Burns night Hackney style: images

Nice to get off the phone from the HoxtonHopper to roll up to this very fine display of pictures taken at the Hackney LCC's annual Burns bash. Looks like a fun time was had by all, with John Campbell very ably MCing the night. Notable turns this year included the Muckers unplugged along with the other traditional after-dinner recitations, including of course, an Immortal Memory speech which traces for the assembled company Burns' development as a cyclist.

The Muckers plugged in for a couple of sets of dancing, and despite a few intial difficulties with the lighting, a fine time was had by all. The 25 dance-only tickets had happily been appropriated by some hipster youth, who apparently much appreciated their initiation into the finer points of Scottish culture.

Not too late for a new year's resolution

I very much prefer not to hit the ground running, so I've been tapering in my activities since the festive break. But here we are on the second Monday of the month, and as yet no new paying clients have been found for the cabinet.

This is not too serious in the short term, but it would be nice to hit five figures of gross income well within the first year of operation, so I've been strolling around the internet "networking". I also started my studies in German, and thought about brushing up my Russian and Spanish. Proper translators it seems, have at least four languages in their quiver.

My German blog is a joke. For the time being the unfortunate Herr Julius Beezer operates a wordpress blog in that language, which consists of machine translated paragraphs from the original English. Well, it's one way to learn. Fortunately I have no other immediate choice as I ditched all the kilos of dull grammars and dictionaries in Switzerland a while back, and it's a long ride down there to pick them up (though they also have my tent, and some low-rider front pannier racks that I miss from time to time).

Herr Beezer is certainly not best pleased with his service provider: wordpress seems to barf on straighforward textual postings with alarming regularity, though they send cheerful notices confirming the receipt of an automated bug report, so he hasn't quite abandoned them in disgust for the timebeing.

Anyway, those are my new year resolutions: to brush up my languages, and find clients who need the fr>en professional service.