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So, as previously mentioned, the early iMiEV can’t charge from modern J1772 or Type 2 chargers. This is because it was built before the protocol that they speak was finalised. Or, to put it another way, The car no-speaka-da-lingo.

The cable that comes with the early iMiEV looks like a J1772 compliant cable, but with an ordinary household plug on the end. And contrary to the standards, the cable is always live. At least when it’s plugged in. This has two unfortunate effects. One, these cables were explicitly designed not to be unplugged when live, to avoid arcing. That’s not going to happen with the early iMiEV. Obviously, best to let it charge all the way before unplugging it, otherwise you’re yanking a lead which is potentially drawing 2.5kW. Arcing may occur.

The other is the one that bugs me the most, the car can’t charge at Type 2, or ‘Fast’, chargers. Take a second. Look at this map and tick only ‘Fast’. See. None of them. Not a one usable with the iMiEV.

Now, in reality, with an early iMiEV you’re a bit buggered, because you’re not going to get a fast charge out of them, the early iMiEV’s charger will only handle 10A. That’s 2.5 kW in the UK. Fast chargers can deliver 30A – or about 7kW (late iMiEV’s can only manage 16A, apparently). But getting anything from them would be awfully handy, if you’re in a bind and no where near the nice DC chargers that are appearing all over the UK motorway network.

Thankfully there are a few solutions, you can spend $40 on a little box that you can hack into the car’s wiring which will allow it to at least talk to the charger and draw 10A from it. You can replace the charger (about £1000) with a charger which will not only talk to the charger but also adds 30A capability. Mmm. Wants. [Edit: It turns out that the company who I thought were offering this were, in fact, not. They just offer what appears to be the equivalent of the $40 module hacked in to the car, but it can still only charge at 10A. However, they never say this outright, they always couch it in terms of ‘You can charge at a 30A charger’. Hrm.]

Or you can do what we did.

See, the iMiEV is not alone in not talking to chargers, the Twizzy apparently doesn’t either. And someone came up this (Locally held copy of that file) which is a fantastically cludgy solution, in which you, the user, manually switch the sensing circuit from ‘connected’ to ‘available to charge’. All it requires is a few quid of parts – a diode, an 880Ω resistor, a 660Ω resistor, a switch, and a ridiculously expensive plug (£85!).

Which is what I spent my afternoon doing.

(more…)

Dramatis Personae
Lady Susanna Erskine – The Lady of the manor
Lord Jeremy Erskine – The Lord of the manor
Jones – The butler
Toaster – A broken toaster

Scene: Dining room in traditional English manor house. Table laid for breakfast. Lady of manor is at one end, Lord at the other, a fine breakfast spread laid out in front of each. The lady of the manor has picked up a slice of burned toast.

Lady Erskine “Jeremy! This toast is dreadful! We simply must dispose of the toaster and get a new one. We can’t go on like this, what will the Cameron’s say when they come to visit?”
Lord Erskine “But my dear, you know that I just gave that stirring speech to parliament about recycling, if those guttersnipes in the press find out that I’ve thrown away a toaster and bought a new one, well… one can imagine the fuss and bother they’d create”

Lord and Lady Erskine continue eating for a moment, quietly, contemplating the burned toast.

Lady Erskine “No, it won’t do. Jones! Jones! Come here immediately”
Jones “Yes ma’am”
Lady Erskine “Please inform the cook that we have to recycle the toaster. Bring it up here and see if we can’t find another use for the benighted thing”

Jones exits

Scene: Library. Lady Erskine is sat on a chaise, reading. Lord Erskine is sat in a high back chair, smoking a pipe. Lady Erskine sets down her book on a side table.

Lady Erskine: “Jeremy, how is that recycled toaster doing?”

[Camera pulls back to reveal Lord Erskine’s feet resting on the back of an older man acting as a footstool]

Lord Erskine: “Oh, he’s doing a fine job! He’s just the right height for me to pop my feet up on whilst I read. An excellent idea of yours to recycle!”

—
Ends

Yes, I know, I suck at writing dialogue / scripts. What can I say, it’s not something I’m called on to do much. But the idea lodged in my head, for some inexplicable reason.

We have new doctors at work, it being that time of the year. Most of ours, thankfully, so far have not been as soft and gentle as those that I’ve encountered before. And so far whilst they’ve not had the generosity of spirit drilled out of them as slowly becomes the norm for people in the ED, they’ve all seemed to be remarkably pragmatic.

The number of times, over the years, I’ve had to deal with the “oh, we’ll just put them on the observation ward this once” suggestion, which is fine, except it never is that once. It’s that once, then a few days later, then every day, then you’re struggling to change a routine from someone who can cry ‘But you did it before’.

Or my favourite of all – the “I can’t get home” problem. Ambulances bring people to hospital that are sick, and whilst I would love to be able to pop every one of the nearly 60k people who come through our doors into a taxi to run them back home; whilst it would make me feel warm and fuzzy inside to provide some sort of resettlement service for everyone, because frankly, being suddenly ill or injured sucks, we can’t.

Our taxis may be provided via a deal with a taxi company, but they still cost us almost as much as they cost you when you hail them on the street. That £20 journey across town to get home? That’s going to cost us nearly that.

And that would be £1,200,000. Which as you can see is quite a lot of zeros. Even if each taxi only cost us £1, £60,000 is quite a lot of drugs, several replacements for our aging fleet of trolleys, new mattresses, or drugs. So we can’t do that.

Mostly transport home is reserved for those in medical need. Need oxygen? Have to travel by stretcher? Need resettling at home? We’ve got a plan for that.

Beyond that, every department I’ve been in has had a deal with taxi firms for those in extremis. A woman who’d had to drive over a hundred miles to our hospital (where I once worked) to reach her relative only to need to then travel on another 40 or so miles to the specialist hospital where her relative was being transferred? I wasn’t having her drive that. She was in no fit state.

We’ll also look after those who are vulnerable…the 85 year old who wants to go home at 2 in the morning because they don’t want to stay in hospital? Yes, we will sort that. There are lots of reasons, and catch me at the right moment, and I’ll fix most things in your world, so long as you’re not deeply rude to me. Even if you’re rude to me I’ll probably still try and fix things, so long as I can suss what needs fixing. Working in the ED you get used to fixing other people’s problems. It’s good for the soul, and frankly it’s often the last port of call for desperate people. A common refrain is that we fix everyone else’s problems. Don’t know what to do with your patient, just tell them to come to the ED… they’ll sort it ;-/

But as with most things in life, there are limits. And there are very distinct limits to extracurricular things like transport home. And acting like it’s your right is a very quick way to find that we won’t organise it. Demanding transport home because you ‘had it before so I know you can do it’ without trying to sort it yourself is not going to fly. Refusing to ring your friends and relatives because they might be busy? No.

Uh uh.

The number of times I’ve seen this end with a nice doctor or new nurse saying “oh, well, we’ll sort it” is quite high. And it makes the saying ‘no’ bit much harder. But perhaps it’s working in a city ED where people aren’t so cuddly. The repeated explanation ‘we do not routinely provide transport home’ accompanied by the helpful ‘but I can ring anyone you like or provide a phone, and we can look up numbers for you’ and the repeated gentle suggestions of taxi (stopping at bank/cashpoint/etc), bus, or even shanks’ pony whilst maintaining a firm ‘yes, we may have done it in the past but it is for exceptional reasons, not for every trip you make to the department’ almost invariably results in someone suddenly being available to collect the person. In fact, I can only think of a few occasions where it hasn’t, and then suddenly they’ve found enough change to get the bus.

What disappoints me most about it is the selfishness, that you would deny someone else healthcare so you can save a few quid getting home. And I understand that at this point many people are right at the limit of their finances, and I certainly have been more generous with taxis over the past year than I used to be. But sometimes you have just got to say no.

Every day we’re meant to do 20 minutes of cleaning/tidying/etc that doesn’t include doing the dishes. It’s derived from this, but tweaked, on the basis that unlike normal people we don’t have 20 sensible minutes each day (and quite frankly, if you think I’m cleaning for 20 minutes on a day when I’m on a night shift you are batshit crazy… maybe on the first day, but after that I am damn well sleeping, or pretending to, until the very last second that I can be in bed).

See, with us both working shifts, we resented the fact that the few days we get off together (and believe me, they are few, this month there’s three of them) were taken up with cleaning. So we adapted this system, and despite both of us slipping on occasion and failing to get it done, the house has meandered towards a level of cleanliness we’re both happy with. It’s quite pleasing. It’s still not quite there, but that’s mainly disorganisation.

So today I set about my twenty minutes with the intention of cleaning under the bed and sweeping and tidying the bedroom. Maybe doing some general tidying up.

And then I realised there were still blinds under the bed. Blinds I bought over a year ago that are the wrong size, that I didn’t realise we’d not be able to trim down until it was too late to return them. At which point we were stuck with blinds that are hopeless for our house.

And so instead today I’ve listed my chunky Eumig RS-3000 projector, the second slice from the Risc PC, my Canon AE-1 and four blinds on e-bay. Impressively, despite having been sat for probably 10 years, the Eumig projector kicked in and worked perfectly…

‘scuse the shuffled duvet and crap videography, it was only ever intended to be a ‘look it works’ video for e-bay.

I’ve also taken out the rubbish, sorted more laundry and readied the washing machine for another load. I’m going to declare that that’s my 20 minutes :)

I wanted to get out in the garden today, but I’m having some treatment that means I’m not meant to expose my skin to too much sun, and every time I went outside the sun would start blazing ferociously. In the end I hid inside with the door open and enjoyed the nice weather that way.

I also realised that despite sluggish progress I could cross some things off the jobs list (and added-and-crossed-off some that I didn’t know needed to be on there). Whee.

So I’ve finished the kitchen lights – well, they were finished in the sense of not requiring anything further structural, but they had a horribly mismatched set of old incandescent bulbs pulled from the stock removed when we moved in / had the house rewired. The plan was to replace them with decorative incandescents and damn the energy usage! …I know, but every other bulb in the house is an energy saver. As it was, the 180W of incandescent and 55 or so watts of CFL power made the kitchen look like the the sun had accidentally risen on our ceiling, which was a little extreme.

However, the kitchen had always been a bit dark with the single bulb that was in here, anyway, so we wanted a couple of bulbs that would actually provide illumination. Having looked around the lowest wattage decorative incandescents with bayonet caps I could find were 25Watt, and painfully expensive per bulb (and only 3000 hours of life… urk).

Still, for the sake of the pretty, we got three of them:

And here they are on, albeit in the early evening light.

And off:

There are a few things I’ve learned from this – for next time I make lights, but mainly I’m really very happy with the way they’ve come out. Kathryn seems pleased with them too, and the sum total of 130Watts is a bit more sane. If any of the CFLs go I’ll probably try replacing them with LED bulbs, since that seems to be the next big thing in reducing power consumption. Nothing to do for the incandescents though – because they’re so preeetty. Weak, I know.

On the power usage front, the forceful application of night-time-electricity usage for our high power appliances (washing machine, dishwasher, charging the car) has led to an interesting and unexpected side effect. Organisation. And me not minding it. Whilst I can’t say I deeply enjoy prepping the washing machine for it’s night time forays into the world of cleaning, it’s certainly reduced our laundry pile. Because knowing I can only run it overnight (well, more accurately that I want to avoid running it during the day) means that I have started approaching the laundry basket with much more planning than was previously the case.

Up until now I’d just wash things when I started to get low. Which mean that the laundry basket would fill and then I’d go “OH MY GOD I’VE GOT NO (under)PANTS! *WAIL* I fail at being an adult!”. Then I’d routle through the underwear draw, find that scabby pair of pants that have gone that special shade of grey reserved for old white cloths, and with the failing elastic that means I spent the day continuously hoiking them back up, and then rapidly wash the underwear, and then probably curse the universe and do several other loads of washing in one day. Then none of it would dry because there was too much on the drying rack (yes, we don’t really use a tumble drier).

But now, now I look in the basket and go ‘what can I set up to wash overnight’ which today will, ironically, be pants, and then I queue it ready. It sits and patiently washes itself at night. Yay.

The dishwasher has so far worked along similar lines, it’s forcing organisation on a system that was previously chaotic. Which is a win for me because I fail at being an adult in so many ways. The only difficulty is remembering whether the dishwasher is ‘on’ or not, quite frequently I have to slip under the sink, switch the bypass on the timer and check that the machine is on, then slip it back onto ‘timer’. This is because there is no indication that it’s on.

The other thing it’s done is made me much more aware of our energy usage, which is much higher than I think it should be. It’s at least a few kilowatts in a day, even when we’re not at home. Most of that is, I suspect the fridge. I’ve had a bad habit of leaving the printer on standby too, which (having just checked) is around 20watts – given the rarity of use, I should have it actually switched off when we’re not using it. So I’ve switched it off (and the benighted piece of crap that’s the wireless adaptor. All pray it comes up again working). Ha. 20 watts gone.

The other thing that probably uses a lot of power is the Athlon XP powering the media server. I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t be better to replace it with, say, another Raspberry Pi. I can’t help but feel that since it no longer has to transcode things, and could just quietly be a little media server with far less energy usage than the whacking great Athlon XP server is using. Mrr. Not sure though, as yet. Also, the big energy consumption there is probably the hard disks, and I’ve not enough money to replace the terrabyte drives with SSDs.

I’m still waiting (optimistically) to hear back about our potential Solar Panels. I ended up ringing the guy today because he’s gone very quiet. If we are going to get them, it’d be nice to get them now, whilst there’s still some summer left (I also have this cunning ploy, which is, I think they’ll be putting scaffolding up, so I could nip up and change the chimney pot that’s broken at the same time, saving 300 quid). But as yet, they’ve not rung me back. It’s cruel, you know, getting me all excited about solar panels and then going quiet. :(

Anyhow, the car charger has so far worked too, which has made me happy. This whole ‘it charges at night’ thing seems to be working quite well… we’re waiting to hear from the Polar Network people about an installation date for our Type 2 charger. I also need to get one for my mums house, since it looks likely that we’ll be able to take the EV down there too.

Incidentally, the EV has so far resisted naming. We went with ‘Puck’ for a while, but it’s not really stuck.

In other news, a month in I’m still loving the EV. The little strange indicator light that came on (this one) turned out to mean, in this instance, that the key-fob battery was getting low. I suspect it of being a ‘there is a fault with a battery other than the 12v one’ light, the specific purpose of which is only easily distinguished by having a can-bus connector with which to diagnose the fault. Well, the people in the garage say that’s what the light is for. I’m a little unclear, because whilst that’s what the garage said, and changing the battery in the remote fob has worked (it seems), my contact at Mitsubishi says that Mitsubishi Japan have not yet supplied him with a definitive answer. This is what comes of having a more-or-less pre-production EV. Again. Oops.

Ignoring that though, the car’s delightful. We made our trip to Cardiff in her, which was so uneventful as to be uneventtastic. And which cost us the cost of parking. We’ve pootled all over Bristol and Bath, and never once had a problem with range – which seems to be most people’s concern. A lot of people seem very interested – Kathryn reports that she gets a lot of questions about the car. I’ve just been really pleased with it. Obviously, winter will be the next challenge. Range drops quite a lot in the cold, and with things like lights, heater and wipers we may find we need to use the minor more (particularly for longer journeys that, in the summer at least, are EVable). But given that it’s not a car intended for long journeys, that’s not wholly unreasonable.

It is very pleasing to not have to fill up with petrol. Indeed, it’s almost glee inducing passing the petrol station near our house on my way to other places and thinking ‘nope’.

In other, other news, I’ve finally decided to upgrade my Macbook. It’s spent the last few days/weeks with the fan running almost continuously. I suspect that what it’s in need of is a reinstall. But the problem with reinstalling is… wait for it… I don’t really want to reinstall on the small drive in the machine with the knowledge that I’m going to need to do it again when I finally do upgrade. So rather than do it twice I’ve bitten the bullet and ordered the new drive and memory. Hopefully this should make the laptop a bit happier – as will not having had 18 billion metric tons of crap installed on it. It should also make it faster. Although I will then have to suck-it-up and buy the back up software I’m using which switched a while ago from ad-supported to pay-for, but on a voluntary upgrade thing, but obviously, now I’ll have to download the new version. Still glee for faster computerdom. We hope. Also, hopefully extending its life a little by not running it so hot.

Less glee inducing is that the Type II charging connector from the EV, which theoretically is winging its way from somewhere in Britain to our house, with which I’m hoping to wire the hacktastic Type II connector, well, it’s not arrived yet. It says on Amazon’s site ‘Dispatched’* and that was a week ago. I’m not sure what means they are using to get it to our house, perhaps this is delivery via a herd of caterpillars tethered to a sleigh of some sort. At any rate, it’s annoying. Anyhow, time’s a wasting.

I’ve pruned the tomatoes, which was one of the jobs to do today. I might go and play in the garden after I’ve done some washing up :)

* And we’ll not get into the qualms I’m having about using Amazon after hearing about the way they treat workers. Because I’m having serious qualms, but also struggling to come up with anything near a decent alternative.

So, today I’ve spent the morning beating a really crappy piece of tech with sticks. Last time I did this (back in 2008) I ended up reflashing the Airstation with new firmware which finally allowed it to demonstrate some semblance of working. Indeed, both the aged RiscPC, and the G5 managed to exercise some degree of internet access via wireless connection using it.

The fact that the password isn’t what it says it is in the manual, and that it’s completely random about its set up only adds to the joy of using it.

Basically, I wanted to get it set up such that I could use the benighted object to make our archaic Kyocera Laser Printer available wirelessly. And yes, I realise I’m into danger territory with printers being greatly hackable objects. But I’m hoping that the printer being behind our pathetic firewall (Lauren, help!) and on our unutterably flaky network, and also a source of not-very-much-of-use make us a not very attractive target.

At any rate, it’s my intention to switch it off most of the time.

However, having got the thing allegedly set up, with its status screen displaying the tissue of lies that it customarily displays (y’know, connected to network, IP address via DHCP, that kind of nonsense) I’d connected it to the printer which resolutely sat saying its IP address was 0.0.0.0 making me make a sadface. Eventually I tweeted at the everlovely Kyocera, who, despite the printer having been around since 2005 (I think actually it was the 1020D that I used to maintain on the network – thought the 1030D was older) offered lots of helpful support suggestions and even put me in touch with a proper tech support person.

Having had it pointed out to me that if the DHCP server is working correctly, it really should just pick up an IP address I sat down this morning and checked that the printer was, in fact working, which meant moving it downstairs to the router.

Lo, an IP address was assigned and Lo (the second) paper came out with nice printy on it when I asked it to print.

‘Goddamnit’ was basically the phrase I used as I wanted the world to swallow me whole for bothering Kyocera when it turned out to be a Buffalo Technology Airstation problem. After about an hour of poking the Airstation with pointy sticks, beating it with bundles of branches and swearing about it on Twitter, it suddenly did what it does. The appropriate number of resets-configure-reboot-find it’s lost config-reboot-configure-reboot cycles later the configuration actually took, it got an IP address from the router, and PLINK! I could connect it to the printer which now prints wirelessly. Ha.

Ha, ha, and god-damn ha.

I must never, ever, change any of our network settings again. Either that or get a more reliable wireless adaptor.

So this weekend has been a weekend for odd jobs. After a great breakfast yesterday* at Rocatillo’s I headed over to John’s with my aged and ratty Goldring Lenco transcription turnable (used for my podcast) which has been getting increasingly hummy ever since it was returned from ‘spares-or-repair’ e-bay land.

The tone-arm would hum if touched, and when tracking across the records you’d get fluctuations in volume and also massive amounts of hum at random. It had reached the stage of being nearly unusable, and with another podcast rolling around I was keen to sort it. Fearing it might need scaring with special tools or ultrathin wire, or some other special thing, I saved the job for a day when John was free. In the end this proved to be a wise plan, because none of the wire in our house would have been suitable, and also without John’s awesome skill and supply of very accurate meters, I would probably not have known that the cable was indeed faulty, and would have ended up doing a blind replace on it. Also, John’s soldering is about 30 million times neater than mine :)

After some poking with meters this proved to be the source of the problem:

The cable that previously ran through the tonearm. Interestingly, both the positive leads are intact, but the shielding had worn through in (at least) two places such that (we think) there was no single continuous strand of copper. Moving it would substantially change the resistance of the thing, and since it moves all the time when the record is playing, well…

It turns out, however, this is clearly not the first time it’s failed – which is probably why the pins in the headshell are so hideously melted and had to be bypassed. That cable is not the original one – and didn’t actually fit into the grooves it’s meant to run through. However, replacing the cable with some of John’s shiny new ultrathin cable has transformed the deck back into something usable. Which has got me all excited about doing the podcast again. The only teensy problem being now there’s one very loud source of hum gone, I can hear:

– How crappy & dirty the records are
– Some rumble from the deck
– Some other fracking thing somewhere is adding more hum

Gah!

Then between yesterday and today I’ve spent some time making up cables and putting sockets on an Economy 7 footing. Lurking (and ticking) under the sink now is a mechanical timer that at 0030 kicks in and turns the dishwasher on. The washing machine came with its own digital timer, and so last night at about 4 in the morning it kicked in to start doing our wash load…

And down in the garage last night a mechanical timer turned the car on (which was a bit dodgy, imho, but it says on it 3125 Watts) which should be enough for a 10A charger (~2430 watts – according to my multimeter down in the garage). However, the intention was never to leave a mechanical timer down there doing it’s stuff***, so when the rain tailed off a bit today I wandered down to the garage which has its own consumer unit (albeit a running through the consumer unit at the house) and spent an enjoyable hour or two wiring in the 16A DIN Rail timer switch. Which would have been fine, but there was insufficient ‘extra’ length on the cable to run it the way it would ideally be run. In the end, the solution I came up with was to turn the timer switch upside down. Which is slightly irritating, but meant not having any extra dubious joins in the wire, such as might cause me worry (or cause me problems when I get it inspected).

When Kathryn gets back tonight I’ll try it out (hitting the ‘override’ switch) – my one worry is that it’s only meant to switch 2A inductive or 16 resistive loads. My initial thought was that old power supplies with their dirty great inductors were ‘inductive’ loads. I’d not really considered switched mode supplies, which is, I’m assuming what’s in the charger, as inductive loads. They, so I have learned, are. However, the iMiEV doesn’t turn on the dirty-great-inductive-load when it’s plugged in, it takes several seconds after it comes on to start charging, and it should have finished charging well before the timer switches back off, so I’m thinking (and you can all shout at me) that the actual switching current should be fairly low, and that hopefully it will survive.

If not, err, well, I’m hoping that we’ll notice and I’ll trade it out for a 25A/30A wall mounted timer. Which is my other option – and actually what I’m wishing I’d bought in the first place.

Fortunately, I’m off tomorrow as well as today, so if it doesn’t work I can put it all back the way it was, and everything will be happyness and joy.

Since I was in a fixie McFixie mood, and because when we had our electricity meter fitted it bugged me, (and in reality it’s been bothering me for a while) I finally made it so that ‘You May Telephone From Here‘ became a reality. I’m not sure where my little enamel sign that proclaims that is, or if I even still have it (I hope I do, because it really should be by the phone), but I finally got the now-working payphone mounted on the wall.

I very carefully hand drilled some holes through the plaster (all the time fearing that I’d hit the wires, despite being fairly certain that I was well clear of them). Lifted said phone up to said wall and screwed it in place…

And now our house feels truly 1940s.

Despite having done these jobs today, all of which needed doing, and having done the washing up, cleaned the cooker, hood, kitchen floor, swept the hall and hoovered Dysoned the rugs in the hall, and done a very quick sweep of the stairs I’m still feeling like I’ve not done very much with my day.

Sometimes I worry about my brain.

* During which we spent a surprisingly large amount of time discussing the practicalities of our evacuation from this country**.
** Hey, do you think they’d pay, with the ‘Go Home’ vans, for our flights to the USA?
*** Many years ago I had, at home, one I’d repaired which had been used to switch a small electric heater for [years] – it had melted horribly internally, as the contacts had worn away and the plastic had overheated. Having ‘repaired’ it and cleaned the contacts it was handy for switching low-power items like, say, lights, but it has left me a bit paranoid about these things.

Forgive this post, it’s sleep deprived.

So, those of you who know me personally know that I’ve always perceived myself as very English. I’ve often been accused of being the most English person some of my friends (who are also English) know. I’m painfully middle-class. I’m all about fairness, I listen to Radio 4, I ‘potter’ in the garden. I drive a Morris Minor. I am impossible to give a compliment to, because I’m quite self-effacing when that happens. I have had a real sense of pride for Britain’s place in the world*.

I grew up in the 1980s, in suburban England, and whilst there was definitely racism in my youth it wasn’t a huge issue. Bullying of a more general form caused me far more pain than racism. Perhaps because despite my mum’s Sri Lankan heritage, and my Buddhist upbringing the rest of my life was entirely British – and even the Buddhism seemed more to bubble from my eccentric (Welsh) father than my mother. My mum’s only concession to Sri Lanka was to try (and fail) to teach me Sri Lankan (I wish I’d learnt now, it’s a really interesting language). And to teach me some bits and bobs about Sri Lankan history. The occasional shouts of “Paki go home” were infrequent enough to not really be meaningful – and usually ended with me returning shouts about how they should get their insult right, ‘cos I’m not Pakistani. Or a comment about not wanting to go to Watford (where I was born – and still my standard response to that one).

I loved the fact that Britain really did seem to be fairly properly multicultural, and that whilst it was no-where near perfect, it definitely seemed to be moving in the right direction. That the mixing of genetic and social heritage was making Britain a fantastically diverse society. A society who’s strength seemed to me to be massively enhanced by its eclectic heritage – and its magpie like theft from the many countries where Britain has had it’s dirty little mitts.

And so, until now I’d never really considered myself Brown. I’d felt English and that was the be-all and end-all of it. I was well aware that I fit into many minority pigeon-holes (whilst simultaneously fitting into none). Indeed, I’d often joked that I was an diversity and equality dream – I tick so many boxes in employment law it’s worth just employing me to balance the figures…

And I’d certainly, over the past few years, moved from pride to a substantial degree of shame as the political landscape moved to persecute those who have a disability, and those who for whatever reason are living with assistance from the state. I’d complained vociferously about policies that suggested that there were ‘skivers’ and ‘strivers’ – what utter bullshit that is. The divisive and unpleasant policies designed to split society seemed to me the very lowest ebb of political manoeuvring and quite frankly the purview of the BNP and UKIP, rather than something than something mainstream political parties should be involved in.

And then this happened.

And I started reading tales of people being stop-and-questioned by UK Border Patrols. And rounding up people who don’t have ID. And I started to think ‘I don’t want to visit London’. Because whilst I am British I don’t always bother to carry ID because in this damn country you don’t have to. Because I don’t really want to deal with the hassle of defending my right to be in the damn country I was born in. The country that invited my mother here**.

And I got really angry, thinking how fucking dare they. How dare they assume just because someone’s not white, or doesn’t speak with RP that they’re not English.

And then I started thinking about

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

And this

And now I need to work out what the hell I’m going to do about it. Because scared and angry aren’t enough. This has to stop. This has to stop. It has gone far enough.

What to do about it, that I don’t know. But something.

(Although mostly what I want to do is leave. But that’s just an amplification of an already extant desire. But I am seriously starting to consider that perhaps it’s time to rapidly earn some money and make like a tree).

* Albeit one tempered by a really thorough understanding of the thing’s Britain has done that are wrong, and at times evil. Whilst I was proud of Britain – really proud of our engineering heritage – I’m well aware that socially we’ve been an atrocious country.

** That invaded my mother’s country, really fucked it up and then left.

So, I’ve spent the day working on the lighting in the kitchen (so far). It’s been a surprisingly pleasant experience, although there’s a few bits I’m not entirely happy with. You can see some of the connector blocks because I didn’t sink them down into the body of the wood far enough. This is basically a mixture of lack of patience and not bringing my chisel up to the house which would have been ‘the right tool’.

I didn’t bring the chisel because I forgot that I’d need to sink the blocks down into the wood and thought that given how soft the driftwood is I’d be able to get away with using stanley blades to hide the wires. This was, broadly speaking, true. But I didn’t quite get as much depth as I should have for the connector blocks, and thought they’d not be visible from underneath. They’re almost not. Mainly I stopped cutting them in because it was f’ing hot in the kitchen that day, the sun being very warm, and I reached a point of thinking I wanted to stop being quite so warm. But from the angle where you walk into the kitchen you can just see them. This is upsetting, but not terribly.

Because essentially I’m pretty happy with them.

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Sadly the time has come to sell our beloved Volvo 340. This is the first time I’ve ever just been sad to see a car go – but we’ve now got 3 and only a 2 car garage. And tbh he’s not going to get used enough. I’ve actually put him up for sale on the Volvo300 forum, but it occurred to me one of you guys might be interested…
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