Chris Curtis Web Site

Amazingly, this blog is four years old today! I started it when I was convalescing from an operation and it has kept going since then. Thanks for reading.

I was planning to go Orienteering with the Army today, but despite this being the only day of the half-term week I told British Gas not to come, they came. They needed to do the last part of “making good” the botched installation of a new central heating system which they put in during May. I could have been difficult, but did not want to give them any excuse to drag this sorry mess out any longer.

At least the engineer was pleasant and looked like he knew what he was doing. By the end of the day, the system is working properly at last and I hope I have seen the back of them.

this is a waterfall in a mobile blog post.

- Posted by MobiBlogr from mobile phone.

I spent an hour or so at the dealer’s today trying to decide on a new car. I think I will stay with Citroen. I like the slight Gallic quirkiness and the embedded technologies and have enjoyed driving my Picasso. The trouble is that Citroen have downgraded the Xsara Picasso range to make room for their new C4 Picasso - which is gorgeous, but bulky and expensive to buy and run - so a straight replacement is not an option. Also, I seem to spend most of my driving life in traffic jams so want to move to something a bit greener and fuel efficient, especially now that I am not transporting lots of teenagers around all the time.

I thought it might be the C4 but we spent some time looking at a C3. If you are going to downsize, you might as well do it properly (though the C1 or C2 would be going too far!). A decision in the next few weeks.

After being ill all week (low level) I was very tempted to stay in bed, but once I got moving I decided to go orienteering despite the miserable rain that was falling. I am glad I went.

As I drove towards Slindon, the cold front came through and it dried and brightened up. It was a very pleasant January day and there were lots of runners. I was still not feeling anything like 100% and it showed. The terrain was chalk with mostly beech woods. Paths were very muddy on top of hard chalk.

The first control went well enough, but I was slow going to number 2, then started moving at a more reasonable pace until about two-thirds of the way round when I just had no energy and went slower and slower. On the way to control 10 all I had to do was run down a road for 300 metres but I just could not do it, then got into nasty thick trees and fumbled around, looking for enormous depressions with the controls at the bottom.

Eventually, I took 56 minutes and was not in contention at all. Never mind. The result made no difference to the autumn series of the club “SO gallopen” league which is based on “best six”. I was twelfth, up two places from the last series, and ahead of a number of people who were ahead of me then – there has been an influx of new talent so although my times have improved significantly, the places not so much. I am pleased with progress generally, though I wish the fitness would come quicker and stay easier!

An article about this blog, and why I write it, appeared in “The Times Educational Supplement” today (available online here). Apparently a survey says that 10% of British Headteachers write blogs, but I was one of the few they could find and identify.

Producing the article was strange. I had a short telephone interview, which was supposed to continue later, but no-one phoned back. One photographer came and took an hour with various set-ups. I flatly refused to pretend to orienteer while wearing my work suit, but various parts of my study were strewn with maps and compasses. We also did some more arty shots where he blurred the background while keeping me sharp. Apparently, the picture editor did not like any of these, so I had another hour with a different photographer, with several set-ups. The photo they used was made by having kids jump around while I kept still in the middle.

I thought the article was reasonable, in a “vaguely interesting, soft news” sort of way, but like so much of modern journalism it is only loosely related to what I said in the interview and, I think, to what I actually write about here. At least online you can judge that for yourself. The photo is very contrived, but how do you photograph “blogging”? I thought the headline was nasty and insulting: I guess the sub-editors had a competition to see who could get the most “b”s in a bottom joke.

I despair of British journalism at all levels. The culture where journalism was fundamentally about reporting i.e. going out and trying to understand something well enough to describe it to the readers, has long gone. Now the culture is about providing the readership with entertainment or selling the paper’s “take” on things rather than trying to convey something that the reader can respond to him/herself. I see this even with our local paper. Reporters are looking for an angle - which can be either sensational or humorous (there is no other angle allowed in local journalism) - instead of simply gathering the facts and telling the story clearly. About the only real journalism left in this country, in my not-so-humble opinion, is on the BBC’s “from our own Correspondent” and, most of the time, on “the World this Weekend“.