Yes, as you might have guessed, SuperMondays, which I attended last month have had another event, and it has had a barcamp kind of a feel to it, with three different breakout sessions, each offering the chance to take in one of three different discussions (well, in theory).

There was a little introduction to the event and a mini-presentation, and a summing up session at the end. Oh, and I bumped into someone I used to work with (Hi, again!). So here’s the bits I went to, in chronological order.

The Secret Bit

I’m not sure what exactly I can tell you about this one, as we were specifically asked not to talk about it for another week to ten days until there has been some form of official announcement. You may therefore notice my description of this is missing one or two details…

This presentation was made by [redacted] who first got up and asked us not to talk about it. Basically it is a venture capital kind of thing which has been put together by [redacted] with [redacted], [redacted] and [redacted]. It will be running in [redacted] over a [redacted] period. The idea is that [redacted] will submit their proposals to [redacted] and these will then be looked at in more detail, with the best being offered [redacted], [redacted] and [redacted] and probably being based [redacted].

Hope this clarifies the situation for y’all.

A Note To The Organisers

When arranging future bar camp type events, there are certain things you may wish to consider…

Post-it Notes

While it’s all very well taking notes for potential sessions on a whiteboard, there is one key problem with a whiteboard. When it comes to wanting to group information (e.g. “these three sessions seem similar, so we’ll run all of them in room three”) or re-ordering sessions (”I can’t speak about google wave if I’m presenting startups at the same time”), there’s not much you can do with a whiteboard (particularly if you can’t write “encryption” legibly — see the post title) or flip-chart other than drawing a lot of lines and crossing stuff out.

I’d therefore recommend the use of post-it notes (the larger the better, and write BIG), which can be easily moved about, grouped, and re-ordered to suit. I felt this was something which had worked particularly well at localgovcamp.

Speakers

Again, to draw reference from localgovcamp, when sorting out which sessions you are going to run, there are two things to consider. The first is the relative level of interest in the room, which can be gauged by a show of hands, but the second is equally important.

Whether or not anyone is willing to lead on a particular topic. Particularly when people haven’t been to these events before, many people will be interested in a topic, but not necessarily know enough about it to be comfortable leading a session. I would therefore suggest that the audience (and/or the organisers) should propose the topics, and that the person proposing the topic has to be willing to speak for 10-15 of the 25 minutes on a given topic, just to get the session started.

Then you look to see which sessions are the most popular, once you know what people are willing to run. This avoids what I’ll describe later as the “Branding” problem…

The Audience

One of the things about the audience at the previous event I attended was that they were all from, or relating to, local government. This made it easier to choose topics which would appeal across the audience as a whole. The problem here for SuperMondays is that the audience is particularly diverse, so there were probably too many people, with too many different interests, to give the camp a tight enough focus.

I would maybe suggest that in future they look at applying a certain focus to barcamp events, such as “SuperMondays: Social Media Barcamp” or “SuperMondays: Databases Barcamp”

Google Wave

Okay, there was an ulterior motive which attracted a certain number of people to this session. The organiser had a certain number of Google Wave invites to give away, so I suspect there were two main reasons which people had for attending: those who were just interested in getting an invite, and couldn’t care about the rest of it; and those who were interested in getting an invite, but were at least vaguely interested in the rest of it.

So, anyway, this session:

Blah, blah, blah, etc, chattered on for a bit, blah, blah, filled in my email address to get a google wave invite, the end.

Only joking…

Google Wave was described in a number of different ways:

• a wave account is like gmail, but for wave rather than email…
• a mashup between mail, instant messaging, wikis and other things…
• very like google document files — a shared document
• brilliant for collaborative working and collaborative writing

What else? Well, it needs a browser which will support HTML 5 in order to run. In other words, you can’t run it in IE (or you can, but you need the google chrome plug in, which is even more of an accessibility black hole than google wave itself), and you instead need Firefox 3, Safari or something similar.

There was also some discussion over the reasoning behind Google’s invite roll-out policy. One of the ideas put forward is that it helps to keep the numbers down during the roll-out procedure so they get a chance to test it with progressively increasing numbers rather than a sudden explosion of signups. However, the most widely believed reason seems to be that the idea of it being “exclusive” is the thing which generates an enormous amount of interest and hype.

This is doubly true because we’re dealing mostly with techies, and to techies it’s a new toy and I wants it, my preciousss…

The demonstration looked at what could be done with it, and more specifically how the SuperMondays organisers have done with it — in terms of allocating tasks to people, collaborating on writing the event documentation together and so on. You can have numerous people editing the same document at once, and updates appear on your screen almost immediately. You can also allow different people have different permissions to your documents (e.g. some may have full permissions, some may be review only).

It’s like viewing a page on a wiki where you keep the F5 key pressed down

Again, like wiki type of things, it is very useful for tracking changes in a document — you can see what changes have been made, by whom, and when. There was a suggestion that this makes some legal departments particularly nervous…

At the moment, it was described also as “not too feature rich” and there was an acknowledgement that “it does crash from time to time”, which caused a few grins and nods from others — suggesting that it’s possibly not that uncommon an experience. It was also noted that performance drops the more people you have in a specific ‘Wave’, and as few as 5 people can bring the thing grinding to a halt.

One of the interesting things is that apparently the standards/tools behind Wave are open source, so just because Google are currently the only ones to be offering the service does not mean that this will always be the case — you could have Microsoft Wave, or even if you can put together the stuff on your own server, you could create your own compatible Waves…

Based on the way Google Wave was demonstrated here, I’d say that it doesn’t look to me as though it will be a replacement for wikis, or documents, or email, or instant messaging, but it does look a useful tool for collaborative work.

Start-ups

To some extent this session went off for fifteen minutes or so on the whole [redacted] thing, which probably meant that the session wasn’t as much use for everyone, because the [redacted] thing has certain conditions attached to it (it’s looking more at scalable products; they are not interested in non-scalable custom services), and also this limits to some extent what I can say about it.

So what else was actually discussed? Well, we learned that there were several people who were onto their second or third business, all of whom mentioned that they had learned “essential” things from the failures (or relative failures) of earlier businesses. Unfortunately, they didn’t actually tell us what these essential things were, so I’ll just have to try and avoid making the mistakes they made first time round without even knowing what they are. Wish me luck!

Then someone was talking about their Web 3.0 startup briefly, although I must admit that while I understand what they are talking about in terms of a semantic web, the entire notion of “Web 3.0″ sets off major alarms on my bullshit detection system, particularly given the propensity of people to talk about this sort of thing because it sounds new, cool, and haz buzzwords without actually understanding what the hell they are talking about.

Otherwise you’ll get clients who think Web 2.0 is rounded corners and pastel colours and web 3.0 will be the same story. Please, just drop the version numbers, okay?

There was a brief sidenote to say that it was the last day of geocities today, which caused a brief wave of nostalgia to ripple across the audience. For anyone particularly feeling in need of some early web geocities “goodness”, please take a look at The Great Duckano’s CSS Zen Garden GeoCities 1996 submission. Please also note that it was not intended seriously.

There was a suggestion that local Business Link services aren’t necessarily the best in terms of advice and coaching (although they may be useful for grants) and a couple of people voiced their scepticism at the idea that any of the business link advisers had ever ran their own business.

Digital Branding

I was expecting this to be a particularly interesting session, full of Dos and Do Nots about what to do with launching your digital brand online, and I had a few things that I was maybe willing to chip into the discussion if people weren’t already aware of them (such as the habitat twitter fail and so on), but here we arrived at the Barcamp Branding Problem.

There were only about five people in the room: all of whom had been there since the end of the previous “Start-ups” session. So they were continuing little conversations about start-ups while we waited for someone to start talking about digital branding.

Only because no-one had actually volunteered to start the session, no-one else came into the room, and no-one volunteered to lead the session. So after about ten minutes of generic chatter during which it became apparent that this session was not actually going to start, I skipped out and instead went to…

Open or Closed

Which was a discussion of open source software versus proprietary technology. Sat in a room full of techies, you generally get very much a consensus…

Open Source = Good; Proprietary = Bad; …oh, and while we’re on, Microsoft = Evil, Apple = Good

…but fortunately while there was a definite leaning towards open source, there were people prepared to put forward counter-arguments (and indeed, if it did ever get as black and white as suggested earlier, they had got past that by the time I joined in). I’m not entirely sure whether I missed some critical bits of the discussion, but the language used was quite interesting (my emphasis):

there are a lot of companies out there which still work on the old model: google and some others are much more up to date

…note how the language used carries certain baggage with it: there’s an automatic implication that closed source technology is not as good; but apart from a few instances of this, there were some very good arguments made on both sides.

Open source tends to be based more on standards: everyone on the software stack is working towards the same standards, so this tends to lead to less tie-in and more quality in code

There was an interesting suggestionn however that open source might stifle creativity. Imagine a situation where a particular open source platform becomes dominant, and everything used is some off-shoot of that. There will inherently be less variation than if (as would be the case with proprietary locked-down code) if companies had built new applications entirely from the ground.

Someone noted that they felt that there are so many different trunk builds that there would be sufficient variation, but to me, this misses the point somewhat. If you’ve got a wheel that works, you don’t scrap it and start again to create a wheel which is only a tiny bit more efficient.

In the natural world, look at convergent evolution (when similar traits are built from different lineages in different ways). This is the equivalent to two separate ground-up builds. The octopus eye and the human eye are convergent: they have the same function, but evolved entirely separately. The human eye evolved off the same “trunk” of builds as other mammalian eyes, but the octopus was an entirely separate build.

And because it was an entirely separate build, it’s wired differently. The octopus eye does not have a blind spot. Whereas for mammals to evolve no blind spot, they would need to dramatically alter the way blood flows into the eye — and any intermediate step would not evolve because vision would have to get worse before it got better.

So sometimes there are advantages in entirely different builds — and I think this analogy can tie neatly into IT as well…

Wrap-up

There was then a little wrap up session which tried to summarise every session in thirty seconds or less (which I’m not convinced was entirely feasible, although it might give people a better feel of whether they would want to attend a session on that topic next time).

There was also a brief mention of Barcamp NorthEast 2010 which will apparently be in the Centre for Life in March 2010. Something to keep an eye on…

There didn’t appear to be anyone furiously scribbling away in notebooks whilst looking pale and consumptive, and nor could I see any signs with bizarre-sounding acronyms scribbled on them, so I sat down at an empty table with my coffee and started reading my book. At least, I thought, when they do turn up, the fact that I am reading will surely mark me out as a potential novelist.

By about five past two, I was beginning to wonder if I was in fact in the write place, but just when I was starting to feel I was going to spend an hour reading instead of actually speaking to people, up popped astroducky to ask if anyone else was here for NaNoWriMo. We were quickly joined by three others, including another blogger and storyteller — La Mouche.

We then sat around together as a fivesome wondering what we were supposed to be doing and whether anyone else was going to turn up before finding that a large group of NaNo people had gathered after us in a different corner of the room. Of course, by the time we became aware of them and joined them, we were kind of ‘out on a limb’ in terms of seats so I didn’t particularly feel we were fully capable of joining in as much.

It might have been helpful if the organiser had cast around the room somewhat before starting up, particularly since we’d been there on time, but also the problem was caused by the fact that there were really too many people to have in a small chatting group — you could maybe have got away with 10-12 people around a big table but 18 or so is not feasible. Hopefully there as people drop out (and I have no doubt some will), this group (which is planning to meet in Caffe Nero, 2pm, saturdays from now until the end of November) will become a bit more manageable.

But while I didn’t feel I got to chat with the main group particularly, our splinter group (for those with a Python bent, let’s call us the Judean Popular Peoples’ Front) did I feel get to chat, and I found out a little bit more about the backgrounds of other people, got some kind of feeling for what they were planning to write, and more than anything else, it was nice just to know that other people were planning to take part in the same sanity-threatening writing marathon.

I left a bit early (well, to be honest, I don’t know how early — I don’t know how long the thing was supposed to go on for) because I wanted to be away comfortably before people started spilling out after the match, and what with feeling stuck out on a limb, I felt I’d achieved as much as I was likely to that day — chatting to and swapping emails with the Popular Peoples’ Front — and so I thought I’d call it a day for the time being and call back the following week.

And there’s still time to join National Novel Writing Month. You are supposed to write from the 1st to the 30th of November, so you’ve still got a week or so. Indeed, I managed to persuade someone else to sign up yesterday. Please don’t feel you have to write 50,000 words either. That’s the ideal target, but just give it a go and see where you end up. Last year I took part and wrote no words, so this year I’m hoping to write more than that.

I’m also hoping to make it a bit of a social thing: to get to know some new people, to support each other trying to write our stories, and generally to have a bit of a laugh while we’re on. See y’all next saturday…

Super Mondays is a “strong and vibrant IT community based in the North East Of England”. At least, that’s what it says on the tin. But having not been to a Super Mondays event before, I didn’t know that myself for sure. Which was one of the reasons (the others being networking, and an interest in the subject) that I decided to go along to the Super Mondays event on the 28th Sept about databases.

I had been booked to attend one of these things before, but had to cancel quite late on, and so with due trepidation I set off to make my way to the Bedson Teaching Centre at Newcastle University for the SuperMondays event on databases. Unlike the last two events I attended in Newcastle, I neither had any problems finding the location, nor did I discover at the last minute that the location had changed, and so I actually managed to get there without difficulty and soon found myself in a lecture theatre with around 60 or so other people, and coffee and sandwiches.

Eschewing (rather than chewing) the sarnies, I plumped for a nice cup of coffee and was soon sat down at one of the lecture tables waiting for the thing to start. Looking around the room around me, I saw I wide variety of people, ages, and professional appearance: from men in suits to men in hats, probably-still-in-college to approaching retirement, and of course the usual disparity of the sexes, with only about 10% women.

And I couldn’t help but think to myself: I wonder who these people are. What do they do? Since I’m now self-employed, are we looking at people who are games designers, entrepreneurs, investors, or (shudder) potential competitors?

Another thing I didn’t know about these events is how technical they are. Would I be presented with some form of high-level overview, or were people quickly going to get into the technical details of the different forms of databases? And what were other people expecting — and hoping — to get out of the events?

One thing I did find surprising was that when the event started, I was the only one with a laptop out. Was no-one else planning to blog about this? Were they all iPhoned up? Or did they just not bring their gadgets along to this sort of thing. Call themselves techies…

Anyway, ’twasn’t long before the event proper kicked off… as usual for this kind of thing, this is my impressions of what was said, with a few random thoughts of my own thrown in. It’s always possible I may have misunderstood what someone has said…! You may also want to read Daniel Swan’s take on it… or Steven Woods’, who reveals that there was in fact at least one more laptop…

A History Of Databases — Ross Cooney

Where did databases come from? Why are new databases needed and what is the theory behind them?

• In the 60s, databases were huge and monolithic, only used by government and large corporations
• The 70s saw the development of much database theory
• The 80s saw the development of SQL, and stuff such as Dbase III and IV
• The early 90s saw more complex systems with less competition
• The late 90s saw the .com boom, with massive investment and stuff like .asp, .cfm and .php launched
• The 00s (post boom) saw investment down but data use up: now pretty much sewn up by 4 providers — IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and mySQL

Then there was some talk about the idea of the ACID database which is generally what most people think about when they think about databases: it is Atomic (something is either written or not: there is no ‘nearly’ state); data is Consistent; data is Isolated and it is Durable (once written, it can be re-read multiple times unless removed by a later query).

The idea is that this type of database is solid and reliable — they were written for banks and governments.

What it doesn’t do as well is online transactions on a massive scale — it is simply not scalable enough. This brought us onto the CAP Theorem which basically states that you can only have any two of these:

• strong consistency
• high availability
• partition tolerance

Coping without high availability is not a problem for banks (indeed, they frequently have overnight downtime); but it is a problem for high volume global applications: the likes of eBay, Facebook, Amazon and Google. It can be solved in different ways — apparently Facebook use a combination of almost 2000 mySQL databases to run — but in particular for those where database consistency is less important, you have BASE databases.

In one of these, uptime and scalability are the important factors, but database consistency not so much… they have eventual consistency…

Having said that, the actual degree of scalability is important: for example, with the right hardware infrastructure, mySQL and other enterprise systems can handle very large quantities of queries (> 100,000 day). But for the big big scale stuff (Amazon, Google etc), it ain’t good enough. What BASE databases are for is “hugely scalable but pretty much disposable data”.

And then there was a statement which seemed to apply…

If you are a startup…

Yes.

…and have plans of taking over the world…

Yes.

…and plans of being the next google…

Bugger off! You think I’m wasting my time answering people’s questions? No, they can damn well do what I tell ‘em, and like it. I was more planning to go for the hollowed-out-volcano-in-the-Pacific-with-death-ray-missiles route to world domination…

But maybe I’ll wait and see what the next speaker has to say first…

Amazon SimpleDB and the Google App Engine — David Lavery

This looked as though it was going to start off with a minor technical hitch: it appeared that the projector was only willing to show the left-hand half of each slide, but fortunately this was resolved before we started. David started off by saying he was going to tell us how he got there. Well, I dunno about him, but I got the bus.

But then he brought up a screen shot for his next slide, and it was all I could do not to applaud. It was a screenshot of some COBOL code, showing the Identification Division down through to the Working Storage Section. For those of you who had their first introduction to computing for business with COBOL, you’ll probably be feeling a warm glow of sentimentality at this point. And then if you think how clunky the language was, possibly nausea.

But it would appear that David’s route through databases was much the same as mine: starting from COBOL keyed files, through CODASYL databases (in my time at Northern Rock, we invariably used IDMS), with all the data definitions and Bachman diagrams
Interestingly enough, David’s route through databases seems to be much the same as mine: start with COBOL files then CODASYL databases (or as we knoew them in my Northern Rock days IDMS), with all the DDL stuff and so on. Bachman diagrams. But still, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

From there to relational databases — the use of SQL with simpler concepts to the whole CODASYL type stuff (foreign keys instead of child and parent records). From here to open source databases, with web friendly, open licencing — mySQL, PostgreSQL and so on.

And that’s where we are. But they are still relatively monolithic so cause backup/continuity issues, escalating costs, difficult schema changes and so on when you try to scale up significantly. Which is why some people are looking to use other options.

So what’s attractive about Amazon Simple DB and Google App engine?

• Schemaless
• Simplified feature sets
• Some mimicry of RDBMS — sql type queries
• distribution of data
• automatic indexing
• scalable
• pay per use with free quotas
• high availability

Google supports a full stack, partially-ACID system, with a few different data types, and with APIs for Python, Java, Ruby and stuff. Data may be stored anywhere. In comparison, SimpleDB offers European storage as a possibility (worth noting from the point of view of data protection?), is non-ACID (offering eventual data consistency, supports anything with an HTTP type call, and everything is string data.

And this then took us to the final database piece for the evening…

RAQUEL Database Management System – David Livingstone

I don’t know whether David has a Phd, but it seems reasonable that given his role at Northumbria University for him to do so, so it’s Dr. Livingstone, I presume. You know, someone who turns up and gives some of their time to telling the rest of us about their database system deserves so much better than that, don’t they?

RAQUEL is an open source project, so follows the standard plan:

1. produce an interesting (not necessarily fully working or bug-free) prototype
2. publish prototype
3. grow user-developer group to evolve into commercially successful project
4. set up company to support users of the project (software still open source however)

David explained that they had finished the second stage, and were just moving onto the third: they are actively seeking contributors to the user-developer group. Of course, like no doubt many people in the room, I’m thinking what’s in this for me? Why should I join this developer group — go ahead and convince me that skills in RAQUEL will prove to be more commercially (or ‘out of personal interesty’) useful than standard SQL type stuff.

So then, David moved on to telling us what RAQUEL was all about.

• It’s a database programming language based on relational algebra
• It sticks strictly to relational theory (in a way SQL doesn’t always
• It is a database management system, composed from lego-like building blocks
• It is intended to be far more powerful and simpler than SQL to develop greater DBMS functions and greater programmer productivity
• It is intended to have a flexible architecture, so you can tune the deployment to your needs, and it should have reduced DB maintenance

All well and good, in theory. I was thinking that statements such as “far more powerful and simpler than SQL” seemed to smack a little of arrogance, when you’re looking at something with a massive community, which has developed over time and has some massive companies involved in it, and here’s Northumbria Uni saying “we can do better”. Mind you, I’m not saying they can’t do better, merely that it would be quite some piece of work to convince people of this…

RAQUEL has only three things: operators, assignments and relations. David showed us some sample pieces of code.

Insert:
Parts < --Insert {some value}

Retrieve
s < -- Retrieve Parts Restrict[PType=1] Project[PName]

RAQUEL code examples

At this point I briefly looked around and noted that there were still no other laptops on show. Nor does anyone appear to be tweeting regularly. Tcch. You may be techies, but your geek quotient is obviously way down. There did not even appear to be anyone dressed as a Vulcan (note, while not a trekkie, I still qualify for full-on geek points as I am a fan of a different science fiction programme instead). Although to be fair, Ross does seem to at least be recording the event on some little gadgetty thing precariously balanced on the front desk.

David is obviously quite inspired by his RAQUEL tool, telling us various things which it offers — different join types and so on. Unfortunately, I found myself unable to get similarly inspired about this: yes, I know they’ve gone to great trouble to develop it, it can’t be easy to develop something like this from scratch, and I’m sure they’ve done a fine job, but I can’t really get excited finding out that they have developed a feature which I would expect as standard in pretty much any database system I wanted to use.

But just because I’m not enthused doesn’t mean other people might not be. They are looking for:

• Users with interesting data storage problems
• People who would like to test the prototype
• Developers with C++ skillz for new modules, or to review, test and debug existing ones
• Experience of opensource/source forge

Again, forgive my cynicism, but this is sounding to me like “come and develop our application for us, so we can set up a company to make money out of it when it is finished”. I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, particularly since David seems to be having a focus very much on the “strictly relational theory” bit to the extent that it sounds at times more like an academic exercise than an attempt to develop a commercial product.

There were also a few questions from the audience.

Have you implemented an equivalent to LIKE for where-type clauses?

No, but there’s no reason why this can’t be implemented later: it is just a small prototype at present.

What’s the motivation? Why build an entirely new system from scratch instead of layering it on top of some existing system?

[Can't remember the exact answer, but it was along the lines of 'pure relational theory is much more powerful than SQL']

That’s as maybe, but when you consider that everyone already uses SQL, you’re going to have a significant amount of intertia: the project is going to have to be pretty kick-ass tto encourage people to use it instead. And it’s not yet making me sit up and take notice.

Do you see this more as an academic exercise or something that would be used in the real world? [I had been wondering the same thing myself]

It is seen as something to be used commerically at least in the long run: the language is simpler and more powerful, and it is also more modular.

And that was about it for databases. The final topic was to tell us about SuperMondays itself: where has it been, and where is it going?

Supermondays Now And Next

This was the 12th SuperMondays event in 12 months: it is growing and becoming more popular. There are challenges: how to keep it fresh; how to keep feeding the event, but it’s important to reference everything back to the original goals:

• to provide a meeting place for techies to meet up, come together and learn
• to act as an advocate for open source software

[that second point is interesting: I'm quite happy to use open source, and I will indeed recommend some open source products, but this is on a product-by-product basis, rather than assuming open source is inherently better than closed-source products -- so it's worth noting that there is likely to be an open source bias at these events]

Alex and Ross took the time to thank people who had contributed over time: speakers, who had given up their time, sponsors, who had provided sandwiches, Newcastle University for providing the venues, and of course the people for turning up (as the events wouldn’t have worked quite so well if no-one turned up).

The plans for the future are to:

• run more events around the region
• run different events
• run larger events
• get national and international speakers

Obviously, this sort of plan requires resources in terms of events management (which is why my old mates at Sailor Girl are now involved), marketing, PR and so on — it all needs money. Sponsorship requires a corporate entity (much as Ross and Alex would presumably be quite happy for companies simply to hand them a pile of cash), and structure and direction are required for stability and continuity.

So it’s been set up as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC). It’s a limited company, specifically for community interest and financially has ‘asset lock’ (i.e. monies can only be used for the community interest, not to provide beer for the board). There are currently two directors and four further board members but at present there does not appear to be any representation from the public sector in the North East, which is a bit of a downer — yes, there may be a vibrant IT community with entrepreneurs and games designers in the private sector, but there are quite a lot of people with quite a lot of skills in the public sector and it’s a shame to leave this untapped.

Having said that, this doesn’t appear to be the fault of Super Mondays: there did not seem to be anyone attending the event directly from the public sector. Why not? Everyone else has given up their time to come — I can’t believe that no-one from the public sector would be willing to come, so that would rather suggest that maybe it’s just not as well known there.

SuperMondays are going to be running an open book on the finances. I did have a mental image that they would be offering odds on how well the company’s finances were, but it would appear that instead they are simply going to be putting the account finances online at some point.

The costs to host the event are currently quite low (around £300 for the grub) as Newcastle University were not charging for the venue. Other events at more commercial venues would obviously cost more…

SuperMondays are held on the last Monday of every month. Do keep your eyes and ears open.

[Note to SuperMondays people: I have hotlinked to your image. If there is any problem with this, just let me know and I'll remove it]

I had two separate lines of response from them. Because I don’t believe in directly naming people, I’m going to call them “A” and “B”. “A” contacted me over the phone shortly after my initial and rather snarky comment was sent to them. Owing to her being busy, and then me driving, I didn’t actually get to speak to her properly until the following day, but other than that, she handled the situation fine.

Firstly, she apologised for not getting back to me earlier, saying that the note to call me had ended up on her desk, but with enrolment being over two days, she had not got a chance to look at it until later on in the afternoon, and she said she’d also spent most of the time phoning round various other people whom she had messages to ring.

A slightly more negative person than me would have suggested that she wouldn’t have to have spent as much time phoning around after people if they had only organised the damn thing properly in the first place, but since she’d phoned up and apologised, this would be a bit churlish, so I won’t suggest that.

She also said that they had instigated some of my suggestions straight away — the idea of writing key information on the board, for example — and would be looking to improve the procedure further for enrolment next year. This also helped me feel better: while it was a complete shambles this year, if they actually learned from this and put it right for next year, then this would be a great step forwards.

She also explained that the decision not to run the A/AS Level English course had been taken on the Monday afternoon, which was why, later on the Monday afternoon, staff did not know that the course was not running. I pointed out that this was really part of the problem: by the time you are actually turning up to enrol, they should bloody well know whether or not your course is going to run. Any decision to scrap courses (other than for lack of interest) must be taken well in advance of enrolment.

So anyway, after a brief discussion on the phone, I sent some further suggestions to her by email.

1. Ensure that there are spare plastic water cups by the water dispensers and that the dispensers are full. By around 5:15 it was not possible to get a drink of water from most places, and this added to the discomfort of waiting around.
2. Consider opening up online registration? Even if you still need to come in for an interview, if you can register your interest online and get an interview appointment then at least you won’t be waiting around as much because you know what time you’ll need to come in for. If people need to do a literacy/numeracy test, then give them two appointment times – e.g. 4.15 for test, 4.45 for interview.
3. Consider running the numeracy and literacy tests online on the internet. This will take some of the time pressure out of needing to get so many people doing it in a small space in a short space of time. It’s not an exam certificate after all; if you’re unsure you can follow up with questions in the interview
4. Try (and I know you’ve said you did) to stick to the commitment to actually have those courses which are listed in the syllabus. At the very least, if any decision needs to be made to drop any of the courses (other than for lack of interest, which I appreciate you can’t know about beforehand), make the decision at least a couple of days in advance of enrolment, so that people don’t turn up, spend their time queueing and THEN find out their course won’t run.
5. When people are queuing and already have their names on the list, give them an appointment time. Granted, you’re not going to be exactly accurate on the time, but if someone knows their appointment isn’t for 40 minutes, it gives them the chance to wander off, get a coffee or something instead of standing around being kept completely in the dark.
6. Ensure that staff check documentation and know where people ought to go. People who are sent to wait in the wrong place and waste two hours waiting there before they find out they should have gone somewhere else are likely to end up in a bad mood (I know!). This should be backed up with signage (”this queue for HEFC courses X, Y and Z”) so people can double-check.
7. Ensure you have some ‘floating’ staff who know several of the available jobs so that they can be sent to help out wherever the queues are at their worst.

My email to ‘A’

For anyone who needs to go down to Gateshead College and enrol in September 2010, please bear this list in mind. If the enrolment procedure is a shambles next year, or they repeat the same mistakes that they made this year, then they can’t say that they weren’t told. If they make no attempt to get it right next time, let’s make sure that everyone knows that they were given this advice which they chose to ignore.

And then of course, there was “B”. I don’t know if you remember the questions I posed last time — how many courses were cancelled, what did they try and do to ensure enrolment went smoothly, what steps will be taken to fix things in future and so on.

I got an email from “B”. Well, I tell a lie, “B” wrote a word document, which they then passed on to someone else to email to me. This was not a good sign: was “B” not capable of sending an email out herself — and if so, why did the whole thing have to be routed though a third party?

However, instead of actually trying to answer any of the questions, I received what appeared to me to be a generic, waffly reply:

We do plan the rooming and staffing of the events, however, higher numbers of applicants attended the evening than we anticipated. This unfortunately did cause us some issues and also longer waiting times than we would have liked. We regret that this was the case. However, we do review our processes to improve what we do and we already had planned a review of our admissions process. As part of this we will be considering our recruitment events and the experience you have had will be fed into the review.First response from “B”

So, no information about how many courses were cancelled, no detail on what planning took place, how many applicants they expected, how many turned up — it was very long on “it wasn’t really our fault” and “but don’t worry, we’ll get it right next time”, and correspondingly short on any detail. I contacted them again, explaining that I didn’t feel this actually answered any of my questions, so I pointed this out to them, and suggested that when someone is already narked, they are likely to feel fobbed off with a generic apology which doesn’t address any of the issues they raised.

I did then get a response (again, from “B” via a third party) which actually provided some detail.

Why did no-one tell me when I had turned up that AS English had been cancelled?

The AS English class was cancelled late on the Monday afternoon and unfortunately this meant that the information sheets on the welcome desks did not reflect this late change. Therefore staff on the welcome desk were unaware of the cancellation and unable to tell you this when you arrived. When it became evident that the course had been cancelled, applicants were already in waiting areas [...]

. New procedures for communicating cancellations at short notice will be considered as part of the admissions review to help ensure that this does not happen in the future.

Second response from “B”, 15/09

In other words, we didn’t tell the staff on the admissions desk it had been cancelled, and we quite happily left people queuing for stuff that was no longer running because we didn’t go to the waiting areas to tell anyone it had been cancelled. But don’t worry, we’ll do better next time.

Why was I directed to the wrong place for English AS Level? Why did none of the staff sufficiently check my form?

I can’t be certain how you came to be in the incorrect waiting area but it is probable that the late closure of the English class and the numbers attending the event contributed to this error.Second response from “B”, 15/09

Right, well I know how I came to be in the incorrect waiting area. It was because Gateshead College staff directed me there. And I wasn’t the only one. No answer appears to have been provided as to why nobody actually checked the form sufficiently, although I would presume that this is because “B” knows that the staff ought to have checked the form, and this one is pretty indefensible.

How many of the courses advertised in the prospectus are not being run this year?

There have been 33 courses cancelled that are in the part time prospectus based on the information we have today. 941 courses are offered for 2009/10 across all of our provision, of which 61 have been cancelled.Second response from “B”, 15/09

Of course, what this doesn’t tell you is that while 6.5% of all courses have been cancelled (which seems quite a high figure to me, but I don’t know what is usual here), it is also the type of courses which has caused a problem: for example, Gateshead College no longer runs any A-level or AS level courses on an evening. If you want to study part-time, evenings only, you can maybe do a NVQ in Hairdressing, or a City and Guilds in plumbing, but if you want to do something academic, your choice is restricted — I was led to believe that the college are no longer running any A-levels on an evening.

It’s simple: if you want to do academic qualifications, and you are at work, Gateshead College doesn’t seem to want you. Which really is a shame: Gateshead College used to run a wide range of evening A-levels, including Psychology, Sociology, History, English Literature and so forth. It’s a real shame to see it having dropped all of this, and I guess that’s one of the reasons I’m annoyed: it’s had a lovely new campus, it has brilliant facilities, and yet the courses it offers now aren’t as useful to the wider community as the ones it previously used to (if you can’t turn up during the daytimes, there’s not much for you).

What steps will be undertaken to ensure this doesn’t happen again?

I have already outlined my plans to review student admissions to College Managers and have requested that a subgroup of Managers work with me to review the processes – from application through to start up using feedback from staff and students. The subgroup has been established and at the first meeting there will be discussion on issues that need to be addressed and then work undertaken to identify what improvements can be implemented. The issues you have raised will be fed into the review.Second response from “B”, 15/09

In other words, we’ll solve it by having meetings. I’m not being facetious here: this process might well reduce the problems, if the process is reviewed properly, if they look at what they need to fix, and if they take action to fix it. But I am concerned that while stuff is being “fed in”, there is no commitment whatsoever to any confirmed action. Talking alone will not fix the problem.

And what else should Gateshead College be doing? Why not join me tomorrow when I take a look at their website…

So I turned up and found there was a queue next to the registration desk. When I approached this, I was told that this wasn’t the queue for me: this queue was only for the people who were ready to register. I had thought that I was, but apparently not: in order to be allowed to take AS Level English, I needed to have an interview.

And that meant that I had to stand in a second queue downstairs near the entrance, where I was given a form to fill in, indicating which course I wanted to do. I noted down AS Level English, along with a few details about myself (such as previous qualifications, including English and Maths GCSE) and when I reached the front of the queue, I showed this to the staff manning this little desk. Here I was directed to the second floor.

On the second floor I discovered two things: firstly, that there was already a big queue (queue no. three), and that there was a water dispenser so I could get a drink of water. Unfortunately, as people seemed to have been queuing for quite some time already (despite me having been told registration was only going to open at 4pm) most of the little plastic cups had already gone, but I still managed to get one of the last three.

After waiting in this queue for a further twenty minutes or so, I made it to the front of this queue, where a gentleman glanced at my form, circled ‘literacy test’ on it and asked me to wait until my name was read out, whereupon I would go and take a literacy test. And, while I was no longer stood in a queue per se, it was still another opportunity to wait — for over twenty minutes — before my name was finally called out and I had to go and stand in another queue.

This queue was outside a classroom where I had to wait until there was a space in the classroom for me to take the test. The one member of staff inside the classroom seemed to be struggling: people were asking for assistance more quickly than she could deal with them, and there was frequently someone waiting for more than five minutes for her to get to them, which wasn’t exactly helping the queue go down quickly.

I quickly found out what was taking so long. The supervisor was showing someone to a seat, and then asking them to click on the appropriate test (numeracy or literacy) and then wandering off to deal with someone else. Unfortunately, this then left you with no indication of how to fill in the basic details screen without which you were not able to proceed.

For example, you had to input a student ID number which no-one had provided, but you then had to indicate what your ‘key skills’ were. Without any information about precisely what they were after, I found it difficult to determine whether my key skills were “none”, “pending” or “1″, “2″, “3″ or “4″. After waiting the obligatory five minutes for the supervisor to come over, she explained that I should put in a student ID of “00000″ and “none” for key skills and to begin the test.

Given that she was having to do this for pretty much every candidate, I was rather struck by the complete lack of organisation. If everyone in a given classroom is taking a test where they have to answer the same sort of basic information, and there’s no additional information about it available on the computer screen (the program dated back to 2003, and goodness me, dated was the right word), and you’ve got students coming in at different times to take the test then I would have presumed anyone with an ounce of sense would have written the information on the board as opposed to needing to relate it to each student individually.

But no, Gateshead College didn’t do it that way.

So anyway, I sat the literacy test and was a bit narked by it. Yes, I understand that for some courses — people wishing to take English GCSE or improve basic literacy — may find this test appropriate, but it was plainly not appropriate for someone wanting to do an English AS level. I have already reached the stage where my grasp of English is sufficiently good to determine that “hlep” is not the correct way of spelling “help”, and asking repeated questions at the same level — 72 in all — does not make the test any more appropriate.

Anyway, it then appeared that I had managed to achieve the required level of basic literacy, getting 72/72 correct in under 7 minutes (you being allowed 30 minutes to take the test) and continued to follow the instructions on screen which asked me to print out the results, asking the supervisor if you didn’t know which printer. So I set it off to print, and when the choice of printers came up I called the supervisor over who said “oh, no! don’t print it! I just write the results down.”

I smiled politely but at this point I was thinking that if you ask people to follow the instructions on a test but then want people to deviate from the instructions at a particular point, it might possibly be helpful if you tell them beforehand. Again, “writing it on the board” might have helped.

So it appeared that I had achieved basic literacy, but I was already beginning to think that Gateshead College was well on their way to failing “being able to organise a piss-up in a brewery”. And this feeling was only to get stronger.

I took my literacy results back along the corridor where I was advised that I would need to wait again, this time for an interview. So I waited. And waited. After about forty minutes more of waiting — by now I had been at the college for two hours and hadn’t been allowed to get anywhere near signing up for anything, instead having to complete mindless box-ticking exercises — I overheard someone being directed over on the basis that they were in the wrong place: the second floor was only for HEFCs, not for A-levels.

I quickly butted in at this point and said that I was here for A-levels: look, that’s what it said on my sheet. The sheet that I had filled in downstairs and shown to the staff who had then directed me up to the second floor. The sheet that I had then shown to the person on the second floor who had told me to wait for my literacy test: the sheet that the supervisor in the literacy test had filled in my test scores on.

None of whom were able (or possibly willing) to put in the required level of effort to actually read my form properly and register that I was in the wrong place for A-levels.

At this point, I started to take a little more notice of other people who I could overhear describing the enrolment process as “a complete waste of time”, “farcical” and the entirely apposite “complete. fucking. shambles.” People were also commented that there was nothing unusual about finding this at Gateshead College, although they were commenting that it was “even worse than usual” this year.

I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t just me, and so I asked people on Facebook and Twitter whether any had encountered any similar experiences, and this pretty much summed up the response:

it it is the same old problem. Lots of demand from new and old students but only 3 staff on duty. Q[ueue] out the door. The lower cafe not open (mid day) and the other reception desk totally uninterested in helping or even confirming if we were even in the right Q[ueue].‘Chris’

For me, the fact that it is seen as the same old problem shows that while the demand may be higher than expected, the bigger problem is that the people responsible for organising enrolment have not learned lessons from the past. I certainly didn’t think it is unreasonable to suggest that their level of competency for arranging this sort of thing ought to be called into question.

Anyway, I then ended up being directed downstairs, where — with the person whom I had overheard being directed — I waited to speak to someone about A-levels. After waiting for a little while, I actually got to talk to someone about the A-levels, and discovered that a decision had been made not to run AS and A level English.

Not only had I wasted my time in queues I had no reason to stand in, not only had I been directed to attend a literacy test, not only had I wasted over two hours because no-one had bothered to actually read my form before directing me anywhere, but I needn’t have bothered to attend Gateshead College in the first place because they weren’t actually putting on the courses they were advertising in the prospectus.

Now I did point out that I wasn’t best pleased by this — particularly since I’d phoned up on Friday and I was still advised to turn up — and I was advised that someone would phone me back the following morning to see whether they might still, in the end, run the A or AS level course. Frankly, I don’t mind queueing for a course that is cancelled owing to lack of interest — that’s not their fault — but when I’ve given up time, and spent money on bus journeys because Gateshead College weren’t sufficiently competent to decide what courses they were offering prior to enrolment, then I feel cheated.

And I’m not the only one, judging by the responses I heard of people coming out. If they are so badly organised in terms of enrolment, then no amount of nice shiny new campus is going to instil me with confidence that they will get anything else right either. And if they are going to be allowed to waste other people’s time like that in future then I think people ought to know about it — or that they ought to feel obliged to compensate people for wasting their time and money.

Where was I? Oh yes, they were going to phone me back the next morning. Only of course no-one actually did.

So I got in contact with them over email. I’ll come to the issues I have with their website another time, but let’s just say that I eventually managed to navigate their contact form and left them a message detailing the issues I had had with them, where I asked a number of questions:

If the college was not expecting to run the English Language AS level course, then why did no-one at reception, or at any time during my queueing inform me about this? Why does the college offer courses on its prospectus that it will not go on to run, and make people waste their time by not only having the inconvenience of turning up when the course wasn’t on, but being sent to waste their time in further pointless queues?

I then left my phone number with this person who assured me that someone would be in contact on tuesday morning to advise further. As it is now 14:35 on tuesday afternoon, and I have heard nothing more, what was the point of this? Was it just to get me out of the building?

I would like to know:

1. How many of Gateshead College’s advertised courses are not to be run
2. What steps will be taken in future to ensure that this shambolic enrolment procedure is improved in future.
3. Can you describe the procedures (if any) which you put in place this year to ensure that enrolment went smoothly?
4. Why I was told to come down to sign up to a course that was not being run?
5. Why was I (and others) then sent to the wrong place?
6. When Gateshead College make a commitment to contact someone, why do they they renege on that commitment?

My message to Gateshead College

I judged from this that they might have managed to ascertain that I was somewhat miffed, and I would like to think that this would have encouraged them to get back to me, but if that wasn’t enough, I also added a further note:

Please note that I have retained a copy of this information, and this, along with any further information from yourselves (or your lack of responnse as appropriate) will be used for publication next week, as will any further information/stories I discover relating to other dissatisfied potential students.My message to Gateshead College

And tomorrow I’ll look at their response…

I’m quite into local history and finding out about stuff I didn’t know, so I’m quite a fan of Heritage Open Days, where you generally get a chance to see certain historical thingummies and find out about them for free. Obviously, the “for free” part is another thing which adds to the attractiveness of the event.

So I thought I’d try and take in a few things with the kids over the Heritage Open Days weekend. I booked up to attend the historical tour and the technical tour of Newcastle Theatre Royal, and I also had the plan to visit one of the Swing Bridge tours, get to see the motor control rooms and so on, but it turned out this was fully booked, which was a bit of a bugger.

But myself and BTP (who is six soon) were going to the Theatre Royal, which is something we were both interested in. Him because he still fancies the idea of being an actor, and therefore wanted to find out a bit more about the theatre, find out what it was like backstage and so on, me because of my interest in local history (and of course, my own pre-children theatre career) and also because of a family connection with the Theatre Royal.

My Uncle Andy died quite a few years ago now, but in my memory he is permanently associated with the Theatre Royal, where he worked. I don’t know if he ever worked anywhere else, but I do know he worked there — sorting out electrics, lighting, and generally being one of the unseen, but still vital figures necessary to the productions. As a child, I also got taken backstage after a pantomime once, although to be honest I can’t really remember too much about it.

And so I wanted the chance to look backstage again, to see Andy’s world, and both the historical and technical tours seemed to offer this opportunity.

The historical tour started in the foyer, where we found out some of the history of the building — that the original theatre had been built elsewhere, but as part of a redevelopment of the city, the old one closed, and the new, larger theatre opened in its present location in 1837.

We got to hear about how much the class system was in operation in the theatre — depending upon the type of seats you paid for, you’d have your own particular entrance to the theatre, meaning that the toffs wouldn’t have to mingle with the likes of me the working classes, and how in fact these separate entrances had remained until the 1980s.

There’s also some very interesting paintings of ‘backstage’ on the ceiling of the foyer in the theatre, and these are of a type called … oh, I dunno, it probably begins with an ‘M’ … where they were painted on canvas and then the canvas was attached to the ceiling. Anyway, they were apparently painted by a transvestite (now that’s a bit of local colour) who included himself — dressed as herself — in one of the corners, along with some other people, including a semi-naked man drinking a pint in one of the corners.

So the next time you wander into the theatre, don’t just look at the posters on the walls, actually look around yourself and take it in.

We then got taken backstage, where we got to see some of the technical equipment used during the performances. We also had the opportunity to wander onto the stage itself, which was interesting because despite having been to the theatre a number of times before, I had never actually noticed that the stage was on a slope (known as a rake), tipping down towards the audience at a 1:24 ratio, and angled thus to add ‘depth’ to the perspective. This also means that certain productions — particularly those involving dancers — need to have the chance to rehearse first, particularly if they have only previously been performing on flat stages.

While we were onstage, a large logo appeared from ‘the heavens’ and lowered itself down towards us. It read ‘Never Forget’, which was the logo for the Take That tribute production that was on at the theatre at the time. This was also the technical tour appearing in view during the historical tour, as the technical tour took place from the fly floor.

After the historical tour finished, we were straight onto the technical tour, where we were shown how scenery was raised and lowered. Out of interest, I asked the man doing the tour whether he had known my uncle, and his answer — that Andy’s passing had been a shock to all of them, and that he had been a ‘fine gentleman’ — I thought was a lovely testament to my Uncle.

I did idly wonder whether, if my Uncle had come back as a ghost (the Theatre Royal supposedly only has one, so it’s probably due a few more as theatres go) whereabouts in the theatre he would be, but then I decided that my uncle’s ghost wouldn’t be restricted to the theatre. He’d hang about watching people set up a performance, and then he’d most likely nip across to the Adelphi for a pint…

But getting back to the tour, and while the instructions for the fly floor looked complicated, the guy showing us round did his best to explain them, and what at first had seemed an incomprehensibly bewildering set of numbers and codes became clearer until finally it only comprehensibly bewildering. The codes relate to different ropes to shift different bits of scenery up and down, with instructions on whether they are coming in or out, fast or slow, whether they are being faded with anything else and so on.

It really was enjoyable to find out a little bit more about how the productions get put on, and about the history of the theatre, and I’d recommend both the historical and technical tours of the theatre to anyone the next time there is a Heritage Open Days weekend on: of course, if you can’t wait until then, you can gather together a group of people and get yourself on one of the paid tours (at £40 for 1 hour, for a group of up to 30, that’s not bad if you can get a decent sized group together).

But I do have other reasons for this. Firstly, the concrete is falling apart, exposing rusting metal rods; what could have been an interesting rooftop restaurant with commanding views over Gateshead and Newcastle never actually opened, the upper levels of the car park have been closed since the 1980s because they are deemed unsafe, and the vast majority of the residents think it looks horrible.

So when demolition plans were unveiled in June 2007 by Gateshead Council and Tesco, a lot of residents were very pleased. Demolition was originally scheduled to begin in January 2008.

Sure enough, in January 2008 all of the other businesses in the area were forced to move or close — including an indoor market which provided a lot of services to the community — to allow the demolition to begin. While that’s not ideal, it was generally felt that this was a necessary evil that the residents had to put up with in order to get rid of the car park.

It was still there in April 2008, when people were offered an opportunity to visit it one last time before it got knocked down, including (when wearing a hard hat) the upper levels, where you could see a sign with 1982 parking prices and a view of the rooftop restaurant.

It was still there — and indeed the car park itself was still open — in September 2008, which I described as shambolic, considering that the town centre had been left without these amenities for eight months during which buggerall had taken place.

The car park is closed now: so not only is the town without the amenities provided by the indoor market, but it also doesn’t have a town centre car park next to the transport hub, which will mean less people will visit the town centre in the first place (rather than parking here, doing some shopping and getting the local metro service to Newcastle, they will just drive to Newcastle) thus making the problems of Gateshead town centre even worse.

I wouldn’t mind that so much if they had been taking any steps to actually, as I’ve previously asked, knock the f***er down, but when visiting Gateshead High Street the other day, I noticed that while some of the buildings around it had been demolished, the car park is still exactly as it was.

Not only that, but there has been no news updates on the demolition on the official Your Trinity Square website since a post from October 2008. Gateshead town centre is being left to rot: progress is slow to non-existent, and all parties involved in this should hang their heads in shame.

It’s a disgrace. It’s not just a disgrace that nothing has been happening; it’s a disgrace that residents aren’t being kept informed of what is going on, why there have been such significant delays, and when we can expect some progress to be made.

Gateshead residents — and businesses — have a right to expect better.

So I went to an ‘author event’ at Newcastle City Library the other day. It was the first time I had been to the library since it had been considerably redeveloped, and I must say — particularly in contrast to the Hancock — how impressed I was with the whole thing.

Admittedly, the key element to any library has to be the books, and I didn’t actually look at them, but in terms of the the bits I did see — the building, the very nice cafe, and the lecture area — there was a lot to be impressed with.

The author event featured Lee Child, the man behind the Jack Reacher novels, and David Levien, with his hero Frank Behr. I had not previously encountered David Levien, but after hearing some of his stories — and listening to people talking enthusiastically about his two books (he’s more known as a screenwriter) he’s on my list of people that I want to check out as soon as I’ve worked through my TBR pile.

The event had quite a simple structure: Lee and David would start talking about something, and then they would invite questions from the audience. This tended to prompt the conversation to wander about the place somewhat, but it did also give the feel of a conversation: this was a two-way thing, rather than the authors simply lecturing on their books.

Given David’s background in screenwriting, he talked a little about his early film Rounders and it was interesting to hear this contrasted to Lee Child’s experiences with film: the Jack Reacher novels have been optioned more than once but until recently little progress seemed to be occurring with them, although Lee did indicate that a screenplay was being written (and no, he wasn’t doing it, but he was happy with the person who was).

This lead to some speculation about who would be cast to play Reacher, and the problems with finding an actor sufficiently tall to play him convincingly (the character is 6 foot 5), but you obviously need someone who can act, as opposed to someone who is simply huge, so certain size compromises might need to be made. He also related an anecdote where he’d been talking to the Australian media a few years earlier and was asked whether Hugh Jackman could play Reacher, and upon saying that yes, he thought that he could, this came out as “Hugh Jackman the perfect choice for Jack Reacher, says author”, which obviously Lee’s film agent wasn’t too happy about as it sounded like he was trying to muscle in on prospective casting…

Garry (the chap with whom I attended the event) asked Lee whether he had any plans to write a stand-alone book, not featuring Jack Reacher, but Lee pointed out that as he was only really willing to put the time in to write one book per year, this would see a two year gap between Reacher novels, and he didn’t really feel that this was what the fans wanted: he felt that Reacher was what they were after. I couldn’t help but feel that he was doing himself a slight disservice here: I think a lot of people enjoy reading Lee Child’s stuff, and they would also enjoy other books written by him in a similar style, regardless of the cast of characters.

This led to a little discussion on whether people set out to write a series of books featuring one character, or whether they just started and waited to see where that lead them. David talked about initially having a two book deal, and then signing up to a second two book deal, so he was pretty convinced that there would end up being at least four featuring his Behr, whereas Lee Child has now Reached his teens.

There was then a discussion about which authors the two authors liked reading — one member of the audience recommended Val McDermid, which I can second, although I’d also add Stephen Booth for what I can only say is something of a cross between detective fiction and a love poem to the Peak District.

What was also interesting was that Lee Child in particular, unlike many authors I have seen before, was also prepared to say (or at very least imply) who he didn’t like. But I’m not going to relate them here…

Someone then asked how the authors felt about the practice where some authors work ‘with’ someone else, where there is an implication (or at very least a suspicion) that the person named as the ‘with’ is the one who has done most of the work. I personally will admit to a certain scepticism here: I generally avoid this sort of thing — for example, the novel Sail, which at first glance looks to be written by James Patterson, has “& Howard Roughan” on the cover in a font which almost completely blends into the background.

The consensus seemed to be that the authors didn’t like the idea of handing over control to anyone else: that he wanted to write the whole thing himself, although Lee did point out that there was no way there in that room could prove at that moment that he personally was the author of the Jack Reacher series (he might have been simply a tall, smart-looking guy they used to help sell the books, or something…)

There were a few more bits than that, but that’s pretty much the gist of what I remember, and then as me and Garry were sat near the back, we disappeared out and were near the front of the queue for the book signings. Garry is very much a book collector; he likes his hardbacks, and he likes to have them signed if he can, so he’d brought books for both Lee Child and David Levien to sign, whereas I am more a collector of the stories (less interested in the physical book object than the text it contains) and so I tend to get paperbacks and hadn’t brought any along to sign, so I just stood next to Garry while he was having his stuff signed.

I had spoken to David and Lee at the start of the event to ask if it was okay to take a couple of photos, as I was planning to blog about the event, and David asked about the blog while Garry was talking to Lee, so I ended up giving him a business card with my site on it. Which felt rather odd: after all, surely he was the writer, not me… but at least I wasn’t cheeky enough to ask him if he’d like me to sign it!

For those of you interested in this sort of thing, Lee Child appears to be on twitter as @LeeChildReacher, although of course whether or not it’s actually him may be open to debate. Or if you’re interested in finding out about similar events in Newcastle, it might be worth following @ToonLibraries.

Obviously, this is just for fun. Results are not legally binding. It might also be fair to point out that these people are probably perfectly capable of acting in a manner which seems neither full of arsiness nor idiocy in most circumstances. I’m simply looking for how you feel they behaved in these particular circumstances.

So let us start…

The Nursery Boss

A nursery boss has apologised for sending a pair of fake plastic breasts to an employee recovering from a mastectomy operation. Mrs B[...] underwent a series of operations after being told she had breast cancer six years ago. The false breasts were sent in 2004, weeks after her second breast had been removed by surgeons.

She said: “When I was having meeting with [...] she started saying things like ‘keep abreast of things, [...]” or ‘you’ve dropped a boob there’.” The nursery sacked her in 2007, following allegations she had breached child protection rules. However, the chairman of the employment tribunal in Newcastle found she had been unfairly dismissed under the disability discrimination act.

BBC News: Boss ’sorry’ over fake boobs joke

So, the question is, do you think that the owner of the Ring O’ Roses nursery in Winlaton, Gateshead behaved like an idiot, an arsehole, or perfectly sensibly and appropriately?

And no, this isn’t the nursery that my youngest child goes to.

Sorry, Was That Sign Supposed To Apply To Me?

On average about one vehicle a month is caught out on the half-mile stretch of road which links [Holy Island] to mainland Northumberland. [...] The causeway floods twice a day at high tide and islanders are mystified as to why some visitors ignore widely-publicised safe crossing times.

The latest rescue involved a couple from Glasgow being winched from their car by an RAF helicopter crew, after being cut off by the tide.

Susan Massey, parish council chairman and owner of the island’s Oasis cafe, said: “Anyone that gets stuck really has got to be an idiot as there are warning signs with tidal times all over the island”.

Islanders also tell of a visitor who bragged that the warnings were “just to frighten the tourists” after being told he was close to missing the safe crossing time. Half-an-hour later he was being winched into an RAF helicopter with his wife and two children. There have been six rescues involving lifeboat crews and coastguards so far this year.

Each lifeboat call out costs the RNLI between £1,800 and £2,000. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency estimates each helicopter call out costs upwards of £4,000

BBC News: Tidal tourists mystify islanders

Obviously Susan Massey has made her mind up, but there’s no need for you to jump to the same conclusion as her. Remember, we want to know whether these people who don’t think that the causeway signs apply to them are acting idiotically, like an arsehole or perfectly sensibly and appropriately.

Although I do have an alternative idea for these people. Turn up in the rescue boats or helicopters, and refuse to actually rescue them until they’ve signed some sort of contract to indicate that they will pay for their rescue in full. Some people may think that is being unsympathetic, but I’d suggest that if I was to be displaying a lack of sympathy, I’d just suggest not bothering with the rescue: after all, they were warned.

So, let’s have your votes please for the nursery boss and the tidally trapped tourists…

Obviously if you aren’t based in the North East, or don’t fancy any guitar tuition, this will be of considerably less use to you, which is why I’m keeping this post short…