Not monday morning, nor 9:15

So,

Yes.

Mmm, in uni, should really be working, but there’s only half an hour until my lecture (well, 25 minutes) and I lightened my bag by whipping the stuff out of it which I would normally study; largely because I’m planning to do studying at home.

For some reason I was incredibly slow to get going this morning and so, spent half the morning running round like some deranged maniac trying to get food made, uni stuff sorted, dressed, showered and ready to go (not necessarily in that order ;-)

Something is lurking in the corner of my mind…

…oh aye, the not normally nationalistic thing.

Yeah, I used to think I was completely un-nationalistic. Not in that “we are better than every other country way” (I’m still not), but in that I don’t really mind where I live not really particularly proud of Britain specifically kind of way. Perhaps coming from my background explains that, my mum and her family saw the other side of the empire rather too closely for a huge and emense bond to form between my mum and Britishness.

And then, a few days ago, circumstances conspired and I suddenly realised that I was actually really quite defensive about Britain. People slagging off Britain winds me up – and I’d never really noticed.

So, yeah, some of my favourite things about where I live…

  • Invention & Ingenuity. We’ve got a long history of invention and ingenuity, and as long as we include all of Britain (i.e. N.Ireland, Scotland and Wales) then we’ve got an awful lot of really bloody good inventions attributable to us (especially given the size of our population). Apparently, even the uniquely american V8 was invented by a Scot…. Unfortuantly we can’t claim the 2 stroke as ours… which is most distressing, because the only V8 I like is Russian, whereas I love two strokes… :-)
  • Tolerance. Britain’s incredibly tolerant, actually, of deviations from normal. Oddly it seems to work the other way round from how you’d expect, in the abstract Britain seems to be incredibly intolerant (if you look at popular media, especially the daily mail), but in person it’s not really the case at all.
  • Food. British food has a sucky reputation, but actually some of it’s bloody nice, but it’s not just that we do have an incredible range of foods available. I was once told there are something like 50 nationalities of take-away in some small area of bristol; isn’t that fabulous?
  • The BBC (and Channel 4). Do I need to say any more than that? Doesn’t everyone love them? Although, to be fair, I’ve been watching a lot of merkian imports recently (The L Word, Joan of Arcadia, Dead Like Me)
  • The countryside. It’s just beautiful; I love the highlands in Scotland, I love the mountains of the Lake and Peak district. It’s just my country…… Other places are incredibly beautiful, I love the Irish landscape, and the beauty of Sri Lanka still resides inside my head, but this is my home, and I just love it :-)

So, folks…. tell me what you love about your home…. Or where you want your home to be…. or whatever. Heh.

KateWE

Kate's allegedly a human (although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise). She's definitely not a vampire, despite what some other people claim. She's also mostly built out of spite and overcoming oppositional-sexism, racism, and other random bullshit. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, she's here to reassure that it's all fine.

4 thoughts on “Not monday morning, nor 9:15

  1. So far, I’ve tried 3 separate compressors, not one has actually produced a usable stream. Given that the application in question fails with a “disk full?” error if I used anything other than the ones it came with…. at the moment I’m stuck.

  2. *And* the bloody thing fails when I try to output completely uncompressed video (again with ‘error -1, disk full?’) which is a touch frustrating. And I *thought* I was winning with Xvid, but this time got a green-square instead of video. Arrrgh.

    Will obviously have to play more at the weekend.

    Anyone recommend a *free* AVI (MPEG4 compressed) to Xvid (preferably 2 pass, I think) compressor for windows 2000?

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