Skimming stones after dark.
speak and spell
Loveliest box I've seen for ages. Somehow has lasted twenty years and still looks incredibly vibrant.
Not quite as bright and gorgeous, but gets points for being seen less often.
job titles of the future
Experience Stylist; now that's a job title. Experience Designer is so 2007.
instorematic
Two steps forward. One step back. That's progress. (And let's just remind you how good the descender will be when it's done.)
drawing on the desktop
Inspired by this lovely bit of desktop organisation, I've done my own.
It's made all the difference.
urban foxy
Went out for a bit of a walk this evening and saw this chap padding around Fitzroy Square. Looks like he'd just come up from a spot of dinner on Charlotte Street. Probably works in the media. There've been foxes in London since the 30s, and I can imagine Fitzroy Square might suit them quite well. People rarely seem to go in there and there's access to quite a bit of open space and food around. Has there been a children's book based on urban foxes yet? seems the perfect topic.
Of course I'm such a poor naturalist that it's probably a large cat or feral dog or something and someone'll tell me I'm an idiot.
arthur's star
I remember getting Childhood's End out of the school library. I devoured it. It was the first time I realised there was more to life than Willard Price. So I made a little diversion to Strand Books this evening, to see what they had, and found this splendid anthology. I used to pore over these Chris Moore covers too.
This is from the foreword, it seems appropriate:
"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star."
building is learning
To Cambridge for the Science Festival today. The obviously populist bits were a bit mobbed but we were lucky enough to have lunch with Andrew and he steered us towards some splendid stuff, starting with a trip to the Whipple.
It's a fantastic little place, with great collections. I didn't really notice the numbering system until I was looking at the pictures just now. Is there a Dewey Decimal System for things?
The big bit of noticing for the day though was how easy and useful it was to learn through building stuff. These two anatomical doodahs at the Whipple gave me more sense of where the bits inside you are supposed to go than the endless hours of medical TV I've watched. Because you have to rebuild something, you have to see how it all fits together. (Warning - do not attempt home surgery using illustrations above, these are both 'before' stages)
Later, over at the Centre For Mathematical Sciences, we spent more excellent time doing and building math stuff. Arthur was delighted and excited to discover that maths (which he likes) is more than adding and times-ing. I'm reading Richard Sennett's The Craftsman at the moment and he talks in there about how making is thinking, it's also dawning on me that building is learning.