Meet Daisy, the dog who lived in the house to which our little holiday gîte was attached. She's pulling that rather alarming face because she's in the middle of masticating one of the many figs that fell from the tree at the front door. You haven’t lived until you've seen a Staffie cross chow down on a series of sticky, slightly fermented figs. Now, you might think that eating dozens of figs wouldn't be good for a small dog, and if you did, the spate of mournful farts she let out in our company would seem to lend credence to your theory.



And, as always, there are a bunch more photos from France on Flickr. Not terrific shots, I must say; the weather was against me, and, worse, the muse just didn't seem to be with me.

Jenny’s cousin and thoroughly, delightfully batty aunts came to visit. We painted crockery...



...got Sheila and Isla convinced that Wii Tennis was a great game...



...and, with the power of OldBooth on the iPhone, turned Sheila into a man:

On this day four years ago, Wife and I hired a band, invited a bunch of people round, and told them all that we each thought the other was a pretty nice person, all things considered. Today marks our fourth anniversary, and we toddled off to the Michelin-starred The Bath Priory for lunch. Such a glorious experience, and rounded off beautifully with this rather lovely selection of petit fours. Marriage rocks, by the way.

Yesterday’s dog was Cassie, a Rottweiler who, unlike Kizzie, was decidedly not arthritic. She was strong, and it took us while to get to know each other, but by the end of walk, I had her sitting at heel like a good girl when we stopped and waited for other dogs to pass. (Of particular note since she lunged madly at the first few dogs we passed.) A combination of heavy sporadic rain and wanting to give her more attention than any of the other dogs I’ve walked to date meant that the only usable image I have of her is the tiny clip below, but I think it’s worth sharing to show that even Rotties are just big puppies underneath. (I was struck again by how alike dogs are; despite knowing that they share a common ancestor only a handful of generations back, it’s still striking to me that a stocky great lug of a beast like Cassie would sniff at a scent in the grass with the utmost delicacy and care, and that she’d respond to the same commands, affection and body language as any other.)



We also went to Cardiff to see Cope, and though we had to leave early today so I could get back and get some work done, we took time to visit the bay and stop into the Assembly building. It’s a stunning piece of architecture, and the use of wood and slate is a sympathetic yet bold mix of traditional materials and techniques married to uncompromisingly modern aesthetic. The openness and welcoming nature of the place is also striking.

What’s more, though the shots below – the brick building is not the Assembly, though I forget its name and use now – have been Photoshopped (sorry Adobe), they’re the first in-anger pictures I’ve taken with the iPhone 3GS, and they are at least passable.

Despite the 5am start, today’s visit to Brighton was wonderful. Met up with some of the dudes from Realmac for brunch, then caught up with The Nicest Man In The World® Simon Handby. Man, it was lovely to see him again. Then it was time for The Dave & Mendy Hour™, and it was all kinds of wonderful to see the little pair of scamps again. The most surreal moment – apart, possibly, from the tale of the glow-in-the-dark paint in the marital bedroom – was when a random biddy came up to our table in the middle of an anecdote to ask us if we could send a text message on her phone for her. Fair enough. Bemusedly, Dave complied, as the other three of us fought hard to avoid eye contact.



It would all have been fine, even though she then just started randomly telling us facts about her life and basically just not buggering off again after the message was sent, but for one odd little postscript to her rambling. It could have been ‘the gays’, but I think she was actually complaining about all the coons, and how they get everything and we get nothing. It’s apparently why she won’t go to London. At this point I made it clear somehow – it may have been by saying ‘goodbye’ with uncharacteristic firmness – that we were done talking, and she ambled off. The bigoted old trout.

Some people take pictures of their first born. Some takes pictures of the amazing places they have been privileged to visit. Me, I use photography to immortalise such epic meals as tonight’s risotto, which looked so fine in the evening sun as I brought it through from the kitchen that I thought it deserved capturing, uploading to Flickr, Twittering, posting on Facebook, and blogging here. It was that good. Good job, Wife.

It was a Venn diagram intersection of serendipity: I wanted to muck about with some portrait photography, and Wife fancied some up-to-date shots. So off we toddled to Westonbirt with my cheap-but-lovely f/1.8 lens and a bag full of shrugs and egg yolk to take some pictures. Much fun was had there and in Lightroom, and further results can be seen on Flickr.

Today we went in a hot air balloon; we took off from here and landed here. It was brilliant; I hereby declare it my ambition to be served chilled champagne at 3000′ at least once a month, while floating serenely above some (surprisingly vocal and unsurprisingly spooked) farmyard animals. Wife kindly pointed out that I was taking more photographs than the rest of the group combined, but I did manage to get some nice shots; a few were well-suited to my tilt-shift technique that fools the eye into thinking you’re looking at a scale model:



And some non-novelty pictures too, such as this one, below. There are lots more, ripe for the desktop-in’, on Flickr.



I know; I’ve completely overcooked the colours. The crazy slab of shadow is real, however.

Wife, who has been at Future for less than two months, has already been nominated for an Online Excellence award, part of the company’s internal awards scheme. She didn’t, ultimately, win, but even to be nominated so soon after joining is fantastic, and what her contributions did for the company is phenomenal. The nominations blurb says:

Production Assistant Jenny Phin posted daily content throughout the Christmas period, with links to ideas for things to make and freebies to download for card making viewers. She did a great job in producing short, snappy, high-value content, which kept users coming back to the blog on a daily basis at a key time of the year. This resulted in Papercraft Inspirations’ highest traffic figures yet, and with REDACTED page views it achieved the highest traffic of all craft blogs at Future during this period.

You Rock, wife. It’s official.

San Francisco = current location
Up for = more than 24 hours
Internet connection = shitty
Me = too tired to write proper sentences
Below = some night time pics from SF
Flickr = not updated yet
Wife = missed

And so we threw our Jenny’s-birthday-cum-winterval-cum-we-haven’t-had-a-party-in-far-too-long Party, collectively known as the Buon Natale. Prosecco was chilled, fancy meats were bought from the ridiculously middle-class deli in Bath, the ConGen 8000* was cranked up, and a fine old time was had by all. We hope. The Copes drove through from Historic Cardiff™ – cursing this country’s odd little badly-lit country lanes – and the redoubtable Mr Thomas brought his lovely lady along from, um, a few minutes down the road.

As is now traditional at parties, Mrs Phin and I were loud and boorish, though in an ‘entertaining’ fashion. The food was nom-worthy, the music swingin’, and, most importantly of all, the guests utterly charming.

I did manage to make myself ill at the end of the night – tiredness? my cold? too much alcohol? that one little cheroot? – and I strained my poor sore throat so much that I really can’t talk today and have to communicate with Jenny through sign language and email, but it was still much fun. Thanks, Copes and Thomas-Passmores!



* The ConGen 8000 was a box wrapped in tin foil, featuring a door and a fake handle, that was filled with facts, ‘would you rathers’ and questions, authored by my mildly psychotic wife.

Do you ever do that thing with your significant other where you wonder what it would be like if you swapped jobs for a day? Wife and I pretty much did that today, with she on her second day of life as a Futureite, and me on the first of three days teaching some lovely folks at the company how to use Apple’s presentation app, Keynote.

It was strange, going home together and comparing notes on our day that sounded like the wrong person was saying them; her concerns were all editorial, and mine were all about teaching, learning objectives and assessment. Still, it was fun, and I’m looking forward to the next two sessions – intermediate and advanced – over the coming days. (Picture included below simply because I think posts can look a bit bereft without images, but it’s just a static PNG; no free Keynote training for you, Jimbob.)



While you’re here, why not pop over to my ma’s Picasa page and witness the demolition* of my childhood home?

* It’s not actually being demolished; only the manky modern extension is being knocked down, and in its place a phoenix† will arise.
† A smarter new extension with lots of storage and an en-suite, I meant to say.

Look what happens when you search for ‘Phin’ in the Future directory:

That’s right, people; we is a power couple. Tomorrow we’ll be skipping, hand in hand, to Future Towers, as Wife embarks on a new career that doesn’t involve getting up at 5:45, cleaning up spilled yoghurt, or threats of physical violence from sixth formers. Unless we’ve horribly misjudged PaperCraft Inspirations.

And yes, I’m a crap blogger just now. Pax.

Wife is slightly obsessed with birds at the moment, drawing them, painting them, modelling them from Mod Podge and kitchen foil and Attenborough knows what else. Our house is rapidly beginning to resemble a prettier, more multimedia set for Hitchcock’s suspense thriller.

Asked last night why she likes birds so much, reason number two was that they “have feet like dinosaurs”. This perturbs me for reasons I cannot quite articulate; what right-minded person, asked why they like birds, would cite their similarity to creatures of which our ancient mammalian hindbrain should be pant-crappingly terrified?

And so the Smith-Graham-Smith’s party was lots of fun. The theme was 70s, and as usual Mrs and I went a little bit over the top with costumes. Memo to self: stop basing sense of self-worth on how well you do any given task; no-one is awarding marks.

As the Mateus Rosé flowed, it occurred to me that nothing marked us out as uncultured heathens more than the reaction of the other guests to the little bowls of pink stuff Lise put out to accompany the Monster Munch, Twiglets and Crispy Pancakes. For us, this was, clearly, Angel Delight. But we’re common; everyone else assumed it was taramasalata. I had never heard of taramasalata before the age of 23, and it’s not hard to see why. “Haw, Jimmy; Ah canna get this tarry massey latta tae stay in wan bit lang enough tae deep-fry it.”

More photos, including one of Mrs P’s get-up, on Flickr.

Oh, and thanks, all, for the rockin’ book recommendations in the comments thread on my post below; keep ’em coming.

Being a list in no particular order of stuff that we already know but that this weekend has confirmed.

• Jenny cannot drink more than one glass of Kir Royale without becoming utterly and amusingly drunk. No other drink has this effect on her.
• It’s not a weekend unless you visit Sainsbury’s at least once for every day of the weekend. Bank Holiday Mondays are included in this.
• There are only three basic plots for Sex and the City. (In this it’s very similar to Scot-wean-toon Oor Wullie, but with more, um, willies.) A Men are bastards/unnecessary B Women are sassy C Maxing out your credit card every episode is consequence-free.
• It’s impossible to buy a REDACTED in Bath, no matter now often you visit the REDACTED shop, largely because it’s never fucking open.*
• We could eat kedgeree for breakfast and dinner. In fact on Monday we did just that. We ♥ kedge. Bonus fact: when I first knew her, Jenny hated fish, rice and curry. Getting her to eat all three in the same dish for breakfast is proof, were any needed, that you can change someone.

* Censored so that D&L don’t have any inkling of the amazing† costume that I’ll be wearing to their 70s party on Saturday.
† Lame and overworked

Utterly sick of seeing dogs on this site? I don’t blame you. So why not hop on over to Mrs Phin’s site and watch her very fabulous guide to making felt. It’s much easier than you might think and we’re hoping that she might be able to pick up a decent little side income from the contextual ads as she adds more tutorials. Please do Digg it up – clicking on the Digg badge here is the same as clicking the one on her site; they point to the same article – and pass it around!

What do you do with £500-worth of high-spec digital camera goodness? Why, take slow-mo shots of an aging Staffie eating grass, of course.

Well that was fun, wasn’t it? This is my ninth day off in a row – a record, I think, since starting at Future – and it has been all kinds of fun. What was originally planned as a week of Cornwall camping was cut short a little by the weather; though we were actually very lucky – the evenings were calm and dry – we did get caught in the car in some torrential downpours, and spent the second night in the tent fearing that we were about to end up in Kansas as the wind whipped around us. The campsite we stayed at, however, was rather lovely; it had a river running through the middle of it, and campfires were allowed. We were quite tentative on the first night (picture below) but on the second we got a real crackler going. It was all very ‘man make shelter; man make fire’. Props to wife for not being too grunky throughout the whole affair.

But we’ve had all sorts of fun back in Bath, too. There have been DVDs (hey, Cloverfield is good, isn’t it?), cinema visits (hey, The Dark Knight is good, isn’t it?) fancy meals out and trips to Westonbirt Arboretum where I played about with my cheap-but-rather-rewarding new Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. Since I took some photos for Mrs P’s Arts Week at the end of term, a couple of her colleagues have asked if I would take some portrait shots of them and their families, and I wanted a lens with a nice wide aperture to let me work in low light and to get some nice bokeh going on. (I’m never sure how to pronounce ‘bokeh’, which I know is an anglicised spelling specifically designed to make it obvious how to pronounce the Japanese; how should a gaijin pronounce ボケ味 so as not to appear like a twat, oh Japanese-speaking-brother-in-law?)

Despite having lived here for well over a year now, it was only this week that we went to the baths for the first time. We’d been to the Roman ruins a couple of times before, but this was out first visit to the new Thermae Bath Spa. It. Was. Idyllic. The rooftop pool is paradisal, and by lying on your back with your ankles tucked over the side and one of the big floaty foam tubes wrapped around you, you can soak up the sun in near-silent bliss.
No dog walking today as some manner of sporting event prevented us from find anywhere to park up at the university. Never fear: the relentless, pitiless and pointless stream of pictures-of-dogs-you-don’t-know-taken-by-someone-you-probably-only-know-a-little will resume next week. Stay tuned!

Finally we got a tent that was easy to put up. So easy, in fact, that our conviction that the first one we bought was actually faulty has only been strengthened. Having given it a dry run in the back garden this afternoon, we’ll pack up the car and head for deepest Cornwall on Monday. I’d like to get as far down as Land’s End – having been to John o’ Groats as a child – but given that the forecast for next week is a little rocky this may be a vain hope. We may be ‘forced’ to ‘endure’ the ‘lack of adventure’ to be found in a cosy, family-run B&B.

I’d like to take this opportunity, too, to make it clear that my technique for folding up a tent – doing a roly-poly along its length to get all the air out so it rolls up tight – is perfectly legitimate and not at all embarrassing. To me.

I will have my laptop with me next week – I have some freelance to polish off; it’s not that I can’t live without it* – but we’ll probably both be offline by choice until 2 August. Keep an eye on my main Flickr account and the photoblog account as we might throw some photos up there.


* No, really. I’d have my iPhone anyway.

The line between genius and insanity is very fine.

Yes, she's wearing slippers inside my sandals. Also, have we told you about our poringe* carpet? We should really tell Pantone about it in any case; I don't believe anyone has ever isolated this colour outside the lab.

* purple + orange = poringe

Yeah, so I'm writing a piece for one of our sister titles (it's all a bit incestuous) and asked Mrs P to cast her deliberately untechnical eye over it to make sure it read OK to the n00b. I showed her how to use Track Changes, which is just as well as I discovered when I opened her draft that she had – in an act of undeserved subversion – changed defragging to defraggling.

Funny.

Sooo, yeah. If you're anything like me, every day when you pick up your mail at home or work, you think how nice it would be if somebody just decided that day to send you a really nice, big-ticket gift. A couple of days ago, that actually happened to me: a satisfyingly chunky box turned out, upon opening, to contain my dream camera, a Canon EOS 400D. It was a present from my mum to mark her retirement from teaching* and it has totally reawakened my passion for photography. I'm tingling at thought of all the stuff I have to learn, opportunities I can take and accessories I have to know about.

I started looking through my late papa's film SLR bag, and found that although the lenses are the wrong mount system (FD rather than EF; apparently non-optical adapters are available for about £27 on eBay – any experience, folks?) the flash (semi-)works in the hotshoe, so the missus and I had fun taking big washed out stylised portraits. I might get one of the adapters after payday partly because I like the idea of using my papa's stuff from his AE-1, and partly just because one of his lenses is a sweet-looking 200mm telephoto. The 400D means that I'm shooting in RAW really for the first time, and, um, it's quite good, isn't it? I'm loving the flexibility, but hating the disappearing gigabytes. I think the time may be ripe to migrate to Aperture or Lightroom, but I need to talk to people who know more about the two before deciding which one to go for.

So, yeah. I know that this sort of stuff is neither big, clever, nor particularly difficult to achieve, but I'm still really loving it.

A reminder: I have two Flickr accounts. My cameraphone account is out-and-about snaps, while my main account will hold all my 400D shots.

* Yeah, I don't know why her retirement was a reason to buy me a beautiful DSLR, but don't draw attention to this, mmm-kay? Particularly since she very sweetly also bought Jenny a 32GB iPod touch as well. Yay, my mum!

Mrs P is off visiting her folks in the motherland. This is both a good and a bad thing from my point of view.

On the one hand…
Get to watch as much Time Team as any one man can stand
Can configure the bedclothes to suit [1]
Can listen to The Arguing Programme [2]

But on the other…
Nobody – literally – to snuggle up to at night
No impressions of the Polo Confidence ad
No nose wrinkles [3]
If I want to ’member things, I have to do it alone [4]
No insane nocturnal mutterings [5]
No rockin’ out to SingStar [6]

And worst of all, nobody to talk to; nobody to turn to to share a joke; nobody whose politics and world view chime so readily with my own that we can profitably spend half an hour discussing a topic while both violently agreeing with each other. And nobody with whom I can share our odd little system of catchphrases and distorted grammar that makes up the surprisingly rich private language that has sprung up from seven years of living together.

1. Technically, the configuration I favour is 'tuppling' – a sort of self-mummification technique that involves tucking the duvet tight around my body. This does not, contrary to current thinking, take up more than my fair share of the duvet.
2. This isn't any particular programme; it's just any radio show during which the interviewee filibusters frantically while the interviewer doggedly repeats "If I can just ask... If I can just ask... If I can just ask...". The Today Programme – AKA "The John Humphrys Show" in Jenny's mind – is an active proponent of this style of robust debate (as I like to think of it) and it drives Jenny nuts.
3. A few weeks ago, I was stressed and frustrated by technology. Jenny could do nothing to help. Nothing, that is, until she diffused the situation by doing a nose wrinkle for me; nothing is cuter.
4. It's easy to forget, when you're a couple, that stuff you do is weird. Jenny and I 'remember' things, such as "Hey, 'member when you fed a deer?" Nothing too odd there, you might think. But we do it all the time, and often – indeed, usually – immediately after the event we're 'membering, viz "Hey, 'member that good tea?" upon laying down the cutlery.
5. Already recorded on this blog: "It's a shame we have to lean against the hurty pain of the doormat" and "Remember when you kept pretending to be the smallest man in Australia all the time?". I've started collecting these weird noctural rantings and will do a big post of them when I have enough.
6. Mrs P has a phenomenal singing voice. With training and a marketing budget, she could be a credible indy music star. I don't say this because I love her; I love her, in part, because she's so fucking talented. I wish she'd realise this.

Having taken a sneaky day off work, Mrs P and I decided to slope off to Longleat Safari Park; all manner of safari-themed japes and scrapes ensued, and the day was proclaimed a success by all concerned. The highlight of the day (apart from the rhinos, which were fucking cool, by the way – I totally want to come back as a rhino) was a terrified-but-excited Jeff feeding a deer some of the special Longleat deer food. The stoopid deer didn't seem to understand that it was supposed to wait while I put some of the little pellets into my wife's hand before she moved her hand out of the car to feed it, and so kept thrusting its very fuzzy and adorable head inside the car to get at the cup of pellety goodness. Amid much excited shrieking, the task was eventually accomplished: one fed deer, one wife-hand covered in deer-spit. Witness the tongue-lashing she's getting below. More animal magic chez Flickr.

So a while back we got a letter from our friendly neighbourhood council informing us that we had strayed into a bus lane in our car.

They're right; we had, though Bath is a bastard of a city to navigate round, and it's all too easy to do this by mistake. We know, we did it; so of course I paid up. A small, spiteful but ultimately tit-numbingly stupid part of my brain, though, wanted to force the council to rescind the fine, because if you look closely at the bottom right of the frame showing us pootling along in our car, you see the legend Evaluation period has expired. Please buy the Elecard MPEG2 Video Deco[der]. Thieves and brigands the lot of them.

To add insult to injury, we'd been snapped on Mrs P's birthday, a day that even before this letter arrived we had agreed had been something of a birthday-tastrophe. Ah well.

Hey, have you met my wife? Not only does she write the back-page column for the mighty ’User, but she teaches, embroiders and can act as an impromptu nursemaid when you're struck down with some mucus-centric lurgy. This much we know. But to coincide with the soft-relaunch of her own website, recedinghairline.co.uk is delighted to be able to share with you its Top 5 Secret Jenny Facts!

She's writing two novels
Oh yes. Not just one, not just one and half, but two. Two, two novels! A-a-aaaa! They're each at only about 15,000 words long at the moment but they're both phenomenal. It came as something of a pride-pricking surprise – I'm the professional writer, dammit, etc – to learn that she is an incredibly talented author; far, far better than me at non-technical writing. I know writing can be hard work for her, but when you read her fiction, it seems so effortless. I had no idea she had this talent, and in fairness I don't think she realised it either. These two novels are my pension. And I'm only half joking.

She worked in a coathanger factory
Oh yes. For en entire summer, she worked three days on–three days off–three nights on–three nights off at a Mainetti coathanger factory, working amongst noisy heavy machinery that fired red-hot needles. I'm sure there was a reason for the red-hot needles other than simply to motivate the workforce – “Ah, the old carrot-and-red-hot-needles approach” – but it has temporarily slipped from my recollection. Incidentally, I recommend against clicking on the above link for Mainetti; it will simply raise more questions than it answers, such as “How, for fuck sake, is it more than just a hanger? Surely ‘a hanger’ is precisely what it is, no more, no less?” and “What qualifies a hanger as a randy hanger, and for what might such objects be used?”

The 6pm brewski
We had to go to the recycling centre recently as the kitchen surface would no longer support the weight of all the empty Grolsch bottles. I had drunk maybe four of them. That said, it certainly does take the edge off. Oh yes.

She lived in Skye
Oh yes. While I spent my entire conscious life in one little village, Mrs RH, having been born into the Silver City with the Golden Sands – Aberdeen, but don't let on; its nickname is so much prettier – moved about a fair bit, and spent a few years living on the quite astonishingly pretty Isle of Mists. She can count from one to ten in Gaelic and sing songs. In Gaelic, like. I'm not just pointing out that she can sing. Though she does have a beautiful singing voice, it must be said, and plays guitar and violin. And writes songs. Can you blame me for loving this woman?

She once sat on some cakes
Now, you might not think this is worthy of an entry all to itself – and indeed I've had to leave out so many other fascinating facts just so this one can be here – but it is worth it. Y'see, it wasn't just that she sat on some cakes – it was a box of six Waitrose mini Victoria sponges, since you ask – but rather that she was sitting on the sofa already, then sort of jumped up, moved sideways and bounced back down onto the box with a distinct crrrrump sound. We spent the next ten minutes hyperventilating with laughter. Quite what precipitated this quasi-Tourettes leap is now forgotten, but if you ever bring cakes near her, bear in mind that there is the danger of crumpage.

BONUS FACT!
While working in the classical section of HMV Oxford Street, she served Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and, unfortunately, the credit card system decided to do a random check at that point. Asking a moderately major Hollywood star to prove their identity must be a sobering experience, but apparently Mastrantonio took it in good spirits.

So there you have it, folks. For more Jenny-related paraphernalia, go and visit her site. It's at www.ribbledoot.com* and has just been completely redesigned. Over the coming months, creative tutorials, videos and more will be being added, so be sure to bookmark it and visit again soon. As an added incentive, her blog is now password-free and damned funny. See for yourself why people as varied as Dave Stevenson† describe her as “irritatingly gifted”!


* A chewy cookie to the first person who can explain the etymology of this rather odd URL. Jenny, you're not allowed to enter.
† And they don't come much more varied than Dave, as he'd be the first to admit.