste of chlorine. I don’t do that now, of course…

I have started going swimming recently at the University, though, and I love my dawn swims before work, watching the rainbows burst from the lights.

¹ Unfortunately, the baths were demolished many years ago to make way for an office building. ↑

We are usually boringly unsociable on New Year’s Eve, but this year we travelled to Shropshire for the New Year’s Eve wedding of some friends of ours. We decided to make a couple of days of it, and stayed in a very grand Bed and Breakfast place on the Estate where the wedding was being held. This isn’t the kind of Estate that we are used to (with tower blocks and urban decay), but the big, posh kind with avenues of trees, grazing sheep, a huge house and acres of farmland. We live right next to a fairly busy main road, so we’re never without the growl and roar of traffic, but for two days, the silence was only broken by pheasants, sheep and calling crows.

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We left it a bit late to buy a tree this year, and the nearest outlet had sold out. So, while I was busy blowing air into rubber mannequins, Mr. Bsag got to do the caveman bit this year, and had to trek a bit further with it. He also got a real bargain because they were trying to get rid of their stock. We got an enormous and gloriously bushy tree (as you can more or less see from the blurry photograph) for the princely sum of £7—-bargain!

We’re going to take a couple of days off to eat, drink and scare ourselves deliciously with all the BBC4 ghost stories and Conan Doyle stuff we’ve been recording on the EyeTV. Happy Christmas, Festivus, Winter Solstice, or whatever else you feel like celebrating (or not celebrating) to you all. (Imagine that I just said that exactly like the Queen, complete with that funny, forced little grimace she makes at the end of her speech).

We had the assessment for our First Aid at Work course today, and I passed! So I’m now Licensed To Bandage. I even get to carry a little green card in my wallet to certify that I’m a First Aider. Nothing in the course is particularly hard if you know a little bit about the basic plumbing and wiring of the human body and apply common sense, but it is good to feel confident about the correct way to prioritise treatment and the techniques you need to help someone. I think it’s fair to say that in a real emergency, a certain amount of adrenalin and panic would set in, so having a memorised and drummed-in checklist of things to, well, check would be a good anchor to hang on to.

CPR is also an excellent skill to have. I think that everyone should really learn how to do it, because of the vital difference you could make in an emergency situation. Imagine how you’d feel if someone collapsed in front of you and stopped breathing, and you just stood there not knowing what to do? Still, I hope I never have to deal with anything that serious.

I’m on a four-day course this week to become a qualified First Aider for work. As a biologist, I’ve got a reasonable grasp of how the human body works and the kinds of things that can go wrong, and as my Mum was¹ a nurse, I’ve absorbed a lot of very sensible information from her about first aid, so I’m not finding anything too difficult so far. We’ve spent quite a lot of time today either pretending to be unconscious², or pretending to treat people who are pretending to be unconscious. Actually, it’s quite a lot of fun.

On the way back from the course, I was suddenly much more aware of all the people around me, and all the myriad ways in which they could have accidents or their bodies could suddenly pack up. It’s ridiculous, but I was thinking, “Please, no-one have a heart attack or a stroke today, because we don’t get to those kinds of things until Wednesday. Simple loss of consciousness, minor cuts, bruises or burns would be acceptable.”

¹ She’s officially retired, but nurses never really retire—-they just stop being paid for the care that they provide. ↑

² In other words, pretty much my normal Monday work state. ↑

I’ve had a pretty busy weekend, as my parents came up to stay, and we met up with Mr. Bsag’s parents (plus our two brothers) for a pre-Christmas dinner on Saturday. On early Friday evening, we wandered around the Frankfurt Christmas Market in Birmingham, and managed to just about eat our own weight in free samples of stollen (fruity, spicy Christmas bread). The lights around the Bullring and the Christmas market looked quite striking, and I put a few photos up on flickr. Then on Saturday, we visited Lichfield for the big lunch, and took a bit of time wandering around the town and the Cathedral. It’s a very unusual style of architecture, and is a huge size for such a small town. There’s nothing quite as lovely as seeing the low winter sun slanting in through stained glass windows, and warming the stone.

Perhaps it’s because—-at current house prices—-we can’t begin to imagine ever being able to afford our own home that we find a particular kind of property programme so masochistically irresistible. In particular, I’m drawn to How to Rescue a House like a moth to a flame, because that shimmering mirage of the perfect wreck that you could buy for a song and ‘do up’ is so tempting. How To Rescue A House is a bit different to many of the shows because it doesn’t feature property developers who just want to make as much profit as possible before moving on to the next place. All the people looking for a property want a home to live in, and generally can’t afford to get one in their area for a price that they can afford. It’s also an excellent reminder of the scandalous waste of perfectly decent—-and often architecturally interesting—-homes that are just lying empty in our cities, while identical mock tudor shoeboxes spread like a rash over former green field sites.

However, my other reason for liking the programme is because of the glimpses of people’s lives that you get through their abandoned homes. It can be achingly sad and intimate, particularly when the former owner has lived there for many years and moulded the house into their shape like an old overcoat. One house belonged to a person who had gone into hospital suddenly, obviously expecting to return, but had ended up in a nursing home. An unwashed mug sat on a table, and there was a wooden chair in front of the gas fire, still with the imprint of the owner on the faded beige cushion. Tattered net curtains at the kitchen window seemed to have been repaired haphazardly by spiders’ webs, and a quiet layer of dust settled on every surface.

It made me itch to get in there with a camera and document it all, which made me feel slightly guilty. But how would you feel if you bought the house? Clearing away a life like that would feel like clearing away a person’s memories, and then erasing any vestiges of the person themselves.