Yesterday was the highlight of the zinester’s year: the London Zine Symposium 2010. I wasn’t in the best of moods at the beginning. Flicking through fanzines, I began to get quite irritated with drunk vegan anarchists and all the same boring things they write about eating out of skips and living in trees. And art students! Five quid for a zine that doesn’t even have any words in it?

I was still feeling grumpy after last year’s humiliation. On the one day of 2009 when every zine reader in Britain was in the same room as me, I failed to sell a single copy of my lovingly cut and pasted and printed and stapled Space Times (still a work of genius, still boxed up by the dozen at home). Bloody zine people with your knitted Mooncups and your BA in Fine Art and your lack of interest in my zines.

This year I’d decided to manage expectations and just print a few copies of my new thing, A Rigorously Unscientific Study of Zines, Zinesters and Zine-making According to the Internet. It’s filled with semi-credible data that I’ve gleaned from web searches, represented as graphs, pictures or quotations. Did you know, for example, that there are as many books about fanzines as there are about bricklaying, Alice Cooper and Cornish nationalism put together? Or that Lidl is six times more likely to be mentioned online in conjunction with zines than any other supermarket? We could almost say that Lidl is the zinester’s supermarket of choice.

I put my little pile of Rigorously Unscientifics on the ‘individual zine table’ and tried not to look at them sitting there as I went round the stalls. I bought some lovely things: Saban Kazim’s really great comic about going to the job centre; an interesting history of the Mayor of Garratt, a fictional position that was elected in the 18th century as a parody of corrupt parliamentary elections; and Joe Decie’s beautifully illustrated guide to the various British English uses of the word ‘piss’. I got ‘Pissing in the Wind’ as a present for a Canadian friend, but now I’m thinking I might accidentally forget to give it to her.

By the end of the afternoon, things were looking up. The rain had eased, Josie Long had made us laugh and I’d eaten an excellent vegan flapjack. I went to see what had become of my new zines. “Oh, you’re the one who made them!” said the people minding the stall, “They were really popular. They’ve all sold out!” Woo-hoo! Thank you anarchists! Thank you art students! I should never have doubted you.

• If you’d like a copy of A Rigorously Unscientific Study of Zines, Zinesters and Zine-making According to the Internet, please send £1 + a bit for P&P by PayPal to this address here.

He drew the shapes on proportional graph paper and I swore and shouted my way through stints of shoddy darning, knitting on too-big needles and Swiss darning in the wrong sort of stitch.

Dan seems quite pleased with them though, as evidenced by his willingness to wear the jumper in public.

A monolingual advert for Sainsbury in Cardiff. I can’t decide whether the man on the left is an apathetic monoglot ‘busy person’, or whether his Sainsbury’s carrier bag is full of marker pens.

So, since I started writing at the beginning of January, I’ve been trying out lots of different ‘background’ radio.

In the past I used to listen to the birdsong on DAB, but it went off-air last year when Amazing Radio launched. I finally got round to trying out birdsongradio.com the other day and it’s a real disappointment.

They’re selling the recording as an mp3 and a CD, so I shouldn’t be surprised that the free streamed version is crap. But still, there’s nothing like having a peaceful outdoor scene interrupted by a woman telling you to “discover relaxation during your day” over and over again to make you want to punch someone, preferably that woman.

Dan got me started on Radio 3, which is great for working to at home, as long as you switch off before you get caught up in some bellyaching 2-hour German opera marathon. It’s not loud enough to block out other stuff happening in the office though.

Clare Teal is pretty good on iPlayer – I like big band music but rarely know the words, so the lyrics aren’t distracting. The problem is, it’s just one hour a week, so by the time you’ve dragged yourself away from Facebook, it’s practically time to put something else on.

My favourite background radio is easily Bobby Friction on the Asian Network. 12 hours a week of loud, inoffensive music, often in a language I can’t understand, with a DJ who doesn’t sound like an arse. Brilliant!

My mum would have hated it. She screams if you so much as pretend there’s a bird about to land on her head. Every time!

In September, when I wrote about Geocities closing down, I should have guessed there would be someone out there with the aptitude and inclination to preserve all that content – and it turns out there were quite a lot of people. Idly Googling myself* over Christmas, I stumbled upon reocities.com.

Reocities is the result of some last minute, very hard work by a coder in the Netherlands, ‘J‘, who was suddenly inspired to download and save as much of Geocities as possible. He’s managed to store over 2 million accounts, including the venerable Plush But Itchy Land of Cheesecake and Suchlike.

J’s diary, The Making of ReoCities, tells you exactly how he did it. He had so little time to capture all the files that the diary reminds you of a thriller – you’d just need to swap MB/s for mph and pretend that Yahoo! was about to detonate a bomb rather than turn off some servers, and it could be a ropey episode of 24.

By the morning of the big switch-off, you can see that J is thinking along the same lines: “08:15 AM. Mod_rewrite reminds me of a chainsaw. It’s extremely powerful stuff but if you’re not careful you’re going to get hurt, badly.”

I’m not sure I can go along with J’s emotional argument that Yahoo!’s closure of Geocities is akin to the Taliban’s destruction of ancient religious artefacts, but I do think he’s done a great thing.

And he’s not the only one. Another site which mirrors Plush But Itchy is the frame-free geocities.ws. They’ve stored sites by name rather than using the original Neighbourhoods structure. So if you’re looking for your own site but can’t remember the address, try searching there. Perhaps sensibly, given the legal ambiguity of hosting other people’s content, geocities.ws have opted to make their site anonymous.

The smartest-looking Geocities backup site I’ve seen so far is geociti.es, built by The Archive Team (slogan: “We are going to rescue your shit”). They’ve written a history of Geocities and are looking for people to help with Geocities ‘heritage’ projects.

Bizarrely, as a result of these and other efforts, there are now more opportunities than ever before to visit the Land of Cheesecake and suchlike.

–

*Although I’m disappointed to be included on a page about men with breasts, at least my name is no longer associated with genital crabs.

Here’s the teddy bear I knitted for baby Natalie. Admittedly I made the arms upside down by mistake, but even so, this is easily my favourite of all the bears I’ve knitted. Besides, the error with the arms makes it look like she’s constantly saying “Yippee!” – which I don’t think is a bad look for a teddy bear.

I’ve got better at embroidering eyes since I started on these bears, although I still struggle with noses. There’s something just right about this bear’s eyes – she’s got more character than the others. Within seconds of finishing this one it was obvious she was called Henrietta and liked moshing to The Fratellis. I wonder whether The Fratellis will still be around when Natalie is old enough to project personalities on to her toys herself.

Incidentally, I reckon this is going to be my last teddy-related blog post, for fear of ending up typecast by those nasty automated link farm websites:

Finally I’ve done something about it: here’s an article on school twinning, which I’ve had published in the current edition.
——————————————————————————————————

Twin and entwine Twinning gives an extra boost to languages in schools for both teachers and pupils, says Philippa Law

Download article (pdf, 1.69mb)

Exchange visits have long been part of language learning. There’s nothing like being immersed in a language for a week or two to improve your fluency and confidence, and learning vocabulary in the ‘real world’ can be so much more memorable than in the classroom. As an A-level student, it was only when I was faced with a dormitory full of giggling French girls that I realised the difference between je l’aime (what I’d said) and je l’aime bien (what I’d meant).

These days, schools often do more than straightforward exchange visits, ‘twinning’ internationally with far-flung schools in a variety of imaginative ways.

On an exchange trip to Russia, 14 year old pupils at Calday Grange Grammar School in Merseyside used their Russian to interview survivors of the siege of Leningrad. The teenagers were told moving, personal stories of the hardships people endured in the 1940s, such as families grinding up furniture to bulk out bread dough with the sawdust. “A lot of the elderly people said they’d never told anyone these stories before,” says headteacher Andrew Hall. “They wouldn’t have told an adult, but they were happy to talk to a child who was the same age they were at the time.”

On their return to Merseyside, the pupils translated the material they had collected into English and, with the help of their Russian teacher, Katya Hughes, turned it into a book called The Siege of Leningrad through a Child’s Eyes.

Hall says that twinning is invaluable. “You see the satisfaction in their eyes when they realise they’re not learning an abstract subject, they can actually communicate with other people.”

As well as facilitating Russian exchanges, the school regularly swaps teachers with Hangzhou Foreign Language School in China. “They send us a teacher for about 12 weeks and we send two teachers back for five weeks in the summer term each year.” An impressive 240 pupils at Calday Grange have chosen to study Mandarin, all aiming at GCSE or higher.

The partnership has benefited other schools in the area too. While offering support and advice to primary schools thinking of introducing Mandarin, Calday Grange teachers found that there were few teaching materials available for younger learners. So they worked together with teachers from Hangzhou to produce Maomao and the Bamboo, a dual language children’s book, illustrated by a Calday Grange pupil.

Hall admits that these school partnerships, which emphasise face-to-face language learning, can be expensive. “For our pupils, a trip to China costs around £800 and a trip to Russia is about £500.”

But twinning doesn’t have to be costly. When schools have access to email and Skype, pupils and teachers can interact with native speakers of another language quickly, easily and above all, cheaply.

The Ridings’ Federation Winterbourne International Academy (TRFWIA) in Bristol received British Council funding to help pay for initial reciprocal visits with its twin school in Tomsk, Russia. Now that the schools have agreed on how they want the twinning project to work, staff and students communicate by email and videoconference, which requires no additional money to maintain.
The partnership began in the English department and later spread to language classes. “Russian is now offered to all students on a voluntary basis, with the aim to offer accreditation in the future,” says Shelley Swift, head of international learning. Swift believes that the twinning project has given students the motivation to learn Russian, because it enables them to explore “relevant topics with real people”.

But while TRFWIA has found online technology useful in bringing native speakers into the classroom, Awsworth Primary School in Nottingham has not been so lucky. “Online links are incredibly difficult,” says international co-ordinator Ian Baxter, who uses twinning to support Spanish teaching for 7- to 11-year-olds. “It’s been a struggle because the Mexican school we work with has limited ICT access. Their teacher has to go to the local internet cafe to pick up messages.” He admits that sometimes it’s easier for the teachers to send letters to each other by post, which lacks the immediacy of communicating online.

Nonetheless, Baxter is positive about the benefits of international twinning. He says his pupils love it “when things are presented in a new and exciting way, and things from another culture engage them immediately.”

And, for Awsworth, twinning with a Spanish-speaking school is as much about inspiring the teachers as the pupils. “We don’t have any fluent speakers on the staff, so it’s a real challenge. The international links help the language come alive.”

Awsworth was matched with twin school Veinte de Noviembre through the Háblame linking project, which has put a number of Nottingham primary schools in contact with partners in Coahuila, Mexico. Keeping in touch with their Mexican counterparts allows teachers in Nottingham to keep practising and improving their Spanish. They can also share ideas for language classes and learn from their partner school’s experience. In this way, twinning has helped staff to develop language teaching techniques.

In addition to its Mexican partnership, Awsworth Primary is twinned with a number of other schools around the world. Although these links are motivated more by a general desire to “open up the world” to children, they present further opportunities to enthuse pupils about foreign languages. When the children were fundraising for their twin school in Tanzania, for example, it was a good excuse to introduce them to the Tanzanian language, Swahili.

There are many different schemes and organisations that can match schools with partners overseas. Some are free, others charge registration fees. Some will find a school a partner within a day or two, others may take several months. Some will provide activities and support, others will simply establish the link. Global Gateway is a kind of ‘dating’ site for schools. It’s free to register, post an advert, search for partner schools and reply to other schools who are looking for a twin. Alternatively, rafi.ki is an online learning community that gives schools access to tools, such as instant messaging. Member schools can take part in existing projects using the lesson plans and interactive resources provided on the website. And there’s BBC World Class, which doesn’t organise twinning projects, but can put you in touch with a selection of helpful organisations.

Schools that already have a twin can access the Comenius Bilateral Partnerships programme, which offers travel grants to enable teachers and pupils to visit other European countries.

Another approach is to mix languages with a practical application. Achievers International teaches students to run their own import-export business in collaboration with a partner school overseas.

Twinning takes perseverance, says Baxter. “There might be misgivings within the school at first,” he acknowledges, “But don’t be held back. And don’t rely on just one link because if that fails, your whole project will fall down.”

Baxter says it’s important to get other people on board, too. He meets with a group of staff once every half term to discuss twinning projects. “Don’t be the only person pushing international links.”

Swift agrees, adding that the key to success is “mutuality in the partnership goals, strong communication and sustainable and realistic projects”.

Here, belatedly, is the second knitting project I finished the other week – the stripey blanket I started months ago. It’s… well, someone was kind enough to describe it as a ‘travel’ blanket. It doesn’t quite stretch across the end of our bed, but it adequately covers four knees in front of the TV.

At one point, three particular stripes reminded me of a Zoom ice lolly, and that made me think it would be fun to try knitting bits of familiar pictures (starting with confectionery wrappers) and Photoshopping the knitted bits into place.

It turns out Felix had already had a similar idea, inspired by a splendid cairn. Look at the pictures!

Don’t you just wish you would stumble across a giant knitted cairn on a country walk? Just once?