Between Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridge

There's a private little world bounded by Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridge, and the Thames and The Cut. Start at St Johns Church on Exton Street, and proceed along Roupell Street, taking a little diversion to look up and down Brad Street, before checking out the new student flats being built at Paris Gardens, at £215 a week.

Then reach Blackfriars Road and a new building that will age as fast as the 1980's beige bin across the road from it. It all looks very workers-cottage and local working class, but there's a lot of expensive iron parked outside those houses on Roupell Street and the prices are pretty damn London - if there's ever one for sale. And everything looks wonderful under a blue sky.

Stables Market and Camden High Street, May Bank Holiday

I've tried before to get a sense of the sheer thronginess of Camden Lock on a public holiday or a sunny weekend, and the trusty Canon A90IS just wasn't big enough to do it. Sometimes you need a 35mm DSLR and sometimes you need a medium-format.

Psylo is in Stables Market and Sis likes their stuff, as indeed I was taken by a couple of the men's pieces, but they don't really cut for, uh, people who work out. There's all sorts of tish, tosh and good stuff there, including a small headphones stall (booth? shop?) whose owner told me that, yes indeed, my ten year-old Sennheiser HD 580's were indeed still pretty much the best open-back headphones I could get without spending silly money.

If you to Camden Lock, don't get out at Camden Town itself. Go one stop on to Chalk Farm. It's an altogether less crowded experience.

Middle Yard, Camden Lock, May Bank Holiday

Bank Holiday Monday, Camden Lock. Middle Yard is where the best food is, but it's always packed and I have never managed to eat sitting down. There's everything from yummy soft French nougat to Kangaroo and Camel burgers, which was what Sis and I had.

There's a man who does hand-made leather bags, belts and stuff, and I'm now the owner of four of his belts, the latest one being a hand-dyed dark blue between black edgings. More discreet than it sounds.

Caillebotte, Bridge at Argenteuil, National Gallery

Sundays I go to the gym, have breakfast at Balans on Old Compton Street and then spend some time in the National Gallery looking at one painting for a long while. Any painting that catches my eye, and it's always a different one each time. This time I went into the Impressionist section, looked around and realised "Jeez, these guys could freaking draw". None of your optically-assisted stuff, sheer freehand drawing skill. This was not how I thought about them ten years ago. My reactions to the Impressionists have changed through the decades. Late teens / twenties they made these wonderful evocative paintings - well Sisley and Pissaro and some Monets. Thirties and forties I saw them as little better than talented Sunday watercolourists, shallow and pretty. This Sunday the sheer bloody skill and surety of touch hit me. Lovely pictures, evocative and technically superb - because it takes a really good technique to be loose and still get the perspective correct.

Right now there's a Gustav Caillebotte on loan from a private collection. He's the critic's and historian's Impressionist, and there's a modernity to his framing and pictures that suprises even now. Here's a glimpse...

and here's the link so you can look at it on-screen, but you really should see it live. Take, oh, twenty minutes to gaze at it. It's well worth it.

And then wonder how long he practiced doing flicks of green to suggest  those wavelets on the Seine. Do I practice anything for that long? Do you? Does anybody who isn't an athlete or a musician?

(Minor edit: 27/1/2023)

April 2013 Review

It's the end of April? WTF? It was Easter at the start of the month? What happened? Well, mostly job interviews and the collapse of my immune system after putting up a brave fight for three months straight. I kept up my training schedule in the first week, even though I had the Wednesday off sick, and saw my Osteo that Saturday for yet more work on the right elbow, followed by lunch in Cafe Rouge on James Street. The following Monday I met a friend in Richmond for an early supper on the way home from work, we had a short stroll to the river and back, and I was unable to get out of bed next morning. That Friday I saw the circus NoFit State performing Bianco at the Roundhouse, but was preoccupied with absorbing SAS code for an interview the next Monday, which I followed by a haircut at George The Barber at 26 Bedfordbury. Sis and I had supper at Samarqand: I had the plov, and it was good, filling and nourishing. Then followed the Lisbon Weekend, which had been in the diary since January. For now, I will just say, sunrise through the windows of Urban Beach Sunday morning. I spent most of the next week recuperating, and here we are.

I read Geoff Dyer's wonderful But Beautiful on the Paperwhite during the flights and while others were sleeping it off, and got through Stand Cornyn's Exploding on the train. One Saturday afternoon I saw The Art of Rap, Who The £$@^% is Jackson Pollock?, and Acoustic Routes on DVD - all cut-price purchases at Fopp. I finally got back to my Twelve-Step meeting towards the end of the month. Somewhere in there, the lawn got cut a couple of times, because it was finally warm enough and not raining. 

Sometime at the start of the month, I finally understood why it's called the canonical divisor, and what it has to do with the genus of a Riemann surface. I can be unbelievably dense sometimes. There was a whole thing about understanding how to use and abuse logistic regression to estimate price take-up - needless to say, it's been abused so far - but that's work, and so far what happens at work stays at work and doesn't count. I got back up to 70 kilo benches by the end of the month. Should you think that's a joke, try it in thirty years' time and tell my laughing ghost how you could just push out the single rep. I upgraded to iOS 6.1.3 on my iPhone to use Passbook. Here's a tip: Passbook doesn't work properly unless you have mobile data enabled. Don't ask why. I had a Moment at Lisbon airport trying to get the thing to work, until I tried re-enabling mobile data.

So I have made no more progress with Musil; I am making progress on the pull-up; I did make changes to my diet and entertainment, but the cold took the fun away; and stuff didn't occur to me. Well, except for the afternoon watching DVDs.

April Interviews - Part Two

And barely needed any of it. The test was entirely about the spotting and correcting syntax errors in DATA steps and drawing very simple-minded conclusions from some toy data. Most of the interview was about the kinds of issues that a mid-level account manager with some basic data skills would handle. Exactly, in fact, the kind of person that the other two candidates were. The interview and group exercise were entirely focussed on what we "insights" we might sell to the clients. Since their product, if indeed you could call it that, was not about using personal data to communicate with people, but selling aggregated data to corporate and state users, I was frankly struggling. The commercial use of "big data" is exactly about communicating with individual consumers, even if there is the occasional attempt to hype applications to economic and social trend-spotting. (If that stuff had half a snowflake's chance in hell of yielding useful results, the hedge funds and investment banks would be wooing Cathy O'Neill and her ilk with serious money. If they are, she's not telling.)  However, at the point of the interview process I was trying my best, and was troubled if at all by the comparative composure of a tall young lady I shall call The Blonde, because she was. Even at the time I thought she looked like someone who knew she had a lock on the process. Perhaps at EE there's a presumption in favour of the internal applicant. Her first words on meeting, after the introductions were "Oh I didn't know they had advertised it externally". 

The next day I went to my tweve-step meeting in Chelsea for the first time since the weather got stupid cold. Whatever it is in those rooms that lets the unconscious work and communicate with the rest of the brain started to do its stuff, and it started going through the interview. I was very angry for a couple of hours the next evening. Banging-the-steering-wheel-shouting-obscenities angry. Not because I wasn't going to get the job, but because the whole process was a fraud. The job title was "Data Scientist", which is pretty much accepted to be a role that requires a mixture of data handling, statistics, interpretation and presentation and all at a fairly high level. What I had had was an interview for a position known as "The Account Blonde". This is usually a young woman with a pleasant manner, docile enough to rote-learn the company ideology, and with just enough tech so she can talk the talk and do a little walking of her own. Occasionally the Account Blonde is a guy, but only rarely. Account Blonde is a commercially important role, but not one for which you would hire anyone with the chops to be a Data Scientist.

So what was I doing there at all? The EE guys had reached the point where they were pretty sure they needed their first Account Blonde, but they had a slight reservation. So why not put out another ad for the type of person they think they might need, and run the two side-by-side? Compare, contrast, inform their doubts and make a decision. This has happened to me before, and I can understand that, but contra to the proverb, the more I understand, the less I forgive. (I think the proverb is about not condemning one partner in a  marriage for having an affair until you've me the other one.) It's deception and it's thoughtless.

Would I even think about another job at EE now? Well, let's see? What evidence do I have about them? Oh yes. They advertise jobs they have no intention of filling. The only person who has a positive experience is the Blonde who got the job. If I'd got it, she would have rightly felt cheated. This approach is pretty much guaranteed to burn goodwill planks at one or other end of the bridge. I was being used as a pace-setter. 

Describing the emotional roller-coaster ride I had that Tuesday is a little difficult, because of what it says about me and my life right now. I had moments where I was thinking "Jesus Christ I want that job, I want to get out of here, I could use the money, hell it will change my life" and other moments when I was thinking "Mmmm, Paddington, travel and maybe longer hours". But mostly it was stuff around the "I really want that job". And all on the inside. No-one to share with. I don't usually share this stuff anyway, until the results are in. Nobody sounds more cluelessly desperate than someone talking about their hopes for the outcome of a job interview. Even writers sound more convincing and grown-up talking about rejections and speculative meetings than wage-slaves do talking about their interviews. 

One advantage of Being On The Program is that one gets a Higher Power. Inside the rooms, this is an idea we understand implicitly. Outside the rooms, it is at best New Age twaddle. In my case, let's say that it meant that, however incoherently, I recognised that having more money and changing my job was not what I needed to do to improve my life. That I was trying to distract myself, and that I was lucky I didn't get an offer I would be sorely tempted to accept. Instead I need to accept that I have enough to improve the quality of my life, though I may not know how just yet.

April Interviews - Part One

Sometime at the end of February I refreshed my LinkedIn profile, the CVs I have on Monster and Total Jobs, and sent an e-mail out to all the agents I have ever contacted since 2000. The mails got a couple of replies and about ten bounces confirming that Andrea Smith no longer works at Wherever Recruitment. Refreshing CVs on Monster and Total Jobs got a bunch of calls from agents who work entirely on search terms that they probably don't really understand, and that gets irritating quickly. 

Then I got two leads through the guys at Salt. One was for an analyst's role at Barclays Business, the other for a "data scientist" role at EE (Everything Everywhere, the T-Mobile + Orange merger mobile operator). Salaries were at least 20% more than I'm making at the moment. Barclays is based in Docklands (okay commute, lousy for easy access to West End after work, sterile location) and EE in Paddington Basin (okay commute, reasonable access to West End after work, sterile location). Both recruitment processes started with telephone interviews.

Who thinks those are a good idea? Where the hell do they think the candidate is when they take the call? During working hours as well? Since I work in a full and busy open-plan office, there is no way I can do an interview there. We don't have spare meeting rooms. I had to go down to the impressively marble but cold foyer of the building to take the call. I'm on a mobile, not a land line, so reception isn't always good, I spent some of the time praying they didn't think I was deaf. One of them even asked me "what gets you out of bed in the morning". My answer was "fear of poverty, a need to pay the bills and I can't lie still. So seriously, I blah blah blah". They still wanted to see me.

Barclays have a two hour interview (three if they add a test). I had twenty minutes to prepare my thoughts on acquiring a portfolio of credit cards. The tricky bit was calculating the interest charge on cards that paid off in full ten days after the bill. The math isn't difficult with one simple assumption about the spending rate, but it's tricky when you're trying to assemble the full P&L and think about options for working the portfolio as well in twenty minutes. We had a good stand-up discussion in which I didn't hold myself back ("Ah yes, competition. They really must introduce that into retail banking one day"). While I have the option, I'd rather not pretend to be different. They accepted I knew what I was talking about, which permanently surprises me, as I have and no formal training in this darn industry. It's all hearsay and rumour. In the end they picked up that I could live without ever working in financial services again, and had issues with people who thought it was cool to stay at the office until seven in the evening, and gave the job to someone else. Quite rightly.

Next step with EE was an online intelligence test. Again, where the hell do they think I'm doing it? At home after a long day and commute? I did it over the wifi in the Eat near the office. Thirty minutes and I was exhausted by the end. I missed a couple and didn't complete it. However, that's okay, as these tests are usually age-adjusted. A long while ago I knocked Raven's Progressive Matrices so far out of the ballpark for my age that the guy running the course looked at me funny for the rest of the day. Since I was up against, at least, some Polish programming hot shot, I more or less wrote myself off as a worthy tryer. So they told me the hot shot flunked the test and I did okay. Would I take an interview? It would be a SAS test, an interview and a group exercise. 

At that point my SAS was scrappy at best. I had about five days to do something about that. Old school. Books. Notepad. Pen. Write write write. I suddenly found reasons to use SAS at work. I had been reading Der and Everitt anyway - an excellent book. Suddenly the syntax of PROCs became clear. I could remember that the table after DATA was the output table and I needed either INFILE (path), SET or MERGE to define the input table. I even remembered %macro (name)… %mend (name). I had done a lot of this before, but it had slipped onto tape memory. I revised in the pizza place across the road from the Roundhouse before seeing Nofit State, I revised on trains, at home, everywhere.