Question Time

He glances up from a myopic analysis of the pages in front of him, turns to me with almost hesitancy and asks:
“I see from your CV that you’re interested in hiking? Have you climbed Mt Blanc? No? Why not? How about the Pyrennes? The Atlas Mountains? Ben Nevis? But you say here that you’re a hiker and yet you’ve done nothing, are you trying to mislead us with your CV?”

“I, well, ah, you see, I’m not sure if, eh, your definition of hiker would really be an, ahem, industry recognised description of hiking and hikers, after all hiking means hill-walking and you’ve been listing mountains”

A faint smile itches at the corners of his mouth but I can’t be sure if it’s the precursor of amusement or further evilness to come, I don’t have to wait long.

“That’s all very well and good but I think what’s important for us is our idea of what a hiker is. Have you climbed any of the mountains I’ve listed?

A deflated “No”

“Okay, it’s not important, Let’s move on. You’re a scuba diver….”

——————-

It was one of those interviews, one that would make you want to laugh or cry and probably both at the same time and it was long, it took three hours for them to determine how truly ignorant I was.

They spent their time trying to tease imaginary pieces of information from my woolly mind while I sat back and was amazed at the number of questions which I responded with “I don’t know”, yet it didn’t bother me. It was almost like a serene calm had descended, I had concluded early on that I really wasn’t the person they wanted and I was curious to see how long it would take them to reach the same conclusion. They looked hopeful as they began each question, as if this question would be the one that would unlock the many talents I’d been hiding from them…

They say that a wiseman is not wise because of all that he knows but because he recognises how much he doesn’t know, after that interview I am truly on the path to great wisdom….

Picking Flowers

Only one month left until the People’s Photography Exhibition and I’m busy selecting photos…

Ayude Me

They say that God shuts one door only to open another and it seems to be that way for me too. Here I am in Utrecht, sacked by the company who brought me over here, not a good position to be in but do I despair?

Not at all. You see I’ve made the acquaintance of a young man whose life has been so much harder than mine.

His name is Aminu Kanu and tragically he’s an orphan, having lost his family due to war and violence over the years. He shares his name with a respected politician from Nigeria who died before my friend Animu was even born but that’s where the similarities end.

6 years ago his mother and younger brother were killed during a Rebel attack leaving Aminu and his father to fend for themselves but that wasn’t the end of his bad luck, just last September, his father died, allegedly as a result of poisoning by his father’s business partner, leaving poor Aminu all alone in the world….

But poor is one thing that Aminu is not, his father ran a very successful cocoa business and as his sole heir, Aminu stands to become a very rich man, only there is the matter of the nefarious business partner….

His father had suspected that his business partner had been plotting something underhand and devious so he made the first move, he secretly siphoned off money from the business and placed it in an account in the Cote D’Ivoire. He was so successful that by the time he died, he’d managed to accumulate over $5m in that one account.

You might wonder who really is the guilty partner in this business partnership, after all if I discovered that my business partner had managed to steal $5m from my company, I might be tempted to do something drastic like poison him!

But whatever his father or the business partner may have done, this young man of 21 is still in need of assistance, he needs some kindly soul to help him. He feels that since he is naive in the ways of the world that some samaritan could step in to guide him as he makes his way into the world of adulthood, to wisely invest his inheritance and to snip through the red tape that prevents him from attending a western university.

Who could turn down such a plea?

Me Ma

Mamma Mia, here I go again, how can I resist ya?
I hate musicals and not just a little hate but with a passion which is a drag since my parents love them and like to have family outings to musicals, I’m a bad son, I hardly go but one day I found myself at “Mamma Mia” and worse still, I enjoyed it!

What’s even worse still is that when I saw the trailers for the film version of Mamma Mia, I started looking forward to it. I’m so ashamed of myself.

I saw it yesterday.

Watching it and I’m reminded of why I hate musicals, it’s not just the fact that people suddenly burst into song for no good reason but it’s the bad dialogue that tenuously links the songs together. What I found disappointing was that at times it just seemed like they’d just transported the show straight from the stage to film without expanding it in a filmic way, it was almost as if it never left the stage, all big eyes and jazz hands.

That said, you can’t beat the soundtrack, Abba has that ultimate singalongability that you need for a musical and judging by the audience in the cinema, it caters for all ages, it’s the perfect movie. What’s even better is you can see how much fun the cast had in making it, they ham it up and throw themselves into the singing, the dancing and even the pratfalls.

It’s not going to win the Oscar for Best Film but you leave the cinema with a smile.

The question is - is it better than the Rocky Horror Picture Show?

On The Bedside Table

I haven’t been reading much lately, I seem to spend most of my time in the middle of three or four books at once, never devoting my full attention to any one of them, yet I’m been lucky, each of them has been good and got me involved in the story (I guess they’d have to be since they’d be fighting with the other books for my attention)

I’ve just finished “Eleanor Rigby” and that surprised me how much I enjoyed it. I think that I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to Douglas Coupland, he’s a writer of our times and not really “literary” but what is literary anyway, does it mean that the book is hard to read, a struggle to finish, a challenge that most readers give up on? Does ease of reading make a book a bad book?

Coupland’s stories are real stories, they deal with real situations and real people, people that, as Sesame Street would sing, are the people that you meet when you’re walking down the street, they’re the people that you meet each day. I’ve read five of Coupland’s novels now yet each time I pick up a new one, it’s as if I haven’t read any of his, I’m always wondering if I’m really going to enjoy a novel by an author like him. He has a novel called “Girlfriend in a Coma” which I want to read simply because it’s the name of a Smiths song. He has a way with words that charms me into his books whether he’s talking about geeks or a woman who discovers a long lost son…

“The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” is a new addition to the bedside table, this is the book of the month for the book group so there’s a time factor which can make reading a bit of a chore but I don’t think it’s going to be a chore at all with this one. I loved “Kavalier and Clay” but couldn’t get into “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” and I’d had “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” lying around waiting to be read, the book group provided the perfect reason…

As a minor mathematician, I’m always interested in books on maths, stats or economics and so my current mathematical pleasure book is “The Black Swan” which examines the effect of “impossible” events on our lives and tries to see if there are ways to factor these improbable events into predictions of what might happen. As with all great maths books, there are no confusing formulae, instead real-life examples and “English” is used to explain the author’s thoughts.

The last book balancing precariously on my bedside table is predictable enough, a mountain tale…

When I read Heinrich Harrer’s “Seven Years in Tibet” it was only a matter of time before I would read his book “The White Spider”. What I loved about “Seven Years” was the combination of adventure story with a philosophical insight into the lives of the Tibetans before the land was “liberated”. In “The White Spider”, it’s got those two same elements of adventure and philosophy as we trace the history of successful and failed attempts to climb the North Face of the Eiger.

Heinrich and I are currently halfway up the side of the mountain and things are going well…

Window Shopping

It was meant to be an innocent cycle, one of those trips where you open up the map, scan for patches of green or open spaces and randomly select one of them.

On Monday, the lucky destination was the area around Maarsen, just north of Utrecht. It’s a nice cycle along the canal, slowly moving from suburbia to the countryside, there’s even a couple of windmills. My bicycle seat was as uncomfortable as ever, I can only cycle for so long on it before the nagging aches become a whining pain, I’m tempted to bring my own bike over from Dublin…

What made yesterday’s cycle interesting was not the windmills or the canal or even the world’s worst saddle, what was fascinating was the path along one particular stretch of canal…

The canal is wide enough to allow people to live in boat-houses tied up to the banks and as I cycled past I looked at these boat-houses, some had gardens and railings, no longer looking like a boat-house but just like any other house and then there was the one with the scantily-clad woman in the window…

I didn’t know where to look.

I kept cycling but as I did I noticed that in the next boat-house there was another window and in that window was another woman hot enough to be wearing hardly any clothes…

As I cycled along, I noticed a pattern emerging, I had discovered the Red Boat District…

High Life

Towards evening, as the sun is thinking about putting on its pyjamas, floating above the buildings and the trees, the freemen go travelling…

Ice, Ice, Baby

Last night was the big night, last night was my Toastmasters’ Icebreaker.

I spent the day terrified and in a muted panic. I’d written several versions of the speech over the last few weeks and when I saw it written down it was good, great even, but as I tried to learn it I discovered that writing beautiful prose does not always make the best speech nor does it make it easy to remember.

Toastmasters have a mentoring programme and I took full advantage of it. I arranged to give my mentor a “advance screening” of the speech. It was only okay and as a proud perfectionist that wasn’t good enough for me. I wasn’t happy with the flow of the speech, I felt the first section was weak and I couldn’t really remember much of what I had tried to learn.

That was Wednesday night. Thursday I spent trying to tweak it, stuff the speech into my head, walk around my apartment talking to myself, each time giving a slightly different speech, trying to cut sections out, it was too long but it was all good and all bad, I didn’t know which to leave in or take out…

Yesterday I was like a caged tiger all day, I could sense disaster looming, it was getting harder and harder to learn the speech, harder to believe that it was all going to go well. I knew that while the speech was me in words, it didn’t sound like me when I spoke. After days of overanalysing, my speech was in shreds and I really didn’t know what was going to happen.

It was in the middle of a long canal walk that I had an idea. Instead of giving the speech, I would give a speech about the speech and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it fit my style, I could drop in pieces of my prepared speech and pepper it with ad-libs, it was almost a plan.

Another thing that made this Icebreaker different was that I wasn’t giving it to the Utrecht Toastmasters but instead to a mixed group of Amsterdam and Utrecht toastmasters and not in our usual pub but in the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam! As if the nerves weren’t bad enough!

As it was the Hilton and because I needed some additional psychological armour, I wore my suit. Naturally this caused some bemusement from the Utrecht contingent…

There’s something about the formality of a Toastmasters meeting that helps, you don’t launch into your speech immediately, instead you greet the people there and while you’re greeting them it gives you a little bit of time to get your head together.

It went well, not exactly the best I could do but this was my first speech, I have to leave some room for improvement…

Then later came the evaluation, or rather the evaluations. First there’s the formal official evaluation and I didn’t enjoy that at all, not because there were problems but because he really didn’t have any problems and was praising my speech. I’m not too good at handling compliments especially when I’m in a room full of people and their attention is all directed at me…

The other form of evaluation is where the rest of the audience writes little notes (anonymous or otherwise) with their thoughts or tips on improving. I liked these more, I could read them on the train home with no-one watching me, much better.

They all liked my speech and no-one picked up on my nervousness at all, I guess I’m a better actor than I think I am! They came up with some useful pointers too, such as:

1. Maybe a little padded - I found this one interesting as I was constantly throwing away material as I made my way through the speech but maybe some of my adlibbing laboured a point or two.

2. Pacing - not the speed of my speech but rather me walking around, up and down, round and round, perhaps this is a carry-over from my teaching days but maybe it was the nerves as well.

3. Volume - this has always been a problem when I speak to groups, I was a mumbler for a many a year and it’s still hard to speak louder and project. That said, one comment felt that my soft voice drew him into the story, so maybe I just need to project the soft voice better…

4. Eye-contact - The room was huge, really wide, it was hard to sweep my gaze from one side to the other, this is something I need to work on.

All in all, a terrifying but satisfying experience and I’m already preparing my next speech…

Mind the Gap - part 4

Mind the Gap - Part 3