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Gosh ...

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Is something of an understatement.

Since I last wrote I have received a redundancy/restructuring notification. In this shake up my job has gone. I can apply for a marginally more senioir role ... in competition with others. I'm well suited to this, but not the ideal candidate. Or I could take a 40% cut in salary (far fewer hours and term time only) ... and again, I am well suited to the role, but not ideal.

This leaves me open to other opportunities around the college, potentially teaching (I am submitting my end of First Year PGCE module today), or coaching - using my range of subject expertise.

Meanwhile I have 20 hours of work to hold on to: 12-14 hours as a digital editor and about 6 hours teaching/coaching swimmers. Not much, but this is at least all year long.

While I approach 60, here I am still wondering what I should be doing with my life. I itch to write, to blog, to podcast, to get back into production, to head up a team creating branched learning (storylines that split in multiple directions).

And I am still an active Green Party Councillor with more important local elections in two years time after some spectacular local wins at the county level the other week - 4 Green seats gained from Zero from the Conservatives. 

Now what? All this and a DNA test from Ancestry says I am 58% Scottish, 23% Northern England and West European ... with 7% Irish and bits of Iceland and Spain thrown in for good measure.  I'd love to see how my wife comes out: her paternal grandmother left Ukraine for Poland to escape the Bolsheviks, her paternal grandfather was Polish; on her maternal side she is all Maltese (though her mother was brought up entirely in Italy, then Britain). 

Who cares? Netflix continues to please. Currently caught in 'White Lines' which I missed first time round.

And teaching has been magic. How many classes start with the trailers for Men in Black and Men in Black International and then challenge the students to identify the standards, values and morals of MIB agents and how these have changed 1969 to 2019. They got all the first three films of the franchcise for homework. We meet again at the end of next week: sexisim, elitism, secret societies, shoot first ask questions later, torture of informants, bribery, corruption and racism against certain alien cultures.

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Design Museum

The joys of research

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Buried in Ancestry and the British Newspaper Archive for several days I am finally venturing out to a library because the photographs in the 1916 newspaper article I am interested in are too black to view. The text is fine.

The Keep

My interest, for The Western Front Association, is on the 19 year old Pte William Gallard who died 27 January 1916. This is him posing for a studio photograph in Eastbourne with his father (sitting). 


William and Edward Gallard

William and Edward Gallard, son and father, 1915 before they went to war, William to the Western Front, his father to India.

Details HERE >  http://bit.ly/2FpaX9H

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Design Museum

Happy New Year

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Nancy's Bordello, Newcastle on Tyne

A gathering of those related to 'Granny Vernon' (1901 to 1984). From 7 grandchildren, there are 12 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren and their partners. Quite a story. 

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Design Museum

The honest image - who are you or were you?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 4 Feb 2013, 09:32

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What image should we use to portray ourselves?

Is there such as thing as best practice? Ought it to be like joining a gym, we have a snapshot taken on a webcam and this current image, no matter how it comes out, becomes who we are?

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Do so few of us dislike or distrust what we see when we look at our faces in the mirror each morning?

It has been the subject of research, role play in online education; I'd like to do some of my own. I began a year ago with this.

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I liked the picture, felt it was healthy, robust and confident and confident.

I should have looked at the date on it. August 2004. Happy and sunny days. You age under stress and from the mid-40s it doesn't take much to add ten years -all that sun in the past, being unwell. As I write below, his spirit, like mine (I hope) remains that of an enthusiastic twenty-something. The same occurred with the Elluminate session we had in H800 the other day, the tutor on the webcam (initially in a scratchy black and white image) is not the person who goes by in the General Forum. Are we all guilty of this. Men included? We go with something in our late thirties or early to mid-forties?

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I then went with this.

An image I long ago used in my eleven year old blog. I wanted something that was indicative of the content and would last. I'm still inclined to run with this. It is indicative of what I think blogging is all about - the contents of your mind, what you think i.e. you 'mind bursts' as I call them on numerous blogs.

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Facebook personas sees me in a number of guises

While on Skype I use a image taken with the webcam on the day of an online interview - this is a month ago, so as contemporary as it gets.

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I have this image fronting Tumblr taken 21 years ago.

In moments of euphoria having just successfully negotiated a 15m pond of slush on a pair of skis in front of a crowd of early May skiers below the Tignes Glacier, France. The day I proposed to my wife. We'd be 'going out together' for three days ... we've now been together, well 21 years. In my original diary we could create banner ads to publicise what we had to say to fellow writers. One of these has a spread as long as the contents of my diaries and blog: they run from a 13 year old Head Chorister in cassock and ruffs, though gap, undergrad, to add exec, video director, with four woman I didn't marry.

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Increasingly, I am thinking of using a self-portrait, that this attempt to capture myself through my minds eye

is more telling that a photograph.

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I could use the drawing I did of a 14 year old

What amuses me most here is how I superimpose these attachments as if I were in a school play, the beard is clearly on the soft face of a pubescent boy - I should have looked at my grandfather for the face I'd get, with the more bulbous nose and pronounced chin. Talking of which, I find it intriguing that I am the spitting image of my grandfather, that my own children see images of him age 20 and think it has to be me. All that changes as he ages into a 40 and 50 year old is he goes bald, whereas I am thus far limited to a thinning of the crown.

This I'm afraid, if the age of my children in the rest of the picture is something to go by, is some seven years ago sad

My only reason for picking it is that I haven't renewed my contact lenses and am inclined, after twenty years wearing them to give up. Maybe laser surgery when I have the cash? This is contemporary. It doesn't say who I am, just 'what' I am. Wearing a child's hat (he's a dad), the headset to record notes onto a digital recorder (for a podcast), a coat he bought for honeymooning in the Alps (we went skiing) 18 years ago …

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I have of course not changed much since 1977

It takes me back to the original point - who are we? how do we representative ourselves online in a single image when we are all a sum of a complex of parts? Is it any wonder that we present multiple selves online, the more so the longer we've lived? I don't remember my father being around to take this picture. though clearly he did. I do remember the great-big wellies though and the joy of water spilling over the top if I could find a puddle or pond deep enough. And the jumpers knitted by my granny (sleeves always too long). And the trees in the garden I climbed behind. And my sister and brother … How set in were the learning process by then?

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The Dracula Spectacula, People's Theatre, Newcastle.

The teeth were made from dentine and fitted by an orthodontist.I rather foolishly sharpened the fangs and bit through my own lip on the last night. I had to sing while gargling my own blood. The joy of memories.

  • Could a daily snap taken when looking in the bathroom mirror be used to tag memories from that 'era' of your life?
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