Jim Granter

In my head and body mostly, so not usually very aware of my immediate surroundings, but when I do look around it’s pretty good too. In two days recently I had visited the Health Centre, the dentist, the barber’s, the Post Office, the newsagents, the ATM, the Building Society, the library, the Coop supermarket, the tyre and battery fitters, the health food shop, the pet shop for bird food and the bird feeders at the top of the garden all on Shanks’s pony within minutes of each other and all with successful mission completions. Which makes it very difficult to contemplate a move to live anywhere else until it becomes someone else’s job to visit these places for us, when it won’t matter where we ‘live’ or are cared for anyway!

Have found Paul Phoenix and the boys of St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir so listening on Spotify. Magic. Looking forward to the arrival of the complete series of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (£4.99 for 350 minutes!) not only for the Nunc Dimittis theme by aforementioned Paul et al.

“Glad it’s all over and we can get back to normal!” was the cheery response twice when I asked two people in town how they had enjoyed Christmas! Whatever their normal is I hope they are enjoying it. Here one of us has had a lot of illness and is just showing some signs of a slow recovery.

The snow of several weeks has all gone and it’s quite mild again – about 6 degrees Celsius after reaching all-time lows recently of minus 11.

Naturally, the car which has started and run well during all the severe frosts refused to start today but attempted to unlock all the doors on turning the ignition key. New battery ordered, since current one is over 6 years old and is obviously becoming unreliable.

Overheard a conversation this morning about the comparative costs now between car ownership and using taxis, with the inexorable rise of fuel costs and insurance. Giving up the car is now quite an attractive proposition for many people, except for the major wrench from all that having it standing in the drive has meant. Independence? Flexible travel planning? Spontaneous trips? No local transport so walking to bus stops and standing in the rain for what might not arrive anyway to take you away and home again?

Work on next door’s orangery has started with skips full of earth disappearing at a fair rate. Mobile temporary builder’s toilet in the front garden is quite a feature of the landscape!

My mother would have been 100 years old this month.

It’s a new month and so I feel it’s also time for a few blogged thoughts. Have received news that Keele University have chosen to close all their Continuing Education classes ( at least the ones I have been attending for the last 2 years – see blog of 10 February, 2010 ). They don’t call it that of course. Couched in some vague euphemisms about retirements in the Department, reduced and devolved budgets and such.  However, now the good news. Have also heard that some of the old stalwarts of one of the classes and the tutor have combined their not inconsiderable wills, intellects and regard for their fellow human beings to arrange with our local pub for our new classes to use the pub’s function room and the tutor has already put together our new syllabus on the theme of  Twentieth Century Liberation movements. To be studied through eight sessions on literature, with a further session devoted to related movements in art and one more on a play yet to be chosen. Wonderful. (If this is what the latest pathetic slogan of  our government means by the Big Society, then I like it. But it isn’t really, is it). How we pay the tutor is nobody else’s business. I already have Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, used to have Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City but had to buy it again along with Meridian (Alice Walker), Disgrace (J M Coetzee) and The Help ( Kathryn Stockett ). How good is that, to have a real reason to buy some new books. The accompanying links are there for me to see some background and also because sometimes such links means you follow one and don’t get back to where you came from for hours, if at all.

Been to Leek today to meet up with someone doing their family tree and who has discovered she is related to my wife. Leek is not like any other town round here and since we spent most of our 2 hours today in a cafe talking, we plan to return soon for a prolonged mooch around the streets, back streets and shops.

Looking after next door’s stick insects – am told there are 8 in the two containers but have only spotted 6 so far amongst the foliage. Hope they are all apparent when I hand them back in 10 days time…… What odd pets.

Two very different treatments of the deal between Amazon.com and the Wylie Agency: straight reporting verging on promotion in The Independent and a critique of the whole move in The Guardian today.

Not sure I’ll ever need to face up to having to read a novel on a ‘tablet’ as there’s enough unread stuff on my shelves already in real books that smell right and feel even better.

And there’s so much else can happen with books that you can’t do with an e-book – take it to a charity shop? Find it in a charity shop? Pile it up on a ‘to read’ pile that just looks good anyway? Reserve it online at the local public library and pick it up a few days later when an e-mail says it’s there, for a £1 fee?

Lend it out and not ever get it back?

A long time ago in a town far away (well 80 miles) I came 28th out of 29 in Woodwork at my grammar school. This didn’t bother anybody too much, as my Dad’s life experience up to that time told him that working with your hands was to be avoided if at all possible, since it meant low wages and being treated badly altogether. This he was keen to tell me, so as to encourage me in more “academic” pursuits which he hoped would lead to a world he knew very little about, but he knew was desirable – anything where brain work was involved, something called “the professions” and it looked like I might make it there if I kept working at the school work that wasn’t Woodwork or Metalwork. His observations were based on a career which started at 14 in the workhouse, (still operating in 1926), through french polishing furniture and spraying cars, coupled with the odd encounter with a solicitor he had to visit to put a deposit down on our house and a dentist for whom he did some french polishing. Such programming against manual work was supported by the school, with its public school pretensions, so what years later came to be called Design and Technology was dropped from the curriculum for clever pupils. Fifty years later I can knock a nail straight in a piece of wood fairly successfully, say 9 times out of 10 and saw a pretty straight line if I concentrate really hard. The shelves I build don’t wobble. The quiet thrill such achievements now create equates in a funny sort of way to the non-manual work high points or “achievements” I sometimes reached working with rebellious adolescent school pupils for many years (after a disastrous stop-off for 2 years in accountancy training).

I have so far read the first 40 pages of  The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford and am liking what he is saying very much indeed. I loved my non-manual, “professional” job most of the time and I don’t think Crawford is so much arguing against such jobs as campaigning for a shift in middle class attitudes towards manual workers that is a bit more respectful than the commonplace “We’ve found a marvellous, plumber and he’s so cheap…!”. I may return to this theme after completing the book.