Tag: options

Taller buildings let us design better towns

I lived in a range of places as a kid, partly because my father was a bit of an itinerant who didn’t know what he wanted in life, other than that I mustn’t live with my mother. Go figure.

Eventually I got to settle down with my grandmother, but in the process I learned a lot about life as a child in different places. Where I felt safe and where I did not.

I did not feel safe in large council estates surrounding cities. I did feel safe in a caravan park. I did not feel safe in a city centre. I did feel safe in a built up part of a large city, living in an apartment block.

Right now I live in a mid-sized house, with a decent garden, in the town of Widnes. It’s nice. I genuinely think Widnes is a very lovely place to live in. Where I am, I have easy access to nature, pleasant walks, parks, a GP, a train station, shops and am not too far from a major hospital. It’s getting close to the ideal 15 minute neighbourhood and I’d say it’s one of the better planned areas I’ve lived in. It’s higher density than some old neighbourhoods I’ve been in, but way lower than others.

But it’s not sustainable. It was built on countryside. Soon more houses will be built. These houses will be between 90m² and 150m². Not that big, really, and they’ll take a fair chunk of land up.

Meanwhile, I can think back to a place that I really enjoyed living in as a kid in Spain. It was rented by my father, so it wasn’t unaffordable, and it was bigger and nicer than any house I lived in here in Britain. It was clean, I didn’t suffer asthma there… almost perfect. And within a short walk we had bars, restaurants, a bodega, and sports facilities. I loved it. I could play safely in the playgrounds with friends, and even went to school there as we had a primary school on site!

Here’s a snip from Google Maps.

As you can see it’s a big old building. I estimate there are between 400 and 500 apartments, varying in size from approximately the three bedroom 90m² apartment we lived in and the larger end apartments which I believe are about 140m².

The caravan I lived in with my grandmother can be seen here although in other pictures it seems it’s been knocked down:

Let’s have a think about housing density here, however.

The caravan park I lived on, including internal roads but not the road to the caravan park used about 320m² per home. Some were more densely packed, some more loosely, but it’s a fair approximation. My current house sits on about the same, funnily enough. The apartment block, however, uses about 100m² of land per home and includes playgrounds, two swimming pools, three tennis courts, a basketball court, shops, bars and more! Use the slider below. Both images are at exactly the same zoom level, and see how 400+ homes compares with about 200 homes for facilities and space use. Our towns could be half the size they are, and rammed with leisure facilities, all at lower cost.

Halsnead Park in Whiston with approximately 210 homes Club del Mar in Alicante with approximately 400-500 homes

Why don’t many British people live in apartments then?

Trust.

That’s it. One word. Due to systemic issues in how the UK treats and manages high density housing, we’ve ended up with a situation where there is very little trust in large apartment buildings.

We have miserable stories like The Decks in Runcorn, where residents have been waiting a decade for resolution and have felt locked in their unsellable apartments.

Historically there have been a number of disasters often down to poor design of buildings so that if something bad did happen, people died. Grenfell is the classic disaster.

By Natalie Oxford – https://twitter.com/Natalie_Oxford/status/874835244989513729/photo/1, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59913134

You had this tower block with a single stairway, no decent quality fire extinguishing system built in, flammable cladding. So many people were let down by the way this country treats high density housing. It was a disaster.

Meanwhile, when I visited family in Poland I noticed there were three stairways in the apartment block – the central one and one at each end of the building. Each corridor also had fire doors at each end, with security access, making it safe but also giving people plenty of options for escape. At the bottom you had a playground, sports facilities, and nearby a park and woods along with good access to public transport and very close shops.

High density housing makes living easier and nicer. You don’t have a garden to tend constantly, and you get a decent amount of space for the money because you’re not handing over a pile of money to wealthy landowners.

But we can’t get from where we are to where we should be without addressing these systemic issues. Meanwhile, we can’t be denying young families genuinely affordable, quality housing. So that means we keep building on land that really shouldn’t be built on. Because we’re scared of towers. And I understand why.

We can build better neighbourhoods, with better facilities, and better lifestyles. It’s possible. I’ve seen how it’s done in other countries. Having family in Spain and Poland, and friends in many other countries has taught me a lot. Being poor up to the age of about 25 has also taught me that we can’t foist middle class solutions to working class problems either. That got us the Southgate estate. It stank of piss.

Are VW in trouble with their electric car strategy?

Could VW really be in trouble, if they’re cancelling a factory and pushing back a car launch? I don’t think so, but they’re not entirely in the clear…

I’ve seen people commenting in various EV forums and social media on VW Could Delay Trinity EV Until 2030 And Scrap €2 Billion German Factory | Carscoops and concluding that VW are in big trouble and failing in the market. In reality I think it’s hard from the outside to draw any conclusions. VW is a master of building factories and cars. We know that. They provide variety and interest to a huge number of market segments.

The problem they have isn’t really an ICE/EV problem. It’s not a factory problem. It’s not a mechanical engineering problem. It’s the other ICE – in-car entertainment. They don’t have a software culture. No matter how much of a twonk you think Musk is, you might have noticed his contentious statements are never about software. Nobody says “Gosh, his opinions on software are so controversial.” And that’s because he’s a software guy. Tesla’s board is stuffed with software guys. His main weakness is that he thinks more can be solved with software than is always realistic – AI is still as dumb as a worm and easily tricked. So the newer vision only Tesla’s are known for being a bit, well, not great at stuff like self parking whereas the older hardware based ones do quite well. I’ve embedded the video below just to help:

Back to VW. They really need to get their head around the car’s user focussed software, build the right team, and nurture it well. That’s going to take a little while.

As for scrapping a new factory – that just makes sense – we’re moving to a world where people keep their cars for longer and there’s a larger gross margin per car. You can’t grow your market through price competition any more, VW as a group sell cars in one form or other in literally every geographical market too. They have to drive other value.

The transition to EVs *is* dangerous for older makers, but the choices to buyers are still sparse. Tesla make some of the most efficient electric cars out there, with some delightful software, but the cars aren’t to everyone’s tastes and cover a fairly tightly defined sector. I don’t like the idea I’m tied to apps from their store – why not use Android Auto or Apple Carplay as well?

So the legacy car makers know how to make cars. That’s absolutely not the problem. The “hours to produce a car” bit is spurious – you absolutely can’t compare two makers with that statistic. It’s often quoted, but I’ve seen wildly differing values from the same car maker’s different plants and it’s such a complex subject that isolating a single variable is likely to be misleading. Profitability over capital employed is the only real meaningful measure in any business, and even that can be hard to isolate if the business is deep into self-investment.

My own EV purchase considerations

I’m in the market for a new EV next year. I really like the mechanical side of the VW Group EV range, but the software puts me off. Some of their brands implement it a little better than others, but it’s still a problem, and I can’t afford a Porsche or Audi EV.

Honda aren’t giving me something to progress to from the little e, which has amazing styling and is a lovely thing to drive and own, but the limited utility means it sits firmly as a second car… but then nobody else does such an interesting small EV, and the e-Up is gone if I wanted to go for just cheap utility. In fact

Only a few car makers sell smaller EVs with some sense of personality, decent RWD chassis, nice interiors. I don’t yet feel ready for a road-trip car to be electric only either. As a family it can work out more economical and maybe even greener to take a fully loaded and efficient diesel car on holiday than to fly. Although, yes, you can stop and relax with your car whilst recharging it, the stops come every 200 miles, and if you’re driving through the night, sitting in a car park with nothing to do for 40 minutes to get another 200 miles in just doesn’t appeal. In reality, I think Hyundai’s group, with Kia and Genesis, seem to be leading the pack with reasonably affordable EVs on 800 volt systems, decent in-car software, and good options for different types of buyers. I could see myself in a Kia EV6 or a Hyundai Ioniq, but they’re also still quite big, and I feel like we’ll have too much functional overlap between something like that and the old Volvo, with the result that the Volvo only really gets pulled out when we need two cars – something increasingly rare with more home working and both kids about to be in high school. At that point, we may even feel it appropriate to go down to one useful car in the household again, with the Lotus Elise providing last measure status for those rare days when we need to transport six or seven people.

What do you think?

P.S. This is a little experiment. I realised I was tapping out a huge comment in a Facebook group and thought that with just a small amount of extra work I could put the content on my blog instead of giving it away for free, to barely ever be read by anyone else, in a billionaire’s walled garden. I opine on loads of stuff. A lot of it is just that. Opinions. But whole magazines are sold on the back of the opinions of thirty writers: so I may as well put mine out there on the open web.

Wealth, income, and why that bloke on Question Time with £80k was wrong (and right)

There’s a bloke who’s been on Question Time who makes £80k a year and claimed he’s not in the top 5%. Which clearly makes him a moron and a subject of derision, right? Sock it to the wealthy! They’re all bastards who need putting in their place!

Well actually, he’s not. A lot of people arguing about him are misunderstanding him. Mostly through their own equivalent ignorance.

Now, I don’t know too much about this guy, but in the way he dresses, talks and where he comes from I’ve noticed a few things.

He and I are super similar, but he got a better start in life than me. He’s even doing well as an IT consultant, like I did. And he likes racing motorbikes. I liked racing a Lotus. Both of us have good lives, relatively.

I don’t feel rich either. I know I’m richer than a lot, but I’m still poorer than a lot too. And now I’m going to explain why someone working class, like Rob Barber or myself from relatively humble backgrounds don’t get to feel (or be) as rich as Julian Middle-Class from Surrey even though our incomes may be substantially higher. Because the system is rigged against us, dear reader, and not against the wealthier middle classes.

Those of you who are working class and shouting at Mr Barber are perpetuating this. I’ll explain this over a few key thingies (it’s an official term for worked out stuff, stick with me), using graphs and stuff. I hope it helps. Today is part one, reaching thirty.

1. The starting point

When I was 11 I went and lived with my granny. Lovely, batty lady, from a well off family, oddly enough, but had fallen on hard times through a bad choice of a first husband, deaths, and poor financial planning. We lived in a caravan. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

I don’t know much about Rob Barber’s early life, so instead, I’ll just do a chart of my approximate wealth from childhood to the age of 30 (I’m now fifty) and, for comparison, a similar middle class person who also gets into IT and starts consulting at the age of 27.

Now, let’s take a look at this hastily drawn chart.

I’m very very different to that middle class person. But why? Well, for starters, the middle class parents carefully saved £500 a year and put it into an account for their kid. I had no such luck. So by the time Julian Middle-Class was 18, he had nearly £10k saved to help him in university. I didn’t. I didn’t even have a home and my grandmother was clearly getting older and less able to look after me. I decided I should really work as soon as I finished my A-levels.

In theory that should give me an immediate advantage. But my grandmother died just a couple of weeks after I started work. There was really very little for me to inherit except a knackered piano and a broken Reliant Robin. But what I did need to do was find somewhere to live, get transport for work which wasn’t easily commutable. Thankfully I had a decent job and better income than most of my peers. Unfortunately I spent too much on consumables and partied too much. But I was in my late teens with no parental guidance, so bite me. I got into a bit of debt too, which explains the flatlining.

But at 21, Julian got an inheritance when Nana Mabel died. Only £50k in shares. Good job too as during university he’d been burning through those savings he’d acquired from his parents!

So, already, quite the difference. I’m earning and Julian isn’t, yet he’s the rich one in comparison! He’s joined the Socialist Students Revolutionary Union because he thinks he’s poor with his lack of income and the state should help him not eat into his capital. He’ll eventually turn into a Conservative. But he’s young and feels skint, so he’s all about wealth redistribution. He means income redistribution, actually, but doesn’t realise it.

On graduation from his Computer Science degree, he spends a year working in a company in London, and takes some risks because he knows that if he screws up and loses his job, he can go home to his parents. The risks pay off and he gets promoted twice in his first year!

I didn’t. I was super careful. I still cocked up, but I couldn’t afford to lose my job, and as employers in the area were generally struggling, there weren’t many options in my small northern town to choose from. I could have moved, but that felt risky.

At 22, Julian decides to buy a modest house. This flatlines his wealth a bit for a while because furniture is expensive and he needs to buy a bit, but it gets him on the property ladder. The furniture depreciates immediately, but the house starts to appreciate right away.

At age 24, Julian’s wealth suddenly spikes! Why? Because his great grandparents died within months of each other. They were very elderly, but in good health and had dodged care home costs. He and his brother got a share in a £600k house which they sold because they had an inheritance tax bill. Julian suddenly starts feeling more, well, Conservative, having seen so much money gobbled up by taxes.

At 26, finally clear of debt, I finally buy a house, cheaper than Julian’s, but about the same size because he’s near London and I’m in Widnes. So at least there I get to feel a little smug.

At 27, we both become IT consultants. Like Mr Barber.

I have a good income, but a good income also comes with some expectations. At a client’s I got the piss taken out of me for my cheap suit. At another I was mocked for my smoky old Peugeot. I bought some good suits and a Rover 600. Phew! But that meant my wealth still didn’t climb as much as Julian’s. Also, property prices aren’t rising in Widnes like they are in London’s commuter belt. So his wealth continues to outstrip mine!

Keeping the working classes down

I’m going to go off on a tangent now. I became an IT consultant not because I was desperate to do so, but because at my large corporate employer I’d kind of hit a glass ceiling. People I’d trained up had been promoted above me. I wasn’t a stellar programmer or anything, but neither were they. But they had Oxbridge degrees and I didn’t. They were on £30k and I was on £18k. I could have tried harder, but going back to Julian’s situation where he could take risks… I couldn’t. I was scared. So I was timid and overly cautious quite often. I was very anxious when on call that I didn’t screw up the payroll of the 70,000 people who depended on my decision during a call-out.

Technical people are often looked down on. It’s something graduates do for a short while on their career paths into corporate management. It sucks. At 18 I was a better coder than half the computer science graduates I interview today, but I didn’t know it then. So I was constantly scared of being found out. I thought I was blagging it compared to those with qualifications. But by the time I was 27 I was over that. I’d acquired a bit of security and stability by then.

Young Julians are currently shouting at Mr Barber, as well as actually hard up people who dream of £80k incomes! Neither should. The hard up should look to him as an example of a working class lad done good. He’s still working class, but he’s cracked the glass ceiling. Good on him! He just doesn’t understand himself very well. Not yet. Give him time.

Coming next

I’m my next post I’m going to cover hidden and typically non fungible wealth. The wealth I had by the time I was 27 and didn’t even realise it.

Bono’s office, some time in 2014

Hi guys, I suspect you know why I’ve called you in here for this meeting. Adam, Larry, uhm… hat guy… you know that costs have been rising and, what with piracy and everything we just don’t get the receipts we used to.

Obviously that means we have to find some savings and, after looking through the options the management have come up with a plan to help save the band and allow us to continue delivering on our mission statement of creating slightly banal rock music along with big, over the top live concerts.

I’m really sorry to be the messenger in this, but I have to inform you that your roles are being replaced by a team of six musicians from Hyderabad in India. Obviously this pains me greatly, and eventually I will go as well as I’m staying as a transitional figurehead until somebody just as annoying can be found and trained up.

You’ll be pleased to note that I’ve been able to negotiate a generous three month notice period for you all, including a generous pay off equivalent to an additional six months of pay if you work out your notice period to management’s satisfaction. I hope this is agreeable to you. There will also be assistance in you finding a new job through our redeployment unit who will be offering training and help with tidying up your CV.

What’s that Larry? What will you be doing during the notice period?

Well, mostly you’ll be training up your replacements who are arriving later today. Hat guy, you’ve got Ishaan and Krishna, Larry you’ll be working alongside Arjun and Diya, and Adam, you’ve got Om. You were supposed to have two guys with you but there was a problem with visas or something.

Hat guy, you have a question? OK, fine, “The Edge” it is… I do wish you’d let that go. What’s wrong with Dave eh? Sure sure, we’re digressing… anyway, no, management don’t believe quality will suffer.

I’m obviously unhappy this has had to happen, but I’m sure you’ll all find success in your new jobs out there. I believe most people who suffer redundancy find themselves better off than before! One guy I knew was just a cleaner, got made redundant, got trained as an electrician and makes four times what he did. Amazing eh?

No Adam, I don’t think after this has happened I’ll suddenly find myself in a nice managerial role. I’m as gutted by all this as you all are, I can assure you.

Chaps, I know our new album is part way through, but I’m sure you’ll all be professional about this and make sure that you transfer all your knowledge and current working situation to our new colleagues. Good luck, Larry, Adam and Dave, and let’s stay friends. Right… right?

image credit link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-11-21_U2_@_MSG_by_ZG.JPG

What It’s Like to Dine Out When You’re Veggie

Imagine, you arrive at the restaurant. It’s slick, it’s luscious. Wonderful smells assault your nose.

You’re hungry. Very hungry. This is going to be great!

So, you sit down, the waiter comes over.  Oddly, he doesn’t hand you a menu.  Instead, he decides to tell you what you can eat.

“Tonight, for starters, you can have smoked duck breast with confit duck fritter, orange & shallot dressing.”

“Sounds delicious!” you reply, “What are the other options?”

“I’m sorry sir, that’s the only dish we have for starters.”

“Oh, OK, well, good job it’s tasty! What’s for mains?”

“Roast Duck Breast with spiced plums, shallot puree, spring onions & crispy confit duck,” replies the waiter.

“And?”

“Sir, that’s the only option for you tonight I’m afraid.”

“Bit… heavy on the duck, isn’t it?”

“Sir, you like Duck?”

“Well yes,” you reply, “but twice in one meal is a bit much. Don’t you have anything else?”

“No sir, that’s your only option.”

“Not much of an option. Still, I’m sure it’ll be nice. And what do you do for dessert?”

“Oh sir, naturally we have about twenty desserts you can choose from!” he exclaims, “You can have chocolate mousse, creme brulée, a variety of ice creams…”

You decide to interrupt him and then… realise that it won’t change anything. Your a minority voice – everybody else is offered ten dishes, it’s only you that’s stuck on duck.

And that, my friends, is what many restaurants are like for vegetarians. You get a single cheese based starter, a single cheese based main, and lots and lots of dessert choices. I’d love it if more restaurants got with it and offered a broader range of food. I also think a lot of restaurants could improve their week-night takings by offering healthier food… people who travel a lot for work don’t need to make themselves sick as a result of eating out four or five nights a week.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/unanoslucror/7314646402/ by Jon Smith on Flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0

Blog “Reboot”

Hello – here’s the refreshed blog. I’ve decided to revert to a more typical blog format, after many months of soul searching on the issue. I previously had a layout based on a framework we used at interconnect/it for a couple of clients

But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout, I’ve decided to use an off-the-shelf theme.  I’m now using Khoi Vinh‘s Basic Maths WordPress theme.

Why?

Well, it’s a lovely theme, for starters.  The typography is pretty good.  The archives page is brilliant (check it out) and should be the standard bearer for all themes archive pages.

But the real question for many, I suspect, is why I’m not using an interconnect/it designed theme.  Well, for starters, interconnect/it hasn’t produced an off-the-shelf theme in years.  It’s just not our business.  So rather than use a product of ours, we’d have to spend good and valuable time on creating a new theme.  And, well, why would we want to do that?

Lots of reasons, actually.  I could have a theme coded at the office that really shows off what we can do.  But the problem with that is that there’s not much need.  My blog is not an important one.  It isn’t about WordPress (most WP related content will be on our company site, not my personal one) and it just doesn’t get much traffic.

I run a business.  Its purpose is to make money, employ five people, and, with a bit of luck, turn a reasonable profit.  Its job is not to service my ego or make me look good.  A really good theme costs the equivalent of around £10k-£20k of chargeable time to design, code, test and implement.

Given that we’re turning work away, I thought “why bother?”  And decided to go shopping for something.

So What’s It Like?

It’s actually quite weird using somebody else’s theme.  I actually tried a few out and here are the things I learned that will hold us in good stead.

Themes don’t do enough to make life easy.

No really, they don’t.  One of interconnect/it’s biggest challenges is making sure that WP is as easy to use for clients as possible.  This means following standards, but it also means using some little tricks that help out – for example, registering and setting plenty of different image sizes, and setting/over-ruling whatever the media settings say.

Migrating WP content really sucks.

There’s a fundamental flaw with the default WP export/import.  If you have inline images, although the importer has the ability to download and attach the image in your new site it won’t change the links.  And if you do a search and replace, and your image sizes have changes, your lost.  Totally – the img tag will point to a file that doesn’t exist.

So what do you do?  Well, usually if I’m moving a site from one server to another, even switching domains, it’s a non-issue.  I have my tools.  But if you’re starting from fresh and working like an end-user would then you have to go through every single damn post in order to fix the images.  Every post with an image in it.  That’ll take a while.

If you’re really geeky, you’ll sort it, but it takes time.  Way too much time.  This kind of stuff needs to be sorted and it’s something we may look into as a contribution to the WP project.

Some Plugins Leave Lots of Crud

The reason for a reboot was that I felt that my site’s DB had been filled up with all sorts of crud.  Lots of plugins create tables, leave options, and so on.  Surplus tables have little impact, but they clutter the place up.  But options, lots and lots of them, do have a minor performance hit, and they add up.

Other plugins leave hooks, don’t deactivate properly and so on.  And over the years, I’d been through an awful lot of plugins.  The site hadn’t been redone since WP 2.0 had been set up on it.  I felt it was getting sluggish.

So… there are beautiful and amazing themes out there, and WP is wonderful, but there are little things that could make life just that bit better.  Better migration tools, a better system of managing images within content and their migration, and a better system for activating themes so that image sizes are better handled.

Is it a lot to ask?  Well, we’ll see what we can do about that!

Itinerary Options

I’m still trying to decide what to do next, but I think I’m forming a plan.

I did debate staying here for all the time I have, teaching some web stuff maybe, for free.  But nobody seemed that interested when I mentioned it, so I think it’s worth heading off.

I’ve already been to San Pedro de Atacama, but heck, it’s a nice spot on the planet and is on the way to Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni the world’s largest salt flat.  I love extremes, and that’s as far as it can get, I reckon.

My only worry is that it’ll probably be bloody cold up in the mountains, so I’ll go and buy another fleece and a hat, methinks.  Maybe a pair of gloves to?

After that, La Paz and a bit of exploring there, then take the boat across Lake Titicaca to Puno, then to Cuzco.  If I have time there and feel up to it I can do the Machu Picchu trail as it’s the right season to do it and the weather’s pleasant there right now.  Puno to Machu Picchu are already known to me, but the trail would be new, as would be crossing the lake.  I also know it’s quite easy to get flights from Cuzco to Lima or from La Paz to Lima, should my itinerary slip a little.

So what do you think?  Sounds like a plan?

Arrangements, part dos

Anyone who’s experienced the death of someone close to them will know that there is often a lot to do.  No exceptions here, plus the added pressure of limited time.  However, I’m not entirely unhappy about the time thing… makes me get things done.

Cementaria Parque de Arica

Center stage, as ever!

So, following the funeral I went yesterday to the cemetary to finish off the paper work.  The tomb is owned in perpetuity by me, although a typical arrangement, that may seem strange in Europe, is to simply rent a tomb for a number of years.  Once that time is up the coffin is disinterred and transferred to a shared grave.  I also had to sort out maintenance again, in perpetuity.  It’s not a lot each year, but with no easy way of paying fifteen pounds to an account in Chile every now and then I had no option.

I actually saw this happening on my second visit.  You could see a clearly subdued couple watching as the coffin was lifted from a tomb, cleaned up, sealed in plastic, then loaded onto a hearse.  It was a sad sight.

And it’s all made slightly bizarre by the music that’s piped into the cemetary.  If you have a funeral it does seem to be suitably sombre, but at all other times they appear to often play cheerful music for the workers to enjoy.

Piping out the tunes

It’s tricky feeling sombre and respectful when you can hear an Abba song.

Still, at father’s tomb it wasn’t so audible.

I took some photos, walked around, paid my respects, and headed back to town for a meeting with the reverend David Hucker who carried out the bilingual service.  He’s clearly a nice man, and initially refused my attempt to pay for the service.  It had to be turned into a donation to his church before he’d accept.  Given the service included a singer, I was amazed.  The kindness of people here doesn’t cease to amaze me.  We chatted about why he and his wife came here, my own background and so on.  All very pleasant.

Headstones

I felt like I’d taken enough of Joaquin’s time so I decided I’d make the effort to arrange the headstone entirely on my own.  With limited Spanish and nothing more than a vague idea of where a stonemason may be, I set off.

Now, this is where you have to admire the Chilean desire for efficiency.  The hospital is at one end of a road approximately 1km long.  At the other, lies the municipal cemetary (not the one Chris is in).  Along this road are numerous funeral directors and various parked hearses, ranging from custom made examples to tired looking old American station wagons.  Given this is one of the more important routes to the hospital, I can’t help wonder if it helps reassure incoming patients.  Still, it’s efficient.

After some aimless wandering I spotted a suitable stone mason, went inside, and did my best.  On Monday morning I’m either getting exactly what I wanted, or a very rough approximation with some crazy typeface.  Let’s see.  Again, Chilean flexibility and a can-do attitude helped.  I explained I wasn’t likely to be around for much longer and that I couldn’t wait the usual week.  He made it happen.

The House

It was very dark when I took this picture of the house Chris lived in.

The next job of the day was to visit the house where my father lived.  He’d rented a room here for over ten years.

I had a real shock when the first item brought in was his suitcase.  It’s the only recognisable item I saw in his belongings – the same cream coloured Samsonite suitcase he’d used throughout much of the eighties.  It was a touch battered, but it even still carried a sticker for a hotel in Sluis in the Netherlands (a small, sleepy town once notorious for having the highest density of sex shops in the world) at which I remember him buying me waffles with cream and strawberries each time we visited on his tours.

From there on in it went a little downhill.  There was no wallet, no photo album, no sign of his early past in South America.  Apart from a couple of postcards from his days in Belgium(!) and his passports going back to the mid-eighties there was nothing.  None of my letters to him were there, nor any photos of me or any of his children.  I still have to visit another place where he apparently kept some stuff, but mostly I believe they were just things he sold on the market where had a small spot.

The old suitcase

So what did I find out about him?

Looking at his passports he travelled an awful lot up until around 2006 when he broke his hip-bone in a fall during a tussle of some sort.  He’d been trading in clothes and, for a while, also appeared to be running some sort of homeopathy service.  He was buying significant quantities of remedies from a german supplier in South America whose exact location I’ll be working out shortly.  He had three books in his belongings, two of which were on homeopathy, with the other being an encyclopaedia.

The rest was mostly junk.  Old lottery tickets, some snacks he sold, a collection of out of date milk cartons, old clothes (though mostly in good condition – looks like he still preferred to be smart!) and a lot of random notes.  No notes, however, spoke of feelings, interestingly.  There was no journal, no address book even.  Just accounts of his work, routes he was taking and so on.

To a twelve year old, this hotel did the best waffles in the world. Ever.

There weren’t any signs of written correspondence with friends anywhere.  I did, however, find a printout with what would appear to have been an e-mail address.  So I now know that at least sometimes he went online.  Maybe he did find me after all but opted to keep quiet?  Who knows.

The house itself was relatively clean, with the downstairs occupied by the landlady and her son, and upstairs by various lodgers.  But my father didn’t really spend much time there – as had been the case when I knew him, he preferred to be out at bars or selling at the market, using his modest room as merely a place to sleep at night and to store a few things.

And that’s really it, so far.  There’s little more evidence.

The Wake

After this it was off to the bars where my father liked to hang out.  He had a few acquaintances and friends there.  People he would drink and play billiards with whilst arguing about sports, politics and any other subject that caught his attention.  It’s fair to say he hadn’t changed much, in many ways.

Myself, Rafael, and a guy whose name is evading me right now. I’m drinking pancho.

So we’d agreed to meet up at the pool hall and have a few drinks and a game of billiards (or pool or whatever it’s called) in his honour.

It was fascinating to sit in the places my father sat, and play the tables he’d have played at.  I didn’t get somber.  In fact it reminded me that his life, whilst poor, wasn’t terrible.  He had friends, and he had things to enjoy.  That’s a big part of what we all need.  So we drank a little, and I learned the favoured drinks of his friends – one called pancho, which is basically beer and Fanta mixed together, and another called hota which is a mix of wine and, believe it or not, Coca-Cola.  Yes, I was surprised by that one too!

Later, as I tried to encourage one particular drunk friend of my father’s to NOT play with my camera, Joaquin told me he’d a call for his mariachi band to play a serenade.  “Would you like to come,” he asked.

How could I refuse?

The bar and stools where he often sat

About two hours later I concluded that Chilenos are, essentially, completely mental.  But in a nice way :o)  They arrive, in their slightly too small costumes, from different directions at the specified address.  And they must keep quiet outside and not be discovered.  Because nobody expects the mariachi.

At the allotted moment they all pile into the house and the singing starts.  The lady whose 50th birthday it was seemed bemused at first, but appeared to enjoy.  Her husband, however, was a strong, surly type who looked like someone who made a living from ripping lorry tyres from their rims with his bare hands.

Still, he didn’t kill any of us so I gues it was OK for him.

And then it was off for a burger.  I was granted my wish of a vegetarian sandwich, which turned out to be a chip sandwich with salad and avocado in it that tasted suspiciously meaty (cooked on the same griddle, no doubt)… but I had to chuckle at many of them ordering nothing more exciting than a cup of tea with their meal.  Which was, of course, served in china, with a saucer.  Don’t see that much in English burger bars at 2am in the morning…

A burger and a nice cup of tea at the end of a night out.

It’s now Saturday here and I’ll admit to a slightly lazy day.  I got up late, wandered around town, had yet another terrible breakfast (they’re better in Peru, I have to say) and generally felt slightly subdued.  The day before had been quite happy, really, and now it was simply about going back to normal.  I have no tasks left until Monday, and attempts to find options such as teaching people how to create websites have failed to elicit much interest.

So I’ll go through the small bag of items I took from my father’s place, take some notes, and generally meander today.  Don’t expect an exciting post tomorrow!  I also have to decide what to do next.  I still have two weeks to use up, but no clear leads in other countries.  I suspect once I’m finished here it might just be time for a bit of a holiday.  I just need to decide – relaxed, or exploratory?  Any thoughts?

Iceland In Winter

I expected more ice, it has to be said.  I also packed my thermals and it turned out to be warmer than home.  But, I also know how bitterly cold it can get in countries like this in Winter even if the thermometer doesn’t show it as looking so bad – driving rain, strong winds and pervasive dampness can chill you to the bone where the same temperature on a sunny day in the Alps could feel positively balmy.

This was my 40th birthday present from Romana.  The hope had been to see the Northern Lights, something I always wanted to witness.  Sadly the weather and conditions meant it wasn’t to be.  But I still appreciated the trip and the unique experiences – it was a great gift!

I’m not going to extol the virtues of Iceland too much here – it’s a small country, with a rich culture and heritage.  It’s definitely one of those places worth visiting if you get the chance.

One note, though – I expected to be hungry, but it turns out there’s six vegetarian restaurants, and most (but not all, by any means) restaurants offered fairly decent vegetarian options.

PS – some pictures are rather grainy as I had to push the camera somewhat.  This is one dark country!