Saviour
Last batch of photos from Simakakata is up on Flickr, including some nice ones of Saviour. She’s a lot more confident and cheeky than last time we were there. Just click the photo for the link.
Holiday snaps…
Half term in Cornwall, originally uploaded by nisuspi.
Are rubbish, I know. But look. Tabby wrote my name in the sand. Give me a break.
Why I can’t cancel Facebook
I keep threatening to remove my Facebook profile. I don’t use it, honestly, and it’s just amassing information about me over which I have no control and someone else is making money from. Then, every once in a while, it becomes the only way I find out about things like Mark Sparrow’s The Truth About Hospital Food. I had no idea an old friend and ex-colleague – with whom I’ve regrettably lost touch – was making a documentary based on his experience of hospital food during 10 weeks of traction. Thanks to Facebook, I caught the whole thing.
And very good it was too.
The school at Good Hope
As the sign says, there’s a set of photos up taken at Good Hope school near Simakakata, and all you need to do is click on the pic to see them.
Good Hope is where George, the headmaster at Simakakata, used to work and where his wife, Linda, still does. It’s an amazing place – proof of what’s possible in development. Even further from the main road than Simakakata, it was started about 15 years ago by a Christian mission with German funding, and is now an incredible establishment for 7-15(ish) year olds. It’s remarkably well equipped, has running water and a brilliant staff. One day, Simakakata will look like this.
Valentine’s Day 1982
Thanks to yet another trapped nerve in my shoulder, I was engaged in some traditional – but unusual for me – Sunday afternoon pastimes today. Like lying on the sofa and channel hopping up and down through Virgin’s rather terrible TV offering. One of the music channels was showing a day long ’100 best love songs’ medley because tomorrow is, of course, St Valentine’s day. The song I caught was Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, which always conjours up faintly happy memories of school discos and suchlike, it being quite a popular ditty from childhood years and all that.
I genuinely have no recollection that the video was so wonderfully bizarre. The complete opposite of the song, which is as prosaically MOR as you get. Possibly the reason is that all videos shot in the early years of MTV this strange and pretentious, so that at the time this was forgettable. Maybe I’ve always turned over or fallen asleep before it gets interesting, or perhaps Top of the Pops never showed the second half. But by the standards of modern music promos, this is high art – albeit a particularly Greek (as in ancient) type of art with distrubingly paedofilic undertones.
If, like me before this morning, you remember the Jim Steinman-penned song but not the accompanying film, watch it from 3minutes on (the instrumental break). The sanest thing about it are the loincloth-wearing dancers circling Bonnie while trying to walk like crabs. The school choir, whose ocular cavities have been hollowed out and replaced with torches, are the most literal interpretation of a song line ever – ‘turn around bright eyes’. The final few seconds, in which Bonnie is apparently revealed to be a teacher at a posh school who harbours highly innapropriate feelings for her charges, would surely never be made today.
Oh yeah, and it has ninjas too. Maybe they were edited in around 1990?
Machaworks
I mentioned a while back that I was going to blog about Machaworks, after visiting them while I was in Zambia, and then never got round to it. This is why: Blogging from the bush: How ICT-led development is working in rural Zambia.
There’s tons of stuff I ddin’t mention in that piece though – but I’ll get round to it..