Pieces of a Man Think it. Do it. Be it. Embellish.

67.68.69.70.71.72.73.74.75.76 77.78.79.80.81.82.83.84.85.86 87.88.89.90.91.92.93.94.95.96 97.98.99.00.01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08.09.10

Labels: 2007

Oscar with the 'Player of the Week' trophy from his Saturday football club.

He had a grin as wide as the goalposts all evening and went to bed with it tucked up beside him. Ahh....

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Yani getting ready for the school disco.

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	Corfu Here's where we're going on holiday this year - North-east Corfu with Albania just over the straits to the right.
	Week 1 - Kalamaki We're spending the first week in the fishing village of Kalamaki, and we'll be staying in the Kalliopi house, slightly back from the beach and a short stagger from Spiros' Taverna. Bigger...
	Week 2 - Villa Marieleta We'll be decamping to Villa Marieleta in the hills for the second week. I thought it would be interesting to sit at breakfast and watch the sun rise over Albania in the distance.
	Google View ... and here's where the sun will rise, viewed through Google Earth. Bigger... Hard to believe people used to book holidays based on the word of a travel agent and a picture of a hotel. I've seen this villa from every angle and elevation without lifting my backside from the couch.
	... and here's the real view - but I wonder if we even need to go now?

Labels: 2007

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Pretty grim up north last night. Man city had a weakend side out, but so did we, and we held them comfortably for most of the game. They didn't create much, although Samaras - who IS as crap as everyone says - missed an easy header just before half time.

We basically lost concentration in the last minute - already thinking about a replay, the same as us in the crowd - and a pass split us open. Amazingly, Samaras scored. Was fun up till that point. Oh, well, when it rains it pours.

P.S. Read today that we just broke even this year, but that next year we won't have the £7 million parachute payments any more. Hard times ahead.

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Yani took a bunch of friends out last night for a big Friday night outing on her 8th birthday. We started at MacDonalds - which went from full to empty in about 10 minutes flat as the kids ran amok - and then went rollerblading nearby to work off some of the fat and sugar.

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Yesterday we went to the Dr Who exhibition in Manchester. View Flickr Slideshow

It consists of a display of real BBC props from the filming of the show - including the large, moving mechanical model of the Empress of Rachnoss from the 'Runaway Bride' episode last Xmas - but the real highlight was the actors wandering around amongst the crowd dressed as Dr Who creatures.

The 6ft Sycorax Warrior was quite imposing, but the creepy scarecrows from the 'Family of Blood' episode were the most memorable since they were the first ones we saw, unexpectedly coming round a corner at us just as we got there. The kids hid behind me like little 3 year-olds again. Well funny.

After the exhibition we walked into the town centre for lunch at Macdonalds and then ice creams in Piccadilly Gardens, giving Jo some extra time to catch up on sleep. We got home just in time for the football results and the day just got better and better - United won, Norwich won and Ipswich got hammered 4-0. The perfect day?

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Pictures from the August bank holiday week, which we spent caravanning in Northumberland. I've wanted to go there for ages and it didn't disappoint. Every beach seems to have a castle and the views along the whole coast near Lindisfarne are breathtaking.

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Here are some pictures from our trip to Norfolk in August, which culminated in watching City squeak three points against Southampton at Fortress Carrow Road. Funny to see Oscar and Nathan celebrating together, like me and Dave a quarter of a century ago.

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... after a good kicking; here's some great nature footage on YouTube. Takes a while to get going, but watch the full 8-9 minutes. I especially like the voice-over near the end where you hear someone say, "Frank, you could sell that video." Too right.

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A few pictures from our day out at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire in August.

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Oscar and I went to United's pre-season friendly against Inter Milan last night. Although they lost 3-2 due to some suicidal defending and clinical Italian finishing, it was a fun night nevertheless.

We got there just in time for kick-off, after picking up a Wayne Rooney scarf and a greasy burger on Sir Matt Busby Way. Old Trafford was packed. It was a new record attendance of nearly 74,000 for a friendly and we were in the South Stand, about 30m back from the pitch with United attacking our end.

It seemed to be going swimmingly when Oscar's hero, Wayne Rooney, scored after 14 minutes - but Vidic, O'Shea and particularly Evra then proceeded to play like the Keystone Cops for the next quarter of an hour and United were 3-1 down before we could blink.

Adriano scored a bizarre own goal in the second half to up the excitement level as they tried to pull off the traditional United comeback, but once Ferdinand blazed over from 6 yards about 20 minutes from the end, we knew it wasn't to be, especially when the referee turned down a good penalty shout. When he gave Inter a free kick shortly after, Oscar stood up and shouted, "You don't know what you're doing!". Good lad.

He took the result well, much to my relief. I guess the disappointment of defeat in a five goal thriller is far less devastating than the penalty shoot-out Scouse thievery of the last visit there for the Youth Cup Final. One of his main memories of the night will probably be not only seeing Rooney and Ronaldo in the flesh, but also seeing yet another Mancunian streaker.

What is it that brings exhibitionists to the Old Trafford area in such droves? There were six in a day at the Windies test a few years back. I wouldn't mind but they're always ugly blokes. The look of shock on new signing Anderson's face as the stewards led the offender away suggested that either they don't have the streaking tradition in Brazil or that if they do, then the streakers are female and as beautiful as their game.

• Our photos (Flickr)
• Game highlights (YouTube)

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The blond hair made me wonder. The blue eyes aroused my suspicions. And now I have definitive proof that Louis can't be my child.

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On the phone to my rugby mad friend, Chris, in New Zealand the other day I was staggered to realise that England's World Cup win with Johnny Wilkinson's last minute kick was FOUR years ago. It feels like two at most. It's just scary the way time flies. To the left - on the beach in Devon that same summer.

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The winning run at the Red Bull Air Race by Mike Mangold, who was the Outstanding Graduate - Top Gun - at the Navy Fighter Weapons School in 1983, a couple of years before the film came out.

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Almost too good to be true, but great to see. Congratulations to the Lions of Mesopotamia, who've won the Asian Cup. It's amazing to see what a change in coaching styles can achieve;

In the days of Saddam, the Iraqi team knew if they underperformed they risked being humiliated or tortured by Uday, Saddam's late and unlamented son. As head of the national football team, his motivational techniques included phoning players during halftime and threatening to cut off their legs.

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I often remember a Spike Milligan poem on days like today - something about the fools playing out in the sunshine - as I sit here locked in my office struggling with ontological assumptions and epistemological bloody methodologies on a gorgeous afternoon. To make matters worse, the Jo and the kids are over in Middlesborough and I've just realised that the Sunderland Air Show is happening this weekend.

Oh well, at least I've the consolation of the Red Bull air race on TV this afternoon. At 1450 hours precisely - in an exercise of equally military precision that started with marinade about 18 hours ago - I will kick back with a huge plate of ribs and fries on my lap as the coverage of the race starts. Sheer bliss, and the sort of carrot I need to get through another thousand ridiculously long words.

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Much excitement in Oscar World this morning as these tickets dropped on the mat. Feels a bit surreal to be going to a game like this, especially since I was stranded in the Far East when Norwich played Inter in '93.

Ironically, I only found out about this game after shelving the plan to watch City play Vitesse Arnhem - our first opponents in that great European adventure.

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A peek into the lives of the rich and famous today with Tom's pictures from his night at the Brian Lara benefit, meeting not only the great man but also various other cricketing legends.

I'm full of admiration since I've personally never wanted to meet my own idols for fear of disappointment. There's the disappointment of being goofy and dumbstruck in the presence of greatness, as experienced when I had the chance to meet Roy Harper after a gig one year. (Mum went in and had a long chat with him and had no similar bashfulness about fan-dom, coming away having begged a broken guitar string.)

Then there's the disappointment of finding out that your idols are maybe not that memorable to meet. This one applies mostly to footballers, and on a couple of occasions I've politely declined the offer of a visit to post-match drinks at Bramall Lane (ironically from a very clever and accomplished ex-footballing friend, but I'm not going to chance it with the Norfolk boys).

Much better to enjoy the fantasy, I say. So, nice one Tom for a massive gamble. Now come on, tell us the truth - how much conversation practice did you do in front of the mirror?

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On Sunday we invited a bunch of Oti's school chums round for bouncy castle fun in the garden. We really lucked out with the weather; it drizzled right up to kick-off but then - just as when Haile Selassie's plane approached Jamaica in 1966 - the clouds parted right on cue and it was dry for the next couple of hours until people had gone.

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It's been a strange week in The Socialist Republic. What looked like just another damp day in the city centre was in fact washing away entire council estates on the other side of Sheffield and the rest of the week has been one long consequence.

Personally it's not been too bad. While the stranded masses huddled in university emergency shelters, a pal in our estates office sorted me a room in a student hall. It was actually a nice change of pace; an evening pottering barefoot around a deserted office, eating chinese and listening to the tennis, then the first uninterrupted night's sleep in ages. Hardly Hurricane Katrina.

The next morning, suitably refreshed, I hitched a ride home on the one and only train that managed to get out of a waterlogged Sheffield station. It was jam-packed with a polyglot group of refugees trying to get to Manchester airport, and even before we'd reached the open country beyond Totley Tunnel everyone was able to confirm their national stereotypes;No wonder that making the trains run on time was top of Mussolini's list of things to do...

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Kids atop a rotten tree stump this morning in Marple during the Saturday morning constitutional. We had chips afterwards to balance the ying and the yang of all that fresh air.

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Here's the main gate of the British Library where I waited for Nick and Anna to turn up for beers on Wednesday. The library was rather underwhelmingly new brick, especially with the magnificent Kings Cross/St Pancras station next door, but I'm sure there's lots of good book stuff inside.

I was in London for a committee meeting of the amazing acronymed UCISA-TLIG-USDWG, the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association's Teaching and Learning Group's User Skills and Development Working Group. Now that's what I call branding! Nice bunch of folks, though, and we hatched various plans for training-related events this year in exotic places like Reading and Birmingham.

It was interesting to visit the LSE, though, especially their bookshop which had a stack of great reading on politics and development. I will be saving my Xmas pennies for the next meeting there in September.

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Here's a picture from brother Nick over at Blog Off, taken on the big night out this Saturday, when, in the absence of a whole herd of cats, the mice went out to play;

Unencumbered by the need to a) tend to the oldies and significant others b) babysit the twins (!?), We the 'pre-1980, 3' took advantage of a rare 'nite off' together and hit maDchester town for an impromptu evening of food, beers and old school grooves! Special thanks to big brother Miles, for reminding Nina and I how to own the dance floor! Rock on! X

For 'own the dancefloor' read "work up such a sweaty, demented storm that people clear a space around you like a demilitarized zone"! Yes, it's the old guy in the club with years of pent-up boogie ready to unleash on an unsuspecting public. What the hell...

Dance as though no one is watching you.
Love as though you have never been hurt before.
Sing as though no one can hear you.
Live as though heaven is on earth.

~ Souza

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Yesterday we all took off to the Crocky Trail near Chester for a day out on Oscar's 6th birthday. There's lots more camcorder footage when I get round to it, but for the moment here are some phone pix.

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The view from the Stretford End a couple of months back when United kids played Liverpool kids in the FA Youth Cup Final. The Scousers stole it 4-3 on penalties after extra time, kick starting celebrations in the away stand and the mother of all paddies from Oscar...

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From today the RSS site feed is going to change. Please point your RSS client at http://www.isogloss.com/seech/rss.xml or click again on the little orange button to the right. If this is gibberish to you, check out this simple explanation to start to discover the wonders of RSS;

Suppose you have 50 sites and blogs that you like to visit regularly. Going to visit each website and blog everyday could take you hours. With RSS, you can 'subscribe' to a website or blog, and get 'fed' all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites and blogs in one list, and see what's going on in minutes instead of hours. What a time saver! Read more...

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Here's some video from our Easter weekend in Norfolk with Mum, Dad, Nick and Jo.

It's been a long old slog since I got the camcorder at Xmas to make all the bits talk to each other - I've had to install and uninstall numerous bits of video editing software, upgrade the operating system on the laptop, find a compatible sound card and buy a bigger pen drive ("We're gonna need a bigger boat...") - but it feels worth it. Enjoy.

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Here are the kids having a day of riding lessons in Middlesborough recently.

Fortunately there was no repeat of what I suffered when I tried horseriding at Yani's age - being thrown from the enraged stallion, landing underneath amidst flying hooves and narrowly escaping with my life (as I recall).

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My old boss has been on a homestay in Beijing and has blogged all about it:

I cycled off this morning and after about an hour my steed ground to a halt. The chain had fallen apart. Fortunately this being BeiJing I was about 50 yards from a roadside bike fixer. The chain is all encased. He took it all apart, fitted a new link oiled and re-assembled for 20p.

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Oh la la! Miss April is the seductive Madame Maître from the Pyrenées. She even has a boudoir;

Maison de Maître offers 7 bedrooms and will absolutely captivate you with her gardens (7,000m²) which are planted with many unusual trees and shrubs and shield the swimming pool and three horse boxes, all of which compliment the lovely building. More...

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And back in beautiful Blighty, here's a building I stroll past twice a day going to and from Stockport station. Either wind or age or the activities of the bodybuilders within made a big chunk of it just fall away into the street. Now I tend to skip rather than stroll...

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It's been a hectic couple of weeks trying to get an assignment done for yesterday's deadline, and I never closed the loop on the house in Rotherham.

Of course, it was too good to be true. It was smaller than it appeared on the photo; I'd like to think it was something underhanded about estate agents and wide-angle lenses, but it was probably just as much the grand architectural features skewing the sense of perspective. It was also damp, not just normal damp from a few months of neglect, but wet up to the ceiling, probably due to a failure in the gully between the two roofs. Most of all, though, it was just a bit of a weird layout, lots of small rooms all over, a bit of a rabbit warren. On the plus side, the cemetery was lovely.

The day was productive, though, as we revisited Sheffield and move that thinking on a bit. I guess I tend to only see the nicer parts of Sheffield; wandering round the town centre at lunchtime, walking up to Collegiate Campus, coming in on the train along Abbeydale Road. Driving in from the north is a different kettle of fish and really brings how many shitty parts of the town there are.

The key insight, though, was provided by Jo; it's probably not that Sheffield has more shitty parts than Manchester, it's just that you can see them so much better. And it's true! Even in the £250,000 plus areas of town you can still see the cramped terraces and pre-fabs a few miles away.

So my current thinking is that Sheffield is off the agenda for the moment and we're just going to focus on now until next year when Oscar will change school, Jo will have finished refurbishing this place and I will have done the Masters. It feels like the right decision, too.

Then, who knows? I notice I'm starting to feel like a big change of some kind as the big four-oh approaches...?

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Here's an amusing piece in The Guardian on the failings of England and Steve McClaren: Why seven-year-old Joe could outmanage McClaren;

Within eight games of taking over McClaren has morphed into Sven-Goran Eriksson. Everything about the Ginger Reaper suggests the deadly one - the corporate suit, fixed smile, constipated body language, joylessness, fear and the sheer bloody stupidity of what he says and does. Take this for example: "I don't read the papers, I don't gamble, I don't even know what day it is." Is that what finally convinced the FA he was the man for the job? Or this: "The goal was the deciding factor." Best of all, the following post-Israel classic: "At this level you need to score goals."

Personally, I hope England get beat by Andorra tonight. Watching them is just so painfully bloody boring; at least the post-mortem would be interesting.

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It is a serious matter - as umpire Darrell Hair found out - to accuse a team, purely on the basis of supposition, of cheating to win a cricket match. It is an even more serious matter to accuse a team, or a player, of taking bribes to lose a match. But to accuse a player or a team of being involved in the death of their coach raises the stakes by several orders of magnitude. Hyperbole may be the bane of sports journalism, but the unsubtle innuendo linking Pakistani cricketers to Bob Woolmer's ghastly murder goes beyond sensationalism. The rush to judgment here is fuelled by that other bane of sports journalism, national stereotyping. More...

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Carolus Linnaeus was the guy who invented the system of Latin names for plants and animals.

Presumably it was much earlier in his career when he came up with the following description of racial type that I discovered today on the BBC website commemorating the abolition of slavery;

• European: eyes blue; gentle, acute, inventive. Covered with close vestments. Governed by laws.

• Asiatic: eyes dark; severe, haughty, covetous. Covered with loose garments. Governed by opinions.

• Black: phlegmatic, relaxed. African. Crafty, indolent, negligent. Anoints himself with grease. Governed by caprice.
  
  The System of Nature, Linnaeus, 1735

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Strip away the endless moaning about the state of the world and Slow Leadership serves up a tasty morsel every few weeks; e.g. this article on sensemaking and storytelling...

I had a friend who worked in air accident investigation. He told me the only truly reliable witnesses to air accidents were small children. They told what they saw. Adults told stories based on what they thought they ought to see, then embellished them to make the stories more vivid and interesting. More...

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Today we're off to the People's Republic of South Yorkshire in order to check out the strange and unusual Rotherham house.

During a bout of essay procrastination last weekend I did some more detective work on the web that not only helped make sense of its price but also made it more intriguing than ever.

Turns out - from checking out the aerial view of the place - that it's actually the lodge at the gates of the historic Moorgate Victorian Cemetery in Rotherham, which explains the low price (£209,995).

In addition to the location, which I guess would be a bit much for your average punter, they also had problems with vandalism in the 1990s, which only serves to reinforce the reaction that every Sheffield person has given me this week to the idea of living in Rotherham; "Don't do it!"

In 1994 vandals rampaged through the cemetery leaving a trail of destruction. Crosses on graves and headstones were pushed over and urns and vases damaged. Although a package of measures to install CCTV cameras in known crime hotspots was approved by the council Moorgate Cemetery has still not been designated for any security measures.

Similarly the future of the two Gothic sandstone lodges at the entrance to the cemetery was in the balance in 1990 after vandalism and there were calls for their demolition. Fortunately the council decided they were of architectural merit and restoration work was carried out on them. One of the lodges was subsequently sold and the other one is still owned by the Council. It is now recommended that the lodges should be given listed status.

So, realistically it will remain but an idle day dream since it would probably be a bugger to sell and, more importantly, we don't want our kiddies squished under crumbling headstones (there was a spate of that a few years back in similar places).

Shame, really. The idea of living next to a beautiful old cemetery definitely attracts me. There are quiet neighbours - as Dad pointed out - and what better place to live to keep yourself reminded of the fleeting nature of life and the need to make every day count.

A stroll home through there at tea time would certainly put the day's staff problems, managerial bullshit and university polliticking into sharp relief.

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The waiting room was once a significant place in public life. Newspaper editorials would lament the smouldering fires, obsolete reading matter and bumpy seats in railway-station waiting rooms and doctors' surgeries. "The furniture and decoration are usually in the very abyss of dullness," complained the Times in 1925. But the reason people complained about waiting rooms is that they had to use them: they were places where all social classes, from vagrants to professionals, shared a temporary berth. More...

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My ears pricked up when I heard on the news that there was a shooting last night in the students' union at my old alma mater - Loughborough - where I used to run discos. When I checked out the union website - surprise surprise - the act playing last night was a rap outfit from Miami called Pretty Ricky. How completely predictable.

But it takes me back to Lieutenant Stitchie...

Back in my student days there, I was the founder of the Reggae Society - an easy way to get a student union grant towards subsidised gigging - and we arranged a minibus to take our posse up to the Marcus Garvey West Indian Centre in Nottingham to see this Jamaican MC - the aforementioned Mr Stitchie - who was big at the time.

It was obvious as soon as we got there that the atmosphere was really tense, mainly due to the friction between the local Nottingham lads and the London security outfit. I remember they were called 'The Rats' and dressed in military-style gear with nasty-looking dogs like pit bulls to match their nasty-looking attitudes.

So anyway, not long into the act it kicked off big style in the venue between the Nottingham and London crews and there followed the most terrifying couple of minutes of my life (apart from the Kobe earthquake). About a thousand people in this dark, packed venue rushed as one for the single exit down two flights of stairs. There were lighting rigs falling on people, guys fighting, bottles flying, women screaming. Insane.

My most vivid memory was that of being swept down the stairs in this sea of humanity thinking, "If you fall, you die". Oh what a night! Still, most nights at Loughborough consisted of scowling at the drunken, vomiting geeks and jocks, so it made a change.

I also noticed this morning on the current 'Ents' website that the format for the Saturday comedy night that we started in about 1989 is still the same. Unbelievable.

Maybe my legacy a hundred years from now won't be a monument in my home town or a street named after me, but the Saturday night at Loughborough University, still going strong! Oh well, it's something.

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Darcus Howe speaking in the OSM World Cup Special on the decline of West Indian cricket and society;

What transformed West Indies into a great side in the Seventies was the confidence that came out of independence and the rejection of the old imperial dominance, and the Black Power movement that was gathering momentum in the United States.

There was a very strong nationalist spirit and, because we were exiles, those of us in England, particularly in Brixton where I lived, felt it most strongly. To see Viv Richards walking out to bat at The Oval, which was just down the road, without a helmet (no matter how fast the bowler was) and wearing his Rasta armbands of gold, green and red, was inspirational. This was a time when black militancy was building - you had the Brixton riots in 1981 - and that fed off the swagger and the success of the West Indies side.

The collapse of our team since then mirrors the breakdown of Caribbean society. The pride we felt in the post-independence years has disappeared. No young person today wants to play cricket; they would rather have a gun. There is an avalanche of violence waiting to hit this part of the world that will be worse than anything experienced since slavery. How can cricket hope to flourish?

I recently asked my teenage godson, who lives in Trinidad, if he played cricket. He said no. I asked if he knew where the Queen's Park Oval was. He said no. I asked if he knew who Brian Lara was. He told me that he was the guy who owns a street; there is a Brian Lara Parade in Port of Spain. Cricket gives him no sense of racial identity in the way it would have done 20 years ago. 50 Cent does. Last month, I walked up to the place in Port of Spain where I played as a boy. In those days, there was a hum of 'Howzat' running through the streets. Now it's a dump, a place where people leave their dead dogs. All this hurts not just because I love West Indies cricket, but because I love the sport as a whole. The global game can't afford to lose the effervescence our players once brought.

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The tooth fairy was skating on thin ice last night having forgotten Oscar's first tooth. We went to bed early last night and forgot all about the dental duties so he woke this morning without the expected windfall.

Fortunately I had the presence of mind to explain that since it was still dark outside - it was 5.30 - the tooth fairy hadn't come yet since she only comes just before dawn. Phew! He went and sat for a few minutes downstairs looking out the window for morning break while I sneaked back up to the bedroom and made things right.

Excellent recovery? Nope - today another tooth fell out and I haven't yet thought of a way to explain the possible inconsistency in the fairy scam tomorrow morning if he gets up before dawn and before me. Bugger!

Labels: 2007

Just looked at the fixtures for this week and realised that it's a biggie - away to Luton on Tuesday followed by a trip to Barnsley on Saturday. Both sides are right below us and we're only 3 points off the relegation spots. "Zoinks!", as Shaggy would say!

Labels: 2007

In The Observer today, Paul Wilson argues for bringing terraces back into football;

Standing areas offer the hope of turning back the clock to a time when the cost of admission to a football ground did not exclude anyone, when you could choose your immediate company, make as much noise as you wanted and feel part of a crowd rather than a member of an audience. All the things that used to distinguish football from a visit to the theatre, in other words.

As it happens, I was thinking about terraces yesterday as I watched Glenn Hoddle goals on YouTube. After one of them you can see this insane sight of thousands of fans surging down the terracing and it makes you wonder how those deathtraps lasted as long as they did, before the disasters like Heysel and Hillsborough took us beyond the pale.

On the other hand, most grounds weren't like the Kop or Old Trafford. My main memory of terraces is the old Barclay at Norwich. The injuries were more likely to be to the sensibilities with the racist chant they used to have in the 80s; "Trigger trigger trigger, shoot that nigger" was the whole of the Norfolk boys' repertoire, perhaps because it only took the recall of four words and had a simple rhyming structure.

I could never understand how these morons could be singing that in their hundreds while on the pitch Justin Fashanu was scoring goals like this in front of them. (I wonder if they'd have still turned a blind eye if they'd known he was playing for the pink team as well as the yellow. I doubt.)

Even having the fag in my mouth sliced in half with a coin thrown by an Ipswich fan was just a good war story. The two sets of fans were only separated by a gap of a few metres and being showered occasionally with Suffolk spit just added spice to the occasion, as did getting a mild kicking on Carrow Hill before the Milk Cup semi in '85.

So, in the manner of an old git, I have to agree that terraces 'never did me no harm'. Up at Blackpool recently we had seats but spent the entire game standing without being nagged by stewards and it just felt right.

Labels: 2007

I was interested to read Nick's account of his NHS job interview in the Brecon Beacons. It sounded rather familiar and I thought I'd speculate a bit about what was probably going on here;

It took a while before I began to realise that 'me' didn't appear to matter. The answers I was supposed to give, and that they were expecting to hear, were to be in a form I had hiterto not encountered: nhs-first-post-physio-speak. Everytime I was asked to provide criteria, I was stopped and asked to be more specific. OK Nick, start again, but with more detail. No, no could you provide a specific example from a specific student placement where you demonstrated interpersonal skills, professionalisms, an ability to be autonomous? Ah .. buzz words! I am no stranger to chipping in at interviews with the odd-buzzword, but every line of every response?!

The traditional interview often asks hypothetical questions such as "What would you do if...", and then explores things from there. The problem is that it can benefit people who know what the interviewer wants to hear rather than being an accurate predictor of what that person would actually do in a real situation.

The different kind of interviewing that Nick describes is, I think, criterion-based interviewing and it tries to approach this problem with the aim of focussing only on things that people actually did in the past. We use it at Hallam. What's more, it IS all based on a checklist - the job specification.

In a big organisation like the NHS the job spec gets created in very particular ways before it gets approved and creates a list of things that a suitable applicant will be able to do. Once the interview committee meets they have to choose what sort of thing to ask about based directly on that job spec. There's little scope for going with the flow and responding in the moment to find out what someone's 'really like'.

The actual question wording is then created to that criterion-based template - "Tell me about a situation in the past when...", and then they drill down into it - "What was your role in that?", "What specifically did you to deal with that?" Sound familiar, Nick?

If you're unprepared for this it's pretty difficult to blag it in the heat of the moment. The moral of the story is to pay very close attention to the job spec and have the examples ready. Even if they don't use this approach it will be useful to have them up your sleeve for regular interviews.

By the way, the job spec is also critical to getting the interview. When they shortlist they are basically ticking off items on the job spec. It's not too far from the truth to say that if the job spec says 'The applicant will be able to crank widgets at a rate of 10 per minute', then the application doesn't need to say much more than 'in that job I cranked widgets at a rate of 10 per minute all summer long'. The shortlisting is being done by some time-poor line manager on a Monday morning who's already thinking of their next meeting after reading the first two. Make it easy for them and keep it simple; the rest it just conversation.

Read more about criteria based interviewing

Labels: 2007

I've just finished reading Bryan Gunn's autobiography. For those not pursuing a yellow way of life, he was the Norwich keeper during our golden era in the early 90s and still works at the club as a sort of ambassador and all-round good egg.

Whilst it's definitely 'fans only' stuff, it's a pleasant enough read; fuzzy warm memories of the Bayern Munich season, behind-the-scenes accounts of the scandals of the time, and of course a poignant account of his daughter's death from leukemia. It's a credit to his engaging personality that it holds the attention despite the clunking prose, at its best in this description of meeting his future wife;

We soon made eye contact and exchanged a few coy smiles. I don't know if you'd call it love at first sight, but something certainly stirred in my loins!

Labels: 2007

A big shout goes out today for my brother, Nick, who's just got a First in his Physiotherapy degree. This would be achievement enough in most circumstances, but he's also had to overcome the most staggering incompetence and disregard from some of the academic staff and from the behemoth that is University of East London. Long story - which you can read about in various places on his blog - but let's just say I'd have burnt a few houses down by now if it'd been me. Nice one, bro.

Labels: 2007

From the BBC documentary archive;

The Japanese village of Ogama is so small that it doesn't feature on any maps. But this tiny community, with just eight elderly residents, has become a trailblazer in a country looking to cope with the effects of an aging population. Listen Now

Labels: 2007

Finally got the wireless up and running on the laptop with the help of an upgrade to Windows XP and now I'm here multi-tasking - downloading upgrades, blogging, editing webpages and watching 'Trading Places'. What a classic - Eddie Murphy farting in the tub and demonstrating the Bruce Lee 'Quart of Blood' technique in prison;

Prisoner: "Tell us how you cut him."

Billy Ray: "Hey, I didn't cut him with no knife, man."

Prisoner: "But you told me last night you cut the dude."

Billy Ray: "It was with these I cut him (shows hands). I am a chang belt in Kung Fu. Bruce Lee was my teacher. Watch this. Woop! HAA! Agai! Woop! Woop! Agai! Ayahhhh! Woop! Iguh! Hiya! Woo! Woo! Ha! Ha! Woop! Agai! Bin! Ha! Haaaaaaaaaa... Watah! Tidah! That's called the quart of blood technique. You do that, a quart of blood will drop out of a person's body.

Brilliant, and just what I need after today's 6-hour perfect storm of management meetings left me like a vegetable.

Labels: 2007

Nick gets the scoop again. Here's Louis showing his face to the web for the first time. Click here to enlarge

Labels: 2007

Some great Wales Christmas pictures from Nick. I can't believe these were all taken with a phone.

Labels: 2007

How ironic. On an afternoon when Norwich are getting tonked yet again at Crystal Palace, I've just stumbled across much happier times at Selhurst Park...


It's July 1984 at Reggae Sunsplash and the mighty Aswad are at the height of their powers.

They broke big a year or two earlier with the Island mini-album, 'Live'n'Direct', which blew my musical horizons wide open - before that I was listening to Billy Joel and Lionel Richie.

This was the first gig I ever went to and what a way to start - Black Uhuru, Dennis Brown, Sly'n'Robbie, The Skatalites and Leroy Sibbles, too. Awesome.

Labels: 2007

Here's my first camcorder output, Mum and Yani playing with Louis at Marloes on Xmas Day. It's the raw output with voices and what not in the background. I'd like to think that at some point this year I'll have a little play with editing sounds and stuff.

Labels: 2007

Yani's picture of Oti perfectly captures the excitement of the brand new year ahead.

Labels: 2007