JULY 21 ED’S CRACK

This is my latest Editorial for the British Society of Scientific Glassblowers Journal. You don’t have to be a scientific glassblowers to enjoy it!!!!!

I am a thinker. I can’t help it so those that come into contact with me just have to put up with it! To tell a thinker to stop thinking is a bit like telling a midget, (person height challenged), to grow up! It’s just not the done thing and potentially illegal. I think about glass, about scientific glass, about lampworking, about the BSSG and I even think about you reading this. Terrifying, isn’t it? I think of questions that have no answers such as why, if there are so many lampworkers, that we don’t have more members of the BSSG? I have been asked to write about my artistic lampworking in relation to scientific glassblowing for the Glass Society and I decided to approach the subject on a personal level by recounting many events that I have experienced during my fifty-year career so far. It is quite a sobering exercise to review one’s glass career and realise if like me all the important life changing issues have happened during the last twenty years. I am sure there is something to learn here but at the moment I can’t think of any but then I am only a thinker.

Sound is a strange thing. Just ask anyone who works all day using a jet number six on a Rotajet! I don’t like my sleep disturbed by bangs especially if they occur from out with my bedroom. During a recent stay in a hotel in Glasgow I became more and more annoyed at some kind of party noises emitting from an unidentified source. I convinced myself that guests smoking outside the entrance to the hotel were to blame and so I rushed down the five flights of stair, (lift too slow) to, as they say, sort things out. It was midnight, pouring with freezing rain and all I was wearing was a pair of jeans and a shirt. Of course, there was no one in sight and I was getting soaked. It then dawned on me that the hotel doors were closed, and I appeared to be locked out. I dutifully followed directions to ring the bell but after five minutes of inaction took to the tried and tested format of shouting and banging on the glass windows at reception. Eventually a security guard came to rescue me. He asked why I was outside making such a din and I explained that I had left my room to complain about the noise as it was disturbing my sleep. Of course, I was more than wide awake by now and the time was one o’clock. Sound be time for breakfast!

I was in Glasgow on the way to meet BSSG Chair Robert at the Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine. I had never been to that part of Scotland before and was pleasantly surprised although I don’t really know what I was expecting. The Museum will be the venue for an exhibition of glass ships in bottles by Dr Ayako Tani and was promoted in the April issue of the BSSG Journal. There is more information in this issue. Part of the exhibition will be live glass working demonstrations some of which will feature Robert and I carried out some scientific and artistic lampworking techniques. Guess which of us will be doing which?

As I mentioned, I am a thinker and walking around Glasgow made my thought genes work overtime. It was May and drinking alcohol inside was banned which left areas outside pubs and restaurants heaving with revellers making up for lost time. No drink was spared, and the production of empty beer and wine glasses broke all previous records which is no mean feat! Queues outside hospitality venues for tables were at least ten deep and socially distancing was measured in millimetres. In the centre of Glasgow, George square, one particular pub couldn’t build gazebos fast enough to contain thirsty drinkers waiting for the next fix of alcohol. Yet only across the road, probably only twenty feet away was another queue people. They were respecting the rules and waiting patiently, each correctly distancing form each other. They were waiting to be fed and watered but not from a pub. This was the que for a soup kitchen and to help me mentally record these scenes of unfairness I took a photograph. No sooner had I had then a person run over to ask me for my camera as some of those queuing would object if their desperate needs were photographic as in some way for entertainment. I took the cowards way out and pretended that I was photographing a seagull perched on a stature in the square. I expanded on the excuse by saying that my wife collects seagull photographs, (she hates the birds as I do). It was a pathetic excuse and I feel a bit guilty about it. I deleted the photograph but the memory of the seemingly injustice will remain in my mind for a long, long time.

Talking of cameras, I always like to ask a third party to take a “snap” of me if I feel the experience warrants it. Usually, I am with Janice my wife and we are either drinking or eating so asking a waiter or waitress is normally not a problem. However, during the last few months, I have on occasions felt my camera is diseased since the majority of people who I have asked quickly refused and run away in fear that they might connect with the cameraitis. This is a condition where people in towns wander around gazing at the ground pretending that they are looking at their camera phones. Seems thousands of people have already touched my phone and there is no cure.

I have just discovered how to translate text using “Word”. Easy to highlight, right click and then click on translate to any chosen language. This is great for societies like the BSSG and VDG as well as our members who perhaps are not as familiar with the English language as moi!!!! The BSSG is very pleased to welcome student members from the Paris School However it will take more than a simple computer programme to translate my humour to some people!!!!

Je viens de découvrir comment traduire le texte en utilisant Word. Facile à mettre en évidence, cliquez à droite, puis cliquez sur traduire dans n’importe quelle langue choisie. C’est formidable pour des sociétés comme le BSSG et le VDG ainsi que pour nos membres qui ne connaissent peut-être pas aussi bien la langue anglaise que moi!!!! Le BSSG est très heureux d’accueillir les élèves membres de l’Ecole de Paris Mais il faudra plus qu’un simple programme informatique pour traduire mon humour à certaines personnes!!!!

Ich habe gerade entdeckt, wie man Text mit Word übersetzt. Einfach zu markieren, rechts klicken und klicken Sie dann auf in eine beliebige Sprache übersetzen. Das ist toll für Vereine wie die BSSG und VDG sowie für unsere Mitglieder, die vielleicht nicht so gut mit der englischen Sprache vertraut sind wie moi!!!! Die BSSG freut sich sehr, Schüler der Pariser Schule begrüßen zu dürfen. Es wird jedoch mehr als ein einfaches Computerprogramm brauchen, um meinen Humor einigen Leuten zu übersetzen!!!!

At this stage I am ignoring the spell checker and giving my proof readers a laugh!