Tweeting: That's Barking, Surely? (Animal Farm)

'So, we've now been told we have to get tweeting; the powers that be are tired of our bleating. We have to twitter our every success, but I hate all this crowing;  prefer mooing and lowing. After all, I'm a cow, and HE is a mess.'

'Really? (She's alluded to her bovine status previously, I believe.)'

'Yes.'

'Well, I own that I'm prone to carping and braying but I confess that these days my nerves are just fraying.'

'Bless. . .  (He's definitely repeating himself.)

'There are those that chit-chat and those that cluck, but it's the latter who always pass the buck. You've spotted, I'm sure, it's the ones with the trotters who turn out to be the absolute rotters? It's the ones with their snouts dug deep in the dirt who manage to get you just where it hurts.'

'Meow. . . 

'I say, something's really got your goat. You've only been asked to boast some, and gloat. If you don't, be careful, you may miss the boat.  There are plenty more fish in the sea.'

'So I see. But, really, don't you think we ought to warn the small-fry they're just lambs to the slaughter? In the meantime, don't count your chickens before they're hatched. Remember your tweets will need to be matched by proof that what you've done has had significant (REF) impact.'

The Golden Age Of Photogenic Style: How To Demonstrate You're A Jolly Good S(p)ort - In A Nurse's Uniform

Police Called To Party For Boy, 3

It was a riot. 

Some Jobs About Which The School Careers Officer Failed To Inform Me (2)

Para-psychology


The Edinburgh College of Para-Psychology is a 'non-denominational charity organisation' which aims - among other things - to 'provide a better understanding of life after death'.


In addition, it offers a 'Paranormal Investigations' service. Led by trained mediums, this service discreetly explores the possible cause behind 'strange events and unexplained noises' - from lights flickering to inanimate items moving independently of any identifiable form of intervention. (http://www.parapsychology.org.uk)


The most alarming thing about this website is that, when cutting and pasting quotations from it, the words remain invisible on the page until you 'preview' the blog; though the spirit of the words is there, the body of the text is not. Even more unsettling: any subsequent text remains unseen too, until published.


This means that I am currently writing this post 'blind'; relying on my touch-typing skills; an option I took at school because I was too poor at Physics to be entered for the 'O' Level examination in 1985. 


Now, I was going to say that I wish someone had told me I could have been a Para-psychologist. I am genuinely interested to know if there is life after death, though I really don't know what scares me most: the inevitability of mortality or the promise of eternity. But according to the Society for Psychical Research website, careers in Para-psychology are few and far between. For most, including those with a doctorate qualification in the discipline, research remains but a leisure-time pursuit.


Unless, perhaps, you belong to the Paranormal Investigations Squad. I, for one, am about to contact them . . .  

Some Jobs About Which The School Careers Officer Failed To Inform Me

According to The Telegraph (All Fired Up: The Future of Pottery, 26.01.2011) Emma Bridgewater arrived in The Potteries (Stoke-on-Trent) in 1985.  Desperately seeking a manufacturer for her own pottery designs, she found the pottery industry on its knees: the consequence of 'bad 1970s-style management'. Though she managed, at that time, to find a manufacturer, that particular maker of pots went bankrupt in 1992. Bridgewater, in turn, bought the factory and, in doing so, secured the jobs of the 35 members of staff already employed there.  Bridgewater now enjoys international success with what David Nicholls, Design Editor of The Telegraph, calls her 'friendly, sponge-painted tableware designs'. Her 'signature piece' as Tiffany Daneff writes in Patterns of Success (see Saga website, 20.02.2012) remains the polka-dot mug, 600 of which 'leave the factory in Stoke-on-Trent every week'.  Apparently, every mug 'goes through 54 different hand-applied processes before it’s finally ready'.  


I neither know, nor care, what the other 53 processes are, but what about the person who gets to place the dots on the tableware? Reading between the lines of the Saga article, it helps if you're a local; the author claims that Bridgewater has saved for the nation - and the international dinner-set market - skills that would otherwise have been lost. I concur; dabbing a sponge on a piece of biscuit-fired earthenware doesn't sound as accomplished as some of the previous decorative endeavours enjoyed by The Potteries.  I'm thinking Wedgwood and John Flaxman. But, it's a continuation of a regional tradition. (It would seem all professions have experienced some form of dumbing down.)


I want that job. Five colours placed seven times on each mug - randomly (which means 'unique'). The mug-painter even gets to initial her work.  


What is 'Art' but an identifiable image by an identifiable person with an identifiable style?  I refer you to Michel Houellebecq's latest novel: The Map And The Territory ( 2011): 'the great painters of the past were considered such when they had developed a world view that was both coherent and innovative, which means that they always painted in the same way, using the same methods and operating procedures to transform the objects of the world into pictorial ones'. (19)


Dots have served the art world well, from Pointillism to Baldersari to Damian Hirst.


And, of course, Hoeullebecq and Bridgewater both owe something to Hirst. If the careers officer had told me about the possibility of painting polka dots for a profession, I could have been an artist.