On anonymity and hiding

May asked (in the course of an e-mail conversation) whether there were any photos of me on the Internets; I replied that there were several on Flickr which were friends-and-family-only but that I'd certainly "befriend" her if she wanted to see them.

Thinking about this later on, I asked myself why I had bothered to restrict them in this way. My reasoning was that I don't want people who know me professionally to find my blog, because they might (would!) find some barely-disguised uncomplimentary references to themselves, and that identifying my face on Flickr is one way that the link might be made. (In the early blogging days, I did tell some workmates about my Flickr account.) The reason is valid as far as it goes, but it only goes an inch or two.

The probability of my being discovered through random googling is infinitely higher than that somebody might recognize my face. "Security through anonymity" doesn't work any more, if it ever did: Big Brother sees all, and tells all to anyone who asks. People have found my blog by searching for the most peculiar and abstruse things simply because all of the search words happened to occur on a single page, one word per post: write about Paris, France and then a week later about the Hilton hotel in Manhattan, and people will find your blog when searching for Paris Hilton (without quotes; many users of search engines don't know to put quotes around a phrase). Ben is regularly visited by people searching for Emma Watson's breasts because he once used all three words during the same month; they are surely terribly disappointed by his stories of children and early-morning jogging.

But my impulse to keep things secret and separate goes deeper than that. I have always maintained divisions between parts of my life: my architecture friends don't know my computing friends, and none of them know my blogging friends who know neither of the other groups. This even goes to the point of segregating my architecture friends from Big Famous Office from my architecture friends from Small Stylish Office. Silly, really, but it is my impulse in all things and always has been.

I am planning a dinner to celebrate my birthday (in a local restaurant) and was thinking who to invite, and kept tripping over this imaginary boundary between types of friends. Can't have both X and Y, what would they have to talk about—other than me? I would like to invite Marco from the Dead White Male Poet Cafe and my favourite barista from the Espresso-Laden, both of whom I think of as friends-in-the-making, but wonder what they'd make of the architects and vice versa.

Well, damn this: I shall invite them one and all, and let them see whether they can get on or not. It could be a very interesting evening.

A pleasant surprise

Sunday afternoon and still no word from the competition organizers; on the other hand, the jury sat on Friday and it had been announced that the entries would be displayed from Sunday to Tuesday. So we said, "ah well, let's go look at the winners" and drove downtown. We entered the exhibition room where the entries were all hung on pinwand partitions; I went left, G and U went right. As I was examining the winner about ten minutes later, I heard a shriek from U and a surprised laugh from G, so I headed in their direction.

I found them standing before a set of drawings that looked oddly familiar, very damned familiar in fact. But they weren't looking at the drawings, they were looking at a large green rosette with a ribbon that said "3rd prize."

Woo-hoo.

Not to look a gift hard-earned horse in the mouth, but: clearly some competition organizers take their duties more seriously than others.

Anyway. Happy happy, joy joy.

In such cases, one always looks at the other entries to see what one might have done differently, where they were better (and one also reads the transcript of the jury's decision). As I read it, there were only two points on which we lost: the connection to the private enclosed garden was dubious (true, I mentioned this previously) and the building volume was too large (i.e. it would be relatively expensive to build). The garden was an oversight, we all misread the briefing documents and were lucky not to be thrown out in the first round. The size of the building was determined by its single best feature, explicitly praised by the jury: the treed atrium in the centre of the building which provided sunlight on both sides of the public areas on all floors, open bright and airy corridors, and a direct view from the front door straight through the building to the garden. Would we have reduced this to win? No. So I for one am very happy with our large atrium and our third prize.

The party

I have eleven ten minutes before switching off the computers at 9pm (well, I might allow myself a small amount of leeway) in which to write about this year's New Year's Eve festivities.

The party was very enjoyable, low-keyed and friendly, almost like "family" but without the generational dynamics and barely-repressed hostility. Based on this gathering, the state of matrimony is in very poor shape in Germany: all but two of us were singles, and the only active pair of the evening had met at Chirpy's birthday party that autumn - and both of them had children by previous marriages. (Actually that's not true, Chirpy's son and Best Friend's daughter, who joined us for the first dinner then disappeared, are "an item.")

We ate well and drank in moderation, danced like untamed gazelles (© P.G.Wodehouse) to the hits of our youth (Chic, Sister Sledge, Hot Chocolate), then did it all again after midnight with a second dinner. I wound up washing dishes and talking about the state of the world at 4am with another non-sleeper, a fine and fitting start to a new year (Chirpy and the other guests having retired).

2006 began with a leisurely breakfast and a long walk by the river, in the shadow of the old city walls.

Chirpy's tale is quite sad, she was at the seminar to come to terms with being deserted by her husband after 28 years together. Say that again, readers: twenty-eight years. They were high-school sweethearts, he fell into a midlife crisis and feared that he would miss out on something or other by remaining with her.

The question on your lips and mine is, of course: "Flower or potato?" I don't know, at this early stage of sprouting it's neither one thing nor the other. I am trying not to think about this but simply to accept it and live it and see what happens.

Today's Song On Infinite Repeat is Uncertain Smile by The The, from their 1983 album Soul Mining; just for the sake of Jools Holland's marvellous piano solo, the final 3'30" of a six-minute song.

And now it's 23:01, and I shall kick my own foolish butt to bed.