Sushi For The Lads

What the England team are eating during the World Cup.

Mini Me

I’m ashamed to say that this is my old school. St. Aidan’s Church of England High School, Harrogate.

They’re banning skirts for girls in years 7-10 because girls are wearing their skirts too short. In Year 11 they will be able to wear skirts again, with strict rules on the length of the hemline.

I would like to point out that I started school there in 1991, that’s NINETEEN YEARS AGO, and I was young for my school year so was TEN YEARS OLD when I joined Year 7. The rules back then stated that the skirts had to be no shorter than three inches above the knee, which is the same rule they are using for Year 11s under their new system.

Except then, as now, we rolled up the waistbands of the skirts to make them into miniskirts. I started doing this in my first week of secondary school and kept it up until I was allowed to start wearing my own clothes in Sixth Form/Year 12, where I also frequently bent the dress code. We got told off at regular intervals and rolled the waistband back down, and then rolled ‘em up again as soon as we could. It’s what teenage schoolgirls do and have been doing for thirty years or more. Along with the also verboten tying their school jumpers around their waists and fiddling with their ties so that they hang in the shape du jour.

Teenage boys are just as useless and dull to your average teenage girl now as they were then, and teachers are probably just as likely to get suspended for behaving inappropriately with pupils. Pervs and paedophiles always existed, too. School skirt length has nothing to do with it. The Mail, as per usual, are having a field day about the whole thing, Newsround have covered it and it’s Grazia’s debate of the day.

World Cup Crayons

Wax crayons…carved into sculptures of footballers by Diem Chau for Wieden + Kennedy. Strangely beautiful.

Click to see the full set – Rooney, Drogba, Ronaldo etc – in detail.

Twit A Hit

Top composer and all round lovely chap (and, like me, he was born in North Yorkshire) Sam Watts is engaging in a little Twitter experiment, called #twittercomposition.

In his own words:

“#twittercomposition is an idea I came up with as a social media exercise on Twitter.  I’m asking my followers (and anyone on Twitter who would like to join in) to each tweet me a musical note and I will use them to write the melody and harmony for a composition.  It’s sort of a form of mass composition.

If you would like to be a part of #twittercomposition please tweet me @i_is_sam with a musical note (a-g including sharps and flats) and hashtag it with #twittercomposition and I’ll include your note in the composition.  Note entries are open until 30th June 2010.”

Because Sam is not rubbish, this won’t be one of those awful embarrassing social media arts project things. He’s composed for the likes of The Sarah Jane Adventures and Planet Earth, and I really love his music. Sam is blogging about the process at A Composer’s Campfire – keep up with him there and follow him on Twitter at @i_is_sam

Ball Ball Ball

No, this post isn’t about Ed Balls.

One of the joys of working from home is the fact that I will be able to watch most of the World Cup…

I can’t embed the proper version of this, so you can have the campfire sing-a-long version instead and seek out the other one yourself:

Meeting A Miliband (Part I)

I recently finally got around to joining the Labour Party – figuring that a time of renewal would be a good time to join and get involved in change and the future, especially as we are now the only big Opposition party. Even though I have disagreed with some pretty big things the Party have done over the past 13 years, I still feel like they are my party and would rather try to change things from within.

My first event as a new party member was Ed Miliband’s hustings at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds last night. A friend introduced me to my new MP, Ed and various other people. I enjoyed his speech and found it interesting, but I want to hear from all the candidates before I make up my mind and preferably meet them all face to face. Next week Ed’s brother David comes to Leeds, and I will be in attendance.

Ed said various things I agreed with about making a break with the old order, stopping being casual about civil liberties, increasing the number of women in the cabinet, improving public transport, building on the Labour movement itself, improving communications with the trade unions and between the parliamentary party and ordinary Labour Party members, closing the pay gap, working on the Living Wage and so on. We’ll see…

News pieces about Ed’s speech:

The Times
The Guardian
The Guardian (on pay differentials)

Pro-Ed statement in the Yorkshire Post by Leeds West MP Rachel Reeves:

Rachel Reeves

Facebook group:

Leeds Supporters of Ed Miliband for Labour Leader

Photograph of me with Ed Miliband:

(Yes, I do need a haircut, I haven’t had one since February, and my cardigan is a little threadbare. Poverty, etc.)

Text of Ed Miliband’s speech in Leeds

Slight Return

Hopefully back to blogging next week – there are various things I want to write about, but my health hasn’t been great and I’ve been very busy with OU work.

I wrote about Pulse before, and it finally screened on BBC3 last night. It’s up on iPlayer until the evening of the 10th of June, do check it out if you missed it. It combined my love of horror, sci-fi and, well, Casualty and Holby City nicely. Plus a callback to my younger self’s X Files fandom. The pacing was a bit off for me in the first half, and I’d like to see more character development from the off, but otherwise it was brilliant and I really want to see how it would play out as a series, it was really intriguing. The problem with pilots versus a normal first episode is you have to try to cover so much ground, cramming in as much of the premise and characters and intended tone as possible, and they rarely tend to be entirely satisfying for the normal viewer as a result. I would prefer to see a REAL first episode of Pulse and a full series. If you enjoyed it as much as I did, do TELL the Beeb on the blog – they won’t know otherwise. Oh and “like” the Facebook page.