(Rest assured I have Twitter pinned)
(The name itself is probably a mistake, by the way. Not only is it unlikely to excite consumers much but it’s also nothing like Windows – although I suppose once Windows 8 comes around it might.)
Anyway: a major factor in all of this is obviously cost, and I’ve always preferred to be on SIM-only deals rather than long-term contracts because they seem to be much better value. Virgin, for example, will give you 500 minutes, 3000 texts and 1 GB a month for around £15 a month – and you can cancel whenever you like. But buying an unlocked iPhone outright is, what, around £600? I bought the Optimus 7, on the other hand, for £200 – and the hardware feels nice, too.
But it’s the software that really matters, and although it may just be a matter of taste, I generally prefer the quite innovative feel of the Windows Phone to everyone else’s rows and rows of icons. Integrating services together makes sense, too: my Facebook account has pictures for everyone and my Outlook knows their phone numbers, so why not link them all together and combine all the information seamlessly? Touching, typing and scrolling all work well, although there are a couple of strange failings, like calendar text which is far too small to read and no custom ringtones. (This latter one is being fixed, though.) Also, I don’t know how common this is across all smartphones, but it’s silly that the phone’s alarm can’t turn the phone on.
Plenty of commentators have said the same thing: that the Windows Phone is a decent smartphone platform that’s just too late to the game, and can never catch up with the others. They might well be right, and if you want the widest choice of apps then you need to look elsewhere. But aside from that, it doesn’t really matter a great deal. Most of my mobile data (contacts, calendar, e-mail, Twitter etc.) is either in the cloud* or synced with my laptop or both, and I could just as easily switch to another smartphone in the future without much hassle. For the moment, though, Windows Phone 7 genuinely offers something both new and a little delightful.
(*In the cloud with Google, mostly. Just because I’m on WP7 doesn’t mean I want Windows Live handling everything.)
All things considered, last week was a perfectly normal week until Friday came along. Abbi and Paul showed off their newly vegetarian (but still reassuringly delicious) cooking with a mini dinner party on Tuesday: all quite respectable. Went to see Mark Thomas at the Tricycle on Wednesday for my mum’s birthday: OK, maybe a (brilliant and hilarious) stand-up routine about the West Bank isn’t a typical outing for every family, but this is North West London after all. It was only when Friday arrived that things got properly surreal: a cocktail of nerves, sadness, reunion and celebration which took a turn for the even weirder and culminated in Geek Corner turning unexpectedly militant!
But first things first. Friday was Jimmy’s funeral, at which I’d been asked to read out my post in his memory. To be honest, I’d been nervous beforehand that this could all seem like a bit of an imposition… as if the Queens Park community, through sheer mass of numbers, could be taking up something that rightfully belonged to his family. Thankfully, I really don’t think this was a problem – partly because when I listened to everyone else who spoke from all parts of his life it all sounded so right. We were all definitely talking about the same marvellous person.
Funerals like this are odd, though, because the sadness of the occasion is mixed with the joy of being reunited with lots and lots of people you once saw every day. Holly and I got a lift there together, and pretty soon we were having the same arguments we used to have during A Level English, which was sweet and lovely. And the pub afterwards was packed with all sorts of students and teachers from different eras, which means there’s so much to catch up on… especially after a couple of beers, when I got around to admonishing my old PE teacher for denying me the cliché of utterly miserable PE lessons. My ride home was kindly provided by Sue Wales with Alison Hook, Luna Rupchand and Chris Moore sitting in the back: now that’s just plain wacky, like someone’s compressed my entire school life and turned it into a bizarre roadtrip movie.
So, an odd mix of emotions, rounded off with an evening of Geek Corner Plus. (Geek Corner Plus? Geek Corner Extra? Geek Corner with Special Guest Star Amber? You decide.) We watched Hercules in New York, which was obviously terrible, and then I tried to get us all to watch Made In Chelsea as an obviously terrible follow-up. I hadn’t bargained, however, on having to fight Saoirse for the remote: an experience which ended up with said remote smashing into my face followed by kindly and helpful siblings scurrying into the kitchen to fetch tissues and ice for the bleeding 
(I do feel bad about telling this story, because it was obviously an accident and hardly a big one. It was just such an amusing one: the jokes about Saoirse gearing up for violent revolution all write themselves! Rest assured, future employers \ boyfriends \ secret service operatives, that she’s not actually violent.)
But if it was, I would fill it with charmingly silly animated Doctor Who gifs, just like all the other Tumblrs in the world. And sometimes I would post silly animated Doctor Who gifs from 1965, purely because I love the Meddling Monk as a character far too much to be normal:
My Tumblr would have no picture borders
Disappointingly, there was no Rapture last Saturday, which not only robbed us all of an exciting period of secular frolicking (or something along those lines: the various diagrams are rather confusing) but also meant my carefully planned Friday can’t be described as ‘going out on a high note’. Still, it was fun nonetheless. During the day Grace and I joined Oliver, Abi and Sarah for a picnic and some badminton in their back garden – now doesn’t that sentence sound absurdly genteel? And then in the evening I went to a charming pub out in Harrow with Henry, who I’ve known vaguely through whatever social networking was in vogue at the time but never actually met. Some things you should know about Henry: he’s the country’s third youngest Catholic school chaplain, he’s got numerous Facebook fan clubs, he’s endearingly passionate about drinking real ale and he – hallelujah! – is great conversation too.
See, this is my thing. Like most people, “I enjoy spending time with people with different views than my own”. Nothing remarkable there – we all like to pretend we’re charmingly tolerant and well-mixed like that, because then when your friends cheer on your drunken rants with “yes!” and “exactly!” and “I know!” you can flatter yourself that it really was the full persuasive force of your elegant slurring which stirred their hearts and won their minds, rather than admitting that your friends were unlikely to have been quiet supporters of the Hitler Youth \ Toby Young \ Comic Sans in the first place. However, some people seem to work by the maxim that you should delicately steer every conversation around any conceivable disagreement so that you can arrive at the hallowed destination of ‘common ground’ without doing any of the spadework first. I have a theory that this is why we like talking about terrible crimes so much. If you think that cannabis should be given to nursery children instead of milk and your neighbour wants to reintroduce capital punishment for smelling of it, then why not open each chat together with a gloomy anecdote about the latest gruesome murder and reassure each other than you’re not monsters after all?
Except this is silly. This is like setting a film in ancient Rome and not featuring gladiators. When I have a rare opportunity to drink real ale with the country’s third youngest Catholic school chaplain, you can be sure that I want to talk about gay rights, condoms and faith schools rather than – oh, I don’t know – petrol prices. So we did! It was brilliant. BBC Four should have filmed it and used it to fill up their pesky ‘Religion and Ethics’ quota. And, as usually happens, I’m liable to get on with people much better after such conversations rather than suspecting someone to be hiding behind a front the whole time. So here’s to Henry. Because no one should have to talk about petrol prices all night. *raises glass*
(Apparently he wouldn’t have been Raptured anyway: not sure American evangelicals are too fond of Catholics. Now, who wouldn’t want to go to the pub with one of them…)
P.S. I have other things I want to blog about, and am behind schedule, but this turned out wordier than I expected. Apologies.
P.P.S. It’s still a lifetime ambition to go to the pub with Father Alexander, although I am unsure as to how this could ever be contrived. I’ll just put it out there, again.
I feel slightly disorganised at the minute, like I’m being tugged in multiple directions. There are even longer to-do lists taunting me than usual (and multiplying at a frightening rate) whilst I also feel like I haven’t seen Everyone In Ages. Yet this is nonsense. I’ve actually been rather productive, completing chunks of work for Melissa’s Schools Wars as well as for The Lexi & The Nomad. At the same time there have been plenty of fun things with lovely people, too. Cocktails last Wednesday with Caroline, Laura and my soul mate Matt (sorry, Laura) at a swankyish bar where Matt and I matched each other’s choices five times in a row and everyone else wondered if we needed some alone time. A recording of QI on Friday thanks to Jamie’s ticket generosity, which proved that Chris Addison is clearly auditioning to be the next Stephen Fry.
And, oh, Eurovision glory! Grace and I made it over to Joshua’s flat on Saturday evening for some delicious cooking (*tips hat to his mum*) and the kind of entertainment that only Moldova can bring. (They really should have won. We did vote for them. Three times.) Here’s a top tip for Eurovision: always try and watch it with an American who’s never seen it before, and there will be an extra layer of enjoyment simply in beholding the bewilderment. It also allows you to look really clever when it comes to the voting stages, confidentially predicting that yes, detailed calculations indicate that Cyprus will probably award twelve points to Greece this year. Tada. What insight.
This is all on top of numerous happy lunches, dinners, drinks, books, Doctor Who episodes and elections. OK, maybe not happy elections, but this was the first time that I’ve voted in the same polling station as my parents before, so it was a rite of passage. (Again. Think I’m squeezing about seven ‘rites of passages’ out of this voting business. It’s like being Klingon but without the pain sticks.*) And I’ve even found time to write the most-detailed-yet plan to revamp this site! Sure, it’s now about four years overdue, but at current projections Duke Mayhem Forever will still have taken longer.**
So there you go: I’ve talked myself into believing that all is fine. I will still feel happier once I have something vaguely full-time to demand my attention, though. Which is odd, because you’d have thought that would make me less happy with even less time to do all of the things I mean to do, but for some reason it doesn’t work like that.
In the meantime – if I’m being abominably slow in doing something that I’m supposed to be doing for you, I’m sorry. I’ll be freer when I’m less free.
* DaHjaj SuvwI’e’ jiH. tIgwIj Sa’angNIS. Iw bIQtIq jIjaH. Nerdiest reference this week.
** Before that one.
Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
