• My mother lives with us, in her own part of the house which I pretty much built myself. Her shower pump has stopped working, so yesterday I went to make a list of things to get so I could put the new one in. This time I was going to do it properly and get the cold water connected to the low pressure feed from the attic. I pushed one of the old pump’s connectors to one side to get a better look and it snapped! Hot water began spraying all over the floor.

    Panic seizes the brain. I could not think where to turn the water off. Slowly it came back to me. the red handle in the airing cupboard. So, I averted that crisis. While mopping up, I realised I would have to get on with the job. I went off to get the parts and got to work.

    Using a blow torch in a confined space is not a good idea. The confined space was essentially a chimney, so I couldn’t get one of the joints hot enough to melt the solder. By the time I realised I should get an old-fashioned compression joint – one you do with spanners – the shops were shut.

    Also, by this stage, I realised that the pipe that I thought was the low pressure feed, was in fact the same mains pipe I’d used before. The whole afternoon had been a waste of time. I was convinced there was a low pressure pipe hiding under the floor boards, but it now seems there isn’t.

    My simple job has now turned into a major bathroom refit. I have to rip off the side wall of the shower so I can bring a new pipe down from the attic. That means rebuilding the whole vanity unit redecorating.

    Not what I had set out to do. It never rains but it pours!

  • keepleftI disturbed a hornet’s nest yesterday. I gave a talk over the weekend about creative organisation and was explaining how the left and right sides of the brain work differently. The left side deals in order and language. The right side is a bit airy-fairy and deals with the world in a wider, looser way. The right side takes everything in, decides what is important and then passes it over for the left side to organise and make sense. That is a very crude description.

    One of my audience had had a couple of small strokes and wondered how that might affect their creativity. They told me there were some words that they just could not remember. This led into a discussion about left and right-handedness. Counter-intuitively, the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa. We then wondered if right-brained thinkers might be more left-handed than the norm.

    Yesterday I asked my FaceBook friends how many were left-handed, as most of my FaceBook friends are writers or illustrators. There was no statistical anomally in the results – If I’d thought about it more I would have known that.

    However, I was not ready for the tirade of abuse that came back about left-handed people! My friends are intelligent writers and thinkers, so I assume that they were being mostly ironical, but a base hatred of all things left-handed was very evident.

    My sister is left-handed, so I grew up with it as an everyday occurrence and learned all about her difficulties with scissors and clothes’ irons and other tools that are made for right-handers. I read on one forum yesterday, how someone said they hated sitting next to left-handers because their writing arms bumped into each other. The obvious answer is to change places! I remember fondly sitting next to a left-hander, who was the object of my affections when I was about six. We both had long pencils with walking stick ends – they looked like candy canes – the hooks entwined as we wrote. I was most upset when the teacher made us swap places. I suppose I was always a romantic.

    Yesterday I was reminded that the word sinister comes directly from the latin word for left and that left-handers were often considered to be witches. One of my friends, assuming I was left-handed for asking the question, wondered why it hadn’t been beaten out of me at an early age! I guess this must happen. I found a few forums with concerned mothers asking how to make their left-handed children right-handed. In the past, left-handers had their arms tied up behind their backs to force them to use their right arms. My Grandmother had a little board tied around her neck to let everyone know that she was a Welsh speaker in the times when they tried to beat the language out of children and make them speak English. It’s the same thing.

    You would think by now that we understand everything about human nature and have become more accepting, but it seems we are hard-wired to go along with the norm. Anything that deviates is deviant – obvious. I won’t mention that I grew up with bright red hair – lucky for me it turned very dark as I got older.

    Alright, I will mention it as I’m frequently shocked at the way “Gingers” are abused on the TV and in the press. It doesn’t seem to happen in other countries. Americans are amazed at the way we treat ginger hair. I think it’s a race memory hatred of the Vikings. Red-heads are the only people you can legally be nasty to nowadays. When the UK had it’s enormous influx of immigrants in the 60s and 70s red-heads were forgotten and had a quiet time as we told jokes about, and were generally hostile to, the Pakistanis, West Indians and the Irish. But now it’s against the law to tell those jokes or show any animosity to other races, so tough luck on Gingers – they are fair game again – and, so it would seem, are the sinister ones amongst us.

  • I’m still re-building my website at the moment. There is a lot to get back to bring it all up to date. It had grown like topsy over the years. Having been hacked meant that I had to get rid of a load of old scripts that had become easy prey for hackers.

    I’m now creating a sensible structure to my site, nesting folders and giving folders names that mean something within the whole site. I’m also naming folders with an eye to the future, incase I want to differentiate files easily for reasons of gaining useful statistical information.

    I’ve outsourced my blog hosting to WordPress.com bringing it into my site as an iframe. I’ve organised the Blog CSS so that is looks seemless with my site (www.shoorayner.com). I wasn’t earning anything off Google AdWords, so I’d rather have WordPress handle the business of keeping me safe and up to date. (I’m pretty sure that the hackers got in through my self-hosted WordPress folders). After couple of weeks I realise there are other benefits. Being on the wordpress.com site brings me viewers that I’d not get otherwise. My tags reach further that my posts. They trigger other pages to include your posting. I get different readers and different statistics about them. Before I had to wade through my site stats to make sense of the blog stats.

    My site stats have changed radically. I could see the moment the robots and spiders found I’d changed everything. They went zipping through the new folders to bring their databases up to date. Of course it’s a risk changing one’s site. The search engines have you all mapped out. Now they are providing links that don’t exist anymore, so I’m getting a lot of 404 documents not found at the moment. These are coming from dead links on search engines and, sadly. dead links on user’s favourites. Those will have to build up again.

    In the meantime, I have a much more manageable site that I’m now happy to grow. The site statistics make much more sense too. What is surprising is that most people want the boring pages. The fun ones, that take so much more time and effort, don’t seem to be appreciated as much. I wonder if that will change as time goes on and users begin to bookmark pages and the search engines take them directly to the pages they want. This time I’ll try to keep on top of the backup!