Tom Ives 
Ok Google, are you listening?
Posted on June 15, 2017 Leave a Comment
[This is an archived blog item written in June 2017, when I was working at 44 Communications.]
As a communications agency we tend to focus on how people relate to each other, but our technological world is becoming more and more about how machines communicate with us – and us with them. 44’s Tom Ives looks at what brought us to this place, and the challenges that come from living in a sci-fi society.
We talk to machines all the time, whether it’s asking Siri where the nearest post office is or telling a customer service line why you’re calling before you’re put through to an actual human. This was once seen as the stuff of science fiction but is fast becoming a normal part of our daily lives. But how did we get here?
A brief history
The first human speech recognition technology was invented in the 1950s, and in the 1970s the US Defence Department invested heavily to get it up to the standard of a toddler’s vocabulary.
By the 1980s a doll called Julie could recognise words and respond with phrases in truly creepy Pinocchio fashion. And in the 1990s speech recognition came to home computing and the first voice-controlled telephone menu system soon followed.
Gradually we improved upon these comically clunky tools, and in 2007 the iPhone was launched.
Hey, Siri?
Soon after, Google busted out a voice search app to use on the iPhone. Google had a great advantage when it came to developing voice recognition – for years it had been indexing billions of questions (made through searches) and what the most likely answers were.
Apple’s own speech recognising personal assistant Siri appeared in 2011 and could actually answer you back, search apps for calendar events and give you funny answers to philosophical questions like ‘what is meaning of life?’ – the answer’s 42.
Coming in a number of different human voices, Siri was set up as a personality – a part of your phone, tablet, PC or TV that you could have a conversation with.
We had been warned
We should have seen this coming; sci-fi has been preparing us for decades. 2001: A Space Odyssey popularised the idea of the bodiless voice of an artificially intelligent super computer, ‘HAL 9000.’ There was something really creepy about the concept however, as the film cast the AI as evil rather than benevolent, using its superior intelligence to prey on the weaknesses of humankind.
But Siri (so far) has been less sinister. And equivalent offerings from other companies soon followed: Microsoft’s Cortana in 2013 and Amazon’s smart speaker Echo in 2014 featuring speech recognition and a personal assistant named Alexa.
A new marketing opportunity
Two things gave Alexa a competitive edge:
• Firstly, it recognised the voice of almost everyone around, almost all the time. It’s so good at recognising its wake word ‘Alexa’ that it causes problems for owners – for example by responding when its name is mentioned on the radio or TV.
• Secondly, it is part of the Amazon ecosystem, meaning you can tell it to put toilet roll on the shopping list (or just order it) from the toilet. Pretty handy.
Alexa can access the combined intellect and data of every Amazon computer and customer. And it’s very popular in the home, where people don’t mind talking to themselves.
Like chat messaging, the Echo is another new tool that marketers are starting to treat like any other channel. As with any early product or technology, they’re also sometimes royally screwing it up…
Would you like fries with that?
Earlier this year Burger King thought they would try a disruptive new concept, where their TV ad would intentionally trigger the audiences’ Google Home products, by saying “Ok Google, what is a WHOPPER?”
This made the device respond by loading (and reading aloud) the WHOPPER’s wikipedia page. In preparation, the page was edited by the company’s marketing department to make it slightly more ‘sales-y’. And the internet responded as you might expect.
Trolls made dozens of edits to the description to claim it was toxic and included ingredients such as children, poison, toe nail clippings and rat. Just three hours after the public heard the malicious edits, Google stopped Home responding to the advert. Wikipedia then locked the WHOPPER entry for edits from the general public.
Epic potential
This turned out to be an epic fail by Burger King. The brazen plug also prompted an epic response from the public. And there’s since been a lot of talk about how easy it was to try and abuse the technology for marketing purposes and the security implications this raises for the future.
These new technologies open up huge new potential, and dangers, for how we interact with each other. But what we can tell is that tech seems to be flying well ahead of rules and regulations, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens next!
Mobile First
Posted on May 15, 2017 Leave a Comment
[This is an archived blog item written in May 2017, when I was working at 44 Communications.]
Companies, both big and small, are using smartphone technology to reach their employees. Native mobile apps, social intranets, mobile-optimised websites – they all put direct lines of communication into the pockets of your audience. 44’s Head of Innovation and Insight Tom Ives breaks down how this ‘mobile first’ approach arose and how it can bring your employees together…
Have you ever heard of a PalmPilot? I used to sell them in Dixons nearly 15 years ago. As you can probably guess from the name, they were palm-sized devices that helped you get stuff done. They had touch screens and an early form of mobile internet connection (WAP).
But unfortunately for the PalmPilot, back in 2003 the design’s processor speed, compact memory storage and internet speed weren’t good enough for it to become mainstream.
Just four years later, Apple launched its internet phone – the iPhone. It took the previous PalmPilot, combined it with phone features and (as some argue) perfected the technology. It took off and smartphone popularity on the whole grew rapidly. It wasn’t just Apple, a whole new channel of communication was opened up between devices, and their users.
But what does this have to do with communication within businesses? By understanding why certain features were developed, we can get an insight into the habits of modern smartphone users – members of your workforce – and how to use the technology to make communications more convenient and effective.
A technical evolution
The iPhone wasn’t a complete package at launch; it has continually evolved and influenced user habits since then. The App store, 3G support, video capture, voice control, the selfie camera – all of these features were introduced as developments in technology occurred. Features that once appeared cutting-edge are now tools most of us use on a daily basis.
So with these personal, internet-enabled, super computers in our pockets, marketers had a fantastic opportunity. The previous mantra of ‘digital first’ changed to ‘mobile first’ thinking.
The new user experience
But in this mobile-first world, what has changed, and how did we get here?
Hardware in the smartphones made new experiences possible. GPS microchips meant the devices knew where they (and you) were. An accelerometer microchip meant smartphones could now tell which way up they were, whether they were moving and how fast. This opened up a whole new world of possibilities – and useful apps such as directions and fitness tracking.
The new multi-touch screens made complex controls intuitive: pinch to zoom and swipe and scroll to browse. The portable devices enabled quick answers to time and location specific questions. ‘How do I get from A to B?’, ‘When does that shop open?’, ‘Are those jeans cheaper on Amazon?’ – actions we now barely register because they come to us naturally.
The technology led to a user experience focused on functionality and task completion.
Getting to know you
The portable size and useful apps combined to enable the most powerful feature of smartphones – the personal nature of the devices. Made to be your private and secure place, they know where you go, your preferences and the ecosystem you use. Perhaps yours are Apple TV for streaming Netflix, Carplay for navigating in your car, and Instagram for keeping in touch with your friends.
So for employers, the challenge is to be where your employees are – ideally on their personal device – and provide the same convenience at work as they get from the apps they rely on at home.
Like the original iPhone did, use your technology to make individual, informative and inspirational experiences possible. And give your employees a place where they can get the information they need in the easy, simple way they’re used to.
#defenderjourneys
Posted on February 21, 2016
In April 2015 I was representing my employer Connect at a round table status meeting with the other Land Rover digital agencies. One of the projects was a year of celebration to mark the end of production for the iconic Defender (at least the current generation.) Sevil Crespo who heads up the social media account at The Brooklyn Brothers had an ambitious project she was trying to sell to JLR. The early working name was the world according to Land Rover or Defender Journeys.
The idea was a participative social campaign where Defender owners and fans celebrate the journeys they have completed and the memories those experiences created. The brand’s rich heritage in expeditions would be used to start things off with curated content, the rest of the content would all be user generated – with an aim of two thousand created over a three year period. For many reasons I was interested in the campaign – including my own fond memories of growing up in a cold, noisy, uncomfortable and lovely Series II.
Before it was sold in to the seniors at Land Rover lots of technical questions had to be answered – how would we modify the Google Maps technology to deliver the campaign? We studied the Porsche GTS community website – a nice industry example that proved that their community trusted the brand enough to ‘hand over’ their routes. We needed to go one step further in our campaign and allow users to plot offroad sections to their journeys (the clear USP of both the vehicle and campaign.) Many other questions remained – how would we capture such complex data, moderate and faithfully recreate? Would people take the time to craft their journeys as we hoped? What practical terms of use could be used for such subjective content with a global audience of uber fans? To answer these questions Land Rover agreed to a prototyping phase to prove it was possible technically and sensible commercially to continue.
We met with the Google Maps specialist vendor gPartner to validate our ideas were possible, affordable and legal contractually. They confirmed all was good if architected correctly and affordable through a pay-on-demand model. They were excited to see how we could use their tech in a new way in the campaign and predictably very keen to show Land Rover what else they had to offer. So with access to developer tools we created a rough proof of concept to generate on and offroad routes and capture the polyline of co-ordinates. We developed some initial wireframes and suggested UX – how a fan would create a profile for themselves, their vehicle and their journey, where they went, what they saw and how they would describe it. Finally we mapped out the technology and process needed. Five parties would be involved – The Brooklyn Brothers guided the original concept and the campaign’s social media activation, Land Rover’s joint venture / in house agency Spark44 would lead the web design, Connect would build the whole experience, JLR’s data management provider Avoka had products designed to capture, securely store and allow moderation of the data and finally Enable – a specialist promotions agency would moderate the content and liaise with users (in the many countries and languages Land Rover operate in.)
The conclusion of the prototyping phase was that it was entirely possible. It was ambitious and exciting both creatively an technologically. It was new ground for Land Rover in using UGC on their main brand website landrover.com. Connect had implemented third party kit from Bazaar Voice and Storystream that allowed Land Rover to curate fan’s content from Instagram (and elsewhere) and present elegantly on LR.com. But this was the first time we were using personal tales from owners and fans in comms in such a way. It was new and fairly complex and I wasn’t sure if Land Rover would commit to delivering it. And they didn’t immediately. From July to September it went very quiet while other pressures dominated and it seemed Defender Journeys would remain just another great idea.
But thanks to a bit of luck and circumstance, in October Defender Journeys kicked off in a major way – with all five parties committing resource to a programme of work. Our campaign was to go live on 29th January 2016 – the day the last Defender rolled from the production line in Solihull. There were many unforseen challenges and false starts alogn the way – even a whole redesign of the data capture form part way through delivery.
Luckily I forgot the drama and late nights when the campaign came together – there was so much media interest in the end of the Defender and the debate on what the replacement could be, our campaign picked up a lot of interest from day 1. The first ‘real’ journey was submitted some four hours after we went live and they have come steadily since then thanks to the many Landy fans out there – from the casual to the truly eccentric. At the time of writing (22 days after going live) 111 user generated journeys have been approved and gone live on the site – spanning the globe and every terrain imaginable. The quality of the storytelling – in particular the stunning photography has pleasantly surprised everyone. My personal favourite is the incredible tale of a 9 month trip from London to Pakistan – living in a Land Rover with an 18 month old boy.
Passing the quil
Posted on February 18, 2016
I think it’s time for Bella to start contributing to the household running costs. She’s had nearly four years of essentials like shelter, clothing and hot chocolate all scot-free. So for my dad’s birthday this year I asked Bella to tell him a story – she can usually produce two or three in a single dinner time. Although most are mash ups of a recent film or story book some are strikingly creative and original – like the time she swam to the bottom of the ocean to talk to a whale’s ghost.
She dictated to me which I recorded, transcribed and edited as truthfully as I could. Bella then illustrated it and Jennie kindly set the whole thing up in a nice PDF for Poppa’s present.
My Pop’s Landy
Posted on February 13, 2016 1 Comment
If I missed the coach to high school my mum would have to drive me in. I was so embarrassed to arrive in an ancient multi coloured Land Rover Defender that I would demand to be dropped half a mile from the school gates and walk around. But it wasn’t always so.
In primary school my dad was co-opted into lift sharing when my Cub Scout group went camping. I ran around the playground asking every boy in cubs ‘have you been for a drive in a Land Rover before?’ the answer was always no, to which I’d reply – ‘if you’re lucky you will and you might even sit in the bench seat in the back with no seat belt!’
When driving in the Landy my brother and I would keep and eye out for another Defender and point it out by shouting ‘Land Rover – Land Rover – Land Rover’ which everyone else would join in with. I’m sure we waved and flashed our lights too.
After a long journey back home from hiking in Wales or visiting relatives in London, when the keys were finally removed the silence seemed deafening. The ringing remained at least until we got back into the house.
My dad owned a 1965 Series Land Rover from most of my childhood. It was a mixture of cream body with a red roof, sides and back door. It made sense to me as a child because the red part came off – dad would remove it and replace with a canvas top slung over a metal frame in the summer, especially if we were on holiday in the countryside.
There was green moss on the and inside of the windowsills. If you slide the window open or shut (horizontally) to quickly it would gouge up the moss and jam. There were numerous holes in the floor through which I would watch the blur of grey tarmac. In the back was a side facing bench seat opposite a gas ring cooker and sink. Above this was a kitchen cupboard and a collapsing circular table screwed into the floor.
I remember sitting on my dads lap on the beach and steering as he worked the pedals. The steering wheel felt huge and almost impossible to turn without my dads help.
I used to wash it to earn pocket money and it was a big job – I’d climb onto the bonnet to clean the roof and windscreen, and clamber up onto the spare tire mount on the rear door to clean the top of the back. It must have taken over an hour.
When I was 19 and my dad had moved onto the luxury of Volvos and Nissans, I worked with a lady who owned an early Discovery and had a similar love for the old beast. I remember telling her it wasn’t a real Land Rover.
Whenever I speak to someone who’s had experience of a Land Rover Series / Defender I find they share the affection I have for it’s many flaws. It’s similar to people who own vans – whether to transport bikes and canoes in or to sleep in for a weekend getaway. The things the vehicle allows you to do is more important than aesthetics or creature comforts. And this is what creates memories ultimately.
My personal experience set me up perfectly in 2015 for a very special work project to celebrate the end of the Defender’s production. More on this in my next post…
2015 Yearnote
Posted on January 3, 2016
Inspired by my talented cousin Paul Carvill‘s year note for 2014 I thought I’d have a go. The speed at which 2015 has passed means either that I’m rapidly getting old, or it was super busy.
Starting with work stuff then, 2015 was full of personal firsts.
I jetted off to Frankfurt for my first international business trip in November. I traveled with my client from JLR Steve Cobelli to meet the team who run JLR’s marketing for the European region. We’re working on a new global owners website and in preparation we need to see what’s working well in each region. The owners club for Jaguar in Germany was the most impressive with the majority of owners if not active at least registered.
A big project for me in 2014 was the build of the current Landrover.com website. I wrote the award submission for the project in the Automotive Campaign / Strategy category for the national Drum Network Awards. In November Connect brought home the trophy for this project as well as Midlands Marketing Business of Year which rounded of the best year ever for awards. You can read more about the year’s haul here. I’ve been involved in projects and submissions for creative awards before, some of which have won awards (including the Range Rover Evoque) but never an award for the technical web build as it’s much trickier to explain to judges what makes good code than a good advert for example.
In November I also attended The Lovies Awards which I didn’t know much about – the name is sarcastic as it’s definitely the most serious internet awards do I’ve been to. For example winner of the most creative use of data was the European Space Agency in recognition of landing Rosetta’s Philae lander on a moving comet. Certainly makes a big data loyalty card scheme seem irrelevant. Connect took a couple of JLR clients along as Landrover.com won an award for UX in a lower but still impressive tier of awards, this time submitted by our partners in the build – OgilvyOne.
For 6 months of the year I worked on a top secret digital campaign to advertise my client’s sponsorship of a blockbuster movie. I can’t say much about it – I’ve never done anything like it and I’ll be lucky to do so again. It involved shooting vehicles for photography and some of the film’s crew for films, all assets shot exclusively for the web which made such a difference. I’ve never lead such a serious production so I learned a huge amount about the craft of photography and cinematography – some of which was surprisingly low-fi but no less skillful for it. I spent a little time in Soho with one of the film’s production companies and it was a tiny glimpse of how massive an undertaking a major film really is. There are some parallels with adverts, if you consider them very short films with increasingly high production standards. The passion of the people involved made the biggest impression on me, no matter how small their part is they have the same commitment to the final outcome.
In September Connect opened a new office in East Birmingham, a whole floor of Building 300 in the commercial park adjacent to Birmingham Airport and the NEC. It’s a great space with good facilities and transport links. The whole of Connect’s JLR development team are based there along with some employees from our partners Spark44 and SDL. It’s great having everyone under one roof in collaborative teams.
Outside of work many wonderful things have happened.
The biggest was the safe arrival of my second daughter Florence in September. Florence is a little star and I’ve been amazed how different it is having two. Now Bella has got used to the idea I think she’ll make a great big sister. Bella joined pre-school in the summer and took to it like a duck to water. She’ll be starting primary school in September 2016 so we have been visiting local schools to make our first, second and third choices. We are spoiled for choice in Warwick with Emscote, Coten End, Brookhurst and Woodloes all being subtlety different but all excellent schools. It was amazing to see how much has changed in a generation. One school told us they have replaced all their computers with tablets as they consider them redundant (every school had a table of ipads and wireless headphones in reception class.) With programming on the curriculum Bella can choose between after school music class or lunch break code club!
My sister’s first child Sophia-Rose also joined the family in February, and since then my niece has grown into a robust little character. She has already been diving in Italian mountain streams, swimming on the Cornish coast and sunning herself in Egypt so it’s no surprise.
I got a couple of gadgets en vogue for 2015 – wearable tech in the form of a Fitbit flex & VR in the Google Cardboard style – goggles and my Iphone 6S. Aside from the strap breaking on my Fitbit after only 6 months I have really enjoyed collecting my sleep and activity data everyday. The initial gamification of trying to hit your daily steps challenge was fun, but looking back over a year of data I find much more interesting. The VR goggles I got for Christmas so haven’t used much yet – but the first few free apps I’ve found have been really fun doing very little and impressed the whole family. Bella tried a scuba diving app and immediately understood and accepted what it was – amazing to imagine growing up with this technology as totally normal. I’ve heard about some 360 photos from Mars taken by the rover that I’m going to try next.
I listened to a few podcasts prior to 2015 but it was this year when I realised what a thriving medium it is. The freedom of content and niche audiences provides a refreshingly simple and very human way to consume information – perfect for traveling for me. My favourites are Distraction Pieces from Scroobius Pip for life tales and lessons, Daily Tech News Show which is basically the Radio 4 Today Programme for my industry, Answer Me This for high and low brow humour in the form of brutal honesty and the stand out Digital Human from Aleks Krotoski / BBC which is Oxford University standard research and analysis on what the internet is doing to our society.
I haven’t seen many films on the big screen in 2015 – but I managed to catch three big ones. Interstellar is close to the perfect movie for me, SPECTRE was a disappointing return to cheese in my opinion and Star Wars episode 7 was a fun, familiar experience. I have watched lots of on demand box sets whilst Florence has slept on me at all hours of the night and I’ve really enjoyed Mr Robot, Fargo and House of Cards. I’ve treasured the last 5 episodes of Treme season 3 which I feel has been shut down when it was just getting going – it’s a real shame such important messages don’t get the support of other shows but I guess that’s life. Better Call Saul I enjoyed more than the last couple of seasons of Breaking Bad, and I hope it continues as I’d love to see a few seasons exploring the background of Mike Ehrmantraut or Gus Fring. Homeland season 5 however was a disappointing flop for me that I just stopped watching after a few episodes. I’ve been very committed to this show from the start but I think they have lost their way. I hope an on demand provider takes advantage of the data they must have on localised support to show popular shows at cinemas – it would be genius and so easy to promote via the platform.
That’s my highlights from 2015 – let’s see what 2016 has in store!
Storehouse – a beautiful way to blog
Posted on November 14, 2015
I was recommended the Storehouse App for my iPhone last year as an app that was made for the newly updated iOS 8. It arrived at a perfect time for me – I was on holiday in North Devon with plenty of time to detox from the digital overload of my job and indulge in the pure fun made possible by the technology in our pockets in 2014. I placed my phone on the grass and recorded timelapse video of the clouds skipping by above my head, used voice memos to record the stream of unthrottled imagination of my daughter as she learned to master spoken language and took endless snaps of our adventures in the countryside and on the coast. All this turned out to be perfect fodder for storehouse – which gave me incredible editing power in an effortlessly intuitive touch interface. I created endless layouts of images, copy and videos within a framework you simply can’t make look ugly or DIY. It was no surprise when I read the creator had left Apple to start up Storehouse – its feels as natural as an iOS app and made for iPhone and iPad. I particularly love that publishing the content creates a public URL for each one, rather than within a social network. The content looked great on my phone, but I found most of the time it looked awesome on a desktop machine too, thanks to size and quality of imagery my phone’s camera captures. I fear it will replace blogging altogether.
I can’t find a widget to pull the content into my blog, so here are the two stories I created from the holiday:
North Devon Part 1
North Devon Part 2
It was such a rewarding way to create content online, and a stunning record of our holiday that I had to have another go when we went back to North Devon 9 months later.
Just snapping away on a sunny afternoon on my paternity leave, I uploaded the lot and let the app suggest a format and flow – with a couple of tweaks you can get great results:
Garden Makeover 2013 / 14
Posted on September 25, 2014
This is my second big garden project.*
Jennie and I bought our first home in August 2012 – a 1930s three bed terrace in Warwick. We’d been planning to buy for years, but were spurred into action by firstly the birth of our daughter Bella, and shortly after, our landlord giving us notice he was selling and we’d have to move on. Cap in hand, we asked our parents for help raising a deposit. We are exceedingly lucky to have such generous and resourceful parents – thank you.
In the mortgage application process we listed our previous addresses and in the last five years we had a combined total of eight homes – it was time to settle down! Even my tireless parents were getting weary of helping us move house again and again (and again) – so we fixed our interest rate for 5 years and agreed to stay put for at least this period.
The house was in great condition and had received a neutral makeover to prepare it for sale, so settling in was easy. The garden however, was an entirely different matter. It was vast compared to our previous houses – maybe sixty feet long and half as wide. In one corner was a paved area with a rotating washing line, and in the other were two large sheds. In between was nothing but lawn – an amazing blank canvas to work with!
Here are the pics from Rightmove (before we started any work):
Lifting a tile from the paved corner we found a foot of concrete beneath – foundations for a structure? Prep for a rear facing garage perhaps? We’ll never know, but we decided the sheds could sit on it to give us maximum lawn space. The empty sheds wouldn’t weigh much but were very fragile as any ageing, flimsy sheds are. With bribes of cake we enticed enough family members around to help us in the task and with the help of many nylon straps slung under each shed we manoeuvred them to their new home. We turfed the spot they had been and got 25% more lawn. So far so good – the next task (for me anyhow) was to choose where to have our new veggie patch.
We chose the bottom left corner as it had plenty of light, was close to the sheds and could be separated from the rest of the garden by some kind of fence or barrier (more on that below.) With Bella napping twice a day, on the first Saturday I got the chance, I grabbed a spade and threw myself into an activity i was bred for. Imagine my shock when the spade hit rock three inches under grass, finding half bricks and concrete rubble under a thin layer of turf. Imagine my anger and frustration in finding the same around it for six feet in every direction. We have to assume that the previous owner – an old school builder – buried his rubbish rather than pay for it to be dealt with. All sorts came out of the ground – six foot long concrete fence posts, dozens of breeze blocks and much more. It was a very long and difficult task – sometimes more than a foot deep. Here is a pic from the first couple of days:
It took months to complete, and thanks to my dad’s help and his trailer we carted endless bags of rubble to the tip. A rough working out of the number of bags we shifted came to around two tonnes – what a mission!
Finally the earth was cleared and with many bags of premium horse muck the fallow land was well prepared for spring.
Jennie decided that a living willow hedge / fence (fedge) would be an interesting and different divider between lawn and sheds / veg plot. It would also grow high quickly, creating some screening from the overlooking four story block of flats at the bottom of the garden. We live by the river Avon, that is also lined with huge willows so it seems appropriate. Willow is nearly indestructible so Jennie actually ordered it online and found a very long cardboard box in the alley one day. We simply drove the thick ends into the ground and wove the uprights – tieing them together with cable ties. Here is a pic of the work in progress:
All the boring stuff was done so we moved onto arguing about what to plant where, after securing a quarter of the beds for herbs I let Jennie go mad with the rest which she did with help from my mum. Over time the beds have filled with a variety of beautiful stuff including a fig tree, bamboos, grasses and fennel with thornless blackberries and hops covering the fences rapidly. Jennie ordered several trees from the net (more huge boxes) – two apple, one cherry and a silver birch which we planted into islands in the lawn.
We debated how to carve up our veg patch like the treaty of Versailles – but we had so much more space than previous nearly everything we wanted could be accommodated (or so we thought.) From memory we had courgette, squash, peas, broad beans, beetroot, rhubarb, strawberries, gooseberries, black currents, red currants, corn (on the cob) spring onions and some salads leaves. Obviously this lots grew massively out of control and we could barely get at some of it to pick. We had a great crop – much more than we could eat.
As the 2013 August bank holiday came around we marvelled at the transformation we had accomplished in a single year – and started planning the next twelve months. The second year’s vegetable patch was much more restrained in terms of volume, and more focused on learning what grows best where and under what conditions. In the picture below you can see the set up (note willow on the left starting to get bushy.)
The crop was good and bad this year – we had lots of peas and strawberries and our first crop of gooseberries but the broad beans and black currants shrivelled or were devoured by bugs. We tried tomato plants in three locations – our conservatory, in some fairly cheap plastic green houses and in the soil against the fence. The crop was good in all places but exceptional against the fence – that must be the sunniest spot in the garden as the amount of fruit on the vine weighed it down to the point it needed support not to collapse entirely.
The next project was a brick BBQ that I’ve had on my wish list since I the epic one we had on honeymoon in Spain (see a pic here.) My dad and I had an awesome day of bonding where I learned how to mix mortar, lay bricks and point the mortar. The final result was very satisfying and although it has no straight lines anywhere in its construction, it’s not going to fall down any time soon. See the pics below:
We christened it with Chinese marinated chicken on the left hand side and Mediterranean veg on the right hand side, as per the intended design.
2014 August bank holiday came around and the garden was coming to some kind of maturity, and looking amazing. Bella is old enough to enjoy it now and spends hours in any weather with a variety of pursuits – from sand throwing to her daily pebble admin, digging up worms and picking blackberries to force feed to me. Here are a couple of ‘after’ shots – compare to the ones at the top to see how much it’s changed.
UCE Survivors
Posted on March 11, 2013
In June 7 years will have passed since I graduated from the University of Central England (AKA UCE.) UCE is not a venerable red brick institution of academia, instead a fusion of an old polytechnic with several previously independant schools of art, jewellery, music and nursing. There are 8 separate campuses spread across Birmingham, offering (mostly) vocationally focused education.
I didn’t have a great experience at UCE, I studied Marketing in the Business School in Perry Barr. The joke I heard before I joined was that you could get into courses with a U, C & E grade at A level. Perfect for me – as these were the grades I received in Chemistry, Biology & English in my first year at college – prompting me to try the equally comically named GNVQ (known as ‘generally not very quick’) in Business Studies. I later found out I could have attended UCE with no qualifications at all. Consequently my class and whole campus was a very mixed bag.
A lot of crazy times were had in and outside the class room, lots good and some very bad. I’m attempting to write up some of the notable events before I forget the details as I think it will make a good record of the culture at the time.
In the meantime I’ve started an online community for a bit of fun and to find out where my fellow UCE graduates have ended up in their careers and lives. I’ve called it UCE Survivors as (on my course at least) you had to have some grit to get anything out of it. I’ve kept in touch with plenty of my class mates and friends and the same attitude has allowed them to get ahead in the ‘real’ world – academic or not.
Now we can all laugh about UCE, I hope the community will show how far people have gone and we can share some stories, memories and many a business referral or two. First job is to get the group out there so all the survivors can get involved, and if it takes off I’ve got some great ideas to keep people interested. It could be big!
Garden Makeover 2012
Posted on January 26, 2013 1 Comment
Jennie and I moved from Kings Heath to Solihull in December 2011. We moved from one small rented, terraced house to an even smaller one in order to be close to my work when our daughter arrived in April the next year. The previous house had a perfectly landscaped garden that we couldn’t make any real changes too (although we grew some amazing veg in containers.) The new house had a largeish garden that was a total mess, but if we put the effort in it could be anything we wanted it to be!
As you can see in the pic below the garden was 80% weeds and 20% cat poo.
Job one was to dig over the whole garden – removing plants, rubble, tree stumps and bucket-fulls of cat poo – and I’m not kidding. The previous tenants must not have had cats so the whole neighbourhood must have been using it as their communal sh*tter.
This was hard work but every spade that got turned over was a step closer to a clean slate.
We made an ambitious plan of how to divide up the slabbed and now bare earth into a veg patch, borders, a new lawn, greenhouse, covered strawberry patch, herb bed, climbing beds (connecting over an arch) and containers.
We got some vital help from my mum and dad in laying the turf which worked a treat. The veg patch was divided into four and we planted garlic, beetroot, broadbeans and onions. I used all the rocks I’d dug out of the soil to make a path that I was very pleased with.
We got a bargain plastic greenhouse for starting of our seedlings, and placed it over earth so we could grow tomatoes in it too.
Next we invested in tonnes of border plants to surround our new lawn and the edges of the patio. We planted a tree we brought from the last house, created a huge herb bed (after visiting the National Herb Centre in Banbury) and planted Jennie’s dad’s strawberries covered with a net strung over knee high metal arches.
By April everything was well settled and the weather was kind – the garden was looking great! We had all the mint, thyme, sage, rosemary, parsley and oregano we could eat too. Soon things were getting out of control – the sweet peas were so big they were pulling down the wire guide I’d put up, the lawn needed cutting every week, the garlic shoots were reaching for the sky and we’d added a wigwam for peas to grow up.
Our strawberry patch burst into life, after two years in pots the plants were raring to go. The tomato plants started a bit late but we still got a few tasty ones.
When our daughter Bella arrived in late April our priorities changed, predictably, and the only thing we did in the garden was sit and enjoy it.
When we got the news in June that our landlord was selling the house and we had two months to find a new home, it came as a horrible shock. Looking back I don’t regret the effort we put in as the end result was very satisfying. Now we live in Warwick the garden is double the size, and has it’s own set of challenges, but as we own the house we’ll pace ourselves and hatch a new plan to make it over.
Tom Ives 