Posts (page 2)

There seems to be an awful lot of bad news around lately, my family had a large delivery of it when we recieved the news that my mum has an aggressive cancer. She's been in hospital for the last five weeks. One of the new rituals in my life that has resulted from this is that I chat for about 15 minutes most evenings on the phone with my dad. He's unsurprisingly becoming frustrated by the fact that my mum's condition is improving so slowly - despite nearly five weeks of intensive hospital treatment.

When I talk about improvement, I'm mostly referring to a lessening of the amount of fluid her body is currently retaining. She's unable to walk because of it and the pain she's experiencing is by all accounts discomforting in the extreme. She also has a cluster of secondary infections - complications that have developed since she was admitted for the operation to remove the tumor. It would be great if these would recede enough to allow her to leave the hospital. Some days it seems that they will, my dad reports back sounding optimistic and hopeful. A few days later I hear the same helplessness and frustration creeping back into his voice...

It must be awful to be bed-ridden in a hospital for weeks at a time. it must feel endless. Never able to leave, living an institutionalized and regimented existence with little or no privacy and bereft of all the comforts you've worked so hard to gather around you. It can't be easy to be separated from everyone and  everything you normally take solace from. That's the real frustration of a long-term illness; it becomes a form of incarceration. You haven't done anything wrong, you've just become unwell. You're locked inside the personal prison of your illness and (if you're hospitalized) removed from all the physical support structure and trappings of your established life. It's disorienting, it's tiring and it can easily engender a sense of hopelessness and despair.

In a way my dad is serving such a sentence along with my mum. He's not in hospital, but he's entered a terminal waiting room; a twilight world; of long sleepless nights and nervous lonely days waiting for his wife to come home. Waiting to have the chance to spend a few private moments with the woman he married all those years ago. Sometimes, he feels he'll never have those moments again. What's worse, is simply not knowing what's going on and the uncertainty of the outcome; having to carry on doing all the things you'd normally do without any of the comfort of normality...

I guess my whole family is in that waiting room with him... My brother is preparing to leave Japan to return home; sounds like he's struggling with it all. My sister is waiting for her husband to move out of the family house; two young boys caught in the middle. Me I'm  waiting each day for my dad's update, trying to find the means and methods to guarantee my families long-term financial security; trying to define what's happening both to my family and my country. My poor mum, she's simply waiting; waitng to be well enough to return home for a while.

A terminal diagnosis places you into a state of anticipation, awaiting an event that has no specified date or time. The doctor prognosticates, offering a diagnosis like some medieval seer gazing into a crystal ball and you're left to act upon that clouded vision. It's the quality of your actions from that moment onwards that determines how you ultimately come to terms with it all and what you become in the process.

Lately, my family has had to deal with the news that my Mum, (Veronica) has a terminal cancer. It's aggressive, difficult to treat, of a rare variety and is likely to kill her at some still unspecified point in the (relatively) near future.

It's hard to grasp news like this. It comes at you out of the blue and you sit there in a huddle with your family in a pokey little small-town hospital side-room nodding your head like you understand, whilst the doctor delivers the grim prognosis. You don't understand at all - it takes days to sink in... Even then, It doesn't seem real. Gradually, when it does, it steals a part of your happiness away with it.

Technically Veronica is my step-mum. The way my maternal relationships have worked out means that Veronica has the 'Mum' tag and my birth 'Mother' (Jacqueline) the 'Mother' moniker. It's all a bit strange, but like a lot of families just works...

This latest news HAS shifted all our priorities around. The whole family is reeling. Everything is in flux. My Brother Justin; who has been living and working in Japan for two years, is now reconsidering his options. He's thinking he'll move back to the UK for a while. Of course, it means leaving everything he's spent the last 24 months establishing...

MY sister Kelly, (who had been spending way too much time in 'Second Life') has two beautiful young boys (Daniel and William) to keep her busy all day and night. She's facing some tough challenges right now.

My Dad is simply devastated. He's 75 years old and despite two recent strokes, is still working  as a late-night cleaner. He always expected to be "the first one to go." My Mum is 64 and has had poor health for a few years now. She already has a blood illness called 'Polychythemia' which means she produces a deficiency of white blood cells. Currently she's still in the hospital. She's been there almost a month and this week was put back into intensive care for three days. Fortunately, she's back in the general ward again.  

The problem with bad news is that it accumulates. Lately it had begun to feel like every day was bringing another gloomy development, rather than the recovery we were all hoping for after the initial operation.

In the short-term we'd just like the news that she can come home and can resume some kind of normal life. Sleeping in her own bed would be a start. Even if it's just for the moment. Now THAT would be a real boost. 

Orange__Tech_Support!

Last month I lost my broadband access for 3 weeks. The saga of my phone dealings with my ISP, (Orange) and my endless attempts to get the situation resolved, would take almost as long to recount in full as it took for me to get them to fix the problem.

The solution proved laughably simple in the end. The source of the problem being that some phone-monkey at Orange had incorrectly entered the first letter of my username in lower case when it should have been upper case!  Why they did this has still to be determined.

It was only by lucky chance that the problem was eventually discovered at all. How something so absurdly simple can prove so deceptively difficult to diagnose and correct is I guess, one of those frustrating mysteries now filed under "Orange Nightmares!"

I'm still with Orange, but believe me when I have time I'll be switching. I'm completely sick of speaking to tech-support teams in a different continent, operating from some robotic script, repeating the same half dozen stock phrases over and over and over again. At times, I felt as if I'd entered a surreal Kafkaesque nightmare, where nothing made sense and I merely went round in endless dizzying circles, being charged for premium rate calls, listening to pre-recorded muzak and entering touch tone numbers on my phone to get through to customer support departments staffed by the living dead, whose only redeeming virtue was their incessant politeness!

I lost hours of productive time last month, which I'm still overworking to reclaim. I experienced levels of hair tearing frustration that would have tried the patience of several Saints, who fortunately for them, never had to deal with Orange Customer Support. If they had I'm sure their cannonization would have proved somewhat less of a formality!

I'm now having to reclaim all the phone charges I incurred whilst keeping a watchful eye out to ensure I'm not billed for a month of access I didn't receive. Of course I didn't recieve an aplology. My advice to anyone using the Orange service? Leave now whilst you still can, get out, before you have your sanity, your patience, your wallet and your will to live emptied by the sanity sucking madness of getting trapped inside an Orange Nightmare!

I'm lying back in bed, it's a weekend lunchtime and the pale Yorkshire sun is casting irregular shadowy patterns on the curtains. I'm in that half-light, between awake and asleep. The ease of dreams and slumber are still close to the surface and the care and concern of the day is yet not fully upon me. I have that delicious feeling, the one you only have, when you're folded inside the twists and turns of a duvet!

I'm imagining the warm sting of shower, which will shortly drench me into full alertness. The bitter sweetness of that first steaming cup of coffee I have yet to taste; the sweetness of a small piece of a Thornton's chocolate reindeer which I have tucked away in the back of the wardrobe and the fact that in exactly four hours and twenty four minutes, Manchester United will be kicking off against Middlesbrough in the F.A. Cup. The game is being televised live and I'll be watching the spectacle... It's going to be a good day!

Then it hits me... Sometimes I go for days, even weeks without ever feeling or being this happy!

I forget to look at the world I'm living in. I neglect its taste, scent and touch. I don't even hear the swell and the silence of its sounds swimming all around me. I fail to feel, as the pulse beats within me and the breath of life passes over and through me. Instead I stumble around, half conscious in the twilight of my own mind with the auto-pilot fully engaged, through endless seconds, hours and weeks, time which will never return. All the while far more deeply asleep then I am right now in this bed.

It's happening now my life... Inside me, in front of me, all around me. I should be present at its unveiling, not sleepwalking through it. Because I can't go back, I can't  reclaim or re-live one single solitary second of it. This is most definitely not a rehearsal.

I want to ensure that this moment and all those that succeed it are viewed with renewed eyes. Because the beauty and gift of my unique life is that all my humanity is contained inside it. I'm the only one in all of space and time who is living this life, its mine and only mine, in all its unrepeatable passing. At any single moment I have the chance to start paying renewed attention to how it flows and feels. To change course if I'm losing my way or retrain my tired scripted habits. I can discard the old lines I have been mumbling without feeling or passion and throw out the tired and cliched. Its my life, this is my time. My own unique irreplacable portion of eternity.

"Time to get up!" I hear myself say... Time to move, live, love and breathe. As I leave this sheltered space, pull back the covers and head for the shower. I heart that quiet still voice of comfort that lives inside me say. "Good move John, welcome to the rest of your life..."

Recently I've been keeping an almost daily audioblog. It's something I've been doing off and on for quite a long time but since interviewing 'The Naked Englishman'  (Richard Vobes) for a regular podcast I produce called 'Citizen Scoop' I've been producing them in a far more consistent fashion. I have now set-up a specific blogger site to host them.         

It's strange the way in which communicating your private thoughts in a raw and uncensored way to an audience unburdens you of them. It also helps to enforce a certain personal accountability. Of course I'm not actually accountable to anyone, simply because they happen to hear my private thoughts. Yet in some mysterious way, it helps me to feel I that have publicly shared certain thoughts and feelings with my (mostly anonymous) audience. It's a good feeling to 'let go' in a stream of conciousness way, without feeling worried or burdened by whether or not the other person is actually listening, or wondering if even they care about what I'm saying. I'm simply able to assume that 'somebody' is, and get on with whatever it is I feel I'd like to say.

Of course written blogs are equally useful for getting something off your chest, although perhaps not as portable and they can't be interacted with whilst doing something else. They require a larger measure of attention and a different kind of concentration to ensure that we get a clear sense of what the other person is really communicating.

Audio is more spacious, it's 'fuzzier' if you will, because the bandwidth of the vocal tone and the surrounding environmental sound field communicate a high volume of both subjective and specific information. When I'm listening to someone speaking, rather than reading their thoughts, I pick up a lot of this fuzzy background. Their accent, the pace of their speech, their energy level, what kind of mood they appear to be in, even their apparent level of sincerity all appear apparent from information contained in their voice and speaking pattern.

These things help to contribute to and colour my understanding and judgement when I form an opinion of what I believe they're talking about. I don't feel I am making an enormous effort to get at this information. Listening is after all a fairly easy thing to do. Although try telling that to some people who never seem to pay any attention to the things that people say to them!

Personally I enjoy the sense of mundanity, lack of pretension, personableness and the everyday reality that pervades audioblogs. Hearing people talking about their lives in an unvarnished way is somehow rewarding. I feel invested in that person and engaged in their daily life. In a certain sense I come to feel that I know them as I some of my friends and family.

The style associated with audioblogs is generally one that is unpolished and unedited. They are unscripted and therfore seem 'real' in a way that that the contrived reality shows sarurating our televsions rarely seem to be. In a media culture that bombards us with proffessional polish and fake reality it's a refreshing change to be able to listen in on the ordinary and extraordinary workings of the minds and hearts of the people who share the world with us.

It's winter here in Blighty and in the north of England it's pretty chilly right now. Not to worry though, because I've been keeping warm on the heat and energy currently sparking off from UK podcasting!

The last few months have been a lot of fun and also a lot of hard of work, but it's been a rewarding period in UK podcasting and for me personally. There have been lots of changes, many late nights, a stack of forum posts, e-mails, skype calls and late night conversations. As Christmas approaches, I can truly say, I'm looking forward to a rest and a little relaxation.

The UK podcast community has grown up very rapidly this year. We've all learned a few hard lessons about the reality of our new medium, now that so many other people are becoming interesred in it. I've learned that it's good to push yourself both creatively and socially and I think that as a commuity we've learned that nothing stays the same for ever. Change is the engine of creative media and as a podcasting pal of mine said recently quoting Anatole France, "even the most longed for changes have their melancholy."

The rapid cycle of activity really ramped up a few months back with the planning and preparation for PodcastconUK began in earnest. PodcastconUK 2006 was the UK's second annual podcast shindig and this years event was yet again a great success. It was probably more serious in tone and nature than last years debut, but this was no doubt due to the fact that there is far more commercial interest in podcasting right now, then there was at the time of the first event in October 2005. 

I chaired a panel discussion on Citizen Journalism and secured a great bunch of panelists to participate in it. As a prelude to all of this I got into producing a citizen media podcast and blog over at 'Citizen Scoop' and recorded a series of interviews and conversations with a bunch of bright and interesting people. We talked about citizen journalism, social media, podcasting, second-life, the future of newspapers and a whole host of other topics.
 
The interview work took my podcasting off in new directions and provided another outlet away from the more serious stuff I've been doing for a while now on Dissident Vox. It also helped me get to know the UK podcast community a lot better. Something which I'm really happy about.

In late November there were some serious ructions in the UK community. The Britcaster forums announced they were to close their virtual doors on December 15, prompting some pretty heated exchanges and not a little recrimination. Most of this centre around perceived agenda arising from the fact that some podcasters are now signing to commercial networks such a BTPodshow or TPN. I've had some overtures and offers myself, but nothing that I felt I wanted to commit to.

It's always better to view people holistically, as whole human-beings rather than as posters on forums with agendas, or bloggers or podcasters with certain ideas or feelings we may or may not agree with. Lately I feel I've had a chance to get more involved with the people behind the shows and postings, this has helped me to see more clearly the people behind the podcasting trees!

Hopefully most of the negativity has now calmed and people have taken stock of the changes, new forums have emerged and UK podcasting is in a healthier position than it was a few months ago. There are definite splits and factions emerging, something that is inevitable as the community grows, but in general the last few months have produced more positives than negatives.

This was evidenced by the fact that 23 podcasters contributed to the last Citizen Scoop. A show designed to say a fond farewell to the Britcaster forum. This showed that in spite of all its teething troubles UK podcasting still has a lot of great people willing to give their time and energy to create something positive.

On a personal note I was interviewed on BBC Radio Five Live this week, (again!) I've been articled and mentioned by the BBC a few times lately which is nice. On Thursday, I was asked to contribute to a conversation about whether or not blogging had now reached its peak and was about to enter its late middle-age. You can imagine how I responded!

I have had some truly brilliant feedback lately, it makes the whole thing seem even more worthwhile. I'd still like to be making a living from it, but even if that has to wait for the right offers and the right environment, I've got the skills and enthusiasm to find a way to do it.

The podcast bug has me well and truly hooked although to be fair it has done ever since my first show, way back in January 2005. I've met some fabulous people, learned a ton of fascinating and useful things, discovered new bands and new ideas and become part of a thriving community here in the UK. It's all good. Somehow I feel it's only going to get better!

I'm not sure yet where this is coming from. I've noticed certain lossy artifacts being added to my last few audio posts here on vox. Nothing is visible my end before upload. The files are being encoded at 128Kbps using iTunes.

I've posted to the Team Vox blog and left a comment in the question of the day blog page. I wonder if anyone else has experienced this, or if it's simply an issue with settings at my end?

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Torchwood09

John B

Another week, another episode. This one entitled 'Random Shoes' sees the series return to a more optimistic tone. All the better for that! Microreview with minor spoilers ahead!