Fleeing the rain!
One of the more successful ‘all of the Selfs’ photos of recent years
Although my first week at Groupon has been fun, it must be said that working Mondays to Fridays really does make the weekend come alive again. I spent this one meeting up with others at Simon’s in Cambridge, where we ate an enormous quantity of tasty food (including some skilfully made panna cotta courtesy of Patrick, yum yum), played competitive games of Hungry Hungry Hippos, watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and whizzed through the air on an impressively high spinning fairground ride which had a disconcerting habit of accelerating you towards our planet face down. (Loved it really. Obviously.)
I am rather sad about my recent economic woes, though…
Caught up on not one but two classic films this week, When Harry Met Sally and Alien, and enjoyed them both as much as their reputations would suggest I should! Honestly, though, sometimes I feel that life is just a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where you’re forever trying to fix the most glaring holes in your pop culture awareness… 
Anyway, I have an announcement of sorts! In a week’s time I will be starting a three month traineeship at Groupon – in a proper office with chairs and desks and actual people and everything! Don’t ask me too many questions, though, because (a) I don’t want to turn my entire life into a job interview and (b) I don’t imagine I’ll be discussing it on my blog very much. But rest assured that I’m looking forward to it, and grateful so far to be getting some variety in work rather than charging down a single graduate route straight away. So, hurrah! Rather neatly, Melissa took Grace and I out for lunch last week as well to celebrate coming to the end of writing School Wars. Rest assured I will plug it mercilessly when it comes out later this year (Septemberish?) but in the meantime here’s a nice photo of us looking pleased with ourselves:
Look at us! You definitely want to buy the book, don’t you?
On reflection, ‘hello sweetie’ would have been cleverer
(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
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
