4. 2009-06-09

    Because I've been in the mood for photo housekeeping, here's the remainder of the photographs from our trip to Manhattan last Christmas. They're mostly concerned with a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge which occurred on the very morning of Christmas day.

    NYC Christmas, part Two

    We took the train down to Brooklyn and just leisurely walked across. The weather and views were rather stunning, and the city much quieter than usual. We did run into a bit of footpath congestion at the Manhattan terminus; the comic image of a frustrated, lycra-enveloped cyclist failing to exert his right-of-way, in opposition to the crowds, camply yelling "Hello! Bicycle lane!" will stay impressed on my memory.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  5. 2012-03-30


    Five LPs I used to frequently listen to when I was a lad, that I frequently listen to now



    1. Green On Red : Here Come The Snakes


    2. Jane's Addiction : Ritual de lo Habitual


    3. Pixies : Bossanova


    4. Metallica : Master Of Puppets


    5. Depeche Mode : Music For The Masses



    Five LPs I used to frequently listen to when I was a lad that I occasionally listen to now



    1. The Sisters Of Mercy : First And Last And Always


    2. Genesis : Nursery Cryme


    3. New Order : Substance


    4. Steve Vai : Passion And Warfare


    5. Frank Zappa : Joe's Garage



    Five LPs I used to frequently listen to when I was a lad that I haven't played in a decade



    1. Marillion : Script for a Jester's Tear


    2. Simple Minds : Live - In The City Of Light


    3. Pink Floyd : The Wall


    4. Madonna : True Blue


    5. Red Hot Chili Peppers : Blood Sugar Sex Magik


    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  7. 2009-06-07

    Thanks to some free air miles obtained when I signed up for my last credit card, we managed to get an entirely free weekend's accommodation (self-catering apartment, right in the city centre), and flights (BA, return from Gatwick) to anywhere in the closest European zone. The only catch was that they needed to be cashed-in before the end of February '09. We elected to re-visit Dublin, as Mrs S. spent several months living and working there, back when she was studying towards her degree. That was several years ago, neither of us have been back since.

    It hasn't changed much. Right before we left, we discovered the exciting news that we were in the family way . This rather curtailed the traditional Dublin entertainment of drinking stout (the Guinness does taste better, you know) and bar-crawling. Perhaps the most striking change was the effect of the recent economic turmoil upon the sterling exchange rate. Dublin was never the cheapest city, but now things were positively eye-watering; a pint of Guiness was pushing five pounds, a decidedly average meal for two (with no alcohol) in a vegetarian restaurant easily overshot the forty pound mark. Luckily with free travel and accommodation leaving enough elasticity in our spending budget, we managed a relaxed weekend break without risking bankruptcy.

    The February weather was cold, windy and occasionally damp. Wind-swept and grey rather suits this city by the sea. On on the evening we flew in, the night of the 14th, we somehow managed to blunder straight in and secure a last-minute table for two in a little Italian bistro, minutes after we'd unpacked; saving us from having to hurriedly improvise a meal with limited shopping options.

    Most of the rest of the time we just cruised around the city streets, feeding the ducks in the park, dipping into second-hand-book shops, cafe's and what proved to be an astonishingly well-stocked Gibson guitar dealer, where I ogled an array of the fancy new auto-mechanical-tuning robot guitars. I was particularly taken by the effect of the grimy, yet bright, winter sky reflecting off the mosaic-tile pools in the Garden of Remembrance.

    Dublin: Feb '09

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  8. 2012-02-29

    The Bitch, the Stud and the Prawn: " It was a film called Crust. It told the story of a pub landlord who finds a giant seven foot mutant shrimp on a beach. The landlord then decides to teach the shrimp to box - and believes this will make his fortune. "

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  9. 2009-06-02

    PatchMatch : A randomized correspondence algorithm for structural image editing.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  11. 2009-04-27

    In Britain, butterflies are also on the wane. In the 19th century, they would flock in the wild in quantities sufficient to obscure your view. Now as populations dwindle , they're a rare treat.

    I've see a lot of encouraging signs of rehabilitated wildlife, as I wander round the green corridors of Bristol, walking that dog . We don't see many butterflies.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  12. 2012-02-23

    My friend Jim won 15 quid by solving the New Scientist Enigma Puzzle. The really neat thing is he did it 32 years after the fact. Read all about it here , in his own words.


    Would anybody with a working BBC like to contribute a real world run time for his BBC BASIC based solution?


    Jim runs the Enigmatic Code blog about his hobby of solving New Scientist's Enigma puzzles using short python programs, which anyone can play along with at home.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  13. 2009-04-26

    I often travel with a laptop. I almost invariably travel with a charged mobile phone. I enjoy using the fancy multi-touch trackpad in my MacBook Pro, but an odd thing happens sometimes when I've put my phone down nearby on the desk; I reach automatically to try and use the phone as a computer mouse. One of those amusing peculiarities of muscle-memory and reflex that can surprise, when you're engaged by something, within the computer, verging upon a liminal state.

    It's a slightly amusing quirk, but when I think further about it, I find plenty of reasons why it perhaps ought to work.

    External mice are more useful than trackpads, although not enough use to me to justify carting one around. My phone is palm-sized, about the ideal weight, is already paired with my laptop over bluetooth, has clickable buttons all over one face, and an optical camera on the reverse. In short, it already has most of the technology needed to be a wireless optical mouse.

    Most but not all. I'm a bit dubious about whether it could be done in software alone. I doubt that the lens will focus well enough to motion tracking without a special surface, and it's completely lacking the light source, but it is almost tempting enough to try. It might be feasible with some sort of very recognisable surface, perhaps a monchrome checkerboard grid, which would be very easy to render and print.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  14. 2012-02-15

    L'Inconnue de la Seine : The death mask of this unidentified Parisian teenage suicide became a popular early-20th century objet d'art , eventually the model for the face of the standard CPR training mannequin.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  15. 2009-04-21

    Baby pictures
    Strickland 2.0 announced. Late October launch.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  20. 2009-03-03

    Macropinna microstoma , the barreleye fish has unusual tubular eyes which are extraordinarily good at harvesting light. Furthermore, it can rotate its eyeballs in order to see upwards through its transparent head shield.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  21. 2012-01-29

    I was churlishly unimpressed by the iTunes "12 days" Christmas promotion this year. However whilst subsequently browsing the iTunes Store home page I did find one app that impressed me enough to blog about.


    There's a store section called " Apps Starter Kit " which lists a dozen or so applications that Apple are promoting as "must have" installs for new iOS users. I installed a handful of these to my iPhone 3GS, but the one that has most impressed me so far is the iOS edition of DragonDictate .


    It's a "split brain" app, by which I mean it uses "the cloud" to perform the text-to-speech conversion. So far I have been quite impressed with the accuracy of the process, in fact I have created this blog post by dictating while walking the dog, with just a little editing afterwards for tidy up and to add hyperlinks. I suppose it is a little like a poor man's edition of Siri, minus the pretend A.I. and the search and reminders integration.


    You can get text by dictating into a text box within the application and there is a quick menu of options that allow you to create an SMS or an e-mail or copy the text to the system clipboard easily for use in other applications. This collaboration isn't too clunky and although dictating text into your phone is a little stilted it doesn't seem to be significantly less effective than my relatively crappy typing on the iPhone on-screen keyboard.


    The app was free, presumably it's intended as a promotional device to introduce users to the Dragon family of software applications. Obviously there are some privacy concerns raised by having the voice processing performed on a remote server, but the terms and conditions include a privacy policy which guarantees to preserve your anonymity and keep your data private. The application did even prompted me to ask if I wanted all of my contact names uploaded to the remote service for greater the use of name recognition, and took pains to explain that this would only include name fields from my contacts database and no other personally identifying information or contact details.


    I am not sure I would make a habit of using it for writing long articles or even blog posts like this but I think it could prove to be quite useful for such purposes as short e-mail replies or even sending SMS messages in situations where it's inconvenient to type.


     

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  23. 2009-02-07

    This year's Bristol Comics Expo is going to be held on the weekend of May 9th-10th. Aggravatingly this is the same weekend that I'm going to be away at ATP vs the fans .

    Even more annoyingly, this makes it the second year in a row that I'll miss it. Last year I gave up, after a few attempts to survive the stupidly arranged ticket purchasing queues. Prior to that, I'd managed to go to every single one since Bristol began hosting them , back in 1999 or so.

    Intriguingly, this year, the small press (usually the most interesting aspect of the festival, for me) is broken out into a separate event for some reason.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  25. 2009-02-06


    • Porter airlines : the only way to fly.


    • A song about the Spadina bus


    • As I suspected, Toronto isn't even cold in the wintertime. Barely dipped below zero, the entire time I was there.


    • Apricot Weißbier, nicer than it ought to be.


    • Prevailing man-hipster fashion trend: Button cardigan, bushy beard, and oversized pseudo-religious pendantry


    • Guitar hero is more fun than I'd have thought.


    • The prehistoric Trypilian culture from the Ukraine, was one of the earliest neolithic civilizations


    • If you own a Birks watch, as I do, you can get it serviced and the battery changed for free at any Birks branch.



    • Do not place your nose into any unusual looking fixtures attached to bathroom walls.


    • Iroquois false face societies , and why you cannot see their masks in museums.


    • My karaoke version of ' In The Air Tonight ' was a surprise success, but perhaps even more suprisingly, my version of ' My Heart Will Go On ', placed me in the final three.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  26. 2011-12-29

    According to wikipedia, the term " Churnalism " was first coined by a BBC journalist. I think they may still have journalists working there.


    See how many items of product placement you can see in this proud piece of presumably PR-led "pop sci" about smart vending machines . I found it, prominently linked, on the BBC news home page on Boxing Day. The entire notion has a whiff that classic of white elephant puffery from the old school  the internet fridge about it.


    I don't know if I'm alone in finding this sort of thing repellant. The motivation to whip up this kind of nearly content-free guff into page length pieces must come from somewhere, which means a degree of specific intent. There's the skeleton of an interesting piece on mechanical learning and commercial interests buried in there somewhere, but I find it difficult to read when I keep being stabbed in the eyes by blatant marketing copy, much of which I uncharitably suspect of being pasted in directly from the source press-release. The focus of the piece ought to be on the science, perhaps some of the biometrics and algorithms supporting the interesting sounding  audience impression metric (AIM) software , but that's given a throwaway mention; instead the article's centre of gravity seems distorted to orbit around some recently launched consumer products, with little depth of story. Weird details leave unanswered questions hanging. In what way is a new Jell-O SKU "Just for adults" to the extent that it requires a screening interview by femputer ? Titillating teaser questions like this are familiar marketing devices used to capture and exploit base curiosity, but seem out of place in a news piece without any resolution. How does the system handle adults whose body shape diverges strongly from their defined four age brackets? What the merry heck is a  general manager of personal solutions anyway?


    I gave up counting the product placement incidents after the first couple of paragraphs. Only someone with intimate knowledge of the BBC house style rules would know just how many direct repetitions of the properly capitalized brand names Kraft and Intel are strictly necessary, but there seem to be an awful lot of them littering the piece. There's a lovely Intel i7 box graphic three-quarters of the way down the piece; it seems to me only tangentally related to the story, yet conveniently re-uses the branding iconography supporting their current consumer-targetted CPU line.


    Like many a British license-fee payer, I have a peculiar, combative slightly proprietorial relationship with the BBC; being in some weird sense a stake-holder in this unique broadcasting organisation; pride mingles with a misplace sense of ownership, disappointment tangles with admiration. Once upon a time I viewed their web initiatives as exemplary, inspirational and essential. These days they seem increasingly overcooked, irrelevant, and misguided.

    I realise, in a sense, I'm a grumpy old man ranting at the telly, but I think this tapering off of content quality provided by BBC online is a real thing. If so, a really worrying trend; added to this we have an effectively Conservative administration, who I'm sure would love to see the BBC, already in retreat, broken up further. Spreading out the more lucrative parts of the special quasi-monopoly, to their chums in commercial broadcasting whilst binning even more of the less lucrative parts in the name of austerity would fit in well with their principles of government.<p>
    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  28. 2009-02-05

    While I was in Manhattan, I happened to wander past the window of Minamoto Kitchoan , a fancy boutique translation of a traditional japanese confectioners. I'm endlessly fascinated by japanese culture, especially the old-world; I have a pet theory that Japan and the UK are peculiar reflections of each other, there's a lot of cultural resonance, but it's all distorted into wonderfully strange shapes. Nevertheless, I was initially a little too intimidated to enter, as the store was devoid of customers, and the interior looked rather cold and formal. Luckily for me, Mrs S. egged me on enough to overcome my trepidation, and in I went.

    I'm not really experienced enough to count myself as even an amateur aficionado of japanese food, but I've eaten a fair bit, and their sweets are a rum affair; they're intended to please more than just a sweet tooth, designed as much to appeal to the eye, and offer textures to the palate. They tend not to be very sweet, and a large proportion of their construction would seem to be kidney beans. This does mean that they're better for you than many western sweets, I'd have thought. Far less fat and sugar.

    I wandered about the shop a little, it didn't seem like the staff spoke any useful English (this could have been my British accent, of course), but I managed to communicate a request through the universal language of pointing and nodding. Every addition to my shopping list was met by the kimono clad shop-girl with a charming sequence bowing and nodding - and then the whole order was packaged up beautifully in a box to take away.

    Here's what I bought.


    • Kohakukakanme (pickled plum in agar jelly, covered with flakes of real gold)

    • Kabochamanjyu (bean cakes, both shaped and flavoured like pumpkin)

    • Fukuwatashisenbei (a topographically curious biscuit)

    • Hanatsubomi (bean jelly in preserved lemon)





    I then ate them in installments, back at the hotel. They were all pretty good eating, probably the pickled plum made the most sense to my palate - not really too far away from a fruit cocktail. The Fukuwatashisenbei biscuit tasted almost exactly like a custard cream, but was rather awkward eating because of it's shape. The bean pastes are a little bit of an acquired taste, but faintly addictive.

    Japanese sweetshop


    The store is part of a chain, apparently there is a London branch, somewhere in Piccadilly.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  29. 2011-12-24

    xmas eve dinner party


    This year scheduling means our turn for hosting the big family meal falls on Christmas eve. Mrs S. did the lion's share of the cooking, facilitated by a new kitchen, more commodious than the postage stamp sized galley we've had for the past couple of years. Champagne, ice-cream,CBeebies pantomime on a loop, nut-roast, sprout and chestnut soup, mechanical penguins, musical crackers, roasted vegetables, and plenty of early presents for young Ada May to open and get over-excited about. Merry Christmas to all four of my readers!


     

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  31. 2011-11-28

    Ken Russell RIP : One of the 'name' directors that made me realise I was pretty interested in film.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  32. 2011-11-26

    Hello there, old friend #movingin

    Of course, I bought and read the Jobsography , Kindle edition, naturally. While I'm not sure I identify with all the howling fanboys' anguished reviews, given my role as super-NEXTSTEP-fanboy  I was a bit disappointed, although not particularly surprised, at the relative lack of NeXT content. So I was overjoyed when this 1986 PBS documentary , featuring NeXT in it's pre-launch startup guise, popped up in it's wake. The linked blog post also contains the NeXT stevenote, from the eventual product launch.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  33. 2009-02-02

    So much for my new year resolution to write more often.

    Just before I went away for Christmas, my trusty white MacBook had developed a bit of a problem with it's keyboard. Initially this manifested as the function keys intermittently losing the ability to switch between special Mac control keys, such as brightness, eject media and what-not and normal user-programmable f -keys. Initially I thought this may be a problem with the fn key that is the toggle, but eventually the keys f1 - f9 stopped working entirely. This was irritating, but didn't really render the machine unuseable. Most of the time I use it with an external keyboard, and luckily all the defunct keys functions were duplicated in software.

    The next key to go was the right Shift key. Although, of course there's a left Shift key, for a touch-typist, this was a little harder to ignore. Although I find much to admire about Apple's current laptop keyboard design, unfortunately user-repairability isn't one of its many blessings. There's no simple way to get into the top casing on a polycarbonate MacBook, it's an expensive specialist job for a service centre.

    Sensibly I'd followed my own advice when I purchased this laptop, and bought it from the always-wonderful John Lewis with their standard two-year full warranty on electrical goods. I was coming up very close to the two-year anniversary, which fell within the first week of January, itself another lucky stroke, as it meant that I'd be able to take it with me on my trip to North America , where hopefully it would hold up well enough to let me edit photos, communicate, and act as an additional entertainment for any idle moments. It managed the job fine, and as soon as I was back in the U.K. I packed it off to John Lewis for maintenance, which is something that they arranged with their usual attention to customer service. More thumbs up for John Lewis.

    Which left me Mac-less, save for my rather under-spec G4 mini, which can barely read mail and a web-page at the same time, under Leopard. And so no blogging.

    The two year mark was also my planned point for a new machine upgrade. Buying a machine for work, I was able to take advantage of the Apple Developer Program hardware discount. Sadly this means abandoning John Lewis to purchase direct, but now we've got a real Apple Store in Bristol , I think AppleCare is probably a good deal.

    I figured I'd be needing a machine with better graphics hardware, to better make advantage of the already signposted future directions in OS X technology. The new 'unibody' Macbooks didn't really suit, as I've probably got as many firewire devices as USB. Also, my recent work had been feeling the strains of my Macbook's 13" screen and modest integrated graphics chipset. And so I'm typing this update from my new 2.8GHz, 15.4" MacBook Pro .

    It's mostly a great upgrade. On the positive side, it's pretty and slim, and I'm remembering just how right the 15" widescreen form is for me. The screen is brighter than anything I've ever seen, and makes other LCD displays, including my expensive monitor look washed out and dull by comparison. The new glass front is dramatically easier to clean than any laptop screen I've owned. The extra-large button-free trackpad is brilliant, and even the gimmicky sounding gestures have proven to be almost practical enough for regular use. The unibody shell seems rigid and light, and bringing across the now-standard Apple keyboard hardware makes a brilliant switch from the old silver PowerBook G4 style, which I frankly hated. It's super-fast, of course; the new CPU, memory bandwidth, and fast hard drive all combining to ensure that as yet, I've not seen any performance stalls when many simultaneous processes grow busy.

    It's not perfect of course. Some of the positives are also negatives. The glass fronted screen is considerably more reflective than the previous gloss models, and while in practice I find that I mostly mind this far less than I'd have thought, it's undeniably worse than my gloss MacBook.

    Then there are more straightforwardly negative negatives. Like many people, I've found trouble with the Apple mini DisplayPort to DVI connector - the integrated NVidea 9400 graphics adaptor can't drive my 23" TFT without sparkly artefacts, I have to run it through the additional 9600 GT GPU to get a useful picture. It's too pretty, in as much as it makes me fret about the wear and tear that will inevitably mar its looks over time; surely computers should be tools not jewellery? It's slightly heavier than a MacBook, and the battery life is probably less, it's too hard to say, the calibration as yet seems to be a bit iffy with estimates. I miss the inbuilt LED charge gauges on the battery which allowed one to check the power without having to connect the battery up, so handy when travelling with two or more. I also miss the ports on the left hand side, and find the supplied ports a bit stingy; surely they could have squeezed a couple more USB slots and a firewire 400 in somewhere? I'm not sure I need a wired ethernet anymore.

    Not only that, but shortly after I'd ordered it, Apple saw fit to announce an update to the polycarbonate MacBook line, giving it a memory bus and GPU boost to inject some of the performance I was lacking, and keeping the essential firewire port in place. And then they announced iLife '09 would ship a mere handful of days after my new machine was dispatched. I think I'll still enjoy all the other Pro upgrades though, and they did offer recent purchasers like me the chance to upgrade the iLife suite for just a nominal cost.

    Overall I'm happy, and I'm sure all the wrinkles will be ironed out, as I adjust to life with it. It ought to keep me in the manner to which I'm accustomed for the next couple of years, at least. What was that they said about never buying the first iteration of a new Apple product line? Oh.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  34. 2011-11-16

    The perfect laptop at last

    Of course it's not actually running NEXTSTEP. Of course, in a sense it is. Just like your phone.


    Thanks to ebay. I like the fact that the sticker arrived with a little template indicating the correct 28° of jaunt. I ignored it of course, and just lined it up by eye.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  36. 2009-01-04


    • Less reading blogs

    • More writing blogs

    • Release more software

    • No more sugar, sweets, confectionary (free pass for tea, if I can't manage that plain)

    • No coffee

    • More politeness

    • Less judgement



    There's some lofty goals there. Let's see how well I fare. An important thing to remember about giving things up, which I learnt when quitting my oodles-of-fags-a-day smoking habit, is that a lapse shouldn't mean that you just abandon the effort. Some of them are obviously aspirational, and need to be viewed as a progression, not a destination.

    I have a few more, given that I'm such a fan of self-improvement, but I won't share everything.

    Last year my only public resolution was to stop drinking alcohol, and that lasted three months, until I got very bored of it. I don't think I have a drinking problem yet.
    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  37. 2008-12-25

    Merry Christmas one and all! We decided to get away from it all this year, and are therefore in New York city. It is tremendously Christmassy.

    Heading to Toronto tomorrow to visit with the Lyles, back to New York for New Year's Eve (where we've a choice between two pre-booked parties to make - option a: Times Square, formal-ish dinner and comedy, option b: Tribeca, trendy club with cool bands playing). Back in the U.K. the day after.

    Here are some of the photos I've taken, so far.

    NYC Christmas

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  38. 2011-10-31

    As if finding young me in a box wasn't enough of a memo from Father Time, I've had the "circle of life" message underlined firmly this weekend, by throwing my back out. I mean, properly out, like a sit-com old man, or a Dad from the pages of the Beano. Lifting hurts, walking hurts, sitting mostly hurts, breathing hurts, and bending over is right out. It's one of those marvellous hysterical systems, as the slightest twinge of pain induces all sorts of involuntary tensing in the frantically overcompensating muscle superstructure of my back. The lower nervous system is clear in it's mission. No harm must befall the spine. I strongly suspect that the resultant freezing and spasm makes everything significantly more painful than the original twinge would have managed on it's own, but I am not a doctor. Even though I often assure people that I am, this is actually a well-practiced lie, serving the purposes of antique stock-comedy forms.


    The generational aspect of this calamity draws from the fact that I triggered the strain whilst throwing young Ada May ceilingward, in response to her requests to "play flying". Unluckily for me, the initial spasm occurred at the point of release of a throw, meaning that despite my attention being drawn to all sorts of immediate and novel spinal trauma, I still had an falling two year old to catch safely before I could collapse sobbing to the floor with my honour and dignity intact. Two year old children, I must say, are quite a bit heavier than their one year old incarnation.


    The thing with back trouble, most sources assure me, is to try and persevere through it. Grit one's teeth, and carry on as much of your normal routine as you can manage. On no account admit defeat and flee to your bed rest. Rest will relax and weaken your back, and exacerbate the problem, or if you're unlucky, invent some new ones. And so I struggle forwards in embittered mimicry of my daily routine, gasping and wheezing and moaning every couple of steps, frozen in place with involuntary grimacing stuck to my face. It has taken me nearly twice as long to get to work as it ordinarily might. Negotiating St. Pancras, I find myself flooded with sympathy for anybody with genuine mobility problems. The place is a nightmare, and it's supposed to be one of London's newest, most accessible hubs. I inch my way towards the office. All my hope is invested in my fancy orthopaedic stool . Please, mighty German engineering, please do your work.


    Twenty-five year old me pouts condescendingly from my home page as I update my blog. He's got nothing but contempt for broken backed old men. He's too vain and pre-occupied to worry himself with mundane things like exercise and posture. I'm starting to hate that guy a bit.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  39. 2008-12-19

    How can I tell ? I've bought him his own duvet.

    I'm heroically committed to a program for keeping the dog off the majority of the household furniture. My strategy is thus; I have one (wipe clean!) sofa I don't actively discourage him from clambering on. The majority of the time, he sleeps on this overnight, even though to my eyes his basket seems as if it would more comfortable.

    When the wintertime arrives, and the nights get colder, he's not so keen on an unadorned sofa. I can tell this because he starts to seek out nesting opportunities in more upholstered regions. The way that I combat this is to pile up a few cheap throws or blankets on the permitted sofa, which gives him something to nest in. Of course, the actual, correct, dog-basket is padded, upholstered, lined with welcoming cushions and blankets, and positioned in front of a good radiator, but somehow none of that seems to matter. It's all about perceived status with dogs, and so far as he's concerned, sofas are extremely swanky real estate.

    To try and keep the winter sofa throws looking less manky after a couple of nights, I've tended to buy woollen ones. Light coloured rough wool doesn't show up the dog hairs so badly. In my heart, I think that I'll source them from local charity shops, but in practice they never seem to have anything suitable, so usually I end up buying them from shops, as cheaply as I can manage. Every once in a while, if they're looking particularly tired, I recycle the blankets in the rag box. The rough fibres are a too successful hair-trap; I wouldn't consider letting them near my washing-machine's expensive German filters, and I'm too lazy to clean them by hand. Then I buy some fresh ones, and restart the whole cycle.

    Which leads into the current ridiculous state. IKEA is a particularly useful source of very cheap and fairly durable blankets, and it's only a few minutes walk down the road. This time I was wondering about experimenting with something a bit more sustainable, a fabric I could more easily clean, using our wonderful new VAX , with it's miracle pet-hair removal tool (which is actually the stripped floorboard tool I think, the 'pet' edition of the same cleaner was more money for the same suction).

    I strode around a spookily empty IKEA (daytime, recession, Christmas panic shoppers busy elsewhere, wonderful!) trying to decide between a handful of different less-than-a-fiver options. I was suddenly flummoxed to encounter pile of somewhat rudimentary, lightweight double duvets selling for £2.78. A preposterous new plan quickly formed.

    And so I bought a duvet for my dog. We put a cover on it from our store of past-it's-best bed-linen, and arranged it on the sofa. He seems very happy with it, but I can't help feeling some sort of key principle of domestic husbandry has been roundly subverted.


    posted by cms on
    tagged as