My fab new running gloves

As you can imagine, the cold weather is a bit of a problem for us runners at the moment. And never more so than first thing in the morning when you can actually hear the howling wind before you even step out of bed. So I've treated myself to a pair of Vangard lightweight gloves. I did a Buy Now on eBay, for £9.49 and gave them a test run yesterday morning.

They're fantastic. or at least that's how they seem, though the test run did coincide with a particularly good performance from me, especially for a morning run (must have been the pasta I had the night before at Sophie's).

I'm pretty sure they're designed for cyclists - at any rate I bought them from an online cycling store. Well I think they work just as well for runners if not better. When you're running in the UK, even on the coldest wintry days, most people will only really need gloves for the first 1o minutes or so. Because my limbs are constantly moving, I'm pretty warm all over after that. Whereas cyclists arms and hands are more stationary, so maybe these only work as liners for them. However I only need these lightweight gloves, and because they wick properly, I don't overheat later on in the run. Previously I was wearing fleece gloves and then finding that I had to take them off mid-run.

So that's £9.49 well spent. Vangard lightweight gloves highly recommended and not just another gimmicky running product that we don't really need.

Slaughtering the Arts to pay for the Olympics

For two consecutive days now, I have stumbled accidentally on arts projects or organisations being decimated through the starvation of arts funding that seems to be a direct consequence of the spiralling costs of the London 2012 Olympics. Yesterday at lunchtime I was browsing the Birmingham Post in our downstairs cafe area when I saw to my horror that the Birmingham Opera Company was threatened with closure due to the stoppage of its funding from the Arts Council. Whilst I'm not opera-literate myself, a condition that I have no wish to defend, I'm aware of how innovative the productions of Birmingham Opera Company are, and as they said themselves in the Birmingham Post, once you get rid of organisations such as this, you can't get them back.

This evening, I went onto the website of my favourite theatre company, The Wrestling School, which performs the works of Howard Barker, arguably Britain's most innovative playwright. On the home page, was news that for the first time, The Wrestling School had failed to obtain the necessary funding for one of its productions. I remember very clearly the first time I saw one of their productions. It was at The Door studio of the Birmingham Rep (who usually premier their productions), and when it began, it was so different from anything I'd ever experienced in a theatre that it was like breathing in oxygen for the very first time. The Wrestling School urged people to sign the online petition on the Downing Street website calling for The National Lottery Fund to stop funding the Olympics. This petition has now closed.

But it's not an either or situation. I am a big fan of athletics - I attend live athletics events in Birmingham whenever I can, and last year sat in the NIA for three days with my friend Sally watching the European Indoor Athletics championships that Birmingham was privileged to host. Athletics is about the physical nobility of being a human being. It's about competing, but it's also about demonstrating the human potential at its finest. The arts is something different. It takes us out of our mundane lives and raises us up into a higher sphere. In 1997, when my life dipped into what I hope will be an all-time low, I was in Cornwall, and went to the Tate St Ives on my own. Just for two hours I was able to revel in the light and beauty of the St Ives school of painters and leave the utter misery of my existence behind.

Individuals and society need both the arts and sport. British society could benefit considerably from hosting the 2012 Olympics in so many ways. It's not just about regeneration and improved facilities. At the European indoor athletics, the renaissance of Spanish sports as a consequence of the Barcelona Olympics was there to see in terms of the success of its athletes and the passionate fervour of its supporters. The arts in Britain, already weakened by decades of funding cuts since the Thatcher era, is now severely under threat, and that that is a problem for all of us, not just those employed in the cultural sector.

A personal review of 2007

Every year, on New Year's Eve, Dave and I each write a list of the most positive outcomes of the past year, plus a list of the bad things. In my quaint little way, I then put the lists into a box labelled "Nostalgia" in our study. So this year I decided to blog our lists.

Sarah's Best of 2007 List

1. Our one-week holiday in Morocco (Marrakesh) in February, including picking up over £500 from British Airways for agreeing to get a later flight than the one we were booked on.
2. Dave's outlandish huge Afro wig that he wore at Christian's 40th (seventies fancy dress) party.
3. Dining at Simpson's in Birmingham with Dave after my Marketing exams in June.
4. Wave jumping on the island of Koh Chang, Thailand, in August.
5. Thai cookery course at Chiang Mai, Thailand, in August.
6. The whole of our weekend in St Ives, Cornwall, in the middle of December. Wintry walks on the beach, Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden and the Alba restaurant were all highlights.
7. My relations with my in-laws improved considerably over the year, due mainly to activities around Dave's Dad's 80th birthday.
8. Debating Matters - I was a judge in the West Midlands round of this inter-school debating competition, and it was enormously fun and rewarding.
9. Sitting with Dave and Elsie at Hilary's barbecue. I hadn't seen them for years, and we chatted the afternoon away in the sunshine. Dave died a few weeks later.
10. Going to the Take That concert in November at the NEC with friends.
11. Kevin Rowlands (ex Dexy's Midnight Runners) DJs at the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath. When I heard him play Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, I thought that anything could happen next. And when I saw Shug dancing to Eddie and the Hot Rods 70s hit "Do anything you want to do", I knew I'd been right.
12. My paper is accepted for the ER&L conference due to take place in March 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia.
13. Dave and I treat my brother to the 7 course taster menu at Juniper's restaurant, Altrincham, one of the best restaurants in England.
14. Working on Project Xedio for Talis.
15. My social life improves immeasurably, for reasons I've not altogether worked out, but maybe it's something to do with good luck.

Some bad things in 2007...

1. Gina Owens dies.
2. Dave Hallsworth dies.
3. The CIM Marketing course took up far too much of my time.
4. Too ill to run the Manchester 10K race.
5. Car crash at Five Ways, Birmingham. A taxi driver runs into the back of me while I'm waiting at the roundabout.
6. My head splits open at home when I bash my head into an item of furniture, and I end up spending a whole Friday evening in A&E.
7. Dave was too ill to go out exploring Kuala Lumpur with me, and I had to go on my own.
8. I faint on the Bahrain - Bangkok flight due to dehydration.
9. The bathroom, which was supposed to be done in 5-7 days, wasn't complete for 4 months, and was an absolute nightmare, in the midst of which we started contacting the media.
10. My Dad's brother, my Uncle John, sent my Mum the nastiest Christmas card imaginable. It began "To Dora. What a shame you haven't got any grand-children at this time of year." And then got even worse...

The optimist goes into a dark place and comes back with hope

Last night I went to see Jim Crace speak at the Birmingham Conservatoire, an event scheduled at the tail-end of this year's Birmingham Book Festival.

He was introduced by, and later entered a staged dialogue with, John Dolan (of the Museums Libraries and Archives Council - or MLA - and formerly Head of Birmingham Libraries). It's always interesting to see people in different contexts. I last saw John Dolan speak at the PLA public library conference in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago. Last night John seemed equally at home chatting to a prominent author, and it suited his relaxed style.

But the star of the show was Jim Crace, who turned out to be a very engaging speaker. It's one thing to have a local author (Jim lives in Moseley, not far from my house, and where I socialise), but it's another thing entirely to have one of international literary renown. I've read two of his novels, Quarantine and Being Dead, both of which stand out as very well-executed works of contemporary fiction. Even his speech glitters with metaphors and is perfectly composed.

There were two particular strands in his speech which interested me. Firstly, he declared himself to be the "least autobiographical author you're likely to encounter". This made me think about the nature of contemporary fiction. I daresay that George Eliot's Middlemarch was not so autobiographical either - it's hard to imagine a woman in early 19th century Britain being able to experience directly those of an up and coming doctor, such as her character Doctor Lydgate. My Dad used to say that no-one put into words the experience of being a research scientist better than George Eliot. But then 19th century writers such as Eliot, Dickens and Tolstoy were using an authorial voice, a voice that they must have been completely comfortable with. In contrast, today's writers usually write in the voice of a character. Crace spoke, unusually, about some work in progress - a novel in which he's exploring the realisation that in his own political past, he wasn't as courageous as others were. To have written about a highly courageous political activist, therefore, would have moved him away from his strength and range, and was therefore not feasible .

The second main strand of his speech was no less than the USA. His latest novel (of which I now have a signed copy following a pleasant little chat with him at the end) is called The Pesthouse. This came out of Crace's ambivalent feelings towards the States. On the one hand, he professes a love for the States, for providing a home over centuries to various groups, from the Irish escaping the potato famine of the 1840s, to the Jews arriving from the East European Schtetls. And yet, it is also strongly associated with cultural invasions - the coca cola can in the South Seas, as Crace said. So to address these feelings, Crace has, in The Pesthouse, invented a future where the USA has become a failing nation from which everyone is fleeing. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this paradox is realised in the narrative. Crace concludes this strand by suggesting that maybe the things he loves about the USA are eternal, whilst the things he hates may only be the duration of one single presidential term!

And as for the quotation from Crace in the title? Well that didn't have anything to do with either strand of the talk. It's just a good quote.

Misleading Amazon Star Ratings

I have been a member of a book group for over 5 years. There's been a few personnel changes during that time - one or two people have moved away, one person found that she couldn't find any reading time once she'd had her first baby, and we welcomed two friends, one of whom had just moved into the area, and the other approached us as she was fed up with her current book club which was little more than a dining club for middle-class mothers. But essentially we've remained constant. In May this year we celebrated our 5th birthday with a long weekend in Hay on Wye. It was lovely. Over the lifetime of the reading group, we've evolved a number of rules of engagement. First of all, we take it in turns to host the meetings, and the hostess (we're female only) has to make a meal as well as serve drinks and so on. For about the past year and a half, the hostess has additionally had to propose three books for election, the book receiving the most votes being the one that we'll all read the following month and review at the next hostess's home. You get the picture, I'm sure.

So as the beginning of September loomed, and with it my hosted meeting, my mind started turning around suitable books, and much perusing on Amazon's Listmania! ensued. I felt that it would be interesting to put a work of non-fiction for the first time, and evolved various criteria for how I would select such a book. It had to be reasonably accessible, for example. And not too long - 30o pages max. The right non-fiction refused to materialise.

Finally, I was waiting for a train one day at Birmingham New Street station, when it occurred to me that any non-fiction book for sale in a train station bookshop should be intrinsically accessible. I started browsing through the History session and my attention was drawn to "The Thames : England's River" by Jonathan Schneer. My interest in the history of London was crystallised about a year ago when I discovered that until relatively recently, the Thames was only one of a number of rivers in London, and I've always thought it a privilege to be living so close to one of the greatest cities in the world. So maybe this book on the Thames was it. This is when a further selection criteria came into play. I had decided that I would only pick a book with an average 5 star rating on.

When I got home I found Schneer's book on Amazon and browsed through the reviews. To my pleasure, I found that every single reviewer had given it a star rating, and there was a number of references to how readable it was. I had found my non-fiction book.

On Sunday September 9th, we all met at my house, and after discussing the last book (The Road by Cormac McCarthy) and eating dinner, I presented my three options. There was slight consternation at the appearance of a history book, but people had open minds and it was voted in (by a narrow margin, it has to be said, and I had to use the deciding vote which is the hostess's perogative!)

A couple of weeks later, then, I started reading The Thames. The first chapter, which went through the prehistoric era, was fascinating, but as we progressed, it started getting a bit hard going. My head was spinning with the speed of the narrative, with important eras such as the Tudors flashing by in less than a page. I experienced mounting panic as I thought of my friends struggling through this stuff, knowing it was all my fault. The narrative did settle down a bit, for example the Blitz had its own chapter, and was incredibly interesting. I did learn quite a bit, but the book was definitely faulty - it was episodic and the metaphors of the river were a bit laboured to say the least.

Last Sunday we all met up at Sally's house to discuss it. We all agreed that it was pompous, with no real narrative flow, and dubiously selected historical episodes, well those of us who had managed to read it agreed anyway. Everyone really wants to choose the book that is unanimously loved and remembered (even though these make for pretty dull discussions), and I'm no exception. Truly on the back foot, I explained that I'd made sure that it had an average 5 star recommendations on Amazon before selecting it. We all speculated about how couild this be so? The best explanation we came up with was that the recommendations might have been from Anglophile Americans. I agreed to go back and check.

So this lunchtime I've been onto Amazon to revisit those recommendations, and am disappointed to find that the 6 reviews have been written by only two people. In fact only two people, namely Kurt Messick and J Chippendale (who incidentally are both English) are responsible for all 6 reviews. Each have written one review and then posted it three times.

Are Kurt and J. friends of the author or are they working for the publisher, perhaps? I think we should be told.

Shouldn't Amazon be checking for duplicate reviews that could be (deliberately or otherwise) distorting the overall rating, perhaps? Yes definitely. The average star rating is displayed prominently with the book's description, right from the initial search results onwards. I for one, use it as a guiding factor when purchasing all sorts of stuff on Amazon, including books. Next time, I'll check the reviews a little more carefully, especially when it's not just my own enjoyment but that of other people that's at stake.

Be who you are, 100%

On Sunday, I went to the funeral of Dave Hallsworth, aged 78. He died a few weeks ago, on 30th August, but the donation of his body to medical research - his express wish - lifted the usual constraints of time and place, so we were able to celebrate his life and mourn his passing on a Sunday in the majestic surroundings of the Palace Hotel in Manchester.

Dave, like his wife Elsie who survives him, was a life-long fighter. He was entirely true to himself, ruthlessly honest with everyone he engaged with, and battled to change the world in line with his beliefs.

Dave and Elsie had two sons and some (at least two - not sure how many exactly) grandchildren. Part of Dave will undoubtedly live on, then, in future generations.

But Dave's legacy transcends the biological. Mick Hume, one of the speakers at the funeral (who also gives Dave an honourable mention in Monday's Times), described Dave as the most vehement and uncompromising atheist that he had ever known (never having met my Dad, presumably). And yet Mick expressed his hope that Dave's spirit was at work in some way in that room on Sunday.

When someone like Dave Hallsworth, one of the great men of the British 20th century imo, dies, the sadness that we feel should gradually give way to something more enduring and edifying. Whether we remember the things someone once said, using them as a tool to fashion our own thoughts and ideas, or somehow try to incorporate something of the essence of that person in the way we live, we should apply more than a narrow biological definition to Legacy. We all have a legacy to build and offer to future generations, whether we are parents or childless.

Today, as I remembered the man who was famously court-martialled for attempting to set up a trade union in the Royal Navy (!), I thought of Dave's energetic fearlessness, his tireless drive for a more just world, and I felt that the day became more intense, more purposeful, as I endeavoured to be what I am, 100%, and all of the time.

Impressions of Thailand

I got back from our three week holiday in Thailand on Sunday (19th August – same day as their referendum on the constitution). I had a great time, especially in Bangkok which is such an exciting city (though loads of people we met couldn’t get out of the place quickly enough). I remember clearly the point, in the early 1990s, at which I realised that something really dynamic and exciting was going on in South East Asia, and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get out there and see it for myself.

I particularly enjoyed getting to grips with a country about which I previously knew very very little. I read the Bangkok Post most days and tried to piece together some robust impressions, combining my reading with my observations whilst travelling.

Obviously the referendum was the most significant theme in the country and was on the front page of the Bangkok Post most days. It wasn’t difficult to get a sense of censorship and manipulation in the media’s treatment of the issue, and this impression was confirmed by my friend Supanza, who has been following the news avidly from her new home here in Birmingham. I look forward to discussing this in greater detail when she and her husband Mark come over to our house for dinner in a couple of weeks’ time. I’ll try to resist making one of the dishes that we learnt to make on our Thai cookery course on an organic farm just outside Chiang Mai.

I think that the most acute comment I read about the new constitution was in Bangkok Post about a week ago. It said that if a group of military chiefs can stage a coup simply on the basis of corruption and write a new constitution for the nation’s consideration, then the biggest problem that arises is one of ongoing instability. Because if one group of military chiefs can do that, then presumably in a year or so, some other group, making the same perception of corruption, can just go ahead and do the same thing all over again.

Of course, one of the most striking elements of Bangkok is the sex tourism. According to a thriller I read called Bangkok Eight, if you take the whole of the Thai female population that is reasonably physically attractive, 20% of them will prostitute themselves at some stage in their lives. And the second statistic that I found amazing, is that the West2East prostitution in Thailand, so prevalent in areas such as Sukhumvit Soi 4, represents only about 5% of the overall sex tourism of Thailand i.e. the rest is Thais serving Thais, in venues such as barber shops. That makes for one hell of a sex industry. The novel explores (in a fairly superficial sort of way) how Buddhism can accommodate prostitution to an extent. This made me remember our trip to Cuba a few years ago, where there was unquestionably more social tension around prostitution than is the case in Thailand – and I see that as a combination of the Catholic Church and the Revolution (which justified itself partly on the basis of eradicating exploitation of Cubans by Americans).

Another interesting discovery I made in the Bangkok Post was that the “happiness level” of Thailand (the so-called Land of Smiles) is actually quite low. The article attributed this mainly to economic factors, specifically to job insecurity (fear of low labour costs in China) and the credit boom which is engendering high stress levels over debt payment.
Maybe one of the effects of the Thai credit boom is the impressive retail sector of Bangkok. I’ve honestly never experienced anything like it. The most recent shopping mall to spring up is called the Siam Paragon (see image above), and it’s wonderful. Highlights for me were the Ferrari showroom (on the second floor!!), the amazing bookshop on the fourth floor (where I bought a disappointing Thai novel called Chalida – a Thai family drama), and the cinema on the top floor (where we were initially tempted by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 3D, but settled for The Simpsons. It was fascinating to see every single person stand up for the Thai National Anthem – I myself have only once in my life stood up for the British National Anthem, though I accept that I’m exceptional in that sense). And Siam Paragon was only one of a whole series of malls in Bangkok, many of which ran into each other, and all of which were several storeys high.

Consumerism in both Thailand and Malaysia (we stayed in Kuala Lumpur for a few days in the middle of the trip) seemed to be conducted exclusively in English language. I couldn’t help feeling that some of the impact of the branding would be lost in translation. For example, Bobby Brown’s eye-shadow colours have English names, and I wonder how many Thais will appreciate the nuances of a colour called Heather.

There are definitely pockets of poverty in Thailand, but the Economist reported last week that the rich – poor gap is not as wide in Thailand as it is in some other Asian countries.

Thankfully my enjoyment of Thailand was not confined to reading Bangkok Post. The Thai cookery course I alluded to was a fantastic day spent with a lovely international crowd, mostly childless which is always good. You can’t fail to be impressed by the ultra-modern skyline of Kuala Lumpur, and we ate wonderful food in both countries. I’m glad we tried Malayan food, which is a bit more elusive in Malaysia than Thai cuisine is in Thailand. We spent 6 days on a lovely island called Koh Chang, which is very close to Cambodia. We made friends with a really nice couple from Vienna, who were staying in a nearby resort, and we enjoyed the time we spent with them. The malls of Bangkok and also the night market of Chiang Mai are both great shopping experiences. And Thai people are really really really friendly and polite, and they’re living in one of the safest places that I’ve ever visited.

The disappointments were few and far between, but I suppose the Floating Market didn't really live up to expectations - it's little more than a tourist trap these days, elephant riding is definitely over-rated, but bamboo rafting is the experience you should avoid at all costs, as it's simply the most tedious way of spending 40 minutes that the tourist industry has yet to come up with.