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Call centre HUD for Asterisk

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At work every fortnight or so we hold what we call Evenings Of Code. The company buys the development team pizza and beer and in exchange we work on projects and ideas that are of special or particular interest to us, that the company would benefit from, but that the company doesn’t really need at the moment and so normal weekday work time cannot be allocated to it.

My recent project has been to create a HUD (Heads-Up Display) for the call centre. I’m particularly suited to do this out of those in my team because I have quite a lot of experience with Asterisk, the popular open-source PBX, on which the company’s telephone system is based. The system, designed for a 1080p display (it’s not yet decided whether we’re going to go for a plasma or a projector yet), uses caller details records (CDRs) and the Asterisk Manager system to gather statistics on the day’s calls. It’s not quite realtime, but the key queue statistics from the Manager are updated every five seconds and the cumulative statistics based on the CDRs since midnight every 20 seconds.

A script runs constantly in the background during the working day (8.00am to 8.00pm) to perform the updates, which saves the results in a database table. The HUD itself is then loaded in a browser and uses AJAX calls every five seconds to read the contents of this table. This will allow multiple instances of the HUD to run without each hammering the CDRs and the Manager. At the moment, as it’s in testing, it’s being loaded into web browsers by certain staff members, and so when it initially loads it loads quarter-size. When we finally put it up on the wall we would then hover over the top right corner and an option will appear to enlarge it to full 1080p, basically by doubling the values in key CSS properties.

It looks slick too. Because it uses AJAX there are no page loads, you would expect nothing less in this day and age. If a digit changes after retrieving an update then the old digit is faded out before the new digit is faded in. If a digit doesn’t change between updates it obviously remains static.

We’re now trying to ascertain whether my algorithms for calculating the statistics are accurate at the moment by using a bit of manual record keeping on the part of the cell centre staff, who have been asked to record the number of calls they are taking per day for a week or so, independently of the records on the PBX. I’m confident that I’ve got it right, however, and actually quite pleased the information that I have been able to calculate given that Asterisk CDRs aren’t all that great to work with.

Assuming the project gets full approval following testing my intention is to get it running on a Raspberry Pi, which can be strapped to the back of the screen or on top of the projector, or indeed easily hidden in the ceiling in either case. Given that modern screens and projectors come with USB ports they will even be able to supply power to the Raspberry Pi. This means that the screen or the projector, whichever is chosen, represents the largest cost of the project as the Raspberry Pi eliminates the need to dedicate a whole PC for the purpose. My research indicates that the Raspberry Pi is capable of running Google Chrome, so that’s all good.

Screenshot of the system during a quiet period (no calls in the queues)

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London 2012 Olympic Games

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After a seven year journey, arguably more if you believe that it was all inspired by the success of the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, the ultimate sporting tournament has now come and gone from London, Paralympics notwithstanding. For most of us this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, which had not happened for 64 years previously and may well not happen again for a similar amount of time. I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish, much much more than I expected to. For a long time I was very cynical about the whole thing, believing that Britain would, like it does so often with things, embarrass itself my making it “a little bit shit”, and that hosting the Olympic games was an extravagance that an already disproportionately privileged capital city simply did not need, but I am happy to stand proven wrong. I didn’t watch the Olympics at all before Beijing, not even the ceremonies. I watched some of Beijing, but with London I had it on the television at every opportunity.

Opening Ceremony

Everyone said that the opening ceremony couldn’t possibly top that of the Beijing games in 2008, but nobody really agreed on which metric should be used to compare the two. The Beijing ceremony was an over the top and ostentatious display, designed deliberately to be virtually impossible to follow in terms of expense and scale. Only China ever could and would do that. London’s opening ceremony, however, was not inferior to this spectacle in my opinion. It told the world the story of how Britain came to where it is now in a hugely tender, original and humorous way and I think that Danny Boyle created an utter masterpiece. Certainly, he deserves a knighthood much more than Gary Barlow does for organising a pop concert on the Queen’s driveway. I was  in tears by the time the five forged rings rose up, and I was set off again when the cauldron was lit. I thought both parts were utterly beautiful. I’m just a big softy, really.

My own silly sentiments aside, I think the best review of the opening ceremony came from Sarah Lyall in the New York Times, who writes:

“Britain presented itself to the world Friday night as something it has often struggled to express even to itself: a nation secure in its own post-empire identity, whatever that actually is… It was neither a nostalgic sweep through the past nor a bold vision of a brave new future. Rather, it was a sometimes slightly insane portrait of a country that has changed almost beyond measure since the last time it hosted the Games, in the grim postwar summer of 1948.”

However, not all was good with the opening ceremony. It was all absolutely brilliant, right up until the very last moment when they wheeled out Paul McCartney. Up until that point the underlying theme and message of the London games, “Insipire a generation”, had been rammed home, since this was the premise on which London was originally awarded the games. We had just seen seven young athletes light the cauldron instead of the usual washed-up old sports star that other countries normally use. They did this with torches literally passed on to them by established Olympians, all heralding and symbolising the start of a new generation. They followed this by pushing out Paul McCartney, an old man from the past who can’t sing properly any more and whose face is falling off his head, to sing a frankly boring song that the world has heard countless times. I can only think that his segment was included to please a United States TV audience. It was very obviously out of place, a huge and awkward elephant in the room, and I think it was a mistake. Critically, however, aside perhaps from not relieving the idiot that is Mitt Romney of his ticket to the ceremony and giving it to a soldier, it was the only mistake.

In case you were wondering, Mitt, this “tiny island that makes stuff nobody wants” produced Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He invented the World Wide Web. Just thought you ought to know. Danny Boyle thought you ought too.

Events and medalists

God save the King

The success of securing the games as hosts is one thing, but it was only half the story of Great Britain’s success at London 2012, and arguably the easier half. More important is the outstanding performance by Team GB. Great Britain won the most medals for 104 years, and the 1908 games don’t really count as that was during the Empire days, meaning that the medal haul was skewed by the fact that we owned a third of the world and its athletes. The medals came thick and fast, allaying any fears that “home games nerves” might affect performance. I have such huge admiration for Olympic athletes, they train all day every day for years at a time and aren’t interested in the glamour, wealth and fame that other sporting occupations readily provide. With this in mind one questions why David Beckham seemed to get so much attention before and during the games.

The congratulations also go beyond Team GB of course. World records seemed be being broken every day by athletes from all around the world. The bar was set very much higher than it was in Beijing. Rebecca Adlington only secured a bronze medal this year, despite swimming faster than the time that gave her a gold in Beijing. Michael Phelps smashed to smithereens the longstanding record for the most number of Olympic medals won by one person previously held by the Soviet Union.

Closing Ceremony

The closing ceremony always plays second fiddle to the opening ceremony, but for good reason. It is supposed to be a more subdued affair, formally closing the games with the extinguishing of the Olympic flame and the passing of the flag to the next host city. Aside from these standard features in any closing ceremony programme, the rest of it left me rather underwhelmed. Again, as with the Jubilee concert in June, they wheeled out more of the same usual suspects that we’ve seen time and again, including George Michael, an ageing drug-addled convicted drink-driver who cynically used the event to promote his new single. I don’t really think that he is an appropriate person to “inspire a generation”. I also thought that we’d all got over The Spice Girls 15 years ago, apparently not. The whole thing felt like a Brit Awards ceremony from the 1990s.

I watched the closing ceremony in 3D, as it was one of the few programmes that are part of the BBC’s trial of 3D broadcasts this year. I would have watched the opening cermony in 3D too, but there were three other people in the room and only two pairs of glasses. Whilst I enjoyed the 3D broadcast I did not understand why the BBC used different commentators to those on BBC1. I would have preferred Huw Edwards, instead of whoever it was who was on BBC HD, whose sidekick could barely string a sentence together. I would also suggest that the BBC HD commentator, who claimed that the closing ceremony was the first time “anyone outside Brazil” had seen the Rio 2016 logo, does not yet have access to Google Images and should probably do something about that.

Controversial issues

Despite the success of the games it would be odd if I didn’t mention some of the more controversial issues surrounding them. I won’t dwell on them too much, relatively speaking at least, but these are the ones that annoyed me the most (there are more, but less annoying):

  1. Cost: London 2012 ended up costing more than four times the original budget put forward by the former Labour Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell, an eye-watering £9,100,000,000. Despite this, LOCOG triumphantly announced that they had brought it all in “under budget” by a few hundred million and Tessa Jowell was made a Dame in return for underestimating the cost of hosting the games by a factor of four.
  2. Sponsorship and brand protection: Make no mistake, I fully appreciate and understand the requirement for sponsorship from large corporations with deep pockets for the Olympic games, even if that does mean ridiculous things like peddlers of cheeseburgers and sugary drinks getting exclusive rights to distribute both in the Olympic park. However, corporate sponsors didn’t fund the vast majority of the games, tax payers did, and if it was supposed to be “the peoples’ games” (the “people” being its major financial benefactors) then if the people wanted to put up a representation of the Olympic rings in their shop window that wasn’t approved/sold by LOCOG, or put that absurd 2012 logo on their blog then they damned well should have been able to without fear of going to jail.
  3. Tickets: I didn’t apply for any tickets, chiefly because I didn’t like the idea of LOCOG helping themselves to random sums of money from my bank account at random times for all or a random selection of tickets for which I virtually had to beg online. If any commercial company tried to sell tickets or any other type of product using this model they would be immediately closed down by trading standards and no bank would ever provide them with merchant services. I saw no reason why LOCOG should have been exempt from this. Even setting those issues aside, I simply didn’t have a few hundred quid to drop on tickets to an event that I probably wouldn’t have been interested in, or a few thousand for a ticket to an event that I might’ve actually enjoyed. Home games or not, the £700 I spent on my television represented much better value for money and I was able to see many more events from the best sofas in the house. Had I bought tickets I would have also been even more aggrieved than I was when I saw all the empty seats which Lord Coe then gave to students and teachers, instead of nurses and firefighters.
  4. Bus drivers: These greedy arseholes demanded and were awarded an extra £500 just for turning up for work during the games, and yet despite this were still unable to not kill anybody.

Legacy

I truly hope that the London games has the impact on the country that has been promised. This isn’t just because I want to see value for my tax money, but because I actually do. The Olympics is arguably the largest and most important regular worldwide event, involving more countries than are members of the United Nations, all of whom come together for two weeks every four years for the same purpose and goal. If that doesn’t have some sort of lasting impact on a country that hosts it then what will?

Could someone of my age possibly see the Olympics on home soil again? Possibly, but not especially likely. While it is true that there were only 12 years between the 1984 Los Angeles and 1996 Atlanta games the United States is not typical in terms of size and wealth, and so this statistic is arguably skewed. More or less a “double award”, this would have also impacted New York’s 2012 bid. If Madrid get awarded the 2020 games it will mean that 28 years will elapse between Barcelona in 1992 and those games, which is a little more realistic but not so long that most people who lived through the 2012 games in London would not get to enjoy, for the sake of argument, a re-run in 2040.

Maybe by then I’ll have saved up enough for a ticket to the opening ceremony.

The floozy in the jacuzzi gets a good view of the big screen in Birmingham’s Victoria Square

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Diamond Jubilee 2012

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The Queen’s 60th Jubilee celebrations took place over the weekend of 2nd to 5th June. Although my primary focus for this weekend was Birmingham Pride, I also took time to enjoy these celebrations, which, although not once-in-a-lifetime like having the Olympics hosted on home soil, are rare in that they only happen once every ten years. I remember my late mother being very much into the Golden Jubilee celebrations  in 2002, the same year in which she later died, whereas I was quite indifferent to them. Since then I’ve become more patriotic and royalist and so this time I took more of an interest, for these reasons and also because my mother no longer can.

I put bunting out on the balcony and I watched the television coverage of the events during the weekend. I was appalled as many others were at the shocking BBC coverage of the river pageant, but I won’t dwell on that. There’s every change that Queen Elizabeth will spend another ten years on the throne and so the BBC will have a chance to make amends. Unfortunately because Birmingham Pride was taking place during the same weekend I was unable to attend a street party that my family was involved with in Walton-On-Thames, which was a shame, but I couldn’t miss Pride given that I was more heavily involved with it this year.

I wasn’t too sure about the concert, however. It’s not like we need any more reasons to give the usual celebrity suspects more air-time, we get more than enough of them as it is, and the whole Gary Barlow angling for a knighthood thing was just plain crass. He also isn’t going to get it, his concert may well have been held on the Queen’s driveway but it’s going to be nothing compared to the Olympics opening ceremony in July. That all said, respect to the Queen for allowing it to take place, even if she did show up late!

Respect to the Queen from me doesn’t end there. I think she is an outstanding asset to this country. She may well have led a life of absolute privilege but that does not mean she does not work hard for this country and care about it. I also think that she’s become much better at this over the past fifteen years since the death of Princess Diana, demonstrating consistently that the monarchy has the ability to modernise with its subjects. The British monarchy is the envy of the world and no other monarchy can hold a candle to it, indeed, most other monarchs around the world are unpopular despots. Nothing could be further from the truth with ours, and I hope that these ridiculous Republic people saw that laid bare during the royal wedding last year and the jubilee celebrations this year.

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Birmingham Pride 2012

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Last year saw my first Birmingham Pride, after having spent seven years living in Manchester and having Manchester Pride on my doorstep. I enjoyed it, but only to a point, as last year I was living out in the sticks of Sutton Coldfield and was not properly able to immerse myself in the event to the degree to which I had become accustomed during my years in Manchester. At the end of it I vowed to myself that I was enjoy Birmingham Pride 2012 much better, having set myself the goal for moving into the city centre in the year that followed.

I achieved that goal five months later, and so this year I was able to deliver on the promise I made myself and I had a Pride much more along the lines of what I am used to, being able to dip in and out of it and be able to quickly and easily return to my home base as needed and use it as a rendezvous point for with my friends. Indeed, I am fortunate enough to actually live on one of the streets that the parade passes down. Although I could have viewed it from my sixth floor balcony I chose not to and instead view it from the roadside with everyone else of course. I was grateful for the handy access to a toilet once it had finished, however.

Enormous Glide banner outside iHost (formerly DV8)

This year I got much more involved. The company I work for, Glide, sponsored the iHost bar. We paid for the events banner on the outside of the building and also branded up the inside of the bar, where some well known DJs from Birmingham and Manchester played classic house all weekend. The bar was constantly busy from morning right through to when the main club opened and beyond. It’s impossible to measure any direct impact on sales or web traffic, and that was never our intention, the whole point of the exercise was brand proliferation and given how much it cost Glide definitely got bang for buck and we received a lot of respect from our industry peers for having got involved.

Outside the “Glide Pride Bar” Pride itself was much like it was last year except for one major difference and that was that this year was the first year that an entrance fee was levied for the “entertainment arenas”. Up until and including last year Birmingham Pride was the largest free music festival in the United Kingdom, but at a tremendous cost to the local businesses who paid for the main stage, the cabaret tent, the dance tent and other entertainment features. The rest of the event was largely funded by various grants, including generous support from Birmingham City Council and West Midlands Police. This was not sustainable, however. Many believed that the venues who put on the entertainment were able to pay for it out of drinks takings, but these takings did not cover the cost, and so it was decided this year that although the Pride event itself would remain free (unlike for example Manchester Pride, where you need a ticket merely to enter the village cordon), there would be a £10 charge for the entertainment to cover the cost of running it.

James makes Jon his honorary boyfriend for the weekend

There was outcry over this from some factions, typically skint students who expect everything for free anyway, so that came as little surprise. I had no problem paying £10 for the weekend (although admittedly Glide paid it for me, I wouldn’t have otherwise hesitated) and I noted that it had the added benefit of dissuading less desirable Pride “guests” who had been known to spoil previous events from coming. As one drag act Baga Chipz put it succinctly, “it keeps the fuckin’ riff-raff out”. I spent most of the weekend in the Village Cabaret Tent as this was the most entertaining and social of the venues. I didn’t care much for the main stage acts. On Saturday I went to Poptastic, a well-established club night run by a friend of mine in Manchester who was running it for the first time ever at Birmingham Pride.

I had proper Pride blues the day after. I always do after Pride, I used to get them when I lived in Manchester and went to Manchester Pride too. It’s always a sign that I’ve had a good weekend. I don’t know if I’ll go to Manchester Pride this year or not. I didn’t go last year and I can’t honestly say I really missed it. If I do go it’ll all be very last minute.

More photos on Facebook.

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Python SimpleHTTPServer

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I don’t use Python on a daily basis, barely at all in fact (knowingly), but I stumbled across a handy purpose for it today which I see myself using. Type this command in a Linux shell or a Mac OS terminal and it will start a local web server on port 8000 using the current working directory as the document root and sending access requests to STDOUT:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

Potential uses include:

  1. Developing local web applications on the local filesystem which use no server-side processing but do use Javascript and AJAX calls that a web browser would not normally allow without starting it with special flags (anyone who’s seen “XMLHttpRequest cannot load $RESOURCE. Origin null is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin” in their error console will know what I’m talking about).
  2. Quickly sharing a directory with a colleague on the same network rather than uploading files to a shared resource such as a file server or e-mail system. Obviously you’d need to ensure that whatever port you choose is allowed in your local incoming firewall if you have one.

There’s even better news for PHP users. PHP 5.4, released this week, includes a built-in web server which can be started with an equivalent command. The advantages of this of course is that it’ll also process PHP scripts instead of being limited to static files.

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Cadburys Olympic Podium Clock

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I worked on a couple of extra-curricular projects over Christmas, one being a a project for Cadburys, who are touring the country over the next six months before the Olympic Games with three podium-style stands on which punters can attempt to win one of ten pairs of tickets to the opening ceremony by estimating how long exactly 20.12 seconds is. These will appear in various shopping centres and exhibitions over the months.

Punters press the big red comedy button to start and press it again to stop, and no, they don’t have view of the screen while they’re playing. If they win there’s a winning sequence of sounds and words on the display and the operator also activates four flashing purple police lights. It’s pretty much impossible to estimate correctly, however, even if you do have sight of the screen.

My job was to create the software for this including all the graphics, which I did using my normal skill-set of HTML, CSS and Javascript/jQuery (no server-side stuff required, runs on a laptop without an Internet connection). I’m also able to push out software updates to each of the three stands over the next six months should they for some reason become necessary.

The screens in the photo below will be installed within the podium-style stands themselves and only the clock digits themselves will be visible through the aperture in the front (simulated by the crude paper surround on the screen on the right). The purple bar at the top of the screens is only visible on the operator’s laptop and contains some basic options and settings which aren’t publicly visible. The red button is custom built and contains a USB numeric keypad with a mechanism that presses the “5” key. This then simply plugs into the laptop as a USB keyboard.

It was a nice bit of fun. It’s not a million miles away from the sort of things I used to do when I worked for 2Heads back in 2000/2001, so almost a little nostalgic. No plugins or flash either, all HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, as it should be.

Testing the displays and the comedy red button

In action in the Birmingham Bullring during March 2012

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2011 Review

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I’ve not done one of these for some time, mainly because I’ve had nothing that I would particularly want to write home about over the past few years, but not only has 2011 been a little different but I’ve also written “blog more” on my list of New Year’s resolutions, the rest of which I won’t reveal for fear of jinxing them. So here goes:

My year

For me it’s been a relatively good year, which is a welcome change. Every year since 2006 when my business failed up to and including 2010 was unpleasant and negatively stressful in some way. I say “negatively stressful” because there is such thing as “positive stress”, which is what I have been thriving on this year. Those previous years brought nothing but stressful losses, whether financial, of personal relationships, of employment and even my home. I can’t say that I’ve regained all of those things because that would be far from the truth, but I do believe to be on my way in a sustainable and realistic manner.

I started 2011 unsure about my current job and I was tempted by a very extraordinary opportunity that came across my path. I wasn’t offered the position in the end, I fell at the last hurdle during the recruitment process. I’m glad that happened now because my position at Glide developed and improved dramatically throughout the rest of the year and I am very settled there now. I see myself staying with the company and being involved in its development and future diversification for some time. Although I have been in higher paying positions in the past I can quite honestly say that it is the most rewarding job I have ever had and I really wouldn’t swap either it or the people I work with for anything less than something that I’d simply be an idiot to pass up.

With greater happiness in my job came greater acceptance and belief that my move from Manchester to Birmingham was a positive step, because for a while I quite honestly wasn’t sure, and this lead me to be able to move in to a place of my own in the middle of the city in November, which has made me immensely happy. Living on my own, on my own terms, in the middle of another fantastic city and with everything in walking distance again is a dream come true and I cherish it every day, whereas when I was living in Manchester I took it for granted. I’d like to thank all those who were so instrumental in helping make it happen for me.

2012

As I mentioned before I’ve a list of New Year’s resolutions and I’m so determined to stick to them that I have designed a spreadsheet that measures my success with each on a month by month basis. By that you can obviously infer that “be less anally retentive” isn’t one of them. However, also as mentioned before I’m not sharing them.

I’ve high hopes for my job and my team as the company I work for grows. We’re moving offices at the start of March to the Alpha Tower from our current base in the Jewellery Quarter, which should make things a little easier although I’ll actually have a smaller desk and my team will lose the separate room that we greatly enjoy at the moment. My team will expand (probably two-fold) and the company’s diversification plans are thoroughly exciting. A pay rise would be nice but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

I want to continue to improve and expand my skill set and experience as you might expect. As mentioned before I’ve learnt more in my current position than in any other position so I don’t expect that curve will get any shallower any time soon, nor would I want it to. I want to get into mobile applications if possible as it would be nice to have something that just earns money for me while I sleep, but as with most software development you typically (but not always) need a problem before you can come up with a solution.

There are some demons still haunting me from the collapse of my business that I want to put to rest this year, finally, I think if I carry those over to 2013 I really will be doing something wrong.

The rest is all personal, really. Yes, I’d quite like to meet another fella, before you ask, but this isn’t high on my list of priorities, mainly because I’m old and ugly enough to realise that such things will happen to you when you least expect and whether you like it or not, so to seek them out would be a futile waste of precious time. That said, I’ve not been as “eligible” as I am now for some time now, so who knows.

I wish everyone who’s bothered to read this far a fabulous 2012. Let’s hope it doesn’t all end horribly on 12th December, eh?

Notable despatches

This section is a footnote really in the absence of a full review of news events this year. I would note that I actually read and/or watch the news every day with a keen interest and during my early days of blogging I would blog almost every day with my comment on whatever was going on, however, more recently Facebook and subsequently Twitter have provided more effective means of comment, meaning that rare is now the occasion where I will create a full blog about current affairs.

Banned shopping

Col. Gadaffi, the Libyan despot who ruled for 42 years since taking power in a military coup. An unpleasant relic from the 20th Century, no doubt, but I think many people will secretly miss the entertainment that he used to provide to the rest of the world. Modern world leaders may well be safe, responsible (Gordon Brown notwithstanding) and largely democratically elected but I can’t think of a single one who I would describe as “a character”, nor will any of them be remembered much beyond their tenures, not that I’m suggesting infamy to be something to aspire to. The circumstances surrounding Gadaffi’s death, however, raises worrying questions about Libya’s brave new future.

Invented nuclear fusion

Kim Jong-Il, the “Dear Leader” of the bizarre world that is the North Korea, itself also a haunting relic of the 20th Century that the world could well do without. Kim’s death was not unexpected, and although he was an abysmal failure as a leader, despite what North Korea state media insist, his passing on is not necessarily a good thing. The pampered idiot he’s left in charge is just that and nobody in the rest of the world wants a nasty coup in a rogue, pariah state armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and the world’s fifth largest army. Orwellian societies were never designed to leave the printed page.

Bins taken out on Bank Holiday


Osama Bin Laden, the criminal mastermind behind the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, who was tracked down to a compound in the middle of an affluent area of Pakistan near to a military academy, which embarrassed the Pakistani authorities immensely and has since strained relations between the two countries. This news was not entirely surprising what with the tenth anniversary of September 11th and Obama’s pledge to remove US troops from Iraq looming large. His elimination was a necessary pre-requisite of being able to say the job was done. May America’s wounds now heal properly.

Also mad

Steve Jobs, the visionary creator of Apple, now the world’s most successful company. I’ve been an Apple user for coming up to 6 years now and I have never looked back. Jobs initially tempted me away with the iPod and Intel-based Macs, and has continued to deliver ever since. The world needs more people like Steve Jobs. He has no clear heirs-apparent in the computer industry. There are contenders, without a doubt, but only time will tell if they end up making the sort of difference that he did.

The BBC have a slideshow on more notable deaths in 2011.

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Birmingham City Boy

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Yes, I am aware that it's another flat above a shop

I’ve moved to Birmingham city centre, ending my 18 month tenure in the nice-but-dull former royal town of Sutton Coldfield. This may seem sudden to everyone but it’s actually something I’ve been wanting to do since moving to the West Midlands and that I have actually been quietly planning for six months or so, which is how long it has taken me to bring it all together for various reasons.

My new one bedroom flat is in Temple House, a popular development on the corner of Temple Street and New Street (the main outdoor shopping street in Birmingham, analogous to Manchester’s Market Street). It’s a 15-20 minute walk to work, which will be reduced by five minutes or so once the company for whom I work has itself moved in the New Year. No longer do I have a total of two and a half hours commuting time each day, which is great, because I get to spend longer at work and at home so everyone wins.

This year even drearier

It’s fabulous being back in the city centre. I always missed it, but now I’m back I realise just how much I missed it. This flat is arguably even more central than the Manchester flat was and there’s always a buzz going on outside, which I can observe from the balcony off the living room, something that only a few apartments in the building have.

Recipients of my Dreary Seasonal Newsletter accompanying my Christmas cards this year will note that I am also using it as a method of informing everyone of my change of address, in case you were wondering why you had not already received such a notification from me. Second class stamps cost 36 pence each these days, you know.

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