YANGTZE and the art of assertive compassion...

Didn't manage to get to London yesterday. Something wrong with the computer I was due to pick up. So John's going to fix it and bring it up to Rud. It gave me the opportunity to sit in the park and write more of Borrowed time on my Revo. Got most of the way through a great chapter about a dominatrix, then hit a wrong key somewhere and deleted the lot. C'est la vie. Now I can enjoy writing it all over again :)

Web working better than Opera on the Revo. Still have to figure out how to access my Yahoo email without paying $19.99 a year for POP whatever access and forwarding. I might be able to get to it through the Yahoo WAP site.

This urban dictionary is cool.

Made Cleopatra better last night by stripping out one of the vocal lines, and adding another an octave below the one I left in. Acts a bit like a sub-oscillator on a synth. Andy McCluskey did it on Firegun, which Cleopatra sounds a bit like. I moved and copied a couple of the Burton/Taylor samples too, just to make it perfect. Going to mixdown today, and then I'm excited about starting vocal work on the second of Paul's compositions.

Spent the last two days at Olwen's. It was Cathy's birthday party on Sunday - she's now 13. It reminds me of the Harry Enfield sketch where Kevin goes to bed a happy, well-balanced twelve year-old and wakes up in the morning a long-haired horror of a teenager. Scary. I always preferred the Fast Show to Harry Enfield personally. Nice.

We all had a great day, even though the kids managed to burst the paddling pool within two days of getting it by trying to move it full of water. It's called experiential learning. In the evening yesterday we had a game of Pictionary in the garden. This was characterised by Ellie and I (team 1) falling asleep whilst Olwen, Cathy, and Isaac (team 2) ripped us apart. When we did eventually get a turn, Ellie was outraged that I didn't get 'life-boat' from her impression of Picasso sketching spilt semolina. Then Ellie managed to roll over on, then tread on, Cathy's game box. We've promised to buy her a pristine copy and take the wrecked one. Anyway, the kids had fun and hey, what else matters?

For some reason, the Blogger interface on my Mac won't display the button to create hyperlinks, so you'll have to wait for them till I can get into school.

Jo's looking after the kids on Wednesday so I can travel to London to pick up a PC and Cubase. I like the ability to wave your mouse and create crescendos and diminuendos and so on. There's a course in Cubase runs at New College Nottingham too, starting September. Might investigate if Cubase isn't intuitive enough. Thank you John Elmer.

My mother has decided that since I didn't live with her and pay money to her when I started work like my brother and sister - I instead selfishly went to university - I should pay half of her removal expenses to Bath. I'll probably help her out. Some friends think I ought to. Even though she's sitting on a £190,000 house with no mortgage to speak of, and already once wrote me out of her will when I married Jo. There's mothers for you.

Drove to Burleigh from Olwen's this morning and arrived at 8.20am. How come I'm always early for work arriving from Cheshire, and right down to the wire from Ruddington?

Last night Jo did some guitar work for me on the Cleopatra track, basically doing what I'd already done but with much greater skill and elan. The track now sounds great. Just got to clean up the vocals and then present it to Paul.

Went to Alton Towers with 100 students and six other teachers today - trips day. There are 3 grades of theme park goer according to the guide writers; young kids, fun lovers, and thrill seekers. According to their criteria I'm intermediate between kids and fun lovers. A sort of developing fun lover. Well, I hate heights, and I don't like rides that go fast unless I'm driving, or rides that go round and round. But the gardens were lovely.

I did go on the rapids and the log flume with four young female members of staff. Naturally, we had a wet t-shirt competition which, unfortunately, I won. I felt degraded by the whole process. Women are such sexist pigs.

Just before we boarded the buses to come home there was a fight between two lads. Another teacher restrained one of the students. The student got very hyper about this and was claiming he'd been 'pushed around' by the teacher. This nicely illustrates another daily danger teachers live with. Luckily I saw it all, and the teacher acted quite properly, in the interests of both students, using reasonable force. Have to deal with the lads tomorrow.

I've managed to add a feedback/comments system to the blog. If you want to comment on anything I've written, or if you just want to say hi, click on the 'comments' link just below the blog description.

Also, you can now rate the blog on the Eatonweb directory by clicking the appropriate number on the link at the bottom of the page. 5 means excellent. I would expect YANGTZE's friends to rate it at 5, because our friends only make friends with excellent people :) Anyone else may rate with their conscience. You can also review the blog on the Eatonweb site after you have rated it.

Went to Bath with Olwen and mum this weekend, looking at houses for mum. Stayed with Carol Friday night, and Longreach House Hotel in Keynsham Saturday night. Olwen and I visited the Roman Baths on Saturday evening. We liked the virtual environments on the displays around the place - they build up from a representation of what has been uncovered and is visible in the museum, to a virtual reconstruction of Roman Bath complete with little virtual Romans.

Saturday afternoon we had lunch in the Jazz Cafe in central Bath. Good music, good food, grumpy Gothgirl 'serving' us. Hey, you can't have everything.

I really want to sort out accessing the internet via my Revo and Nokia 5100. I'm led to believe they can do their voodoo via GPRS. I have connected by infrared using the Opera browser on the Revo but it's too slow without a GPRS connection. Can anyone out there help me?

Alternatively, I suppose I could just get a life.

Hoorah! Managed to figure out how to change the side bar stuff today. The links and lists are a work-in-progress at the moment.

Ordered Tony Benn's speech/street music crossover cd (!).

The latest bright idea to come from Burleigh management to boost achievement is... to sit the students in alphabetical order. The idea, I think, is to aid concentration and classroom control by removing people from their friends and showing the rabble whose boss in this classroom. The effect, of course, will be to alienate students by making them do disagreeable things for no good reason, and possibly putting them at risk by seating them with students that want to bully them. Why can't school management show some compassion? Oh I forgot, it's because compassion is incompatible with targets and career progression in today's schools.

Dubya tells us the weapons of mass destruction have been looted, but Tony says they'll be found soon. Probably down the market then, being sold by the local Baghdad Del Boys. "This fine pair of anthrax filled shells to you for not 50 Dinars, not 40 Dinars, but to you, darlin', 30 dinars, and I'll throw in this experimental neutron bomb if you're quick. Hurry up love, I think I hear a humvee."

By the way, I've developed a simple rule to ensure effective, accountable, democratic, corruption-free government; never vote for anyone that wants to be elected. On that point, the only politician I can think of with unblemished integrity and intenal consistency is the eternally admirable Tony Benn. I picked up his integrity laden new book Free Radical, published by Continuum International Publishing, containing an edited set of essays which first appeared as articles in the 'Morning Star' newspaper, at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival when I was there with Olwen earlier this year.

I've been buying some great music recently - I don't have broadband so ripping stuff from Kazaa really isn't an option, though I would do so willingly if I had the facility. The new Jeans Team cd Ding Dong is hugely interesting, if you like the idea of a slightly less minimalist, slightly less up-themselves Kraftwerk. They did a ripping live set for the immortal John Peel recently, and if you're quick you can still get the limited edition double cd set from the indie Kitty-Yo website for not many Euros.

While we're talking about music, don't forget the YANGTZE radio session and interview is still available too. Some of you are namechecked on local radio! Rip it now before it's deleted!

It appears my Blogger profile is B1 d- t- k- s-- u-- f- i- o x-- e- l- c . If anyone can tell me what that means I'll be grateful.

Ellie has a choir festival at De Montford Hall in Leicester tonight. Tomorrow, all the little new year 10s arrive to be inducted into knowing that they are merely numbers in our College Management Team's career plans, and it's my job to ensure it all goes well. It's also my job to explain to CMT that the 'visitor' activity I have roped them into is a chance for the students to ask them questions, not a chance for CMT to 'lay down the law'. Apart from that I'm not busy.

All of the people being promoted in education at the moment are great systems people, but have zero emotional intelligence and are total hardliner diciplinarians. This is BAD NEWS for your children everyone, believe me. You thought they were going to school to learn how to question, how to live sustainably, and how to be independent. They're not. They are relevant only to some asshole middle and/or senior manager's performance management targets.

Next time I blog, I'll try not to be so upbeat, I promise.