Happy new year, happy new decade and happy rest-of-your-lives to all my friends and family across the world.

To paraphrase Quentin Crisp, think how you’d be – how you’d behave, how you’d dress, who you’d love – if there was no one in the world watching you – and JFDI.

SG’s 10 best bits of the last 10 years

Best sportsperson – Ricky Ponting (Australian cricket captain)

Best album – Hairspray the soundtrack

Best book – Shantaram

Best pub – Hermits Cave, Camberwell

Best film – The Boat that Rocked

Best holiday – Kangaroo Island, Australia

Best web things – BBC, Facebook, any of the google sites and apps, spotify

Best tv series – 24

Best purchase – Trixie, my BMW. She stood the test of time and served me well for most of this decade.

Best gadget – its a toss up between skyplus and the creative range of mp3 players

remember, be nice to one another and kinder to animals, children and those less fortunate than you.

happy new year

sg x

I’ve even turned a year older.

S’pose I’ve been busy mulling over loads of ideas for self learning. Thinking about trying my hand at wordpress theme design (but I haven’t got a creative bone in my body……), creating a site using html 5 (but on what exactly?), getting the hang of Aptana Studio (for building the html 5 site, maybe) and learning a little Jquery coding.

You see, there’s always something to learn about, the pleasure and pain of life I guess. My brain never really rests; if only my body was the same.

Then there’s work.

Absolutely thrilled with how well the recent project went, the team were indeed fabulous – those Amazonians, those MandSers, those designers, creatives and testers. All worked their socks / heels off and did brilliantly.

Me – I talked a lot, planned a lot, browsed a lot, drank a lot of starbucks, stressed loads and probably drove folks mad… but we did it! And now we are going to do it more….. soon.

And then there’s the Australia thing. Sadly, still waiting….. and waiting …….. and waiting. We’ve done all we can and just need to …..

Currently loving Spotify, and House, riding my vespa, reading a couple of good books, and planning for Rome next week.

Oh, and looking for a new wordpress theme for this blog. And fixing it, the tagging is broken somehow.

<end of brain dump>

So, in a determined effort not to become one of those stats, I thought I’d update it today with my to do list so that when I am reclining on a beach (in winter) in Queensland in a couple of months, I can look back here and see why I needed a break!

Here we go – between now and June 26th:

• phone the design agency to see when they want me to start

• land the first phase of a big site refresh project at work – new global navigation and stuff, folks

• line up a couple of web agencies in Sydney to work with on a site rebuild

• do the paperwork for the local fete which I am organising for September – and line up events and entertainers etc

• finish painting the front of the house

• try and get another new idea for londonforfree off the ground

• plan my trip to Oz – internal flights and so on

• finish Grown Up Digital and become an active member of the twittersphere again

Will I get it all done before the end of June??? Probably, hopefully…… then I will definitely need a nice break in Oz

I’ve been thinking for a while about getting a new phone so I can check out all the mobile apps available. But after posting about it on Facebook, I realise the choice is staggering.

Now I really don’t need an iPhone as all I would use it for are the mobile apps. And I’m a big google fan. So I’ve decided to wait until a cool new phone using the Android platform becomes available and more apps get launched for it.

In the meantime, I’ve opted for a dongle with 3 network – bargain at £90 for 12 months “unlimited” access. Not exactly mobile apps but mobile web using my laptop . Haven’t tried it out yet – might take it to starbucks one day soon and give it a whirl.

This week has been amazing for London for Free. The number of visitors in the past month has now exceeded 21,000 and adsense revenue for Feb has jumped 30% on January.  And we do absolutely zero paid advertising.

The site is now ranking top of results for a number of google searches around “London”, so that would help. It even beats commercial sites about London. e.g. for “London walks” I rank number 1, above “walks.com” and others.

So I’ve been thinking of ways of boosting the site’s numbers even more and I’ve now set up a twitter account for London for Free, where I will try to post daily info and links to free stuff. Its also another way of learning more about how twitter can be used for business purposes.

This week I also discovered an excellent plug-in for Outlook called xobni. Can’t rave enough about it – it brings all your LinkedIn and Facebook contacts and statuses into the outlook client so you can see info about people as you read emails from them. It also enables you to integrate hotmail and gmail accounts so you can check them all from outlook. An excellent plug-in.

Lastly, I’ve bought two books recently which look very interesting.

Click and Grown up Digital.

I’ll post reviews of them once I’ve read them.

Some people are generally curious about the whole idea of them and want to learn more, others see them as a waste of time and potentially dangerous. But for every conversation I have with someone (such as my partner) trying to warn me about the trouble they have caused and why I shouldn’t write it , I have another with someone else who thinks they are great and that I should keep on writing.

So why do I do it? Here’s why.

• I write it so I can learn about it, so I can understand this thing called blogging

• I write it because I can – I am privileged to live in a country which supports freedom of the press and free speech

• I write it because I believe in the voice of the everyday person needing to be heard for political, social and cultural reasons, no matter how inane the conversation

• I write it because I enjoy sharing knowledge, always have, always will – I’ve learned loads from the web and this is my small way of giving something back

• I write it because its an easier and more accessible way of communicating what I am up to with a wide group of family and friends than by email

And yes, I fully appreciate the dangers of not only blogs but of social media in general (people being sacked for their Facebook comments and so on). Naturally I don’t wish to be sacked, sued or assaulted, or to offend any individual or group as a result of what I might write – ok, except for George Bush, child abusers, racists, homophobes and bigots. You can all feel free to be as offended as you like, the more the better.

But I will continue writing my blog until I run out of things to say. And people who know me might appreciate that that day is some time away.

We had another highly successful pre-xmas spectacular sale day last week at M & S – 20 % off absolutely everything (OK, not food or tech stuff) and again, head office staff were asked to help out in stores. So once again I went to the Marble Arch store, but this time I spent the day inside, on a sales counter packing purchases and laughing with customers and regular M & S store staff.

I’ve never laughed so much at work  in ages, and I met some lovely store staff including a chap from Poland (some of whom remembered me from last time). We also received some compliments from customers about how nice it was to see happy staff serving – so I guess it was good for business – and the day just flew by. Maybe I’m born to be the new Mrs Slocombe

Away from M & S and on to christmas shopping – and yep, you guessed it, back to M & S. Sdf and her M & S “Partner of an Employee” discount card have become very well acquainted lately – it will be a traumatic parting for them if I leave – and so we spent most of yesterday morning in – sigh, the Marble Arch store. My world is becoming very surreal these days.

In fact, yesterday was a massive shopping day in central London, and damn if I didn’t realise it before we set off. Loads and loads of people.

They closed Oxford Street and Regent Street to traffic and had lots of christmas entertainment – carol singers, bands and so on – so after visiting the competition to buy some cheap, poor quality clothes for around the house – I decided not to do christmas shopping (too many people, great excuse!).

It then became less stressful as sdf and I wandered around laughing and taking some silly photos, enjoying the christmas atmosphere and the classic London christmas smell of roasting chestnuts.

I did draw the line however at her suggestion of sneaking into the middle of a High School Musical dance routine for a photo as my knees were killing me from having danced at the fabulous OLP christmas party the night before. (Salt of the earth, the OLP gang, love em to bits!)

Which means of course that I still haven’t finished christmas shopping, haven’t written any cards – goodbye last posting date, it was nice to see you – and haven’t put up any decorations at home. Maybe I can use the excuse of my badly cut finger thanks to an incident at the PwC ball two weeks ago, involving the lovely Mr D, his housemate and some bottles of red wine

Either way, at least I have retrieved the tree out of the loft and away from hungry squirrels. Maybe we’ll put it up next weekend……..

I told him the story of Thursday, of how I was handing out leaflets for the sale at our Marble Arch store and then the competition turned up. “I hope you got rid of them”, he said.

helping the competition

Indeed I did. In true Aussie fashion

When I sent the press article to Kimberly, her response was

“You can’t say this year has been dull in terms of work”.

Nope. One minute sorting post and parcels, the next helping in one of England’s flagship retail stores. It’s a laugh   Whatever my next job is, I clearly need to consider this factor when deciding whether to take it – so I guess that definitely means no jobs with the likes of Pizza Hut or Transport for London.

One great thing about working for M & S is the ridiculously generous staff discount you get. I think it’s recognised in the industry as being one of the best. I happened to mention to my friends at work that I was going to the pwc UK IT ball next week  (thanks for the invite, Mr D) and I needed to get something to wear to it. They showed me some tuxedos on the m & s website and also gave me ideas for party trainers and shirts.

So yesterday sdf and I headed off to Westfield.

We spent most of our time in M & S and did our bit for the UK economy, making two trips to the car. (Thanks to a tip from one of my Royal Mail friends, we knew to take the car and weren’t shocked by the car park fee – £12 for up to 5 hours, quite expensive but probably worthwhile if you’re doing lots of shopping.)

Westfield is absolutely enormous. I reckon its probably twice as big as Bluewater – there were whole sections we never even got near. I recommend anyone who is going there that they get there early and wear comfy shoes.

I’ve now got my suit and can’t wait for Friday. It will be lovely to see some of my pwc mates again.

Between now and then, I’ve got a load of stuff to do for the Brunswick Park Tenants and Residents Association, which I was voted in as Chair of recently. Emails to write, xmas drinks to arrange, web site to continue setting up.

And, speaking of websites, lots of changes to make for pivotpowerproducts, marywadeassociation and london for free. And then there’s David, who contacted me recently asking if I could help him create another site, this time a French version of londonforfree.

Its a great idea and we’ll catch up to discuss further – but, er, not this week. I think I need a bit of a rest!

It was wonderful to see that he had become married to his partner – but very sad to see that he had to move countries and make some personal sacrifices in order to do it. It made me realise how lucky I am to live in the UK, where same sex marriage was legalised around 3 years ago.

But is “lucky” the right word? Surely, we shouldn’t feel the need to be thankful to our governments for recognising civil partnerships. Surely, as a social group, we should have expected legal recognition to have been granted world-wide as a matter of course several decades ago.

Ironically, being able to get married wasn’t such a big deal for me personally as I have been openly gay for as long as I can remember and have always talked about it in the same terms as I speak about being an Aussie. The fact I am now married hasn’t changed the way I live my life at all – though it leads to more arguments with call centre operators who ask for my “marital status”. (Message to companies: don’t try and sell me anything if you can’t correctly record my status.)

Being gay is simply a part of who I am. My entire family and circle of friends have always known I was gay and have always welcomed my partners and friends into their homes, right from when I was a youngster. They accepted it as being me. They didn’t and don’t need any laws to make them do that.

And I’ve never had to hide my sexuality or felt the need to apologise for it – and I never will. So laws haven’t changed that either.

But I know that I am one of the fortunate few in the world – and that until same sex marriages are recognised worldwide, as a worldwide community we will still have to fight for true equality and to end homophobia and discrimination.

Not that legal recognition of same sex marriages will put an end to homophobia. But hopefully it will eventually make homophobia and sexuality-based discrimination appear to be even more outdated and irrelevant in our society.

And we can then all get on with living our different lives, with our different families, in our different ways – working together to address the REAL problems of our world such as the environment, global hunger and poverty.

With minimal advertising and a next-to-nothing budget the organisers provided a brilliant day. Free face painting, free bouncy castle (the two most popular activities from what I could see), a very popular cake stall, free barbeque, bands and choirs, sports activities and various stalls including from the Council and local police.

And I was struck by just how successful the event was.

I guess we must have had over 300 people visit. It reminded me of our other big event: our first public meeting held last year where we established the association. Two big things that the Association has done – and two big turnouts of public support.

In between times, the committee has worked very hard to navigate its way through lots of admin processes involving the Council and various other public bodies and spent lots of time debating issues, but I guess most of this is probably quite dry and uninteresting to the wider community.

But I think they’ve spoken loud and clear on a couple of things: they support the need for the association and they support the idea of free public events in the park. So hopefully we will do more of them in the coming year, whilst also working away at the “duller” but equally important stuff that is necessary to keep the fun stuff happening.

I was also amazed by just how multi-cultural our local community is. Its great.

And I was reminded of that wonderful Margaret Mead quote about a small group of people changing the world.

Our park has had a tarnished reputation over the years but what we did yesterday was basically reclaim it for the decent folk – some of whom have actively avoided it for many years.

It wouldn’t have happened without the efforts of a small group of people working together to organise the bands, food, stalls and so on. And without the support of the wider community, who simply voted with their feet.

Simple actions that made a difference. Wonderful.