midwinter on a sunny beach

It's the shortest day today and I suppose it's also midwinter.

After my early morning work phone calls finished, I could have taken some time out for shopping. Maybe a shopping centre, a mall or even a supermarket?

The weather was suggesting an alternative. Despite all of the recent rain, there was a blue sky of the kind you see in watercolour paintings.

Why not a visit to the beach?

So we did.

not feeling D Love from DAB

The fancy radio in the kitchen is playing up again. It sounds like there's a very raucous chicken stuck inside it.

By comparison the £10 lo-tech shower radio that looks like a penguin works fine.

I thought the idea with DAB digital radio was that it was supposed to be 'better' but there still seem to be some problems.

The first DAB radio I used was several years ago. It was a bedside radio and looked neat in a sort of 1950s way but needed a 1 metre telescopic aerial in order to work.

It's controls were slightly obscure too and when it blew up after a couple of years I replaced it with a normal FM clock radio again.

The radio in the kitchen is part of a mini hi-fi system but is notoriously difficult to keep tuned. The scalded cat sounds on DAB mean there's a tendency to retune to FM and forgo some of the extra channels.

I can't understand why the reception is so bad. I've unplugged it and moved it around. I've moved the aerial. I've got a booster aerial. Nothing seems to work.

By comparison, my car has a DAB tuner and it seems to work well, even when parked right outside the house where the other radio doesn't work.

At the moment the BBC are evangelising DAB continuously. Someone should tell them it doesn't work properly.

afternoon tea at the priory

We were in the priory at the weekend, hiding behind curtains and wearing silly hats.

A skilfully executed 'convergence' event, with all of us arriving from different directions, yet managing to be in the right place at the right time.

This was a proper tea and cakes occasion, complete with out-turned little fingers when sipping from the teacup.

Our gang had a great time, and a chance to chatter, even ahead of the upcoming festivities.

the fairy lights are on the blink

I seem to remember I was handed the above list of prompts in the form of a scroll by one of the angels of the North.

It turned out that being the donkey in the nativity wasn't such a bad thing. The year the toon cat tugged the tinsel on the city Christmas tree, it fell across the metro tracks and I was called into action.

Someone had to pull that train back into the station before the two snowman passengers started to melt.

With some further assistance from a jovial bearded man in a red outfit and his team of reindeer, we managed to get the train to where the passengers could alight. Although the snowmen didn't like that particular turn of phrase, preferring 'slip away'.

Anyway, Mariah Carey was in town to switch on the lights and when she heard about it, decided to sing 'Little Donkey, Little Donkey, carrying a heavy load' in recognition of the event.

in which the porridge sets off a whole chain of thought

I've just been reading another blogger's post about blogging. In case it all sounds a bit circuitous, it was about what has happened over the last few years.

This blog's mantra is 'fun going forward' so it doesn't spend too much time in retroactive analysis, but on this occasion it's worth a moment.

I can still remember that the original thinking behind rashbre central was to set something up as an experiment and run it for a maximum of -ahem- two years. It evolved in the period when social networking via the internet was becoming more mainstream and as a way to keep abreast of developments. Things like bianca's shack had already run their course in those days.

Now I already had previous form with the internet, including in the period when NCSA Mosaic and then Netscape ruled the browsers. I remember buying a diskette copy of Netscape in the USA in the time when it was still classed as munitions unsuitable for export.

Of course that was a world away from the more mainstream and accessible introduction of blogging. For me it became more usable when the content could finally overtake the need to type in html markup language and run syntax checks.

More importantly, it heralded internet connections between people at a more social level, without some of the chatroom issues. I started out with simple publishing and didn't get any hits at all to begin with. I worked out that interacting with others would start a process that has persisted to this day.

I also devised a few rudimentary rules.

• Anonymity through the use of a pseudonym.
• Nothing about 'work' except the incidentals of travel and similar.
• Very little that linked back to home-life.
• A general principle of one picture and ten minutes to write the text, per day.
• Usually one, or a maximum of two ideas per post (except if it was a Thursday Thirteen).
• Hardly any use of generic memes (I know, I broke this a few times for special occasions).
• A back-beat of London to keep it grounded

I actually wondered if it would leave me with anything to write about.

In the course of it I discovered a vibrant community. Not so many commenters compared with the number of visitors. As I added more content, the number of references into older posts has also continued.

Of course, The Facebook was starting out and twitter soon followed. I was the 135th twitter follower in London (749313 globally) and like app.net was a few months ago, there was early experimentation to figure out how to use the medium.

It still seems to me to be about the difference between content creators and content consumers.

Bloggers are mainly content creators, at least if they are not moneytised recyclers of press releases and the like.

Bloggers write unique things, partly for themselves and at least partly to entertain and challenge others.

It's easy to manage time around blogging because there's a deliberate act to read or write something. Thinking as a blogger makes one a little more observational - stuff that happens could be useful in a post.

Twitter is far more distracting because of it's pop-up nature. I'll sometimes fire up a few conversations - like at the moment when a group of us all do the early evening saturday sweepstake. I'm past the point where I feel the need to keep twitter babbling across the screen and don't even have it fired up on my 'work PC'.

Facebook is the quaint anachronism in my collection of social software. I get it that lots of people use it, but there seems to be a poor signal to noise ratio. I can remember the days of the pointless flying sheep and those spy games, but the controllers of the format have deigned to make it more of a juggernaut. Or to put it another way, even less of a place that I visit. I keep a presence, both as the 'real me' and as rashbre on FB but maybe only drift onto it once or twice a month (except when there is a special reason).

And along the way there has been another dozen or so systems come and go. There's always the next great thing to try and so I guess many of us have userids littered across plenty of other systems.

I still keep rashbre central as a hub for my own varied endeavours. There's my links out to novel writing, photography, music, cycling and general adventures which are all from the single source.

My old rules seem to still work quite well for the content. And the friendships it has generated along the way seem to hang in there quite well, even with all the changing modes of interaction.

back in the smoke

Back to London today. After a 650 mile round trip by road across a fog covered Britain, I'm back in 'The Smoke' although, as can be seen from my picture, the air is surprisingly clear.

It's also several degrees warmer. 'Up North' there was a need for scarves, but 'Down South' I even put on shorts today when I took the bike for a spin.

I'm well past the 4,000 mile mark from cycling this year, against my original target of 1,800 miles. With my travelling over the last two or three weeks, the cycling rate has had to diminish and I'm currently around 4,600 miles year to date.

The remainder of the year's labyrinthine calendar of events means it won't be possible to click over 5,000 miles, although that could be an interesting target for 2013.

Trashed Organ Broken Christmas Cabaret

The Broken Christmas Cabaret was a fabulously trashy success. The piano had been drinking, the fairy lights were on the blink and we were gently sozzled on the bright green cocktails.

We'd been in the Broad Chare immediately before things at Live kicked off. What followed was a continuous succession of edgy alternatives to the normal festive celebrations.

The cuckoos had advice on everything from what not to do at office parties to ways to redevelop the 12 days song.

Noize Choir whirled luminous tubes whilst harmoniously singing entire carols backwards.

We all had bubbles and small incendiary devices to detonate. Secret Santa had also taken a perverse turn with his present selections. I found myself on the naughty list.

Tim Turnbull let us into the secrets of a somewhat off-beat dinner party before bringing in some Dionysian parallels to keep us all thinking. Then Paddy Campbell reminded us that even last resort help desks have seasonal moments. Monkey Junk plugged in and slid some excellent foot-stomping blues.

Just time for a top-up of wine and some head in bucket singing before Mary appeared, ably represented by Alison Carr, who auditioned the part (very) completely.

Kate Fox featured a range of poems before adding an accompanying ukelele and a rather adapted form of Hallelujah. Like many of us, she admitted she really quite liked this season.

And to wrap the performed part of the evening we had Matt Stalker and Fable, who played their own songs plus one from Bon Iver before moving to a festive finale.

John and Melanie, Gez and Rosie then recited their way through the Trashed Laureate compilation and the final trashed port of the year was awarded.

A brilliant set of performances and, as luck would have it, the bar was also still running, so now it was time to move on to the less structured section of the evening and - er - morning.

seasonal party dressing tips

This site doesn't publish direct fashion tips for the upcoming season very often, but tonight we'll make an exception.

With the trashy broken Christmas cabaret about to take place, it's important to know the type of look required.

It's kind of après-party wear. I think it's called 'dress to depress'. The kind of thing that looks right later on in the evening.

There's a few serving suggestions here.

Prepare the fir tree shaped cookies drizzled in marmite.

shopping

Although it is Wednesday, it felt quite like a weekend being out around the shops today.

There were so many people gathering presents as if everyone had simultaneously decided to go shopping midweek in order to avoid the weekend rush.

polychromatic brick and wrought iron finials

A strange co-incidence that I received this card the day after standing at the exact spot it depicts.

The person that sent the card wouldn't have known about us hanging around St Pancras, nor sipping fancy cocktails in the Gilbert Scott bar.

The picture is from an earlier time though. You can see that the red buses have poles on them, which dates them as trolley buses from no later than 1962, which was when they were finally withdrawn.

That would be about the same era as when the poet John Betjamin was campaigning to stop the destruction of the original St Pancras train station. Fortunately he was successful in preserving the magnificent structure, which now houses the main train line link to Europe.

far down the shining lines

Another week of travelling up and down the UK. It'll be the third week in a row.

Last week it was to the North West, this time it's the North East.

And the time before that it was kind of 'middle' rather than top.

I've been using the car instead of planes and trains, although I still seem to spend time at train stations and on tube trains bound for Heathrow.

This time I must ship a few extras along; spare sets of tree lights, feather wings and pints of customised beer.

It's all good though, and means I'm reducing the contents of the over-occupied garage.

Ever so slowly.

green day

I know, it looks like a typical day in the office.

Actually, we'd decided to go along to the Hammersmith Apollo to see that Green Day show. I think of Green Day as a sort of guilty pleasure of a band. Slews of power chords and nearly everything set to maximum, we'd decided it wasn't going to be a quiet affair.

The musical is the fourth re-incarnation of the American Idiot album (after the live gig CD called Bullet in a Bible and the live DVD from, yes, Milton Keynes).

The musical is an excuse to play all of the American Idiot tracks back to back (and a few extra ones) with a thin story-line of three bored teenagers making their way from the post 9/11 'burbs. One becomes a father, one goes to war and the third does drugs.

Add in full-on Green Day tunes at express train speed. By the end of the first half we were wondering if there could be many more songs left from that album, but sure enough, the second half didn't disappoint.

There's a rage throughout the storyline which has a kind of deliberately chaotic manner and a jagged ending (pre-encore) to an entertaining evening.