Christopher Hamilton

I find it difficult to really talk about the events of 9/11. The difficulty doesn’t come because I lost any friends that day, or because I have a personal connection to the events. I obviously have that shared empathy and shock that the world experienced as we watched those events unfold, but I was already in something of a state of shock at the time. I had made the decision, as a 22 year old kid, to move to the other side of the world on my own and spend a year backpacking around Australia. I’d arrived in the country a week earlier, and with the levels of fear, excitement, and severe jet lag I was experiencing, the events of that day are vague snapshots of images and thoughts.

I remember being woken up to the news and sitting in front of a TV all day watching CNN, BBC News, and every other news channel we could find in a state of total disbelief. I remember thinking that what I was watching couldn’t be real, and I remember calling home to speak to my family, and ex-work colleagues. The job I had left to go traveling had an office in one of the towers, but we had closed it shortly before I had left. I want to say it was only weeks before, but it may have been longer than that. Either way I wanted to check whether anyone I knew would have been there; they weren’t. The days after 9/11 were all a blur and I really don’t have a clear picture of those days in my head anymore. I know it changed everything, even for a backpacker on the other side of the world in Australia. The world became afraid overnight, air travel became much more restricted, and there was an undercurrent of anger that spread throughout every political discussion regardless of the country.

Even with all of this I didn’t feel as connected to the events as people back here in the UK did. Australia is a very strange place because it is so physically isolated from most of the world. That isolation had an unusual effect on me and I became detached from almost everything that wasn’t my immediate surroundings, the people I spent time with, or the events in Australia itself. For that entire year I had almost no clue what went on in the rest of the world barring those major events that burst through that bubble. It wasn’t until I got home a year later that I started having real discussions about 9/11, and the impact it had on the world.

I’ve had many discussions about the events of that day and the wars that were born from it, but I don’t think any have been as important as the one I had today with my Sister, the English teacher. It was brief, only lasting for a few minutes as we were in the car on our way to our parents for dinner. It’s topic was George W. Bush’s plans for his Presidency before the events of 9/11 occurred.

I really didn’t know this until today, but before George W. Bush had declared war on terror, he had declared war on illiteracy. I assume, if like me you didn’t know that, your reaction would have been to chuckle a little about W. talking about illiteracy. Think on it though. While I have no respect for him as a President now, I can’t help but wonder how different today’s world would be if his Presidency hadn’t been hijacked by those horrific attacks. They forced him to focus his time in office on war, and retaliation for the acts of terrorism that happened that day. He called illiteracy a “national emergency” and really wanted to do something about it. Just think how different the world would be if even a fraction of the billions upon billions of dollars spent on the wars had gone to education in America.

It blew my mind!

It made me think about that day ten years ago in a slightly new light. Not only did the events of that day horrify America and the world, they poisoned the political landscape of America from that day onward. Then potentially the worst thing, other than the loss of life obviously, those events caused would be the damage to the education of millions and millions of American people for years and years to come. I read about how the American education system is failing it’s students, and how Presidents Bush and Obama have tried to create reforms to fix the problem. I read about schools trying to remove some sciences from the curriculum in various districts because they don’t align with their religious beliefs, (my opinion of that last point – those people are fucking idiots). It’s extremely difficult to find an article talking about American public school education in anything other than a bad light.

Would that still be the case if Bush had been able to spend his time and money on education rather than war?

Unfortunately that’s something we will never know.

This whole opinion comes from someone outside looking in. That discussion with my Sister got me thinking, and I found I had to write something down because my mind wouldn’t let me think on anything else until I did.

You should go and read an American point of view of today, and the last ten years. I can’t think of anyone better to send you to than Brad ‘Otis’ Willis and his post: “To the victims of 9/11: I’m sorry“. Brad as always writes from the heart, and is simply a fantastic writer.

I’m approaching the end of my first week of a very much needed two week break from the day job. Well that’s supposed to be the case, I have had to deal with work related questions 3 out of 4 days so far this week. My phone is going to be switched off for the remainder of my time away from the office so there will be no more interruptions.

I had grand plans for my two week break that began with having a great time at my friends wedding last weekend. That was achieved very successfully as my body could testify to three days later when I was still exhausted. Then my plan had been to go visit friends in Canada. That however didn’t exactly fall into place. I’m not in Canada just now, though I really wish I was. A few things fell the wrong way and it just wasn’t going to be a feasible trip this year. It’s been tentatively penciled in for next summer, which should be excellent if it all goes to plan.

So with my initial plans out the window I started to think of things I could do with my time. The first week was set aside for recovery from both the wedding and work. My brain has been in dire need of time away from the myriad of issues I’ve had to deal with at work this year, and to start processing something else entirely. Namely this fledgling writing career of mine. This makes the intrusion of the work questions a little more annoying than they would otherwise be.

This week has been, for the most part, greatly relaxing. The fact that it’s Thursday already caught me a little off guard. Even though my break is approaching it’s peak, I’m now finally relaxed enough, and in a place to actually write something with structure, though this isn’t really it. This post is really just to mentally clear some space before getting into a few projects I have in the wings underway.

This week I allowed myself to sleep in late, and read without thinking about time constraints. It’s been a week where I’ve read two books, and completed Dragon Age II on the PS3, and that’s with spending a lot of time with friends and dragging myself out of bed closer to noon more days than I should admit.

I now have ten days left before I head back to my day job. That gives me time to focus on the path I really want to walk rather than the scatter gun approach I’ve been employing up to now. This rest has now given me the time to strip away any excuses I might have had stopping me from really making the effort with this journey, and these next ten days give me the opportunity to make significant strides forward with my goals.

Now it’s time to stop talking about that next major step, and to just get it done.

This weekend I was off on a friends stag/bachelor weekend in a small village called Aberfeldy, a few hours North of Edinburgh. There was boozing; there was hijinks; there was some frankly hilarious moments. As well as all of this there were activities arranged for the Saturday.

I wasn’t taking part in the activities since they were water based. Whitewater rafting followed by water bugging may be fun things to do, when you have a small problem, such as lacking the ability to swim, these things become an issue. While I could have forced myself to do them, I decided early on that it wasn’t going to happen.

Due to the heavy rain on the week leading up to this weekend, there was a last minute change of plan. Some of the water based activities couldn’t be offered by the company running them. It had become too dangerous, and so the afternoon activities were changed form water bugging to paint ball. That was something I would be happy to get involved in, and so I signed up for it immediately.

When we got to the paintball we discovered that it was our group, another large group of people, and then after waiting around for another half an hour in full paint ball getup, a smaller group of people rounded off the afternoon’s teams. The smaller group that made us wait for that extra half an hour turned up hammered to varying degrees and made the entire afternoon slightly less fun than it could have been, though it gave us lots of joke material for the rest of the evening.

The paintball was fun. We were broken down into two teams, with the drunkards on the other team from us, and we ran through a few different game types. We won a few, and we lost a few. Then at the very last game a couple of us rather than buy more paint pellets, decided to call it a day. We were tired, sore and had had enough of the drunk guys on the other team. We made our way to the safe area where you can get changed out of the paintball gear and wait on everyone else finishing up. In my case I hobbled up there as I somehow managed to get shot on the outside of my left knee three damned times, all from pretty close range.

So we get to the safe area, change out of the paintball kit, and stand around chatting with a few people from the other team that had called it a day too. They’d had it with the drunk guys too, and we shared a few jokes, as well as chatting about why we were all in the area that weekend.

After a few minutes of standing around chatting, a paintball gun fired closer to the safe area than we’d previously heard, and so I turned my head in that direction, only to see an orange blur scream towards me and slam into my face. It caught me about an inch below my right eye, and I let out a curse while grabbing my face in pain. I was lucky that the paintball hit me below the eye because it was damn close. I was lucky that it didn’t actually burst covering me in orange paint either. I was lucky that it lost just enough velocity to only leave a small red mark that went away pretty quickly. Considering I was hit in my unguarded face with a paintball pellet I’m just fucking lucky it didn’t do more damage.

One of the guys that runs the place raced over to me and asked me what happened, and who fired a paintball gun at me. I had to explain that a pellet had come flying over the large nets that are supposed stop this happening, and that of all the places it could have gone, it caught me in the face, as I was turning. Once he was sure I was fine, he shook his head and told me that it was the very first time he’d ever seen that happen. It’s not a milestone I was hoping to be part of, but at least I made it out of there almost unscathed.

The rest of the weekend carried on without incident, barring the extensive liver abuse from the Jägerbomb’s and the steady 8+ hours boozing sessions. By the time I got home yesterday I could do nothing nap, and then have dinner before taking another nap, and then going to bed early.

It was a really good weekend, with lots of fun stories that I’m sure will be brought up when we meet again at the wedding in a few weeks. Until then though, I think I may need to stay out of the pub and let my liver recover.

As I briefly mentioned earlier I’ve been playing with the theme on the site today. I was pretty happy with the one I had, though I was beginning to have a few issues with certain aspects of it.

I’m going to be working on my own custom theme soon as part of a series of projects I’ll talk about later. Until then I wanted to play around with the new twenty-eleven theme from WordPress themselves, and decided now was as good a time as any to play around with it.

There’s a lot to like about this theme out of the box. There were a few things that annoyed me, but with a little tweaking I’ve managed to fixed most of them. Rather than focus on the things that bugged me, I’d rather concentrate on the things that I really like. For example, the theme is really clean and fresh feeling. There’s just enough white space to allow the site to breath, but not so much that you feel like it’s a big echo chamber.

My favourite feature has to be the post formats, and in particular the handling of the gallery format. Granted the theme I had before took advantage of the post formats, including the gallery, but it was nowhere near as well done as this theme. I love the fact that instead of just displaying a whole block of images from the gallery on the front page, it creates a thumb nail of one of the images, then takes whatever you write in the gallery post and makes it the description on a small but cool looking post. It’s something that was obviously a constantly requested feature ever since Matt Mullenweg started using it on his own site.

This formatting means that I’m much happier to move all of my photography up onto this site, as you can see from the previous three posts. I’ve started taking batches of my photos from my Flickr account and uploading them here. I doubt I’ll upload all the sets I have over there, but one things for sure, all my photography from now on will be uploaded here. I’ve nothing against Flickr, but I prefer the idea of having all of my photography under my own roof.

I really like the theme at the moment, though I may customise a few more aspects of it over the next few weeks just to make it feel more like home.

Let me know what you think of the new look, and also let me know if/when I’ve broken anything as I tinker with it.