When we have a proposed project in an area it is our standard practice the officer who is leading on this is responsible for making sure that we communicate what we are proposing with those that live there. We use a variety of methods but the “little black dress” of our communications arsenal for work in small areas is a letter drop. We draft up a letter saying what we are proposing, why its being proposed, give details of how to contact us, give a timescale to get back in touch and say whom in particular to contact ie the lead officer. We then post it through all the doors of the houses surrounding the area of the proposal. Depending on the feedback we get we then move forward with the proposal, do further consultation or choose not to proceed with the work.

Inevitably the lead officers over the years that carry out these small consultations will encounter some negative responses and criticism from local residents who don’t like what is proposed. Thats fine. Thats one of the reasons why we carry them out, to get feedback good or bad. No-one particularly likes getting an angry phone call or email from a customer but thats part of the job. If its your work your details go out and you take the positive with the negative.

We recently had a project we were proposing in one of our areas. So as we do the lead officer sent out letters to all the residents in the area of the proposal. One resident in particular was against this proposal and not only contacted us to inform us of their objections but also sought to promote the reason he was objecting. This resulted in them putting a piece in a local hyperlocal site. We have no problem with this which is good because theres little we can do about it if we did. Its all part of living in a democracy and if anything our jobs is to get people involved and engaged with us to make the area a better place to be. Objections are just the other side of the coin. However, in their piece they used the name of the lead officer as taken from the letter which they had received when we did the mail out. There was no personal attack on the officer in the piece but they did use the officer’s full name.

I didn’t think anything of this piece when I saw it other than my usual concern about if it was factually accurate. As I said at the beginning I spend a lot of time and effort trying to get the work of our teams, as well as my own work, publicised. However, the lead officer was genuinely upset about having their name “in the paper” and that I as the local comms guy had allowed it to happen. We have a good critical friendship with the publication and when we contacted them they kindly agreed to remove the officers name from the piece. The officer later sought me out to apologise let me know that the issue was not personal. They were just upset that this had happened. I accepted the apology, tried to make light of it and we both quickly moved on to other things.

BUT I’m still not entirely sure what the issue is. As it only happened this week I decided to let things cool off a little before I speak with the officer again to find out exactly what it is that has upset them about this. After all they speak at public meetings all the time, do lots of letter drops in the area with their contact details on them and are well known by all the residents who live there. They also have the full support of our senior managers in everything they’ve done with regards this proposal and we have had no further negative contact from the public as a result of this piece. So, what is it about getting your “name in the paper” that is so upsetting?

I’m blogging this up as its been quite an eye opener for me and I thought it was worth sharing. I’ve also been very careful to anonymise the parties involved for obvious reasons.

Anyone else had a similar experience? Am I just being really naive about this?

Last week, as well as starting David off on Twitter, I also started a “blog” for a member of our Community Safety Team. As part of a new way of working we are merging our Community Safety Team with our Environmental Wardens. This means that staff from both teams are being trained on how to do the other team’s work. One member of staff which this will effect is Ann. Ann has been in the Council for a number of years, most recently working as a Community Safety Officer in the South West Office.

Our Environmental Wardens do a great job, and not one I think I could do. They deal with environmental offences such as littering, dog fouling, fly tipping and traders putting their waste in residential bins. They spend a fair amount of their time going through flying and bins looking for evidence of who’s waste is it. Not the most glamourous of jobs but very important.

So, I was approached by the Community Safety Team Leader on the Thursday before Ann was due to start her training as an Environmental Warden and asked if it was possible to do “some kind diary of her training on the website”. It sounded like a great idea! We had a quick conversation about what they wanted to get out of it and what I needed from Ann to make it happen. Thirty minutes later I got emailed a photo and Ann’s first post. The arrangement we came up with was that Ann would email me her daily post, I would have a quick look at it and then upload it onto the website. I would have had Ann upload it to the site directly but in terms of the time it would take to get training put in place I opted to do it through me. This week I had another member of the Community Safety trained on the website so, like David, soon they will be publishing and promoting their team’s, and therefore Ann’s, content.

I want to be very clear on this point: when looking at it I’m not looking to polish, edit or sculpt Ann’s writing in some way. The reason I check it is because I’m not a warden and I don’t know any of their terms or abbreviations so if I understand what Ann’s written then any other member of the public will too. Thats why and no other reason. If you’re looking to add some personality to a service then you have to let that personality come through in their writing. People don’t all speak with 1950′s BBC pronunciation. We have accents. Sometimes the things we, and I mean we, write are not grammatically perfect. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact this can be a positive.

I have queried one thing in Ann’s posts so far and that was “over flows”. When Ann sent me her post which included a reference to these I didn’t know if she meant over flowing bins or something else. I went to find Ann to ask. Ann was out so I asked another of the wardens. They confirmed that it would be bins…probably. As it turned out it wasn’t bins but water pipes. I then asked Ann to reword the first line when she introduced the topic on her post and then it was this revised post which was published. (See the last paragraph)

A while back I approached a number of different staff about putting together a blog but at the time no one was keen. So, to have staff actively seek me out and ask to do something like this is a huge thing. I feel a bit awkward when calling Ann’s posts a “blog” because you can’t comment on them, a characteristic which for me defines it as a blog. However, this is something which will soon be rectified as since starting this piece of work I have been told that our website has a blogging function which I have been offered training on.

So my longer term plan now is to set up a blog for the office and try and get more of the staff to write on posts which people will be able to comment on. Fingers crossed, depending on how the software is setup, I might even be able to get the staff access to post directly on it like the web pages.

I started out working in the Cooncil as a Library Assistant. That was my job title. However, my role was much more Youth Worker or Community Worker. The libraries I worked in were not in leafy suburbs or filled with academics. My libraries were in less fashionable areas of our fair city and our “client base” had a very strong contingent of teenagers. In turn these teenagers reflect the areas they lived in. Some were in gangs, some had criminal records or were at least well known to police. They weren’t in the library because they were desperate to get their hands on the next Harry Potter book. They were there because they didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Many of them were excluded, or about to be excluded, from school. Generally this would revolve around a difficulty with reading or writing. Said teen would not attend school, they wouldn’t gain literacy skills, when they did go to school the idea of being shown as weak in front of their peers terrified them, the easiest way to get positive attention and deflect from their weakness would be to act up in class, teachers would get them in trouble or even worse put them on the spot by asking to read something in front of the class and the cycle would begin again.

They would then spend their time in the library where and we would try to engage them in ways to improve their literacy skills in more non-conventional ways. However, we had to be careful you didn’t make the same mistakes as many other adults did and put them in a situation where they might be seen as weak in front of their peers. These teens didn’t communicate like we as adults do. More importantly they don’t see the consequences to their actions. Or even understand sometimes that there ARE consequences to their actions.

One such teen was Dave (not his real name). Dave was 14 at the time of my story and had hardly ever been to school. His parents were of the attitude: if he doesn’t want to go I’m not going to make him. I really liked him. He was short, about as wide as he was tall and had a skin head like me. He could be aggressive and offensive but the reasons behind this were that he had almost no literacy or social skills. If he liked you he had no idea of how to express this. So in place of compliments or niceties Dave would get quite aggressive towards you almost like he wanted a fight. Part of our role was then to challenge that and attempt to correct that behaviour.

One day Dave took it too far and started being very disruptive in the library. It was time that he left for the day. The library is a place for all and no one can spoil that for the majority. So Dave and I had a bit of back and forth. Me asking/telling him to leave and him refusing. After a while I had to play the one card I knew would always get him out but also was my last resort. I told him unless he left I was going to phone his dad at work. This is not something I used lightly. If I did phone Dave’s dad there would be repercussions for Dave. He screamed at me: “FUCK YOU YOU BALD CUNT!!” and stormed out of the library.

The next day my boss was in the library. She had had the day off before so had missed my altercation. As was standard practice I had a debrief with her to let her know what had happened and make sure it was recorded. My boss had a good relationship with Dave’s parents so decided to phone his mum to let him know what had happened.

Dave’s mum was furious. “He said what!!” I could her hear shout down the other end of the phone. Less than 10 minutes later Dave’s mum marched him down to the library. She made him stand to attention in front of me and then she gave him this order: “Right! You apologise for calling Graham ‘bald’”. She continued: “‘cos you’re a baldy wee cunt yourself Dave.”

My boss and I exchanged a silent look. Did I now have to throw Dave’s mum out of the library? Did we have a number for her dad? Dave then as ordered apologised for calling me ‘bald’ and conceded that this was wrong as he indeed was also a ‘baldy wee cunt’. We shook hands. I accepted his apology and reminded him he was stilled banned for that day but told him I looked forward to seeing him the next day. He was sheepish but clearly happy.

Teenagers are teenagers. If you want to know what they think they’ll tell you. You might not like or understand what or how they do it. You need to be the adult in this and look beyond the words they use and the actions they take. This doesn’t mean condoning them (I’ve been in court before due to charges we brought against some of our teens). They are a product of their environment.  You can’t change that but what you can do is work on showing them another path and encouraging them to take it. But you can only do that if you let them in the library.

Over the few years I was at the library Dave grew up into a fairly responsible adult. We had a lot of back and forths during that period. I banned him regularly. Then he would go, calm down and later come back and apologise. I would meet him half way and we would both move on. Progress was made. We even got Dave his bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award. To this day I’m still a baldy cunt.

Vexed by the roadworks in the Gorgie area? A bit of info and light at the end of the tunnel…ow.ly/jYfN4

— South West Team (@southwest_team) April 11, 2013

As he has little experience with Twitter today I set him with his own Hootsuite profile and sat down to give him a tutorial on the main elements and how to use them. One of the first things we decided was that for his first steps he will post and schedule tweets but not respond. This is just so he can find his feet. A while back I got David trained to update his section’s web pages so this set into a using a tool to promote them as a concept was an easy transition. I went through what a username is, why hash tags are used and touched on Twitter etiquette (when introducing someone into this new world I feel a strong responsibility to make sure they have good manners or it reflects badly on me). I also found for some reason when I do any kind of “Tweetorial” I find it far more fun to do it in Werner Hertzog’s voice. Everyday’s a school day.

I have trained a good few different people to Twitter over the past couple of years so I’m used to the standard questions about the medium. However, David came up with one which I hadn’t had before. “What words can I use?” This comes from the fact that David has a great vocabulary, much better than mine, and when approving his web content and copy for newsletters, etc we generally end up having a bit of a to and fro on his word choice. For instance today on a web page he wanted to use the word “exacerbate” and I asked him to change it to something of a lower reading age. (This is a pretty tame example as I can’t recall some of the better ones off the top of my head. Sometimes he likes to put in deliberately obscure words in just to wind me up! The online dictionaries are my friends.)

 So it was a good question. I replied by asking what words did he want to use and reminding him that the major factor was character length. He said “vexed?”. Thats fine I said. He looked very pleased and went off to his PC to schedule said tweet. Five minutes later he was back. He looked concerned “I think we might have to set a Parks page”. Great!

As much as I love using social media and the web I think I love it even more when I see people get into it for the first time after I’ve introduced them to it. David is the first in a new wave of our office staff who I’m training up Twitter and Facebook. The idea is essentially get them their own web pages for their particular teams on our web site, have them update the pages with content and then get them posting it and answering any queries which come from it. I’ve also set up dashboards on Google Analytics for each of the team’s pages so they can see how many people are reading their content. I will have sight of the various teams’ online activity but it won’t have to come through me. I think this approach will also engage members of staff more as both they’ll feel more in control of what they’re doing and also they’ll actually be able to have some kind of tangible audience for what they’re doing rather than just putting up a page and not knowing if anyones actually read it. This is the theory anyway.

I remember once someone telling me that your goal in any project is to make yourself redundant. The idea is you set things up so they don’t require your input. I have been striving to do this with the online stuff for some time but I think I’m finally on the way to making this happen and it feels good.

With that in mind I’m going to take the challenge. Here are some of my favourite songs.

1) What song do you remember best from college/university?

Being a student in Edinburgh into his retro tunes and clothing Saturday nights were at The Egg. The Egg was Edinburgh Art College’s bar/club. It was cheap, friendly and dirty. There never seemed to be any trouble. I remember in the summer once a friend was so drunk the bouncers let him go outside to nap for a bit before going back into dance later.
One of the big attractions of the Egg was the tunes. They played loads of northern soul, proto-punk, new wave, 60s, Elvis, you name it. One thing my little group would do would be try to find out what the best tunes were when we heard them then spend our days scouring the charity shops to find them. One such song was Al Wilson The Snake. It took us a long time to find a copy and it always takes me back to being drunk on the Egg dance floor with my mates trying to mime the intro drumroll….and failing miserably.

2) What song best evokes your experience of a study or work trip?

After I graduated Uni I went on a work exchange program to Vienna. I was there for three months working for a small advertising company. Its an amazing city full of history. I spent a lot of time just walking around the Ringstrasse and through the Imperial Palace and down into the heart of the city and St Stephansdom Cathedral. It was like being on the set of The Third Man and in a way I was.
I couldn’t take much over to Vienna but one thing which came with me, as was always with me while I was there, was my mini disc player. Retro, eh? Two stalwarts of my collection at the time were Scott Walker and David Axelrod. I most remember listening to Axelrod walking round the centre of Vienna staring up at all those fabulous historic buildings and letting my mind wander as to who might have lived there over the years and what their lives must have been like. My favourite Axelrod track then, and to this day, is General Confessional. A great mix a massive orchestrial sound being driven by this great break beat drumming.

3) Which song is most likely to bring a tear to your eye (or to make you weep copiously)?

At uni my sister made a great friend, Yaa. The pair of them were inseparable. They ended up as flat mates and whenever I went to see my sister, or whenever she came to see me, Yaa was always there too. Yaa felt in many ways like almost a half sister to me during my sisters time at Uni. After Uni they moved away in different directions and I lost touch with Yaa. Then one day my sister phoned me. She was upset. Yaa had died.
I don’t remember how I got a copy of this, I’m not a Nick Cave fan, I just remember listening to this and crying. For a long time after Yaa’s death I couldn’t listen to this song. It still moves me.

4) What is the best song to kickstart your most creative thinking?

Songs for creativity….hmmm. Its a toss up between the Bonzo Dog Band and Ween. I’ll go for Ween because back when I first got a four track recorder it was Ween I was most trying to emulate. They had a way of thinking about things and recording that just strikes me as extremely inventive and infectious.
Whenever I’ve got something creative to do I listen to one of Ween’s early albums. This is one of my favourite versions of one of my favourite songs of theirs Ween I Saw Gener Crying In His Sleep

5) Which song helps you work when you really need to concentrate?

When I was studying at college and/or uni I used to listen to jazz. Not any particular artists just whatever albums I could get hold of. Many times it was the 2 or 3 quid albums that Fopp was selling at the time. There was something about it that you could just get lost in while drinking copious amounts of herbal tea. After a few years though I kinda slowly moved from jazz into funk/soul. The JBs were one group that really stuck out. Infectious beats and horns. This is one of my favourites The JBs Pass The Peas.

6) When you’re angry, on which song do you want to turn up the volume?

Its gotta be Rage Against the Machine for this one. Angry, defiant and erudite. The only trouble is which track. Killing in the Name Of is the obvious choice so to be a little different I’ll go for Wake Up. Although the whole of their first album is great when you’re in a full on….welll, uh….rage I suppose.

7) Which song sums up the person you would like to be?

This is a tricky one. I think it can be hard to separate the persona of the artist from their work sometimes. I’m going to go for The Midnight Rider. Its a confident and up beat song about a man who really doesn’t have much. But it doesn’t bother him he’s just going to get on with it. Looking forward and heading the same way.
That confidence and chilled out attitude really appeals to me. I don’t have any ambitions to own lots of things. I just want to keep moving around the world meeting new people, seeing new things and having new experiences. I am a bit of a worrier and would like to be less so.
Although I do like the Allman Brothers’ version I’m going to go for Paul Davidson’s instead. I like my ska and reggae. I feel this version is even more chilled out that the Allman’s.

Thats me done for this post then. Hope you enjoyed the tunes and maybe even heard something you liked but hadn’t heard before.

What would be your seven Songs of You?

I love twitter but something that it’s really missing is a training environment. I think almost every piece of software I have used since I started in the Council has had a test version on which you can train and get all those daft/newbie mistakes out of your system. For social media, however, you’re out there without a safety net. Everything you do goes live within seconds.

So to combat this I have a method which I use whenever I first get one of our teams out “tweeting on the beat”. Basically I get them to text me their updates and photos. I get them, copy them and then post them through the account. This provides comfort for both the managers and the staff who are doing the tweeting. Both know that if they “do something wrong” that there is an editor in place, me, to correct it prior to the public seeing it.

Diagram of the process using texts and Hootsuite

In reality I have VERY rarely corrected or edited anything which has been texted to me prior to posting it. These teams maybe new to tweeting but they are customer facing workers who have a wealth of experience in working with the public in respect of their services. They know what they should say and how they should say it to the public they meet everyday in the street. It’s just the uncertainty, and therefore perceived danger, of the medium itself which robs them of their confidence. In that way I find this makeshift “test environment” is a great confidence building exercise for the newbies. After their first live patrol I sit down with them and show them a list of all the tweets “they” have sent out and how they compare to the texts which they sent me. If there are any issues, and the rare one I have had is when someone uses text speak for tweets, then I talk to them about how they can improve but generally I take pains to highlight the similarity between what has been sent out and what they texted me. The other thing I highlight, because they won’t have seen any replies to their tweets, is the feedback they’ve received. The next day, if possible I will then get the same individual to go out and live tweet by himself using Twitter directly without having me act as filter. I always offer to do a repeat of the first text/tweet exercise if they don’t feel confident but, happily, no-one to date has ever taken me up on it.

An example of the texts and resulting tweet

By doing their first live tweet this way it gives the teams and their managers, and even the managers managers, confidence that they can use the medium by themselves. Next you tend to find that the individual who has now started tweeting for work will then set themselves up a personal profile so they can have a shot out of work.

What do you think? Over cautious? Should they be let loose on the live account straight away?

As I said at the beginning of the post, this is half the story. See what that Kenny McDonald chap thinks about all this in Part 2 of A Training Environment for Twitter.

The more our teams start to use our accounts, especially our Twitter account, the more posts we are going to putting out. This all sounds great, at first, but the more teams we have using the account the more I’m concerned that those who follow the account will find it difficult to keep track of which team is doing what. For example if our Environmental Wardens are out sending out tweets about  removing graffiti in one end of our area whilst our Housing Team are doing work in another if our audience is dipping in and out will they be able to keep track of who is who?

Immediately there are two possible solutions to this, as far as I can see, the first one is planning or scheduling it so that only one team tweets a day; the other is that we simply use hash tags for each of the teams. So, our wardens always use #wardens at the end of their tweets, housing use #housing, roads use #roads, etc. I’m just not sure which one is best and I don’t think I want to go down the route of giving them their own individual accounts just yet.

So thats why I’ve posted this. Are you doing similar things; sharing an account across a few teams? If so how are you managing this? Or should we just bite the bullett and set up an account for each service team?

Channel shift?

When we first started using Twitter the account I most looked to was that of PC Ed Rogerson or @hotelalpha9 as he’s possibly better known. When we were looking to enter the world of Twitter I’d seen a lot of people live tweeting their day jobs. These tweets were generally far more interesting than the tweeting of live special events especially when such events can be so far and few between. However, there was a lot of concern around confidentiality issues with our teams posting live updates from their jobs. This was especially true of our Community Safety Team who are very much an enforcement service. By using examples of PC Ed Rogerson’s work I was able to draw the parallel between his role and our Environmental Wardens. This allowed me to set up and run the #edinwarden pilot whereby our Wardens were given access to live tweet their patrols and interact with residents online whilst out and about. This pilot really helped the service become more visible to the online community in Edinburgh and now our Wardens regularly live tweet their patrols, to much positive feedback too. It was also this pilot which got a number of the other teams interested in using social media for work and broke down many of the barriers I had come up against in getting their by-in. At the moment PC Ed Rogerson is on a bit of a twitter break but this post by Mark Walsh (via Mark Braggins) gives an interesting insight into the benefits for Police in using digital media to engage.

STV Edinburgh using #edintravel

Edinburgh City Council now has a number of social media accounts serving a variety of different topics and sections. One of the first ones to be set up, and for my money one of the best, was Edintravel. This account was set up in 2010 to: “to provide accurate and relevant information on traffic delays and to pre-publicise major roadworks in Edinburgh”. It now has over 11,000 followers and provides some great information out to them. However, its not really the tweets posted from the account itself which makes the account so interesting. Its the fact that in addition to the info posted through the account, the account also promotes the use of #edintravel to crowd source real time travel info from people across the city. Its a very simple idea and one which I’m really jealous I didn’t have. It means that rather than having people depending on the account during the hours it is managed, commuters can share information 24hrs a day 365 days a year.

Commuter uses #edintravel to share info

The first social media account I set up for work was a Facebook page. Well…..actually thats not entirely true but lets not go into that just now. Anyway when I was looking at Facebook pages run by other groups and local authorities I saw a lot of examples I liked in terms of the content and interactions they were generating. Ones like Coventry Council’s and Belfast’s. However, the one which really captured my imagination, and I used to show the potential to my skeptical managers, was one from a lot closer to home. It was the first Community Council in Edinburgh to set up a Facebook, South Queensferry.

An example of some of the comments and discussions on Queensferry’s page

They don’t have as many followers as the other accounts I’ve mentioned but the interactions on it between the admins and users was great. It was people discussing our services, in the main very positively, but there was no “Edinburgh Council presence”. It was the perfect example of a conversation going on about us without us even knowing or being involved and because of that we were missing vital feedback and, in a number of cases, compliments. I think that if it wasn’t for this page I might not have got our page setup.

These next heros and heroines are a wee bit of a controversial choice. Greener Leith are a community group based in the area of the Edinburgh which I live and their aim is “to promote community engagement, better public spaces and sustainable development in and around Leith”. They do this through events and campaigns but they also have a really strong online presence which they use to great effect. The reason that they could be seen as a controversial choice for me is that they don’t always see eye to eye with the Council. And thats a very positive thing. Its good to be challenged and as a Council officer the community I serve have every right to have their say about what work is or should be carried out in their areas. My day to day work is facilitating the debate between local residents and services and it can be very rewarding for both sides to marry the local knowledge of the community to the professional experience of officers. Doesn’t mean that it is always the smoothest of processes though but then nothing worthwhile is ever easy.
The reason that I’ve included them in this is post is that they share with us a desire to engage local residents in whats going on to make the area a better place to be. They also use a variety of social media channels to do this, just as we do, but whats interesting is that their tone, use of language and use of media can differ greatly from how we as a Council would try to do this. In many ways they almost translate some of our more technical terms or “Councilese” which we do have a habit of slipping into sometimes or just come at things from a different angle. A great example of this is their recent #loveleith campaign about using positive reinforcement to help combat littering.
They’re a group I follow with a lot of interest because I think as a local authority we can learn a lot from them, even if we don’t always agree with them.

Patient Opinion are my final heros and heroines. I first heard about their work at an Scottish Health Council event during Glasgow’s Social Media Week last year called Make Health Social. At this event Gina Alexander gave a presentation on the the project which looks to get feedback from patients on the services they’ve received from health services. Theres nothing new in seeking feedback from your service users using the web or social media but what I think really makes this project stands out is the way it does it. Patient Opinion is about stories. Its not about the user filling out a survey or questionnaire but them giving full chapter and verse about their experience. For a start I think this allows the user to really highlight the issues which are important to them. These stories are then published on the site for all to see and the health services concerned are able to comment on them publicly too, such as this recent example shows. This process is supported by a Twitter account which draws you to the site by posting engaging quotes from these stories.

I’m quite a nosey bugger but I think this is great. What we have a habit of forgetting is that yes the technology behind social media is new but the humans using it still are of the same human nature as they’ve always been. People are interested in people. Patient Opinion very astutely recognises that and it uses it to draw people in to the advantage of all. If you look at the photo of the tweets above, and you’re honest, I think you’ll admit that you want to know more about what these people are talking about, especially the more critical ones. Its certainly a lot more engaging than the standard “Come take our survey/give us your opinions on XYZ” posts which we see numerous times every day.
Patient Opinion is one of these projects which I think I can certainly learn a lot from and expect to see a blog post on here soon about a project which is takes a leaf out of its book.

Thats probably enough gushing from me for one post although there are a good few others I could mention doing some great work. I hope you find these examples and links interesting. Who are your social media heros or heroines? Let me know below, I’d love to hear.

I went for lunch with a work friend to the cafe of a nearby Sainsburys. I didn’t have anything usual to eat or drink. It was just a pleasant lunch away from our usual lunchtime haunt, i.e.. the office. When we got back to the office suddenly I had a strange distortion in my vision. I would later find out this is what is called an aura.

An example of an aura similar to the one I experienced

It was in the top left hand of my eyesight no matter which eye I looked out of. It was a little strange and annoying but nothing more. It wasn’t sore and it was very small so didn’t effect my vision in any way. I tried to ignore it expecting it to go away. After about an hour it did.
I had a meeting later that afternoon in town and my then boss asked if they could accompany me. They were new in their role and were keen to see the sort of work I carried out. He had his car with him so said he’d drive us both in. Almost as soon as I sat down in the car I started feeling very unsettled and strange. As we started to drive off in the car I suddenly lost the feeling in both my arms. This startled me and I made comment of it to my boss. He joked it off saying that its a good job that it wasn’t one of my arms as that would be a heart attack. Although I didn’t find this funny it passed quickly so I shrugged it off.
Twenty minutes later as we were getting in town I suddenly became extremely nauseous. I though I was going to throw up and asked my boss to pull the car over. I got out of the car and after a couple of minutes felt much better.
Five minutes more of driving we arrived at the meeting with a local rep to talk about our services. I chatted with the rep, my boss sat in just listening to the back and forth. However, as the conversation went on I found it harder and harder to concentrate on what the rep was saying or indeed even follow our conversation. This obviously didn’t show to the rep or my boss as when time came to finish my boss remarked how well it had gone. At this point I began to feel like I was coming down with something. For the first time since this began my head started to ache. I asked my boss if I could go home as I only lived round the corner. He agreed as we were both sure I was a little under the weather.

I got home and my headache got worse. I sat on the couch for a bit but just wasn’t comfortable so decided to go to bed to try and sleep it off. I hate getting a cold but sometimes a good couple of hours kip can take the edge off. When I woke up about an hour later I felt horrible . I felt like I had been hit across the left side of my head with an iron bar. I also felt extremely nauseous and really wanted to throw up just to feel better. Something was very wrong. I decided to phone my then girlfriend now wife. I’m not sure what I wanted her to do, I just wanted to speak to someone. However, when I picked up my mobile phone I didn’t know how to use it. I’d had this phone for two years but suddenly I couldn’t use it. After a few minutes I muddled my way through and got my girlfriend on the phone. I explained what had/was happening but I was now having trouble speaking. It wasn’t that I was having trouble using my mouth it was like I kept forgetting words.

My girlfriend came round right away and decided quickly that a call to NHS 24 was required. This resulted in an emergency appointment at one of the local hospitals. Within twenty or thirty minutes of arriving at the hospital I was seen by a doctor while my wife waited outside.
After explaining to him what had happened and how I felt he said, “I’m going to ask you some simple questions and I just want you to answer them”.
“What is your name?” he began
“Graham Budd” I replied
“What year were you born?” he asked
“1978″ I replied
“What year is it?” he asked
“2009″ I replied

The questions went on like this for a few minutes and I answered everyone. Then he brought in my girlfriend turned to her and said “I’ve just asked Graham a number of simple questions and he hasn’t been able to answer any of them. I’m not sure what’s happening but we’re going to have to do some more tests”. I understood every word the doctor had said to me and had given the answer to each and everyone of them, as far as I was concerned.

I was then taken to a ward for more tests. At this point all gets very hazy. Over the hours that followed I went from being perfectly lucid and coherent, to answering simple questions with a completely random jumble of words, to being completely unable to speak. I would move back and forth between these differing periods constantly with them each only lasting a few minutes tops.
During the periods where I was answering with random words I was, as far as I was aware, giving perfectly articulate answers. At one point I was asked if I’d had a headache like this before. I said “Once, a while ago when I was eating ice cream”, or so I thought. My reply to anyone listening though was apparently “it’s like San Francisco, nachos….fuck!…..ice cream….coffee”.
During the periods when I was unable to speak I would be asked a simple question or to name an object. At this point I would suddenly forget all words. You know how you feel when you can’t put your finger on someone’s name or the name of a place? It was like that but for all words.

After a succession of doctors had come and gone I was sent for an emergency CAT scan at 1am, thirteen hours after my symptoms had started. At this point, although my head was no longer as sore and my speech was returning to normal, I had decided that I had an aneurism or something in my brain and at any moment that was going to be me. I lay in a hospital bed waiting to get the results of my scan deciphered by a neurologist they had awoken especially whilst I contemplated my fate. It’s a very strange thing. My thoughts were that the most important thing was that my girlfriend should not be upset. We chatted, we kissed and we waited. After what felt like days a matron appeared. In one sentence she announced that I had been given the all clear and it was time for my girlfriend to leave. I would love to say that I ran around the hospital like James Stewart in Its A Wonderful Life but the truth is I kissed my girlfriend goodnight and blacked out cold.

Someone having a CAT scan

The next morning I awoke, still fully dressed, to find myself a bit of a celeb in student neurologist circles. Indeed they came round to talk about me very near to me but not directly to me. I sat in bed fully dressed, waving at them whilst grinning like a man who’d just been told he wasn’t about to die. After a couple of hours two fully qualified neurologists then came round to see me and, after chatting through my results, diagnosed me as having had a migraine. I was free to go.

I’d never had a migraine before that day and although I do get similar episodes now, touch wood, they are never anywhere as severe as my first time. Usually if one starts I just head to lay own in a darkened room for a couple of hours and then I feel much better. In terms of what triggers them off for me it appears to be a combination of factors. The main ones are; stress, coffee and citrus but its a fairly unpredictable combination of them which will set off a migraine. My symptoms have also changed too. Instead of a headache on the left side of my head I now get a headache on the right side of my head.

I’m not sure how helpful this post will be to anyone but I know after my experience I went on the net to look for advice or even someone who’d been in a similar situation and couldn’t find much. So if this does help anyone I’m glad.

A photo of one of the reefs of Eyemouth

My sister Eileen and I learned to scuba dive a good few years ago now in Eyemouth, a small scottish town in the borders. Its an amazing place to dive and its great to see that its starting to get the recognition it deserves as a great area to dive. I learned at a PADI dive centre called Aquastars and the instructors were amazing. They all had a huge amount of experience at diving across the world in every sea condition imaginable.

On our first sea dive for our course we went into the sea off the shore just behind the dive centre. The first thing I saw under the water was an octopus. Its was mind blowing. The idea that such things could bee seen in the UK just feet from the shore not to mention the beauty of the creature itself. The thing that struck me most about it though was its eyes. As much as I was fascinated by this creature, through its eyes I could see it was taking me in just as much if not more. On successive dives we saw all sorts of amazing creatures off the shores of Eyemouth but none came close to those times we came face to face with an octopus.

An octopus drawn by my wife Roughcat

Each time we went diving in Eyemouth we spent fascinating hours listening to the stories of the dive instructors and tried to soak up as much knowledge and experience as we could from them; things to be wary of if you are boat diving in Belize, the strange things that divers will do while narked, what it’s like to dive with sharks in South Africa. Great stories.

One day we were asked by one of the instructors, “Have you ever dived with a cuttlefish?”. We had done very few dives at this point and all of them off Eyemouth. Although we knew there were cuttlefish off of Eyemouth we had yet to dive with one. “You can talk to them” he said. “If you ever see one then raise your hand to your mask a raise your fingers and they will do the same”. We were very polite at the time but we were both thinking that he was taking the micky. I mean think about it, talking to a cuttlefish. That’s just daft.

A pair of divers as doing a safety stop off a wreck in Croatia

A few months later my sister and I went to Croatia to do some diving. I’d read that the water was supposed to be amongst the clearest in the world and held a wealth of underwater life. The other reason, which was key, was it was very cheap as diving holidays go and were both, and still are, pretty poor.

We had a great time and some very funny experiences which at the time were pretty terrifying. (In a future post I’ll tell you about how we went for a dive in a storm with an instructor who we found out couldn’t swim.) On our final dive, a reef which had a maximum depth of about 15m, we were coming to end of our dive heading back to our exit point when we saw a shape moving in the distance. It was a large cuttlefish. I was very excited, as was my sister, to see one. The cuttlefish, however, looked much less happy to see us. Indeed it look quite nervous and started to slowly, without turning its back on us, move away. Its at this point that Eileen decided to try out the advice we’d been given back at Aquastars. Eileen raised her hand to in front of her mask and raised one finger. To my complete astonishment the cuttlefish responded. It not only did the same signal with its tentacles, changed colour and moved towards us. You could see in its eyes it had relaxed about us and no longer saw us as a threat.

Eileen put up another finger so now she was holding up two. The cuttlefish did the same. Over the next five minutes Eileen and I took it in turn to chat with the creature, although I have no idea what topics the conversation took in. Probably shellfish. After around five minutes it was time for us to go as we were getting low on air so we said our goodbyes. Mr, or Mrs, cuttlefish headed off in a different direction to us. However, it moved away very slowly and happily turned it back on us to do so.

This is why I now do not eat octopus, cuttlefish or squid. They taste great, don’t get me wrong, but they are obviously very intelligent. I have flirted with vegetarianism in the past and its something that I do wish to embrace. Its purely laziness which stops me and I know that. However, as time goes by I find it harder and harder to justify eating any kind of meat. I have pet cats myself, I love dogs and, if I’m honest, animals in general so I really need to get my finger out and go veggy. They are sentient beings and I can’t ignore that. Part of the reason I’m putting this down is to force myself to stop thinking about it and actually do it.

Has anyone else been in a similar postion recently? Any tips for how a meat lover can go veggy more easily?