Wilf Wilson

I’m moving back to St Andrews tomorrow morning.

I haven’t been this excited in years.

“From WBEZ Chicago it’s This American Life distributed by Public Radio International.”

Just over a month ago I caught podcast fever like I’ve never experienced before. Having listened to Andy Ihnatko recommending the show for years on MacBreak Weekly, and more recently having my good friend and future housemate Mr Adam Kesby recommend it, when an episode of This American Life was mentioned on one of my favourite blogs, I took notice.

I decided to check it out, and I loved what I found.

Do you love watching documentaries? Do you like learning things and finding things out? Do you enjoy feeling cultured and having a wide view of things? Do you want to get inspired? Yeah? Then you’ll love This American Life. It gives me the same enthusiasm that the best television and film documentaries do, and you can listen to it whilst walking. Or eating. Or gardening. Or shitting. It’s up to you.

Episodes of This American Life are always an hour long, and are usually split into several “acts”, unified by a single theme. Each act is a different segment of the show and could be anything, but it’s usually documentary style. It could be personal, factual, funny, moving, or interesting. The About Us page puts it this way:

There’s a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It’s mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always. There’s lots more to the show, but it’s sort of hard to describe.

They do have a longer guide, if you’d like.

Episode #441, “When Patents Attack!“, was the first episode of the show that I ever listened to, sitting in Coach D of the northbound Highland Chieftain on 26th July. I was returning to Perth after a short stay in London, during which time episode #441 was released. In the previous months, there had been much bother in the ‘tech community’ about the morality of software patents and the existence of patent trolls. Of particular concern was a company called Lodsys, which was suing iOS developers over their use of In-App Purchase techniques.

Basically: it’s all a load of evil bullshit, and so This American Life decided to cover it. All of the tech blogs of course linked to it, with a strong recommendation to listen. This time I followed the advice. Really, you should listen to the episodes if you’re at all interested in the issues of software patents and patent trolls. It’s very good (although not quite one of the best).

The next episode I listened to was #438, called “Father’s Day 2011“. It was even better than “When Patents Attack!”, and the stories it contained stick in my mind. Moving. I listened to it whilst gazing out the window at the passing coastlines of Northumberland and East Lothian. It was a decent journey.

441 is a large number of episodes, yet as I write this entry in early September even more episodes have been broadcast. 444 in total. The first episode “New Beginnings” was broadcast in November 1995, when the show was called Your Radio Playhouse. Read the Wikipedia article if you’d like some history. The lack of polish and new-ness of the show is obvious in the first episode, but the promise is already there. For you number-lovers out there keeping track, there have only been about enough episodes for a new one every fortnight. Whilst an episode is aired every week on radio stations in America, roughly half of the time a rerun of an episode from the archives will be aired, rather than a new one. That’s fine by me.

The show is also distributed as a podcast. The most recently broadcast episode is always available for download from the feed, without commercial breaks. The available episode is therefore not necessarily the most up-to-date one. As explained on the TAL podcast page, however, all of the episodes are available to stream for free or to download for a dollar ((Although anyone with some technical know-how can easily find the URL to the mp3s which the flash player uses to stream past episodes. They don’t make it hard to find, but remember the show needs money to survive.)). You can browse the archives, and listen, on the website.

The host of almost all 444 episodes has been Ira Glass. He’s a journalist by trade and the creator of the show, and he’s wonderful.

He’s got a weird voice, but I quickly grew used to it and started to like it. He seems like a really funny, sometimes playful, all-round decent sort of guy. Really endearing.

Perhaps my favourite thing about This American Life is that there is such a huge back catalogue. The About Us page says:

Probably the best way to understand the show is to start at our favorites page

That’s probably a good idea. Many of my favourite episodes coincide with their favourites, so if this post has interested you in the show and you want to know where to start, I have some ideas. I’ve listened to about 70 episodes so far, much less than a quarter of the total. Here are the ones that I can recommend to get you started:

• #168: The Fix Is In
  • The story which led to the movie “The Informant” about a guy informing about a price-fixing ring. The website describes it: “The whole program is devoted to one story, in which we go inside the back rooms of one multinational corporation and hear the intricate workings—recorded on tape—of how they put the fix in”. It’s enthralling.
• #396: #1 Party School
  • This episode’s about the drinking culture at Penn State University in America. I listened to this whilst walking 6 miles from my brother’s place through central London to St Pancras station about 2 weeks ago.
• #419: Petty Tyrant
  • The story of a corrupt maintenance man’s rein of terror in Schenectady, NY.
• #430: Very Tough Love
  • Have you ever heard of ‘drug court’? It’s this American thing which is about getting treatment for drug offenders rather than prison time. This episode is about one drug court judge who seems to be a total bitch.
• #436: The Psychopath Test
  • This one’s about psychopathy. Are you a psychopath? Probably not. But would you know if someone else was?

Something I’ve noticed about my favourite episodes: they tend to be composed of just a single ‘act’. A single story. Most episodes aren’t so focused on just one story, which I’m glad of. I love the more varied episodes, but my very favourite episodes mainly seem to be those which cover just one main story. Maybe I like the depth of insight which they give me. Maybe it’s something else.

I’ve not listened to an episode for over a week, but that says more about my current emotional state than it does about my enthusiasm for the show. I just have other things to think about. Because that’s what the show makes you do: think. And laugh. And maybe cry. I’ve not had that happen, yet, but I’ve barely got started listening…

Further Reading:

• This American Life’s “About Us” page.
• Their “About Our Radio Show” page, more extensive.
• Their favourite episodes lists.
• The podcast’s RSS feed.

I want to try something different here today.

A few weeks ago, in the middle of August, I was taking the train down south. As usual I took the Highland Chieftain ((The Highland Chieftain is the only train from Perth which goes to Edinburgh and then directly onto the ECML and London. I like it because it means I don’t have to change, and I get to travel on an HST.)) but on this day it was delayed for 10 minutes before being allowed to enter Perth station. By the time I’d got on and travelled to York, we’d lost even more time and I missed my onward connection. Instead of catching my reserved direct train to Grantham, I would have to make alternative arrangements. Fortunately I’d prepared for such a possibility, and I knew that I could wait about 20 minutes and catch a train to Newark, and from there I could make my way to Grantham.

York station:

Without a reserved seat on these trains I would have to be quick about getting myself a seat. On the train from Newark I was the only one in my whole HST coach, but from York the 225 was packed. I found a seat in Coach H ((Half of which was the train shop.)) – an aisle seat of an airline-style pair (no table).

There was a very peculiar man across the aisle, a few rows ahead of me.

He was in the aisle seat of another airline-style pair, and he was facing me. We weren’t face to face but I could see him clearly. If the direction he was facing was 12 o’clock, I could see him from 2 o’clock. I didn’t get a picture (too weird), but I wanted to. Let me try to describe to you what I saw:

• This man was in his forties.
• He was white, looked British.
• He didn’t look retarded.
• His face was boney.
• He wore a royal blue jumper.
• On the left breast of that jumper was embroidered a 3-inch diameter picture of a black and white cat.
• He wore typical blue-jeans coloured jeans, mostly likely Tesco Value.
• He wore hiking boots – fabric-type, not leather.
• He had very bad teeth: discoloured, misaligned, pointed.
• He had an awful grin semi-permanently fixed on his face, revealing his very bad teeth and a lot of gum.
• His hairline was considerably receded, so he had shaved his head, leaving a short stubble of hair where it still grew.
• His face was clean shaven, totally.
• He wore sunglasses that looked like the wrap-around goggles that you wear at the orthodontist to shield your eyes from ultraviolet radiation used to set your brace cement. The CSI team wear similar ones. Like this, expect in black. Honestly.
• He had a really creepy vibe.

Sitting behind me was a mother with her little toddler daughter. This girl was being annoying, wandering in the aisle and touching stuff. At one point this girl touched me, and reflexively I recoiled from it. The man I’ve just described was watching and when he saw this scene unfold, he laughed. He laughed. His face cracked with glee and he let out an almost silent chuckle that lasted a good 10 seconds.

He’s the most peculiar person I’ve seen in a while.

After a lengthy break, I briefly return to my InterRail Travel Log. This post continues from the last post, when I was on my way to Grenoble.

[Side note: read up about the city on Wikipedia, if you’d like. It’s a beautiful one and I’d love to return]

Wow, it’s been ages since I updated! Although it’s only Tuesday. Because I’m writing texts and emails to people about the same stuff, it feels like I’ve already written this.

The last bit of the TGV ride from Paris was really slow. At some times we were going barely 20mph, and one time we stopped. So much for being “sans arret jusqu’a Grenoble“. Maybe we were stuck behind a slow train… a very slow train. I don’t know. I don’t care.

We arrived about 15 minutes late, which wasn’t a problem. I got off the train and was surprised at how easy it was to exit the station. I’m used to stations where there are one or two specific exits, with everything else fenced or walled off. Here, everything was open, like you see sometimes in the movies, when the station is in the wilderness. Except this was a city. I wandered around the area confused for a while, with that feeling of not having ‘one’s bearings’ that usually accompanies arrival my in a new place.

Then I returned to the station to go to the ticket office, because I wanted to book a seat on a Lyon-Marseille TGV for Wednesday. Lyon is one of the largest cities in France, and it lies on the main TGV route to the south coast. If you want to go south quickly from Grenoble, you must first go to Lyon.

“Full”, the man behind the counter said.

Yeah, right. Anyway, it’s worked out okay. Lyon is a bit out of the way from Marseille anyway, so I’ll be getting there (more directly but more slowly) by regional train (ter), changing once at Valence and having a stop there for a few hours. It’s a chance to see another town.

I left the station and wandered to the river. There were lots of cars driving on the roads around there, and 2 dodgy people started lurking so I abandoned my riverside hangout and ended up at Place de Victor Hugo (I thought I had been much further west). It started raining heavily, so I sat on a bench under one of the trees there and ate some yoghurt and chorizo. Yeah, nice mix. After a while the rain hadn’t stopped, so I went and found the right bus (No. 1) and took it to Quinzaine, the stop for the hostel. A single ticket cost €1.40.

To my delight I saw a Lidl two stops away from the hostel!

I got to the hostel and… wow, what a difference from Paris. It’s really modern and clean. I think I confused the receptionist – it was my fault, I wasn’t being clear – but then Julian (who I think is the owner? Not sure.) came along. He was friendly and spoke very good English. I put my stuff in my room and then checked out the hostel – it’s nice. What’s cool is that your Youth Hostel card is used as your dorm key! I ate some of my food in the kitchen, and then I ended up at the bar. I had some €1 ‘happy hour’ half pints of Kronenbourg (draught) and then a €2 local beer which the guys persuaded me to try (it was called Mandrin or something? I dunno. It was good, anyway). I fancied being even more French so I asked for a glass of red wine, but it was completely shit and so they didn’t make me pay for it (the bar man agreed with me). I didn’t drink it of course. Then I played some €2 pool. The people around were friendly – we mainly joked about our language differences and my attempts to speak French.

Afterwards I went on the internet for a bit (this might have been when I ate actually, just before using the internet – I don’t remember). I used the free WiFi with my iPod for browsing and I also used their resident iMac G3 to write some emails. What a throwback, in 2010. Those things are ancient, and slow, but nostalgic. I found the AZERTY keyboard unbearable, however. Jesus fuck. They’re close enough to QWERTY keyboards that it really fucks with your mind. The A and the Q are switched, for instance. Fair enough. But there are some weird things too – you need to use the shift key to get a full stop, and to type a number too. Seriously, check it out. Be warned: keyboards in France are not as friendly as they look.

Then I went to bed.

I got up early – I was awake before 7. Breakfast was decent. Coco Pops, an apple, some bread and nutella, and tea. And orange juice (I think it was squash). The views from the breakfast hall were good, including some of the mountains. Afterwards I went on the internet again. I finished and sent an email to Mum that I had started to compose the previous night.

I decided that I would spend the day walking to La Bastille, following a few sights from a map. And that’s what I did.

As soon as I had left the flatness of the city and started to climb… it started to rain.

I’d been listening to The Pleasure of Finding Things Out until it my iPod had a little crash when I was in city centre, and I lost my place and gave up. Then PadPundit. At the top I took shelter, and the view was amazing, although much was obscured by the rain clouds and rain. The views were spectacular, that’s all I can say, especially when I caught a glimpse of lightning across the city and in the Alpine mountains. Being up that hill in the middle of a thunderstorm was one of the most awesome experiences that I’ve ever had.

I waited for the rain to give in, but it didn’t, so I headed down the hill wrapped up with my hat, hoodie and Berghaus waterproof jacket. It did the trick and kept most of the rain off me. Very cosy. On the way down I was listening to Starship Troopers (verdict: better and written in a more modern style than I’d expected).

When I was back in the town I came across a free museum about Grenoble’s history, so I went in. They receptionists encouraged me to get a French audioguide (it was free, but in French). I did, giving my provisional driving licence as a deposit. All of the labels in the museum were in French but I understood it well enough to find it interesting… to a point. After I’d seen everything I left for Grenoble’s Natural History Museum. This one wasn’t free, and the receptionist wouldn’t accept my €20 note! I’ll admit that’s understandable as was the ticket was only €1.10, but at Lidl on Monday they rejected my €20 even though I was buying something closer to €10. When will I get a chance to get rid of my twenties?

Museum was great. Highlight: eagle owl.

I walked back to the hostel, stopping at Lidl for some groceries. When I entered the stop the security guard started to follow me, and after some confusion and misunderstanding, I realised that he wanted to keep my backpack whilst I was in the shop! Ridiculous. Presumably they think I’m going to steal from them. They’re not very trusting in France, and it’s not nice to be considered a thief.

Dicks.

The views of the mountains on my way back, and from the hostel, were amazing.

I used the Internet at the hostel and then ate my salmon and some chocolate dessert things. I watched a bit of dubbed House – it was hilarious seeing the characters talking in French, the words not properly matching up with their moving mouths. I went back to the room, tidied my stuff, did some washing, had a shower, wrote this, and now I’m going to bed.

In the morning I’m getting the 10:38 train. I’ll either bus or walk there, but I want to get postcards before I leave. It’s a lovely place.

Last year I grew strawberries seriously for the first time, and I wrote about the experience at length, here on my blog. In the concluding sentences, I wrote:

Finally, what will I do with these 100+ strawberry plants? I’ve not decided. I think I may be able to find room for another 20 in the front garden, but the rest will need to be planted elsewhere. Yet I can’t bring myself to throw them away – as I’ve said, I’d much rather have strawberries than no strawberries, and I’m happy to do the work to make that so.

As it turns out, I did put in the work to make it so. For much of my spare time in August and early September, I set to work. I put new runners into pots, and once they had established I found a spot for each one in the front garden, pushed aside the gravel and then cut through the ground sheet in order to plant the runner into the ground, well fed with compost. By the end of summer, I had well over a hundred new plants in my front garden.

I went to university, and whilst I was away: they grew. But not straight away. Once again, the leaves died back, and once again came a harsh winter. The whole garden was covered in several inches of snow for at least a month.

Yet despite the cold, once the snow had gone and the days started to get longer, they started to grow again. In early March when I visited for the weekend, I saw the first few signs of new growth:

Not much, but enough for optimism.

The next time I was in Perth was at the end of April, on the weekend of the Royal Wedding. My plants had come on amazingly well by that time: they were reaching up to the Sun, a bright green colour to the leaves, and many plants were already flowering.

I like to think that Theo’s wave helped them along ((Theo’s my nephew.)):

The next time I was home was when I moved back from university at the end of May and many of the flowers had turned into berries that were close to ripening. Last year I picked my first berry half way through June, on the 18th. But this year, with my front garden plants better established, I had my first sample around about the 2nd, more than two weeks earlier than before.

The birds were wise to the ripening too, and I lost many of my early berries to blackbirds. Bastards. Like last year, I again tried to protect my ripening berries with clear plastic bottles, which seemed to be effective (although I didn’t have nearly enough bottles to protect them all).

Here is my first significant picking session, from the 6th June:

As you can see I was a bit impatient, and they could have done with an extra day or two to ripen on the plants. However: fuck that, and anyway, the birds might eat them if I wait. Picking berries a day too early was a recurring problem for me for a while, as under the bright direct sunlight of the afternoon the colours are exaggerated and it makes the berries look riper than they actually are. I eventually learned to wait longer before picking a ‘ripe’ berry.

OK, the numbers. This is what happened last year:

The total yield was approximately 4.5 kilograms, equivalent to 10 supermarket punnets – about £20 worth!

And my prediction was:

What with my more mature plants, as well as the new ones I’ll plant, I predict I’ll grow at least 10 kilograms.

Heh. Yep, I beat that prediction. I grew 34kg. THIRTY FOUR FUCKING KILOGRAMS. That’s equivalent to £170 worth of the 400g punnets that Tesco sell for £2 at the height of the season, except it’s not equivalent as mine would surely be Tesco Finest and far more expensive.

I was amazed I grew so many.

This year’s graph:

I made last year’s chart in Google spreadsheets, but this time I used Numbers on my Mac. I don’t know how to use it properly but it does the trick, sort of. It’s not meant to be precise, hence my use of curved lines and and crappy scales ((Furthermore, I’ve adjusted my data so that if I’ve skipped a day of picking, I share the pickings of the subsequent day between the two days, rather than having loads of zeroes all over the place.)).

Look at the data. Absorb the data. Feel the data. Yeah, go on. Touch it.

You can see that I start picking (seriously, at least, and recording it) on 6th June in the front garden, and the yield after that increases dramatically, with the highest output being around the middle of the month (by which point last year the harvest was only just starting!). The back garden’s output was insignificant in comparison and pretty poor.

Last year I wrote:

Through the rest of June, I picked a steady 100 grams every day; this was the front garden in maximum production mode. Next year I would expect this portion of the graph to be level at at least 200 grams, as the plants will be much better established.

Not even slightly accurate. My plants were producing several punnets worth of strawberries every day. Several. Heck, I already miss it, but the amount of sugar that I ate mustn’t have been healthy for me. Strawberries are very sweet.

Here’s some more stats:

• I picked 34kg of edible strawberries in total, 31.5kg of which came from the front garden and 2.5kg from the back garden. I didn’t weight the wasted ones.
• The peak day for picking was 14th June, when I picked 1570g from the front garden. I had picked on the previous day, too.
• The day when I brought the most berries into the house was 18th June when I picked 2670g from front garden. However, I had not picked the previous day so this is the production of two days, not one.
• The first day of picking from front was 6th June and the first day from back was 4th July – 4 weeks later
• The last significant pickings from front were on 20th July, with the back 2 days later.
• Subjectively, the largest and tastiest berries came in the final week of June, which happens to coincides with the summer solstice.
  • Oh my God, the berries that week were so good. If you think you don’t like strawberries, number 1: fuck you, and number 2: try mine at the end of June. You have to try them fresh from the plant. Strawberries from supermarkets have been picked days ago, and are not at their best. Mine are no where near their best even just 2 days after being picked. Seriously, you’ve got to try mine.

Here are some of those big juicy delicious end-of-June ones that I’m on about. They’re SO good:

That’s about all that I have to say. Before I go, though, I’ll just lay out some of the problems I encountered:

• Picking too soon. I just need more patience.
• Rain collecting in bottles. It rained a lot this summer. When water collects in the bottles (as water tends to), if the berries are sitting in this water then they will go bad, wasted. Some even rotted and went mouldy.
• Birds. I just have to accept that I’ll lose some to the local wildlife. I’ve got plenty to go around.
• Clumsiness. I often break my plants whilst I’m picking. I’ve probably lost a couple of kilograms through my carelessness this year.
• Growing too many to eat. Overdoing the berries can make you feel a bit off, I’ve found. First world problem.
• The berries go off quickly. It’s best to leave picking them until right when you need them.
• Washing the berries makes them worse. I think the cold water makes them harder and removes some nice scent from them too.

I’ve not mentioned the back garden much. It was pathetic. The plants there are old, producing smallish, hard, deformed berries. The plants are mostly leaf and almost no berry. What’s more, they get much less sunlight than the front, and they’ve slowly become overrun by slugs. And even earwigs. Eww.

So: I’m getting rid of of them. In the next few weeks I’ll dig them up and put them in the brown-lidded bin. I have enough plants in the front garden. The back is just a waste of time, now.

A positive thing that I’ve learnt: you know you’re going to eat a delicious strawberry when you hold it up and it shines. Shiny ones are the best, and you rarely see that in supermarkets. They have to be very fresh. I think the shininess comes from the berry being laden with water/juice, which stretches the skin from the inside. Beautiful.

Another thing that I’ve learnt: contrary to previous reports, I don’t prefer refrigerated strawberries. My very favourite berries are those large juicy ones at the height of summer, picked and eaten within seconds. Unwashed, warm from the sunlight, juicy and amazing. And shiny.

This year, when the berries finished, the runners once again went mad:

What have I done with all the runners this year? Most I’ve destroyed, and with some of the others I’ll replant the worse-performing plants from this year. But the rest? I’m sending them down south. I spent some time last week and most of Monday digging a strawberry patch in my Dad’s garden. Diversification, baby. Here it is:

I’m still sore from digging it. Roll on next June.