INparvo

140225 mod 140326 What is social media?

Target was 55 miles, a 10 mile increase for 2014. Another dry Sat= Whizzday on more used B roads. Cons: Drivers pass more closely, sometimes cutting in too sharply. Pros: less risk of thorns and floods. We were to go East via the Severn valley's more open southerly route, with a cross back-wind.

Riding might suggest horses. We call it biking, though Motor-Cyclists hijack the word biking for brevity's sake. I would too. Push-bike suggests that you get off (on a hill) reduced to pushing it. Definitely pejorative, or in modern parlance, a no-no.

I am happy to do this: riding a bike, biking whatever, for fun.

I - well, we – were to struggle with a forecast 24mph wind at temps. in single figures for much of this late February day.

We climbed uphill from the house till we looked east over the shallow valley.

more pix with brief note at the end.

After the event- it is now Sunday- I need a sit-down, even if it is only to open a conversation with similarly minded readers (as in those technically and philosophically struggling with implications of social media) but at least occasionally with contiguous folk, similarly with time on their hands. Contiguous, as in having something in life in common with me which might brush against me from to time to time.

Also, I am a slow two fingerer, only even slower than slow: I look-at-the-keys and dreamily wallow in my unintentional transpositions. I could do cartoons of these, I suppose, but cartoons are well practised forms, not learned overnight. Like the finer points of cycling. If I ever had this facility, I pay the respect of not revisiting it with disappointment. Practice as in, I suppose golf, or some religious, or other specially fancy-dressed meeting of kindred spirits.

Cycling, say more than running, say more than squash (the trad

busy-peeps game) all have one thing in common: they benefit by being done every day. (Perhaps with a rest day …..but that's another thread

Note many of these italicised words have a textile origin . Also as in a sea-faring country we also use watery metaphors.

OK, non-cycling readers ... Cycling is easy too. Just do it?

Just sit on the saddle. Level pedals. Relax. Check behind. Push gently on which ever pedal you fancy, then keep on turning the pedals. The gyroscopic motion will mean you balance.

Tots could ride up a velodrome banking. Doubtless, someone will now show me a sophisticated video clip, to support this.

Another will tell me it is my fault that little Johnny now has broken a collarbone... or worse.

Textiles

I began work as a textile designer in structural as opposed to decorated, textiles, then moved into teaching it (and other things).

Where I began, in the Fashion and Textile school a colleague, Harry M, a technical northerner, a lovely man, would chide me for using flowery language. I got on equally well or better with the enlightened add-on bookish part of the course). My reply to him was, call a spade a digging instrument but ask if anything else that might do job too? Literalism can be a drag. What job are you trying to do?

Later, I was encouraged to teach on a course attached to the Technology part of the Art and Technology college, later to become a Poly, where I introduced new ideas from my lowly position, (and seen as a threat, winning no higher friends.

The unenlightened Textile Institute, whose external course it was, produced a maverick. They suddenly leap-frogged us. Notes were allowed in exams. It was our the first use of hand-outs: reprographed. Those with the best filing system might pass exams.

A bit like the real world where the sensible go to a specialist for advice, or an information source such as a library, now often effectively on-line.

My notes were spare enough for them to only really understood by attending. I hoped this would show in their results

We kept a watch on course work: forté of any art school.

The in-college time of the majority of the Fashion Textile school students were now undergraduates -we had moved on from HND to Honours Degree as it became a Polytechnic. (Now it is the DMU - or De Montfort University for those with historical King Richard 3 bones and Car Park flavouring).

I was a rebel/misfit. As far as I was concerned it a PLOYtechnic. I was voted on the Academic Board as a spoiler, but apart from that enlightening experience I made a point of avoiding grey meetings, doing any student contact teaching that came along to the best of my ability. After some best forgotten no-man's-land years, like a long term prisoner I finally fitted in, deemed I guess as no threat to the status quo, and asked to do what I really wanted in the first place, namely to teach drawing to all ART and DESIGN student areas, a little outside my original remit. It was the best 7/8 of my 25 years in the college. Apart from a separation of my making, my 8th was a shambles when models were expected to pose and students to work with holes in the winter wall while a 70s factory, after one year of luxury, was rearranged to suit money-saving panic management of the late 80s. It got worse I was to hear later, culminating in 1997. Irrevocably tarnished it seems.

I enjoyed all-well nearly all-the experiences. I earned my salary with a clear conscience. We had visitors like the long lived Abram Games and I would take students along when his annual visit coincided with my hours. He was famous for his wartime posters and 1951 Festival of Britain logo.

I befriended part-timers, who bore out my teaching, found empathy with Illustrators and OU Engineers who would often come to our cottage with a bottle. My long suffering wife, J. would cook meals better than those found in pubs at that time.

Drawing can mean to really look and study structure, form phenomena.

Design aesthetic is not an add-on but a time-heavy ethos, slowly absorbed.

Drawing can be communication .

Elements of depiction, denotation, expression, bearers of ideas used with or without words. 

(I just thought I'd pop these in. They are just examples for my grandchildren. Just continuing a family tradition of epithets.

History twists

Just as art and science, along with many other school subjects were long ago separated for convenience, so the French have only one word, dessin for both drawing and design. Some of us fashion cloth around our bodies.

You, me, everyone plans things: designs, as we also draw from life's experience.

Engineers design.  I was called into Cranfield, itself given Uni status. the word design has been well abused in recent decades as were New and Improved before it. Still are. I taught mainly before CADCAM became widespread. Later I was asked back to Cranfield a few times for the early stages of an engineering manufacturing course.

Even now I find I am best thinking with a pencil in my hand. If English is the lingua franca of the skies, so drawing is pretty much universal. For example. You are driving in a foreign country, you seek out an address. You hand over a suggested plan of the route. Or pass over pen and paper. Please mark the garage on the corner.Or maybe you sketch a shed with a car in it. You communicate.

I am as hopeless at remembering a list of instructions as B is without place names. Read the words of Mike Parker in Map Addict. ISBN 978-0-00-735157-2

Later that day I was to say nothing as I noticed one of those old posts while still upright had collapsed fingers having first been blown 90 degs out .

(This might be un-reliable evidence. My stomach juices were working, I knew we still had a mile of cross headwind and glanced up with bleary eyes into it.

Teaching was never cramming, beloved of nameless reactionaries in this decade; never, this is how you do it. Instead it was posing questions. As a pen or pencil to make marks was most likely to be used, I sometimes set depiction problems for illustrators .

It meant I was always learning too.

For example, in examining cues to space, show a pebble beach coastline receding into the distance. 

  Staying ahead of the students' likely needs was the game, or in some cases getting them to show me things they had learned, so I could put them into the course. I learn from everyone, help everyone. Still do. Don't you?

I became more educated - for fun ! not qualifications.

I was doing a good job but a higher about-turn cost me my autonomy.

Since then I have been unintentionally largely hedonistic, though not in a Bacchanalian way.

Too bad I have got so slack in retirement. I am always changing my systems. It makes for an untidy desk and clothes drawers, never finding anything.

I never quite get the implications of Facebook or Blogging. Do you? Our young GP admits to not using a mobile but just keeping it in the car. B, a few years my junior, sits at the desk-top, or tablet (we've just skyped distant folk). Apps we guess, are short for application i.e things you can apply to your gadget.

Oh, and there are Smart phones. Still somewhere else.

We are probably way behind most, even on the subject of mobiles. I even think the word cell-phone might be better. It explains itself:warns of its fallibity. With mobiles, Alexander Calder always comes into my mind and I wonder why he is there.

 thread : a topic to comment on. Another textile analogy!

Never mind all the Boson jokes.

I take some comfort that Prof. Peter Higgs has never sent a email (I guess this might be true).

In an earlier blog I referred to my coincidences. This may also be said of Alan Coren with his short cut via Marie Lloyd. Though he can be fanciful! ISBN 978 1 8467 321 3

I used to find any teacher admitting defeat to be endearing; I felt I was taking part when another asked, well, what do you think?

In a similar way I still have to come to terms with GPs not knowing everything, already half-expecting younger folk to be looking on-line. 

I was born in a more rigid age where, in the rural areas at least, the professions: parsons, bank-clerks, solicitors, school-teachers, (freehold) farmers, were small gods. They were also the only car drivers-everyone else rode bikes or used buses and trains. On top of that I was/am a mix of conformity and rebellion.

You can imagine my thoughts on cramming. I was delighted at privately having a reasonable excuse to quit tertiary education.

I have had a great life since. AND BEEN LUCKY.

I certainly left the education-dog earlier than I wanted to, when it became wagged by its tail. I continue what I now see as one outcome of the influence of the how and when of my parents. The era and environment.  Enjoying life, though often worrying about whether I or we, as a group (any?) could do better, whatever that means.

We are driven by success at all costs, exhorted to consume more. What you do, who you become, is generally referred to as gene and environment luck. Add a few more: right place, right time:

horsesforcourses, notwhatyouknowbutwhoyouknow.

What about those less ambitious souls, happy to support?

Ignoring traditional carpe diem.

Because vanity will out I hope to pick up a few readers by wallowing in my slow understanding of the various merits of social media. If I ever catch up. There seems something new everyday.

I can't be alone in this surely? Someone always has something to sell. To Old established businesses trying to keep up .. well, good luck ! But ...  

...back to the ride

Here we face Rodney's Pillar. Now for a bit of true back wind. This was testing: easy way out, hard way back, toughens.

Such is the variation of standard of cyclists, that a pair (half-term father and son?)flew past us bird-like, in blue, while we turned into a reliable lane. 15 minutes later, after using a longer route, they repeated their 2x faster flight.

    I knew there were more hedges and woods for homeward shelter. But as soon as we turned there were diversions, traffic lights, puddles and men in hi-viz mending drains. They were as frequent as the rotting flat badgers, whose stink if any, was whipped away in the rising wind. My aide-memoire type pix of these were not needed. After about 3hrs we were on the way home but by then needing a luxury break to eat. Like an ex 12hr rider I used to be at times, I can manage by feeding on the hoof.. we had bonk food ie energy bars and water (but the missus likes to be taken out). I had secretly lightened her bottle so she had less weight and we both had anticipated a light sit-down lunch. The next few pix save a few words. I waited on top of a slope in a wood (with only one gear I must work harder and use momentum but keep moving. Or topple over. A bright green sign in a wood promised a fishing lake where food was effectively served 7/7. We freewheeled down through a farmyard balancing on mud atop clinker or concrete. Surprise surprise! B's fear pheramones attracted the inevitable trailing, though silent, collie....

over mud on concrete.

through to the sandstone rockcaked mud, but in clean air (note the orange lichen on hawthorn) to a lake and shed cafe.

that face won't lighten your on-line album, Mrs W.

homeward overnight fishermen shouted, Not open? it wasn't last night either.

We might have picked the only weekend in the year when a tree had fallen on the owners' house. Or someone had passed away in their sleep. or... or...

They brightened up as I recalled being on a Leics campsite last year, hearing a huge splash. Turning to see what I thought was brown dog: a ghost carp .

 We then had to climb back up over the slimy concrete, pass Cerberus and onto the road again.... then into the wind, past the signposts I omitted to mention... onto our next reliable destination ....

...in Listed Sandstone-land

    No staff around, kitchen muzac drowned our calls. The landlady finally arrived, flushed, apologising for trying out the chef's moped. A virgin ride I would say. What can I get you the chef's good? I did not doubt it.

Indeed the French onion soup was better than I had ever had in France!

     Outside the wind had worsened. But there was that spring feeling. It was like leaving an afternoon cinema performance into light. I hoped no disaster had befallen the house and garden sheds, still an hour away.

C Mick Ward 26^th March 2014