Learn how to Skype or write a sitcom? Why not!

Learning, we are told, should be a lifetime experience. It should not end when we finally kick off the chalk dust from school or throw the graduation cap into the air. We should, instead, aim to be learning new skills for the rest of our lives.

Crucially, those skills do not always have to be career-enhancing, they can also be life-enhancing and that is why we need educational establishments that have got the nerve and imagination to give us opportunities to learn those things we may not even imagine can be taught.

And that is why I would recommend you all to take up a bit of light reading this weekend and get a copy of the Love 2 Learn prospectus which has just been released by the City of Bath College.

In this fascinating book you can find full details of the very serious courses that can help to grow (or change) your career including accounting, building, electrical engineering, plumbing, teaching et al. But, beyond that, there are hundreds of other courses which will fire your imagination and give you an opportunity to indulge an interest or a passion alongside like-minded individuals.

For, in a commendably bold move, our innovative college has invited many local enthusiasts to teach courses in subjects that go beyond the traditional academic scope. Fancy learning how to get started on Facebook? There’s a course for that. Want to learn about helping your baby to sleep or understand- ing the terrible two’s? Yes there are courses for that. Or how about learning what it’s like to be a member of an air cabin crew, how to drum, how to Skype, how to lip-read, how to cook the perfect mousse, how to taste whiskey (and no that’s not as obvious as it seems!) or even (and I have to confess this really appeals to me) how to write a TV sitcom.

Yes, courses in all of these and more are now available at the college and before people start screaming (and sadly one or two already did on our website when we told them about this story), this isn’t costing us the taxpayers a penny. For all the leisure courses you have to pay to be on them – and they will only happen if enough people subscribe. Simple.

Personally, I think this whole concept is laudable because we all want to learn new things and meet like-minded souls and colleges should be there to provide a service to the whole community. And this is certainly what Bath is attempting to do via this exciting and dazzlingly varied new programme.

Not convinced? OK, I urge you all to pick up a copy of the book and I would almost defy you not to find something that would interest you. There are courses that last just for a few hours right through to vocational ones that last several years but there really does seem to be something for everyone – including, and perhaps most importantly of all, those people who may well have thought that school and/or college had nothing more to offer them and couldn’t really teach them anything new.

Right, I’m off to fill in my application form. I look forward to joining my fellow would-be sitcom writers on March 10, 2012.

Online, offline, onwards and upwards.

This first appeared in the Bath Chronicle of March 24 On a recent Tuesday at about 2.30pm something dramatic happened in our office. Grown men exhibited panic. Frustration levels grew. The air was tense - the mood unpredictable. Why? Because, oh reader, the internet had been switched off. For reasons which (as usual) were unfathomable, none of us could get on to our own site (thisisbath), Google was as impossible to access as the mind of Colonel Gaddafi and, to misquote Frankie Howerd, it was a case of "Twitter Ye Not". That sense of minor shock and awe bought on by the loss of our online contact may sound a bit OTT but as the minutes passed into the hours on Tuesday and people got decidedly twitchy it brought home again just how much cyberspace has affected all our lives. As journalists the "interweb" is an essential tool for what we do but it goes much deeper for people like us than a mere resource. So much of our lives both personally and professionally have become entwined in the nether regions of the world wide web that it is only when it is taken away - as it was on Tuesday - that you see how hamstrung and rather bereft people can feel without it. You get the impression some people think life and communication didn't begin until a bright spark thought it would be an idea to link his computer to someone else's just a few short years ago. But it is worth remembering just how few years ago that was. YouTube may, for example, seem to have been around forever and with an estimated two billion videos being shown every day on the site you could believe it took decades to build up that clientele. But YouTube has only been an entity since February 2005 and it (quietly) hit the world at the same time as, for instance, Charles and Camilla announced they were to marry. And that doesn't seem that long ago at all does it? As for Facebook with its 600 million users, that only became available to us as members of the public in 2006 - the same year as Twitter began building up to its now 190 million users. In industry terms these are baby companies and yet they are the biggest, noisiest and most impact-full babies in history. The phenomenal speed in which these sites and the internet has taken over all our daily lives in such a short period of time is, truly, a source of amazement. Life will never be the same again now we have this astonishing technology and the only remaining question is just how much more of our lives will the all-embracing internet envelop. And yet . . . . Anyone watching Comic Relief on Friday night will have seen that for a world that can get so smug about its massive information technology advancements we are remarkably bad at simple things like keeping children from dying of starvation. So, while the world wide web may be developing at a pace the offline world, sadly, seems as slow to really change as it ever did . . .

Cinema + Sofa = a great place for a Facebook movie

Last Sunday night I did what I’m sure many of you were doing at the time – I sat on my sofa and got lost in the online world of Facebook.

But no, I wasn’t sitting at home. I was actually in one of my very favourite places in Bath – the Little Theatre – watching a film about how Facebook slowly devoured the world around us. In a cinema.

On a settee.

For the Little Theatre has introduced a new balcony which allows you to sit and watch a film on a lovely two seater sofa complete with beautifully plumped-up cushions. It feels like home from home – although my own sofa is not nearly as nice as theirs – and I’m sure will be lovely if you were part of a canoodling couple. (Unlike me as I was with my 17-year-old-son who’s never a great one for canoodling, to be honest).

I have to say that opinions between us on the ‘sofa in the cinema’ experience were polar opposites. I thought it was a wonderful luxury because, as I put it, “it’s like watching the film at home”. But that was exactly the problem for him. Even at the tender age of 17 he’s a cinema traditionalist and he said he goes out to the cinema precisely because he doesn’t want to watch a film at home. I’m sure he would feel different if he was in a canoodling mood though ...

As for the film itself, The Social Network, I simply cannot recommend it enough. It is the remarkable, true (?) story of a nerdy young man who had fallen out with his girlfriend and wanted a way of telling the world about it who stumbled on the idea of Facebook. It now has 500 million users and has made our ‘hero’ the youngest billionaire on the planet.

The story charts the rise and rise of the site and the rise and fall of his friends who helped him to set it up and is told in shifting time between court cases and the university days where it all started. It is a great film – beautifully acted and stylishly written by Aaron Sorkin, the genius behind the brilliant West Wing. He is a man that dares to treat audiences as if they’ve got intelligence but want to be entertained as well.

As someone who contributed to a BBC radio debate this week about the rise of the internet and how people shouldn’t be frightened of it, I am fascinated by the whole Facebook story because so many people are obsessed with it, and yet I’m sure we’ve all got items of clothing that are older than this now seemingly universal site.

To actually see how it came together almost by accident proves the point that some of the best ideas come from the most unlikely people and the most unlikely sources. Intriguingly, the man behind it barely saw any financial benefits and, as becomes very clear in the movie, he was never motivated by money and apparently isn’t so today.

That’s why much as I love the current series of The Apprentice, if you’re looking for the future brains in our country, I think you’d be better looking at the unlikeliest kid in the classroom rather than the sharp-suited people trying to impress Lord SirAllunSugar.

So, if you get the chance, pop along and see The Social Network and if you want to enjoy it in unique circumstances then why not curl up on the sofa at the Little Theatre?

The only problem is you may drift off to sleep in that settee. But don’t worry – I can reveal that the man from Facebook did well.

An 18-year-old daughter? Me? I am far too young/....

If you were to ask people around me to list my most irritating faults, I am pretty certain that one thing that would crop up frequently is that I am forever banging on about the fact that I don't think I look my age. No matter what my passport or driving licence tells me in my own warped mind, I am convionced the mirror tells a different story.

However, sometimes something creeps up and bites you on the big bottom of life that cruelly destroys your self-delusion about your age.

And that happened to me last weekend when my eldest 'child', my 'little' girl, Charlotte, was 18. Yes, I am now the the father of an 18-year-old and no pretence that I look young enough to host Blue Peter can escape that fact.

It really is a sobering moment to realise your child is no longer your 'child'. She can see the same films as I do (not that we have the same tastes), vote in the same elections (not that she has the interest that I do) and do practically anything she wants really without ever uttering the immortal words 'Dad, can I.....?'

Actually that isn't strictly true. As every parent of a teenager will know, you become a taxi driver – and so, last Saturday night, my role was to help ferry her and her friends off to Poo Nah's Nah's in Bath. Nightclubs hey...and all this from that sweet little well-mannered girl who only a few years ago (in my memory) was taking her first dancing lessons at the age of just three.


Crazy.

Nowadays, in the world of social networking sites it is so easy to track the length of people's lives and learn all about them easily but for me, and the rest of the family, our pondering over Charlotte's 'big 1-8' has still been centred around digging out old photographs of baby competitions, first days at school, first holidays and so forth. It has been, as our American cousins say, emotional.

Perhaps the best way of tracking that time, however, is to see how different the world was when Charlotte was born (in 1991) to today.

For a start, the aforementioned social networking sites obviously didn't exist. It is amazing, considering their influence, to learn that Facebook is only six years old (and in reality was nothing like we know it today until two or three years ago), Twitter is just three years old and even the supposed 'grand daddy' of them all, Youtube, is astonishingly just four years old. How many other four-year-olds can genuinely be considered a world phenomenon?

Oh and as for Wikipedia (nine years old), if I had wanted to give Charlotte that much info as a birth gift I would have had to pay £200 for a book of dusty old encyclopedias – which would have been outdated the moment after purchase.

Those 18 years have, of course, seen many epic, often frightening worldwide events but it is probably this dramatic age of communication change that has characterised this past generation.

Many of you, may, for example be reading this online on my blog (hi there!) rather than in print and with so many developments of this kind happening so quickly one can only imagine how different the communications scene will look when one day Charlotte talks about her 'eldest's' 18th.

By then the world may not, for instance, be 'run' by the US and Europe as we pretend it is now but by the 'BRIC' countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China, the next global powers apparently). And I defy anyone to predict what life will be like then because no one, but no one, could have predicted life now the day 'Lotte' took her first breath.

So, a belated very happy birthday 'young' Charlotte. No dad in the world could be prouder of this but please don't be offended if you overhear me say: 'An 18-year-old daughter? When I look this young? Impossible....'

Social kissing = social embarrassment

Sometimes I find it very awkward being a British male.

Take kissing.

I’m not talking about romantic or family kisses – I am talking about social kissing. Do you or don’t you?

Before I came down to Bath, nearly four years ago, this wasn’t an issue – they just don’t ‘do’ social kissing in my part of the Midlands. Or at least they didn’t do it with me.

In this city, however, I soon saw that kissing is far more common in social occasions but the problem I have is I never know when it is right to do so.

Will the ‘kissee’ be offended if I do – or offended if I don’t?

At the start of my adventure into lip-puckering contact, I probably looked horrified as people came towards me face-to-face. I guess I thought at times I was going to be head butted rather than have a smacker on my cheek and that is somewhat off putting.
I did, slowly, get into the drift, but last week, after socially kissing at least three charming ladies and wondering afterwards “Oh blimey, should I have done that?” , I started to think I would retire my lips from social occasions again.

I put my dilemma on Facebook and received a number of not terribly helpful responses, which showed that nobody really understands these things, so I did a bit of internet research to try and see if there was an official etiquette for the embarrassed UK male.

The most amusing site I found – which provided such fascinating nuggets as the history of Paris ‘four kiss greeting’ and the fact that in Belgium, if someone is at least 10 years older than you, you can kiss them three times as opposed to the traditional one, there was a lovely description of the awkwardness we Brits find in these situations.

It said that as a nation we are shy of physical contact and would prefer to opt for a handshake or a nod.

It also wisely told foreign readers to remember that if a British person says “How are you”, they absolutely do not want you to tell them.

So I’ve therefore decided that I’m going to return to my British stereotype and avoid PDA (that’s public display of affection, to the uninitiated) to all apart from a couple of people for whom such non-contact would be impossible (hello Lorraine).

Of course, I then face the ultimate horror of going in with my manly handshake and being greeted by an outstretched cheek and not knowing what to do with it.

My, oh my, aren’t these things confusing? I blame the French.

Happy birthday? Baah humbug........

On Tuesday it was my birthday. Well, hip-hip hooray.

I won't reveal how old I am just yet but I had a perfectly pleasant day despite the fact that I spent more than 10 hours of it at work and it rained constantly throughout.....

The truth is, however, when you hit a certain age, birthdays just ain’t what they used to be. I can still remember the thrill of waiting for the big day when I was younger – and to be fair, I still see it in my two teenage children today – but these days it can all just feel like another hurdle crossed on the path to leaving this mortal coil.

It is very much the sign of the times that I received most birthday messages from 'friends' on my social networking site on Facebook. I put the word ‘friends’ into inverted commas because when you add someone to your site who you know, they are automatically classified as your friends. Thus, according to cyberspace, I have more than 200 such friends, but if so, how come I only received about half-a-dozen birthday cards from non-family members?????

To be fair though I was very touched by all their kind messages on tinternet - even the two who said 'happy birthday Adrian' in light of my apparent looka-a-like sound-a-like to Mr Chiles. As you can see here there is no connection.....

Anyway, the truth is, the older I get the more I fail to understand why we even celebrate birthdays at all. Now I don’t want to come over as the birthday equivalent of the ‘bah-humbug-Christmas-deniers’ but I wonder why we should be congratulated and lauded for something totally out of our control?

Indeed, I came to the somewhat startling (and possibly unique) conclusion a few years ago that on our birthdays we should actually have our own individual mother’s days, because it is them who did all the work. Being saluted on your birthdays is a bit like when you go to a social function and win the raffle for a box of Quality Street and people clap as you go up to collect the prize. Why??????? You didn’t achieve anything by buying a ticket and nor did you when you took your first breath after hours of motherly agony. . .

The other thing which I find different now is that I often forget my age or birth date. As I recall, this never happened when I was younger when it was etched on my brain and I started ‘planning’ for my birthday from practically the moment I had unwrapped the last Christmas pressie.

It is because I know how much children take their ages seriously that I came up with my own ‘Dragons’ Den’ idea (just admit it, we all have one!) which I’m now happy to share with you on the strict instruction that you can’t nick it as it is here in print and so I duly claim the copyright.

I was having a chat once with a former colleague of mine – the former circulation director in Bath, Mark Stroud, pictured here somewhat worse for wear. He is a fantastically funny guy who has a wonderful business brain and is always looking Del Boy-like to how he can get his first million.

So we tentatively shared each other’s Dragons’ Den ideas (his was a rubbish one by the way about how you keep your takeaway curry hot in the car) and I told him mine. And I could see him mentally counting the cash we could rake in . . . .

My idea is half-birthday cards. Ask any child of between seven and 10 how old they are and there is every chance they won’t just say eight or nine but eight-and-a-quarter or nine- and-a-half. These things matter to them so I think there is millions to be made (and huge misery to be put on parents and grandparents!) by having half-birthday cards to be sent six months after an official birthday.

Would-be investors can contact me at the Bath Chronicle – but please don’t do so on October 3 because I will be out celebrating my 45 1/2th birthday!