Study break

I’ve taken this week off work to help Jake study for his GCSE exams. He’s had a few already, but he has this week off and then some major exams coming up, so I thought this would be a good chance to sit at the dining room table with him, supervise and give him a hand.

We’re a bit slow to start: Monday was a bank holiday. I arrived back from a couple of days on the Isle of Jura, where I was “working hard” on my whisky-themed blog and tasting enterprise, Dubber & Clutch. Jake was in London with Kerryn & Haydn and their boys, Shay and Zac.

We both experienced train delays on our respective journeys home (and I even missed one of mine, while Clutch boarded with the tickets) and so we were both tired and unproductive last night. This morning’s a sleep-in of course – and hopefully I’ll get Jake to write something on his blog about his trip (his first solo journey through London).

Maybe we’ll start studying after lunch…

Of cats and monsters

Years ago, I put a couple of radio shows I had produced back when I was a radio producer up on the internet. One of them, Ashley’s Worlds, was a kids’ ‘cartoon for radio’, in which all the characters were cats. The other, Claybourne was a sort of sci-fi-soap-opera-thriller-adventure in which – well, lots of weird stuff happens. Monsters and what-not.

One of the people who downloaded them was an American schoolgirl who became their biggest fan. She got in touch and told me how much she loved the stories (and how much she loved animals) – and, so of course, I replied.

Over the past five or six years, I’ve had the odd email from Beth, letting me know how she’s getting on and what she’s up to. And today I received this wonderful email from her father, Nick:

My daughter Beth has loved your stories since she was little…so much so she has written you several times. She is the American from South Carolina that loves animals and you recommended she read “All Creatures Great and Small”. Anyway I just came across your blog again and wanted to let you know how thankful I am that you encouraged her to read that book. She is making great strides in the field of zoo keeping and now is an assistant keeper at Riverbanks Zoo in South Carolina.Thanks for being a good mentor. Our world is so large and yet so connected.

This makes me happy. As I said to Nick in my reply to him – when you look at the internet, at first it just seems like technology. And then you start using it and you begin to notice that it’s just people talking to each other.

New look on the blog

I started a new project this week. A book, actually. And I set up a website for it. It’s called Deleting Music.

I was looking around for a really good WordPress template to use, and I found this one. It’s called P2. This video explains what’s so good about it, and you’ll probably get why I like it so much. In effect, if I’m logged in, all I have to do is come to this page you’re looking at right now, and just start typing. It’s brilliant.

As I messed about with it, I thought it would be really good to use that template here on my personal site too, and made a note to give it a try after May, once I’ve finished with all of the NZ Music Month one-a-day videos.

But I really love using it so much, I’ve decided to just jump in and start using it here. What do you think?

By the way – you can get yourself a little picture that’ll show up by your comments if you just go to Gravatar and upload an image.