Creative Writing Assignment 2

This was the second assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignement was for one person to interview another, and for one more person to listen, and take notes of the quotes of what they said. I had to choose one of my quotes, which is the first sentence of this piece, and then use it as the basis for a piece of writing. I read this in class, and got the impression that it was too long. Let me know what you think. After the class, I went home and re-wrote it in third person, which shortened it quite a lot, even though I added a bit more in terms of narrative. That is the one that I posted as Assignment 2, variation. I would really be interested in which you think works better.
 
    "I do like tennis, but I swim."

Diether, a man with whom I had recently become friends, said this. We were speaking over a coffee in the Porchester Sports Club, where we are both members.

    I had watched him swim, his monotonous breathing done up and down the pool as his strokes glanced in and out of the water, barely causing a ripple, a fluid movement, beautiful to watch. He did this every day for 2000 metres, or about 40 minutes.

    The first time we met, I had just finished swimming 1000 metres, which was a lot for me at the time, and swum with considerably less grace than Diether. I was in the dressing room, he came in from the pool, still in his Speedo and swim cap, we began changing together near the same lockers, and began talking, as you do, about the recent freezing weather and not wanting to go out in it.

    "Why don't we have a cup of coffee at the bar?" I suggested after we had both changed, and that is exactly what we did.

    "You're such a beautiful swimmer," I said. It is a bit odd for men, in conversation with one another, to refer to traits of other men as 'beautiful,' but I am one of those people who like rather expressive language. I also like women, if that was your next question.

    "Thank you. Swimming is an important thing to me. It keeps me fit and sane," he answered.

    It was maybe a few months later, when, again over coffee in the bar, we somehow began talking of tennis. Perhaps it was coming on spring time, and I was beginning to yearn for the courts. That is when he made the comment about liking tennis, but swimming.

    The comment tickled something in me, and began my fascination with him. It could be that it was because he was German, or that he was rather set in his ways, but I found it at once hilarious and worthy of derision. I have learned my lesson at my age, though, and kept my mirth to myself.

    "But do you like to swim?" I asked.

    "That is not the point—I do it for myself. My body likes it."

    "What about your soul, though? Don't you become bored?"

    "You don't understand," he said, and was absolutely right.

    I was to see him many more times, and despite the fact that I teased him about how stiff he was, albeit obliquely, and unlikely to pierce his Teutonic armour, we became friends.

    Friendship, in this case, meant swimming together maybe once a week, though I was really no match for his form, I could at least almost keep up. It meant dinners every week or two, and drinks on Friday evenings. And it meant a sincere regard for one another, though it must be said that the regard I had for him was tinged with a certain fascination at what I saw as his eccentricity. In hindsight, it was less that he was eccentric than the fact that we were quite different in outlook. Normally one has a hard time warming to someone as different, but in this case, for whatever reasons, I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to our meetings.

    Diether was not a man one got to know very well, very quickly, and it took me a long time to piece together who was, what he did, and from where he had come. He was German. I already mentioned that. He had been married to an English woman, but they had divorced a number of years before. They had a daughter, Hannah, who had lived with her mother, but who Diether saw often. She was a nice girl, and Diether was justly pleased with how she had turned out, despite some misgivings about her mother's child-rearing skills and the fact that she had grown up in a country that Diether did not particularly like.

    Diether had moved to England initially to join his wife on a two year assignment. She had been working for a large German bank in Germany when they had met, before the City had become so dominant in finance, and that is where they had met. Cologne, it had been, when that city was rather influential, being just up the road from Bonn, prior to the fall of the wall. Having lived in Cologne myself for a short time, I was sympathetic to why Diether's ex-wife had taken the assignment in London. Though a very nice city, Cologne is very closed in terms of allowing outsiders in. I mentioned this opinion once to Diether, himself Koelsh (being from Cologne), and his response was that "it was better than London, where everyone is welcome, even the English." He had that 'bah-humbug' air of him. In some of my classmates in university I had heard such statements, uttered in an attempt to goad someone into protesting or calling the utterer a racist bastard, or said with sly irony to suggest the opposite.

    In Diether, though, there was no irony. None. That was likely another aspect of England that he disliked: To someone unable to use or understand irony, living in England, it must be almost as though you don't understand the language. I don't know, but can guess, that after he and his wife began to live in England, and speak English, that could have been one of the things that made their relationship difficult. I imagine his wife must have found his irony deficiency tiring.

    Diether was a master printer. The Germans, he told me, make the best presses in the world, and I will have to trust him on that point, knowing nothing of the subject myself. Being a master printer involved an apprenticeship which began when he was 14 years old, and continued until after he was 20. There were tests along the way. But after he had finished his apprenticeship he was merely a journeyman printer, meaning that the formal training of the apprenticeship gave way to more responsibility, and more focus on the job itself. After nearly 10 years of that, he had become a master printer, meaning that he could run a wide variety of printing presses, and could manage others to do it, too. He had had his own apprentices, though not for long, since about two years after becoming a master printer in Cologne, he had followed his wife to the UK.

    In London, aided by his former company, and contacts they had in the UK, he landed a job as the foreman of the print shop of one of London's major daily newspapers. This meant odd work hours, which could have been one more reason his wife had wanted out. He worked from 9 pm to 6 am, so I am not sure how much of a sex life they must have had. In fact, he still works those hours. They suit him, he said, and there is no reason to change that which suits. That was Diether all over. He still complained about the fact that his company moved their printing facility outside of London, down near Gatwick, and he refused to move out of his central London flat to be closer to work. I guess with the hours he worked, traffic wasn't really a problem.

    One day I was at Diether's flat in Bayswater, on Inverness Terrace. He had a nice, large apartment there on the first floor of a Georgian townhouse, in fact taking the whole floor. He liked, he said, to have somewhere for his daughter to stay, though by that time she was off at Oxford and I don't believe that she often stayed. In any case, his apartment was large by London standards. He had a large kitchen/lounge/dining area with lovely high frescoed ceilings, wooden floors, two bedrooms, and French windows looking out on to Inverness Terrace.

    Diether loved to cook. Like everything that he set his mind to, he was very methodical and precise, following the recipes very carefully, and reading books to develop his cooking skills. On this evening, he was preparing a Spanish meal of some sort, with fish, a very good gazpacho, and something else I can't remember, for reasons which I will explain in a minute. Diether spent two weeks every summer (and if he said every, you could count on there being no lapses) in Majorca, and that had been one of the things that had caused him to want to cook in the first place, to recreate some of the foods that he had there. So a Spanish meal with Diether was in no way unusual.

    What was unusual happened as he was preparing dinner. We heard some voices outside the door to his flat, coming from the landing. That wasn't so strange, I guess, as there was another family living on the second floor, and they of course had to get there somehow. These voices, though, were speaking a language that I didn't understand, rather loudly, and it wasn't the French of Diether's upstairs neighbours. And they continued to speak loudly for maybe ten minutes.

    "Your doorman has let some riffraff in the building, old boy," I said with a posh voice and a grin.

    "Unfortunately, James, I do not have a doorman. Would you be so kind as to ask them to leave their position outside my door?" he asked me from the kitchen.

    I peeped out through the peep hole, and could see a woman in a red wool coat. She was speaking to someone who seemed to be rather short and leaning against the door, as when I looked through the keyhole, something blocked it. I couldn't understand the language they spoke, but the woman in the red coat seemed Oriental. All I could see of who she spoke to was a foot sticking out, as if the person leaning against the door was sat on the floor with her feet out.

    I coughed as loudly as I could, really a clearing of my throat rather than a cough, but the red-coated woman and her friend didn't seem to take the hint. So, I eased the door open, in case the person leaning against it had her weight on it. The door opened inward. As soon as I had opened the door, the woman leaning against it stood up, and grabbed the door frame.

    "Can I help you?" I had begun to ask, but this woman, maybe 40 years old, I thought, and like her friend, with Oriental features, began to try to force herself into the flat, holding on to the door frame and trying to pull herself in. What was preventing her was me blocking the door and her friend pulling on her other arm.

    "Close the door!" her friend shouted. I would have happily complied, except that her mad friend, who hadn't uttered one word, just a very intense and frightening look, still had hold of the door frame, and I would have broken all the fingers on her right hand if I had shut it.

    "What's going on out there?" Diether called from the kitchen.

    This seemed to spur this woman to get in even more, and I couldn't answer him, having to concentrate on keeping myself upright as she tried to bowl through me and into the apartment.

    "Stop!" I yelled, but it was no use, she kept trying to get through me.

    "Stop right now, or I call the police," I tried again, still to no avail.

    "Stop or I slam the door and break all your fingers," I tried again. Her friend then shouted something at her in a language that I didn't understand.

    Right at about that point, Diether came out of the kitchen to see what the commotion was.

    The woman trying to get into the flat stopped dead, and spoke for the first since I opened the door.

    "Diether!"

    "Nat!" said Diether, "Mein Gott! Was machen sie hier?" That I did understand, though I am not sure she did, as she just repeated his name again.

    Diether shoved past me, and embraced the woman, who began to sob. I and the other woman just stood staring, as they embraced, she with her face buried in his chest, and silently racked with tears. After a bit of that, Diether moved her into the living room, to the sofa, and the other woman followed us in to the apartment.

    It transpired that Diether had lived, as part of some kind of German international development program, in Thailand for what was supposed to be one year. He had lived with a host family, and Nat had been his host sister. Pat, the other woman, was her older sister, and had already left home and married an Englishman by that time. On this evening, she had been trying to convince her younger sister to drop things, as it was mad trying to get back with someone thirty years later. Her arguments were the ones I had heard outside the door prior to opening it, but had been to no avail.

    I didn't find out the details until later, but Diether and Nat had fallen in love. Her father, who was someone rather important in the Thai government, found out about this, and promptly had Diether sent home to Germany, with a strict order to keep away from his daughter. Neither of them said it, but it seems that they were completely in love, and both suffered broken hearts.

    Probably because they were young, both ended up getting over things, getting on with their lives, getting married, and having families. Except that she, apparently, hadn't gotten over Diether, and when her husband, who was somewhat older than her, suddenly died, she had gone to England to see her sister. Considering her state that day at the door, I am guessing that her mental state had been fragile.

    Nat did speak English, and later we had many long conversations. She told me that her English had been one of the reasons that Diether had initially become so close to her: She was the only one in her family who spoke English. Diether hadn't spoken any Thai, and hadn't tried to learn at all. He had decided that he would improve his English, which was a lot more useful than Thai. This refusal to learn the language had meant that he came to depend on Nat's English ability. His world was somewhat limited by his rather stubborn and arrogant view of the place he lived in, Nat told me, but that had been ok with her: He had been all hers.

    Her passion was tennis. She and Diether had gone to the country club nearly every day, and I asked her whether Diether had played tennis.

    "No," she laughed, "along with not speaking Thai, Diether did NOT play tennis. Believe me, I asked. He preferred swimming, he said. I couldn't get him to even try tennis."

    Nat was an attractive woman, even at 47 years old. She had kept fit, and had kept a youthful air about her, almost childlike in manners. She was, after the initial impression of mental instability had worn off, a very nice, lively woman.

    But I am getting ahead a bit. We were still in Diether's apartment, the four of us, Nat still recovering, Pat and I stood looking on like uncomfortable spectators. Diether, ever the gracious host, got up and asked me to set the table for an additional two. We had dinner, and as usual Diether's Spanish dishes were lovely, but to be honest, on this occasion I am not sure any of us derived the full enjoyment out of the food.

    It fell to me, the Englishman, to make polite conversation during the meal. I was still very much unsure about what had occurred, and therefore stuck to those subjects that every Englishman learns to speak of ad nauseum.

    "So, it was quite a nice day today, wasn't it? Hoping for a bit of sun tomorrow as well, knock on wood."

    "Yes, that would be lovely," said Pat.

    Silence.

    "So, assuming the weather holds, what will you be up to tomorrow, then?" I ask.

    Not a good question, as it depended on a resolution to the question of what her younger sister would be doing next. Chatter about football and jokes about politics followed, but the air was constrained, I think everyone thinking the same thing: 'What next?'

    In a funny way, that question was answered by Diether: He had to go to work. That is one of the aspects of dinner with him, that he has to finish by 9 and then go off to work, except on Friday, which he had off. It was a Sunday. He had never, he told me, missed work, in the 33 years he had been working. On this occasion, it meant that Diether was able to offer Nat and Pat accommodation for the night, and leave the awkward situation until the next day to sort out.

    I took my leave, but called him the next day to check up that everything was ok. He wouldn't say anything besides "I am dealing with things. I will let you know if I need any help."

I called back about a week later, when I hadn't heard from him, and he was equally cryptic, but suggested we meet up at the club. I went early, and expected to see Diether in the pool, as that was what we usually did: Plan to meet at three for a coffee, but actually see each other in the pool beforehand. This time, though he wasn't in the pool, and I did not see him, in fact, until I came out of the shower after my swim. He came in to the locker room from the club side, dressed not, as was usual, in Speedo and swim cap, but in tennis whites.

Creative Writing Assignment 1

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This was my first assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignment was to take the dream image of one of our classmates, and write what happened before a certain moment in that image, and what happened after. I chose the moment on the cliff, with the leopard.

The spotlights came up, highlighting the mountains behind the plateau on which the assembled string musicians sat, bows, fingers, and hands poised to play the opening notes of a most unusual concert, set in a most unusual setting. The plateau sat atop a ledge above the mediaeval town of Aran, cut into the spectacular mountain which rose behind it. The moon was full, and visible above the peak of the snow-peaked mountain Prima, the tallest mountain, which jutted into the sky, seeking, it seemed, to impale the moon on it's narrow spear of a peak.

Closest to the mountain and protected by an overhang, were the string players. There were an enormous number of them, more than 500 players of all sorts of stringed instruments, from violins to shamisens, from guitars to sitars, from lutes to banjos, and many more whose names are known only in the tongues of the farflung places from which they come. Even with so many, though, they occupied only a small part of the massive plateau. In the centre of the plateau, were assembled over 400 tables, each seating nine people. To the side, were four massive tents, in which the food was being cooked to feed the assembled guests. The deer and cattle served that night, over 50 head, had been marched up the mountain and then slaughtered, special precautions taken to muffle any noise, the plateau possessing almost magical acoustical properties which meant that any sounds generated there carried to Aran as though they were being produced mere feet away.

At the front of the plateau sat the prince of Aran and 500 of his closest friends. At the side of the prince, sat a leopard, a sleek female with an improbably small head atop a lithe, sleekly muscled, and beautiful body. The prince stroked the beautiful animal, but not in the way one would stroke a cat, or a dog, but in the way one would stroke the hair of a lover.

The conductor of the assembly of strings, the very well-known Mr. Sowaza, awaited the signal to start, which was to be relayed to him from the prince.

The assembled guests sat at their tables, chatting, and drinking the sweet sparkling wines that had been served, and sensed what was coming. The noise abated as they either discontinued their conversations or began to speak in hushed tones. String playing and listening is such a fact of everyday life in Aran, part of the fabric of the town, that it was respected but not revered. Everyone, to a person, expected a fantastic concert, and had respect for the musicians who they expected to provide it.

The sweet evening mountain air, the floodlit mountain behind them, the twinkles from the hundreds of candles on the tables, the moon in the sky, and their beloved Aran below, all created a magical atmosphere that no one would forget. If anyone had any doubt that this was the best party ever, they disappeared as the prince gave the signal.

Mr. Sowaza brought his baton down, and the entire assembly of musicians played the same note, an E flat. The song had been specially composed to resonate at those frequencies that carried best to Aran. After the initial note, the violas, the shamisens, and the Lao lutes took the melody, and the other instruments took the harmony. Two old Lao men, Mr. Kangprathet and Mr. Ngam played their small instruments, constructed of coconut shells covered in calf skin, long teak frets, and strings made from the guts of water buffaloes, and played with bows that had been given to them by one of the famous violin makers of Aran, being so far superior to their own bows that when they returned to their country, the technique of making them would be designated a national treasure.

The melody was high, with the slightly spicy smell of the Orient, yet came back again and again to one which owed it's debt to the lovely melodies first conjured many hundreds of years ago in the valleys around Aran. One by one, instruments came in and left, the banjos, the guitars, the 30-strong bass section's deep sounds shaking the glasses that the guests had now set down on their tables, enraptured o f the music, and completely forgetting all else, the wine, the conversation, and even the beautiful setting they sat in.

Those not fortunate enough to have seats on the plateau sat in the market square of Aran, or in their homes, windows open to hear more clearly, and because of the way that sound travelled could hardly be called deprived of the marvellous performance going on above them. They, too, stopped all that they were doing, and listened to the performance, the magical performance, some closing their eyes to better experience the sensation of the sound, concentrating all their focus on that single sense.

The Symphony of Aran, as the piece later became known, was never heard in such perfection as on that night, the night of it's first performance. The composer, Mr. Jalakey, was seen with tears running down his face for nearly the entire performance. The pride of hearing his masterpiece, and it will definitely be remembered as such for many centuries to come, for the first time, in such an atmosphere, in Aran, on such a night, was so great that the memory was his most treasured.

The symphony conjured the images of the mountains, of the flowers growing in the high meadows, of the sound of the water of the creeks in the valleys, it was the sound of birds which migrated in from the east which brought the slight hint of the Orient, and there were the sound of winds of the southern Mediterranean desert, but all came back to Aran. And Aran, in this piece, ebbed, and it flowed, from the sounds of great thunderous crashes of avalanches, to the sound of a single songbird.

The finale was dominated by the violins of Aran, nearly 200 of them, and incredibly each one weaving a different part of the melody, though all playing in the same key, a nearly improvisational performance, but one that had been practised and refined, and followed a grand design rather than individual expression.

And then, some 90 minutes later, Mr. Sowaza raised his baton, and it was over.

The silence was profound. It was as if day had suddenly turned to night, the light, powerful rays of sound suddenly stopped shining on the guests. After a three second silence, a man near the front stood and began to tap his wine flute like a madman with his fork.

"Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo!" he shouted, and was joined by others who also stood and struck their glasses. The glasses, in various states of fill, echoed a variety of notes across the plateau, and down to Aran. And suddenly, the sound 4,000 wine glasses being struck created it's own wall of sound, a sound of pure joy, of wild joy, uncontrolled and therefore not recognisable as music, yet containing in it's random notes, randomly struck at irregular intervals, a music of the soul, a pure form of expression. It was, somehow, the magical sound of laughter. And when the assembled guests began to hear it as such, they put down their glasses, and began to laugh. It was a laughter of joy, of having experienced something that was so perfect that tears were shed even as laughter bellowed forth.

Mr. Sowaza acknowledged their praise, recognising it for what it was, and bowed. On his signal, all of the musicians not already standing, stood, and on a further signal, all 500 plus musicians bowed. The applause was loud and enthusiastic, and held for over two minutes, laughter and tears mixing with the applause.

Even the elegantly attired ladies and gentlemen of the prince's party stood and clapped, their concern at outward appearances falling away in the face of such a magnificent display of musical virtuosity.

The female leopard had curled up around the feet of the prince, wrapping her long tail around his left leg, and purring contentedly.

The night continued to echo the wonderful sounds of the musicians, who took turns in four groups playing dancing music late into the night.

The guests sat down to dinner, a wonderful meal prepared to perfection, and served with impeccable care, of such basic ingredients as beef, venison, potatoes, cabbage, and things that made regular appearances on the tables of Aran, and yet seemed to have been transformed by some magic into a meal of extraordinary depth and richness.

When they were done with their exquisite meal, they took to the dance floor, which sat between the diners and the musician, a fabulous tile floor across which they glided to the sounds of fiddles and banjos, kotos and cellos.

No one wanted the party to end, and the guests, the musicians, and the nobility danced and talked and ate until the wee hours of the morning.

As the sun rose behind Prima, the rays of light flashing from the top of the mountain as though emanating from it, they stopped their dancing, their drinking, and their talking, and sat facing the rising sun, as though it was a god to whom they were praying.

And, if truth be told, they were praying, praying to never forget what was, hands down, the very best party. Ever.

One man who attended the party composed a song that described his feeling, and the following verse from that song probably echoes the feelings of many of the guests:

Song of Aran

Won'drous Aran, your valleys and yer heights

Won'drous Aran, your music and yer sky

Won'drous Aran, I had not lived til I'd seen your sights

Won'drous Aran, may I have mem'ries of this night until I die

Back on the road

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I love to run. Not totally sure what about it really appeals to me, but I really love it. But it doesn't always love me: I have had my bouts of shin splints, tendonitis, chafing, bloody nipples, exceedingly sore knees and legs, to the point where the physio told me that "some people just aren't meant to run, and maybe you are one of them." Frackin' moron--doesn't she know that running is a basic human thing? Fight or flight actually requires the ability to fly, or rather flee.
Part of the problem that I had was that I was slow, at least the last time I was running seriously. That meant that my form was poor. I don't know why that is, but for me running slower than 6 minute kilometres seems to mean that my form is poor. I have heard others say similar things. After I speed up, somehow it improves. I only know this because of pain: Many years ago in Japan I started up running again. I had a lot of stress, and a newborn son at home, and needed a release. I started running at night in an old pair of New Balances only sold in Asia. It was perfect for stress release, but I got shin splints. I investigated extensively on the Internet and bought a pair of New Balance 580s from Road Runner Sports in the U.S. They seemed to do the job pretty well, and I was able to continue running, but there was still a niggling pain in my lower leg.
However, after I started running faster, there was no more of that. I started to train for a half-marathon, with my goal to finish in 90 minutes, which was when they re-opened the road that the race was being run on. I was quite good about training, and had run half-marathon distances in training at about 96 minutes. The marathon was in early January, and I went home to Oregon that Christmas, via Honolulu and a week in Hawaii. I slacked off the training in Hawaii, but got back to it in Oregon.
Oregon would seem to be the perfect place to train, and especially Eugene, where I am from, and where I spent that Christmas. The problem was that it was shitty rainy weather, and I was running around Amazon Park, which was only a hundred yards from my mom's house. It was a 2k barkamulch trail, which was completely mushy with the rain. I was training, at that point, on about 8 or 10 km per day, and somehow the softness was not a good thing. Not a good thing at all, and led to some serious pain in my right knee. I rested after that, hoping it would be better for the half-marathon, which I was due to run 2 days after getting back to Japan. I made it to about 10k before the pain was too excruciating to continue. The next day when I went to the hospital, the doctor gave me a shot of cortisone, and, similar to the physio, told me not to do anymore running. I told him to get stuffed, but the combination of not finishing the race, and being in quite a lot of pain put me off it for quite a few years.
Fast forward to two years ago when I applied, and my application was accepted to, the London Marathon. I had never heard of a race that didn't accept all-comers who applied in time. Eugene doesn't have those sort, and neither does Japan. London does, though. But I hadn't really been training. I had applied to motivate myself to train, but waited until the results of the lottery in December before I really got serious. I set myself a very ambitous training regimen, which involved training a lot, and doing a long run on Sundays. I was up to 15 miles on my Sunday run, at a so-so pace, but after my long runs, and after some of the longer training runs, I had very bad shin splints. I found a store in London, Profeet, which did gait analysis and then used that to choose the perfect shoe and create custom-molded insoles for them. They set me up with some Mizuno's which seemed to be pretty good. I still had shin splints, though. And the longer my long runs got, the longer it took me to recover. I could barely move my legs on Mondays.
That's when I went to the physio to get her to reduce the pain. But nooooo! She had to tell me to stop! Again, I railed against her advice, but was also in enough pain that continuing despite her advice was difficult anyway. This time, though, I did quite a lot of research about why I might be having these problems. It looked like, in reading Gordon Pirie's book on running, as well as alot of other stuff, including a rip-off eBook that looked terrible, but wasn't actually as much of a ripoff as I thought, that the problems in my lower leg were probably the result of heel-striking, or some other problem with my form. There were some jump-roping exercises and others that would apparently help. I also heard about something called the Pose Method, which was a method of getting people to run with proper form, on the balls of feet (BOF). I bought a book from a guy in Reading, which also had a DVD with samples of lots of exercises. Most of the exercises required some amount of space, and I began to use the gym at work's aerobics studio.
I had also, during this time, joined our company's volleyball club. It is a great game, which I love playing. However, within a very short time of joining, I injured my thigh muscle, a first, and also a short time later my calf muscle. The thigh injury took quite a while to recover from.
It looked more and more like I would never get back to running.
I had, in my mind, however, accepted what Dr. Nicholas Romanov said about form in his Pose Method book. It struck me as being essentially true. Some of the things he says:

• Humans naturally run on the balls of their feet, which can be seen watching someone run barefoot. It is only the running shoe companies that pad up the heels to such an extent that they can be run on that have thwarted natural human biomechanics.
• Running is essentially about falling forward. Gravity moves the body forward.
  
• Pounding the ground and/or pushing off are very hard on the legs, and it is far preferable to pull the legs upwards and let gravity, rather than muscle, propel one forward.

Anyway, because of various reasons, starting with laziness, but also involving massive flooding of the gym, as well as volleyball-induced injury, I didn't get back to running. I did training sessions with Oleg, a Pose coach in Reading, a few times, but he moved to Germany, and scheduling the sessions was a pain.
Last summer my mom came over and my family, together with her, travelled to Italy. We stayed most of the trip in Amalfi, the headline town on the Amalfi coast. It is a lovely area, but one the features is lots and lots of stairs. I sweated like a pig. I was so out of shape, and a fat 95 kg, that I was huffing and puffing like my 65 year-old mother. Not good.
So, I joined the gym and started doing exercise biking nearly every day. At some point, I think I mentioned it on a previous blog post, I also started to look pretty seriously at my diet, and to reduce my calorie intake.
However, I didn't run except very occasionally. When I did run, I tried to run Pose, but I kept getting cramps and minor muscle tears in my calves, a clear indicator that I wasn't running correctly.
I got extremely busy in December, and was spending a lot of time in Paddington, where I didn't have access to the company gym, which was the excuse I used for why I didn't continue with my every day training. It was/is, as far as excuses go, an ok one, but it is still an excuse. Recently I have been trying to get back in to it. But stationary biking, as opposed to going home and seeing more of my family, is lame.
Last weekend, I again tried running. This time there was no pain. I told myself that I need to make sure that I don't run with any tightness in my muscles, as that can lead to an improper running style. I did have some tightness on Monday, so I held of. Tuesday is volleyball night, so I got a different kind of exercise. Yesterday, I ran again, also without any real pain this morning. So, I ran again today. Again, I don't feel any pain. Yeah!
I didn't run fast, but I did run on the balls of my feet, and the lack of pain hopefully means that now I've 'got' the Pose method. I use some quite flat and light shoes, which hopefully will last awhile, as I bought them in Japan, and they aren't available here.
It is really good to be back on the road again. Hopefully I can stay running, injury-free.

More Cuts

Image via Wikipedia

I may have mentioned a few weeks ago about my bet that redundancies would be announced on January 16th. I was about 5 weeks too early in my reckoning, apparently.
Today 500 reduncancie at Vodafone UK were announced.
The odd thing is that the redundancies have already started, two weeks ago in Vodafone Group. The facilities project manager for the Paddington project, as well as another person in facilities, I heard directly from them, had been made redundant. Very strange, as he was quite good at his job, and genuinely cared. Then I hear that Simon Lewis, the Group Communications Director, has left, as has the head of internal communications, several other people within internal comms, as well as several people in the Corporate Social Responsibility team. Next I hear about some internal audit people gone. But there has been no announcment.
We learned more from Bloomberg than from any communication from the company. Perhaps that is because internal comms is not functioning? Quite possibly. However, it was the CEO's business manager that took over as head of corporate affairs, which absorbs communications, internal and external, and one would think that if she was involved that, naturally, something would be communicated. I have known her since my Japan days, and would give her very high marks when she was the manager for Bill Morrow, our CEO there, as well as Vittorio Colao here.
This reminds me a bit of when Arun Sarin sent David Jones, formerly CEO of Vodafone Netherlands, to Japan to straighten things out as the COO there. Everyone knew, from day one, that he was there to make a show of exerting central group control over Vodafone Japan. He made no attempt to speak to employees, never addressed all employees, even when given the chance at an annual event we held, opting instead to speak on video. He, also, was very quiet right up until the day that he offered all employees the chance to take voluntary redundancy. Twenty five percent of all full-time employees quit the company, receiving quite a good package. Many were the most able people, since the package was so generous that if you were good at your job the temptation was clearly there to take the package and then start at a new job. And since the majority of workers were non-regular employees, so called contractors, the employees really did have the role of driving things, and that was really lost after the 'restructuring'.
He stayed on afterwards, but it was a miserable failure. His people skills, never good in the first place, led to new lows in morale as draconian measures such as 'every trip outside of Japan must first be approved by David Jones' were implemented, but it was never possible to get an appointment to actually get anything approved. I used to send one woman on my team up to his office at 6 pm on Fridays, because we figured out that was the best time, everyone else gone drinking. Also, she was quite cute, which I found really helped, as he wouldn't give me the time of day.
Ironically, it is another former Vodafone Netherlands CEO that is again in the drivers seat. Not knowing Guy Lawrence well, I wouldn't venture to say that he was responsible for this round, since it has apparently been planned for awhile. I would say, however, that Vodafone UK seem to have only two pages in their playbook: Redundancies and Outsourcing.
As a Vodafone Group employee, the complete lack of communication on what, if anything, will happen to us, hasn't been comfortable, and because the rumours didn't specify whether it was Vodafone UK or Vodafone Group or both sorts of employees which would be made redundant, it was very hard to tell where we stand. It still is.
Perhaps the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) of the past few days are fully justified, as there are always those willing to fall back on tired managment techniques in an effort to show how tough they are, how much 'fat'--as if people were an expendable resource--they can cut. Irony of ironies, these 'change programs' or whatever other current euphemism for large scale firings are called, cost quite a lot in the first year in severance costs. By the end of year two, there is a significant chance that the company has hired other people for the roles that were cut, or is using contractors for it, an option that is actually more expensive in the short, medium, and long-term economically unless your entire business model is based on the outmoded industrial legacy of layoffs, which make much less sense in a business where the number of people tied to the scale of the product being delivered is quite small: Our network still needs to function, our billing still needs to work, our portal still needs to deliver content, our call centre staff have no fewer people today than they did yesterday calling to ask for help. In this sense, we are truly post-industrial, in the sense that we are selling a service where each employee is not necessarily directly tied to the scale of it's use. Unlike auto workers, whose productivity and their use to the company is tied to how many cars they can build, and how many of those cars the company can sell, we don't build anything. Nearly everything has been outsourced, nearly all differentiating factors have been extinguished, and FUD is not a great working environment.
Back at group, the randomness of some of the trickle of redundancies I have heard about does create a fear.
I shall be interested in whether our hermit leader explains the grand strategy he has been working on. People who actually know anything are being incredibly tightlipped.
Fuk this FUD. Not only did 500 people get fired, but our volleyball club members, most of them Vodafone UK people, were in no mood for games tonight, so it got cancelled.

Enough!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I have a bank account with a certain large bank's Jersey branch. The reason that people usually bank in Jersey is to somehow avoid the taxman, and I am no different. Because of my tax status, I am allowed (supposedly) to keep a very small percentage of my taxes back from the UK tax man. In order to take advantage of that privelege, however, my money needs to not be repatriated to the UK, which means that it needs to be payed directly into an offshore account. I turns out that, even with this mechanism in place, I had trouble with making my refund claim this year, but generally it is worth doing.

My bank, like many banks, seems to have a really arrogant feeling towards it's customers: They started to charge me £20 per month about two years ago, simply for the privelege of having an account, and their charges for certain transactions are silly. However, because my choice of offshore banks that do business in pounds sterling, that are part of the UK banking system, and therefore can be used for direct debits and whose debit card can easily be used is limited, and once you have 16 direct debits set up, it takes something reasonably major to push you toward change.

It has been building up for a while, but yesterday was the last straw, and this camel's not having any more of it. I am so hacked off with them that I was literally speechless yesterday.

My discontent is not a new thing. Firstly, they sent me a premier account card a couple of years ago, which had some additional benefits advertised, like a premier credit card with a better rate of interest, a better rate on a morgtage, access to lounges (which I actually used in Istanbul), and free transfers between accounts in different countries. All sounds great, right? Well, last year I needed to deposit some money in the account in order to cover some direct debits that were coming up. I asked them how I could quickly do that, and they said, 'mail us the cheque, and we will credit it to your account in 5 working days.' The problem was that the debits were coming up.
'So,' I asked, 'do you have a facilitiy for an overdraft?'
'No, sir, I am sorry, but that is only available to premier accounts.'
'Well,' says I,' I have one of them. '
'I'm sorry sir, but your account is not a premier account.'
'Then why does my debit card say 'premier' on it?' ask I.
'I don't know sir, but your account is not a premier account.'
'Well it *was* a premier account, and if it is no longer one, why wasn't I told?'
'I'm sorry, but all I know is that it isn't a premier account, and so your query about an overdraft will not be possible. Can I help you with anything else today?'
'Yeah, you can help me by giving the phone to your manager. I am not happy with your inability to answer my simple question: WHY IS MY ACCOUNT NO LONGER A PREMIER ACCOUNT?'
'I'm sorry sire, but my manager is not available. Would you like someone to call you back?'
'Yes. When?'
'Within 4 working days.'
'Four working days!?'
'Yes sir.'
'Are you taking the mickey?'
'No, sir. That is the SLA (he actually said that) for our response.'
'Right. So, I can expect someone to call me after I actually have a problem? Here I am calling you to try to figure out a way to either get money in the account or get an overdraft arranged, and you will have someone call me in four days...not bloody good enough.'
'I will mention your displeasure sir. Have a nice day.' (I don't remember if he actually said that, but his generally chirpy demeanour would be consistent with that).

No one ever called me back.

Fast forward to a week ago when I was in Costco buying some stuff. I tried my debit card, and it didn't work. I thought this might happen, as they had sent me a new card, and the old one was meant to expire at the end of the month. Never mind that it was only the 29th. I had the new one ready, and tried that one. I was told that 'the pin number is incorrect.' See, this was actually after I had tried the new one and gotten the same message. After I had called the bank and been assured that was just because they hadn't switched over to my new card yet, and when my old one expired my new one should work with the same PIN number. So, here I am at Costco, with five people in line behind me, and I had to run over to the ATM and use my Amex card to get some cash, with lots of unhappy people glaring at me. When I got home I called the bank and had a conversation along the lines of this:
'Yes, I received a new debit card, and when I put in the PIN number it doesn't work.'
'But it should work, sir.'
'Yes, but it doesn't.'
'Well, sir, would you like us to send a new PIN number?'
'How long will that take?'
'Five to seven working days.'
'Well, I think you can do better than that. I don't want to wait 5-7 working days to have access to my own money.'
'We can send it by DHL, but there is a charge for that.'
'I don't think so. I know my PIN, and it is not working with this card. That is a problem with your systems, and there is no reason why I should pay anything extra for you to sort this problem as quickly as possible.'
'Well, sir, we can open an investigation, and if it turns out that it was our fault, we will refund the money.'
'And how long does the investigation take?'
'Two to three working days.'
'Right, so here is what you will do: You will start the investigation, and at the same time send the PIN by DHL.'
'Yes, we will do that, but please realise that there will be a charge for the DHL until the investigation is finished.'
'Fine. Since I am absolutely sure that you will find that you screwed up.'
'I screwed up sir?' he asked indignantly.
'Not you personally, your bank.' Plonker. What other meaning could there be, and is he not aware that he represents his employer?
'Can I help you with anything else today, sir?'
'No.'

Fast forward to Thursday. I received a call from a very apologetic woman from the bank who assured me that they were doing everything possible to rectify the situation, and as a token they would credit £25 to my account for telephone charges. I said that all I wanted was access to my money, and she assured me that I would be receiving the new PIN by the next day.

I did indeed receive the PIN by Friday, but was in London all day, so I didn't have a chance to check it, and preferably change the PIN to a preferred PIN. I tried that yesterday at Tesco. Can you guess what happened? It didn't work!

I called when I got home, and was told that there was a general problem with PINs not correctly matching to newly issued cards, and to please destroy my card, because a new card and PIN number would be sent out immediately. How soon, I asked, is immediately? Five to seven working days. No, you will send it by DHL and you will refund me the cost. Ok, right, can you tell me the reason why we should pay the cost? Because it is the result of your mistake, and it has caused me to not have access to my funds for a week now. Right, ok, I will put that down. Big of you. You might also add that I will seriously be considering moving my account to another bank. Well, sir, that is your right. Yep. And since I am not insane, which I would have to be to continue to do business with your bank, I will be very carefully weighing my options.

What I didn't say was that after they started charging £20 a month, I got upset and had opened an account at one of the competitors, where they don't charge that amount, and who have a much better intergration of their offshore account with their UK-based branches, so depositing cheques and so forth is much simpler. I had never activated it, because of the abovementioned pain of moving all of my direct debits. Yesterday was it, though. I moved my salary to pay into the new account, and changed without much hassle three of the 16 direct debits. I will be making more phone calls and visists on Monday to change the remaining ones. I also moved money into the account so that I could use the debit card. That cost me £25, but I figured I was ok, at least I had access to my money.

By the way, there is still a £17 charge on my account for the DHL fee. Oh, and the £20 monthly charge was charged yesterday.

And bankers wonder why they garner so much hate.

Snow and Picture

It snowed today, virtually bringing the UK to a halt. It isn't a major storm on the scale of some of the ones I saw when I went to school in Minnesota, but there is a lot less infrastructure for dealing with it. So, I decided to work from home, and Christopher's school was cancelled.
Separately, I got some gift certificates from my company for doing above the expected level on the Paddington project, and bought myself a really nifty Nikon D40 digital SLR.
So, I went out for a walk and took a bunch of pictures. I am still figuring out how to set the aperture and shutter speed, but the great thing about digital cameras is that they don't cost much to learn. Anyway, here is one of my first attempts to use it.

Religion, Race, and Nationality in the Obama Era

Image by futureatlas.com via FlickrOur first black president. That is what a lot of people are calling Barack Obama. He seems to include himself among those who identify him not as mixed race, not as white who happens to have an African father, not as Hawaiian, not as any of the identities in the melting pot of identities that he could adopt if he chose, but as black.
I personally believe that his choice was a powerful one which will bring all Americans closer to a level of acceptance and respect for one another that has often been coloured by color. The absolute hopefulness that a black man becoming president represents is one of those things that, as one British journalist put it, could only happen in America.
What I find truly amazing about Obama, and also really hopeful, is the way that he has, as much as Jay Gatsby, defined who he is in the world. Half American, half Kenyan, yet here he is as the pillar of American conciousness. A middle name of Hussein, and a mother whose religious beliefs were quite open and free, Obama chose to be a Christian, and a Christian whose flavour of Christianity is deeply rooted in an African-American culture. Half white, half black, yet look at his diction, at his mannerisms, at his rhetoric, and it is clear that he has made a conscious and sustained effort to behave as a black man. Nowhere in his speech can you hear the Hawaiian influences, despite him having grown up there. In fact, you hear the speech of an urban black man, and specifically an urban black man from Chicago. That, despite the fact that he was raised by a white grandmother from Kansas. But he had choices, and he made choices. Certainly, as a half black man in America, the perception would probably always be there that he was 'black.' Obama chose to make that a positive thing, though, to embrace that identity that was assumed, no matter how at variance it may have been at first with who he 'really' was, how he was raised. That America accepts and believes in those choices is itself a very hopeful thing.
My own family is just such a melting pot, and for the sake of my son, half Japanese, half American, being raised in the UK, and my neice, who had a similar background to Obama, right down to being brought up in one of the last two states in the Union, today is a very hopeful day in the history of America. It is the day that a man who chose to be black has become president. That a man who chose to be American became president. That his choices were not only accepted, but embraced, is a cause for celebration. This is the America that I feel immensly proud of, the America whose ideal is hope, the America that, should my son choose it, is a country where not genetics, background, language, or anything else determines who we are, but where we make choices about all of those things.
There is a lot of hope in that. A lot of hope that real change, a time when none of those things even matter, is just that much closer to reality. We aren't there yet, but today, January 20th, 2009, we just stepped closer.