I just wanted to take a moment to talk about Building Partnerships, which was one of the key themes at the dominicself.co.uk AGM this year. What, you didn’t make it? Well, luckily, the key slide is reproduced below. Essentially, in these difficult economic times, it’s important that liquidity can be maintained. Specifically, tea liquidity. But that requires mugs – no no, not readers – of the tea-containing kind. And this is where you come in.
Building Partnerships with nicparkes.com
You can read more about the competition from Nic himself, but the important thing is to keep on clicking through 
In order to serve you better, the next couple of posts will emerge in an exciting multi-part serial format, with all the narrative runarounds and painful padding of a children’s television drama. And it would please me greatly if you could all try not to do anything notable during this period, so that I don’t fall further behind. All agreed? Good. So if you’re sitting comfortably, then I’ll begin…
For the first half of my Easter holiday with Lucy – the countrysidey bit – we were based in the Crakehall Watermill. This was an awesome B&B and exuded friendliness to the extent that our hosts were printing and annotating bus timetables with suggested visits, offering to give us lifts to the nearby village and bringing fresh milk in a little flask every evening. Reccomended! Plus, check out the surroundings…
Crakehall Watermill: the view from our window
Parish walks: the “I can read maps” look
Free! Cheese!
On Tuesday we visited the village of Hawes (pronounced the way you wish it would be) to fulfil my primary life aim: to visit a cheese factory! And the most exciting part of a cheese factory, as you might imagine, is the free cheese. A very wide selection of free cheese samples, in fact. I think the countryside is onto a winner here, personally. As did the friendly old man sitting on a bench outside this dairy paradise, who started talking to us through the age-old method of opening with a joke (it wasn’t the best, but then it was better than most of mine) before moving on to extolling the benefits of the North. (Which was a bit of a running theme that day, actually, as a woman on the bus had already told her friend about the pressures of living at a ‘frenetic pace’ in, erm, Oxford.) The conversation swiftly moved on to why there “has to be a creator” because “a Big Bang would only be messy” and reached a bit of a low when he introduced us to a companion as “this man and his girlfriend or wife”. Beating a retreat, this man and his girlfriend or wife walked back through Hawes where the BNP had taken to handing out leaflets at the market. I really am annoyed at myself for refusing one with a smiling ‘no, thank you’ – damn British instinct – and would like to amend the record to a ‘fuck off, thank you’ if possible. But it did really highlight the peculiarities of a place that can be so warm and friendly to some and so viciously exclusionary to others.
Relaxing!
We set aside the time on Wednesday to attempt a real and proper walk through the Dales. Armed with water, a few sweets, a map and a healthy sense of optimism, we made our way through the beautiful countryside to seek out the village of Redmire. There were ups and downs, of course. At one might we may have darted across a railway, jumped past a troublesome gate and had to scramble over a wall in order to regain some semblance of a footpath. And the mighty Redmire was perhaps a little too village-like, offering no possibility of lunch after all, but help was at hand in the form of a well-timed train, and we ended up somewhere slightly more populated tucking into the best burgers and milkshakes ever. Success!
The Yorkshire Dales during our walk
Stay tuned for Leeds…
Book Club sometimes has a habit of losing its literary aspirations, particularly when none of us have actually finished the book yet. Yesterday evening may have been planned to resemble a meeting but, with Sanna unable to attend, it soon turned into an excuse to have tea with Saoirse. Long-term readers will be aware that ‘tea with Saoirse’ means a great deal of political chat interspersed with only a little gossip, which is always great fun. In fact, along with Saoirse’s mum*, we talked long enough for me to receive food and wine: is my entire life just a continual cycle around the hospitality of others? (Which reminds me: you all must come over sometime! We can compare carpets.) But yes – it was not only a lovely evening but I also finally finally finally got to try out the Wii. I know this is roughly equivalent to somebody proudly announcing that he or she has just tried out this funky ‘e-mail’ thing for the first time, but better late than never.
[*There is no really satisfactory formulation of this sentence. Yes, parents are individuals too! But it’s all about context, innit?]Anyway: I am very shortly off on holiday with Lucy! We’re going ‘up North’ – which means a bit of Yorkshire countryside as well as Leeds – and I won’t be back for a week or so. (Come to think of it, afterwards I really should be in high-powered revision mode anyway.) So please excuse my relative online absence. I’m sure I’ll still manage to Twitter…
Oh, and points for getting the title without looking it up, you literary folk.
A few days ago my watch strap broke. All very well, you might think, as your mind begins to drift onto the theoretical possibility of using artificial intelligence to fetch, read and digest your RSS feeds for you, before relating only the most important sections in a nicely synthesised voice balancing a matey joviality with gravitas and authority when the subject matter demanded it. (“And the breaking of watch straps”, you note smugly and with a slight trace of a snort, “would certainly be discarded by any intelligence even half worthy of the name!”) But hang on there, buddy, because it turns out that the opening to the watch strap story – in all its banal simplicity – was actually only the mere lead-in to the observation that the aforesaid event seriously disrupted my ability to live. I drifted through the days – two, possibly three – without much awareness of what time it was, my days punctuated instead by the motion of checking my empty wrist and sighing. Sure, I had the time on my phone, on clocks, on my laptop and in the corner of breaking news channels, but none of it could compensate for the simple service of a watch. Plus said watch can go 100m underwater, which none of the rival timekeeping devices can, so there’s a USP right there. Here’s to watches!
I’ve seen rather a lot of Joshua and Niamh recently, so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re mightily sick of me by now. (“A common sentiment”, our hypothetical rude reader adds, who you should probably know is Cubert.) On Monday night we were at the Blues Bar they’re fans of, along with Lucy, who was using London as a central cog in the transportation of goods between Rome, Sussex and Cofton. The next day the pair joined me and Katie in a Peggle practice session, in preparation for the Peggle ‘n’ Pizza tournament I have decided must be held. (In fact, I have apparently decided it must be held on Easter Sunday. Outlook doesn’t tell me things like this, you see, and each year I find it a big enough struggle trying to remember how many days Easter even spans. I thought I had it figured – death on Friday, ‘your call is important to us’ on Saturday and (brief) resurrection on Sunday – but then my dad started talking about ‘Easter Monday’ and I lost it again.)
Joshua and Lucy
We read Nic’s bl… I mean, Peggle practice
Battle of strength
And then, yesterday, I went to see Oliver and Abi – plus Abi’s sister Sarah – for a picnic. Except that it rained, so we ate indoors instead, but then ate crisps, popcorn and French Fancies during a splurge of Buffy watching, so all’s good. It is true that the sugar slightly went to our heads. as we may have ended up lying on the floor trying to arm wrestle, but that’s allowed. Oh, and we all watched the first episode of the latest series of The Apprentice, on which I want to say only two things. Firstly: using the phrase “at the end of the day” should result in instant expulsion, not just from the show but from society itself. (Shut up, Cubert. I don’t want to hear about your mastery of the search engine.) And secondly: the boys’ choice of the team name Empire – on the explicit grounds that it was ‘distinctly British’ – actually caused me to involuntarily drop a spoon. Good idea, you utter, utter pillocks.
Those of you living in an RSS or Facebook world might never even notice. But tonight I have been spurred on to a small bout of online home improvement, motivated both by the release of IE8 and Nic’s forward march. While Nic is busy adding features like ‘comments’ and ‘gravatars’, however, I’m already several steps ahead* 
So without further ado, I present the new version of feed mix!
Feed Mix Upgrade
*Nic’s blog is wonderful really. Go read it.
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
