Landlocked Navy Dreams

After the plane crash, our teachers came round to check that we were OK. Mr Snowkey specifically said 'OK' because that was the way he always spoke. If he shouted at one of us he would always ask later whether we were OK. We all knew he did this because he had less confidence than we did. He shakily put his arm around one of the girls who pretended to be upset and then removed it in the confusion created in his head by his Liberal and Conservative parents. I was still wearing my really cool mirror shades and this seemed to throw Mr Snowkey a bit. Where another teacher would have told me to take them off he tried to tough it out and see through to my eyes but had to turn away. We loved him just the same because he let us drink beer - or more likely cider - at the school parties. At lunchtime we would sneak out to the pub across the street where the head girl lived. If she felt generous we would return with cold cider and swig it in the garden. If not we would make tea using an old sock and an antique teapot left by our temporary German Physics teacher when he went back to Hamburg.

All the best teachers are the ones of your own age though occasionally you must get a good one who is a bit like a favourite uncle and says 'mate' a lot. At our school this was Mr Jones (his real name possibly) who had been the source of several rumours about inappropriate behaviour with female pupils and still we liked him, especially the girls. Svengali or Slightly bedraggled uncle? I chose then but you can never see him so you will never know. Knoxxy Eugenia loved him and still does. He once caught a group of us with gunpowder we had made using the relevant ingredients found in the old science lab. Rather than turn us in to the head master, he helped us light it and though the bang was pitiful, we all remembered it as much louder, probably because it had been set off by a teacher.
I have no idea where he is now and no idea why he is here in this story apart from Knoxxy being besotted with him. At the age she was then, she was easily swayed in one direction or another and Mr Jones was a cinch.

I like this story. Knoxxy Eugenia is joining up everything though she is not in the plane crash stuff. I could just lie back with my eyes closed and try and find where she was when the plane crashed. She would obviously like to think that she was the cause and had brought the machine down just by thinking it but that is just her. I want to make up a poem just for her at that moment. I know she was outside, probably under a tree somewhere with a book. She will say that she read about a plane crashing just as we heard the first crumps of the engine failing but I know she was still reading The Kon Tiki Expedition. Just the thought of reading under a tree makes me so happy now. We did it all the time at school and never thought about how lucky we were. To be able to do that now would be so wonderful. Did Knoxxy Eugenia cause the plane crash. It really happened. I will find you the number. Find me a tree with a broadband connection.

Disabled by the light, we make our way to the shop. We have our own pathway and only we are allowed out. The younger children think it is unfair that they cannot use this path at break times and so did we. We do not realise the responsibilities that our guardians have towards us. We just think that they want to be horrible to us. They think of us dead in ditches while we just think of the sweet shop at the other end. It is a pleasant walk at any time of year but now, with the trees fully greened up, it is heaven. Even we realise this between our thoughts about girls and boys and confectionery. We think we are so cool and maybe, in this small county we are. We are to young to love anyone properly but we think we love each other. This is just the season making its way into our heads. The sun dapples the ground and tries to shake us awake but this is England before we worried about anything. The weather has no chance with us and we will live for years before the darkness of the rest of the world sneaks into our minds. In the future we will think back to these days just to help us get to sleep when all the illness and despair gets too much.

The music is just the sounds of the last great, undiscovered country, the birdsong and the wind in the trees. In the distance, there is the fingerprint of this part of the world, the gentle roar that we could record and analyse to determine its source better than any satellite navigation. There are farm machines in the distance and the occasional swoosh of a car on the main road. The weir on the river adds its own white noise. We top off the sound with giggles and happiness. We are the teachers' grand design for the world and will take all their prejudice and dislikes out to rule the world.

Weather Ethics

I was going to write about Peter Singer and the intense moral and ethic questions raised by his controversial views on human life but after watching yesterday's profiles of him on BBC4, I feel that the whole topic is just too controversial and may attract some very heated replies. You will have to read about his views yourself. It even seems dangerous to link to this page. Martin mentioned about an Australian who wanted to give the Great Apes significant proportions of human rights and then mentioned the fact the Bananas share 20% of their DNA with humans and should we give a proportion of human rights to Bananas. A stupid argument of course but it was repeated in last night's programme. The whole thing seemed to be proof of Singer being quoted out of context. The issues involved are amongst those which produce more passion than anything else and yet he seemed to distil the ideas which I hear from a lot of people using a consistent morality. I said I was not going to write about it and I have - so write to me. I know my views and I am happy with them.

Everything is an inspiration. I also watched a programme on BBC3 - yes the youth channel - what are you trying to say? The programme was Body Hits which is always a bit Gee Whiz. Last Night's was about Smart Drugs. There are people who take over 100 tablets of various types per day. Some even feed them to their dogs. They then go on to take LSD in order to enhance their creativity. I have news for them - The Smart Drugs Are Not Making Them Smart. One of them told the interviewer his age and seemed proud of it as if the drugs were keeping him younger. He looked his age in that tight skinned, sun-bleached Californian way. I have decided that Body Hits is a programmed specifically designed to show how stupid people who take drugs actually are. The one on Cocaine, Cannabis and Ecstasy was a long procession of people you would really not want to meet - unless you yourself had taken something. Stupid, Stupider and Stupidest. Don't do it! Creativity is only enhanced by a clear mind.

Obviously, the Advertising person who came up with the slogan ‘Ignite Your Senses’ did not take this advice. This is for some shower gel/personal cleaning product. Please tell me what it means. It seems that selecting a few words, which suggest something and then throwing them together randomly is the solution to all requests for slogans. There is not thought to how the words fit together and what the total meaning of the phrase actually is. There is of course no literal way of igniting your senses and I would suspect that the closest feeling to that would be given by taking large quantities of illegal drugs. Let us put that to a focus group.

I can't get enthusiastic about anything else. Work is not interesting - in fact it is rather bitty but it all has to be done so I should not complain.

I was reading some of Brian Eno's A Year With Swollen Appendices
yesterday and within the first few pages he talked about watching Kavangh QC. He described the specific episode as a new story where the good guy wins but is on the wrong side, meaning, I think, that it was a completely new story on top of the supposed 7 basic stories. He then backtracked on this and supposed that maybe it wasn't new. I am sure I have seen an episode of Quincy/Kojak/Starsky and Hutch with this premise. This got me thinking about whether we all have a block in our brains when we write things like diaries and blogs which makes us write rubbish even though we know it is rubbish. Martin has just arrived and said that cleverness is relative. Brian Eno is only just cleverer than the rest of us but that is a gulf we can never cross.

Poetry at Lunctime.

I Wish Alistair Cooke was my Uncle

though I would probably want to shout at him sometimes. Shouting at the radio is very therapeutic and does no one any harm. Looking forward to hearing Mr Blair on the radio this evening so I can get some more therapy in before I go completely crazy.

Inspired by In Yer Face by 808 State because I am sure that the voice is Alistair Cooke.

How do you keep everything together? I find myself reading old entries in this weblog and they all seem so much more together. Is it just that I am exhausting everything I have in my head? That cannot be true. Am I just bored? There is still so much in the world and again I never write things down when I think of them. I have all these people in my head as well and none of them can speak properly because I cannot write properly. That sounds like some form of mental illness but what I actually mean is that I have characters in there which I cannot detail sufficiently. Knoxxy Eugenia is one of course but I have other people trying to be heard. Of course they are all me really or at least have various bits of my own character. What has happened to Knoxxy Eugenia? She is stuck in that wonderful garden with all those thoughts about thinking floating in front of her. This is not the place to detail her life any more.

Words do not flow easily. Poetry is lost if you try and turn it into prose which seems to be fashionable. Does Martin Amis write poetry? I tried to get a book of his from the library but the only one they had was The Information and the first page was missing. I considered borrowing it anyway but then I thought that the first page is probably more important than the last for most books. It is never the final page where you get the plot twist - The Wasp Factory - Harry Potter V etc all had great chunks of come-down text after the denouement - like the humorous bit at the end of all American cop shows as rigorously satirised by Police Squad. This has me thinking about some form of book where any page missing would make no difference but then again Jeffrey Archer has already done this. Even a bad book etc. Ho Hum.

I wanted that to be either completely random or totally coherent and it has come out some where in the middle.

Closest by 74 centimetres

Soundtrack - This is the Return of Cult Fiction - (very) Various Artists

Just returned from a week in Malvern which while I have been away seems to have turned into some humid outpost of Empire in South-East Asia. It was very hot and very difficult to sleep.

Thank you to the Government for making Politics interesting again but for nothing else at all. The Hutton Enquiry is the ultimate arena for quoting things out of context. None of us read anything about it other than the summaries in the paper and see no more than the headlines but we all sit there trying to work out who lied and who is covering things up and the answers seem to be everyone and everyone. Tony's turn today. Maybe not quite as spectacular as the Saddam statue falling but maybe of more consequence.

What is Geoff Hoon for? If he knows so little about what goes on in his own department then he should step down on grounds of incompetence. It is worrying that so soon after the biggest war that Britain has been involved in for years, the defence secretary is so in the dark about the people around him. But then again, hasn't it always been the civil service who runs Government departments? Yes, Prime Minister was probably closer to the truth than a lot of elected ministers would care to admit.

We went to Upton-Upon-Severn last week. Upton is only just along the road from mjy old school and I was certain I saw someone there who I was at school with. We were in the playground behind the old fire station so if you were there and spotted someone you thought you knew then it was me. email to the usual address.

Celtic Poem

All the dead land from the urban waste
has covered parentage with slag and dust
to bring an end to sad, romantic language
used by poor and helpless lovers.

In this smoke, my eyes would burn
to cover up my tears at all the illness,
death and power lying in the air like hate
to keep us stitched to earth and sand.

Our gods have wings and fly this night
to fight polluted air with sense and love
of Angels in the blasted architecture,
lost for ever in the grass and hills of home.

And essays on the health of industry
will never bring us occupations.
You fail forever if you bring us death
and fail further with your smiles and sand.

Confronting the Intricacies of Large Scale Orchestration

I am turning into my father. Almost all chart music these days is just tat. There is no hook to anything, which makes me fear that youngsters are being de-educated regarding music; they do not see that things can be so much better. Why do they like the lack of melody? It seems as if all music these days is just rhythm and while I can appreciate a really heavy (should I say phat?) beat, even the power of that has gone. Bass lines are monotone and there is no variation in the drums - I say this listening to Music for 18 Musicians, which has more variation in three minutes than any pop song of the same duration. My daughter listens to classical music almost to the exclusion of everything else these days - she will hog the radio when we are in the car and has classical collections on when she goes to sleep. There is some hope I suppose but I dread the day when she starts listening to whatever is the equivalent of Britney Spears. There have to be new classical musicians created don't there so maybe she is one of them.

You are complaining at me for linking Music for 18 Musicians with other classical music but I know that I am right to do so. I think I may just have had a visit from someone at Ushaw College. Hello there if you are returning. Maybe I mentioned the word God too many times last week. Sorry if you were expecting some religious discussion. My test on the Internet decided that I was most likely to be a Secular Humanist and then possibly a Quaker. I am not a Quaker but I play one on TV.

Kaitei Shonen Marien

How important are Blogs? The BBC's Bill Thompson has been wondering about the appeal of Blogs. From my reading of other blogs it is very difficult to see that many of them have any interest or relevance. We should not let that get in the way as there are so many out there, there are bound to be more than enough to keep anyone interested. I read this one quite a lot but it gives me Javascript errors. Alice is obviously trying to steer a line of controversy right down the middle of every accepted 'ism' in the same way that Julie Birchill does. You are right Alice; you do need a Newspaper column. Don't ask me to agree with much of it, but it will be interesting. And yes, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea is very good. I have it here ready to play.

How do you sort out your own thoughts? How can you put down what you are thinking so that the meaning is clear and yet the writing is good? It seems impossible to make writing sound intelligent and interesting in they way that writers manage to. In "Thinks" David Lodge seems to write in a way devoid of all emotional colour, a little like Orwell does in "The Road to Wigan Pier" and I am sure that this is the proper way to write if you want to create the most factual image possible. I can write poems and I can write factual (technical stuff) but if I try to write creatively, it seems like one big poem. That is not always a bad thing but Simon Armitage is known as a poet and yet he was more than capable of writing a novel (Little Green Man) and a collection of prose (All Points North) both of which are very good. Maybe I should stick to poems. And here comes another one now.

Just what is wrong with a big long poem? DJ Taylor comments that they were already going out of fashion when Orwell was trying to write them. Actually, I think that most of Orwell's poems were far worse than mine which probably sounds sweeping in the face of him being published and well know and me being an oik. I used to write huge, ugly poems which were simply diaries like Clive James' and though I can drag out interesting themes they were strings of cliché rather than any serious attempt at literature. (No change there then).

What is it about a well-placed guitar squall that makes you want to write something powerful? It is the same thing which makes you think of the worlds best Poem/Novel/Music after a couple of beers. I used to thinks up pages of stuff while sitting at tables, at the student's union, on Saturday nights. Just for clarity, this was after I had stopped being a student and was working for this very company. They used to employ placement students and I had far more in common with those guys than with the family men that made up most of the department. The students all lived across the road from here in halls of residence, made up of lots and lots of tiny rooms. Most of them were art students and it is from them that I got the idea for collages when one of them saw the pictures stuck on my wardrobe door and started putting them in different conversations. I did a few in the style of John Heartfield - this was the time of Gulf War I - and then started the scrapbooks after digging out the catalogue for the Liverpool Tate Gallery's opening exhibition on Surrealism. Still need to post that first page.

We are living in one giant scrapbook - a continuous line of pictures, music, smells and feelings which we can never quite place the start of and never know the end of. All our life will be incomplete in our heads because we can never remember all that has happened or know all that is to happen. I get this incredible sense of unease at not being able to complete everything. We would all like the world to be perfect but what is perfect for me would be horrible to others. Try and imagine what the ideal programme schedule would be if you could control a TV station for one night and could show anything you like. I tried to think of what I would show and there was so much choice, that it was impossible. And of course there is an element of what you think of as your current favourite stuff. My Daughter got The Secret Garden" from the video shop they other day (and watched all of it) so that was on the list but I kept thinking of everything I had ever watched and enjoyed from Marine Boy to Gods in the Sky and there was just too much. Life is too difficult to compartmentalise. You will never solve every problem or even make everybody happy.

Marine Boy was brilliant and the theme song was so catchy that I can still play it today at least thirty years after I last heard it.

User's Guide to Suffolk

Hi there to everyone at Adastral Park. Did you have the Haddock or the Chicken today? Or did you have sandwiches?

From Puffer Fish to Five Star

This title came from a short discussion amongst us this morning. It started with Puffer Fish (and how deadly they can be if eaten when prepared incorrectly) and carried on through how Oysters look like nasal effluxions (and probably taste like them) until we ended up talking about 5 star who, amazingly do not have a web site. I would have thought that they were the ultimate cult band. Or am I getting confused with Debbie - sorry Deborah - Gibson? The discussion also encompassed Frank Skinner in Korea eating almost live squid tentacles which have to be coated in oil before consumption to prevent the suckers attaching to the throat of the Gourmand.

Soundtrack is Stereolab - Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements - Again

I object to your use of the chords F and D. They belong to me and no one else. No one should be one word. And so another day in the land of the urban myth springs forth from the mind of the un-occupied. That fish smiled at me after it was put on my plate so I could not eat it. Years ago, we went to a small shed in Scalloway on the Shetland Islands where we were shown a large tank with hundreds of lobsters in it. They were scrabbling around and making a spooky scratching sound as they tried to get out. They were destined, I am sure, to be eaten in the hotels around the Islands. That night, I dreamed of breaking into the shed and opening up an escape route for the lobsters. They would only have had to crawl a few yards to the dockside where they would have fallen in and been free. Now I like lobsters but only to eat. This is just another way in which I have changed probably for the worse. I would still set free the lobsters, but they cannot live out of the water.

You cannot have a full empathy with all creatures; it is impossible to do so and live happily. It is possible to know that you need to do something to change your attitude or all the creatures and plants of the Earth will die - us included. I am 14 next birthday and will travel over the mountains with my cousin the Duke towards the mountains where Oetsi was found. He was my cousin as well. We do not know where all our thoughts come from but we can guess that they are formed in the mind of one god who rules the world with others. The Deity of perfection is a dream we can never reach in this life.

Dream of the Mountains.

Dreaming of Pianos in my room,
deep within the castle my father bought
one year while dabbling in business
across the mountains of the moon,

I closed my eyes and saw the music
dancing through my mind like snowflakes,
spread against the moon and wind
to give me holidays and block.

I could not know the way we go
to reach the little station
high at Garmisch in the German Alps
and get back to my home.

My little brother sleeping at my side
has counted every sheep between
the stars and Innsbruck
and smiles, a dream within a dream.

At the border, we are stopped
by severe guards with rifles
and with callipers to test our faces
for our origins and mountain minds.

In mountain language we accept
and wake to sounds of ships
just beyond the dirty window.
I sleep and dream of lobsters.

Which picture do you choose for Lowlife?

We are all one blown fuse away from infrastructure collapse. How can one incident - wherever it is - cause 50m people to lose their electricity? It seems odd that in these times of disaster recovery and back-up it is possible for so much of the power grid to go down. And if by any huge chance any British power managers are reading, then don't take this as 'a beat up the Yanks' rant; I would ask yourselves if it could happen here and I am sure the answer would be yes. Civilization walks a tightrope.

After the heatwave (Copyright - All Newspapers) - we now have that early morning autumnal feeling which heralds the back to school period. The children are already back to school in Scotland so another year nearly over. Time is an illusion and all that. While we were in the car last week, my daughter said that it looks like everything else is moving and we are staying still. Relativist is not quite the right word - it is a philosophical concept rather than a scientific one - but you know what I mean. Last night she also noticed that things are appear to be bent when you look at them half in and half out of water. And they say that there is a lack of scientists. Now what would the world look like if I travelled on a beam of light?

By the way, if your IP address begins with 193.113.37 then contact me at the email address listed.

I apologise for yesterday's schoolboy rant. Well no I don't. I can be accused of simplicity but I would accuse my accusers of acceptance ("rolling over and dying in the face of hardship" would be a better description). There are plenty of things wrong in the world and the modern solution is a complex web of committees and conditional aid. There is no "just do it" culture (even at the BBC Mr Dyke - Get on with it).

I was thinking yesterday about how I would have felt about September 11th if it had happened when I was younger - out at the weekend and all that. I have responsibilities now so anything that threatens the nice balance of existence in the world is a very worrying thing. This reminded me of how shaky I got during the first gulf war. There were a lot of jokes from older colleagues about how the young ones might get called up. I never really believed that but there were some that did and got very worried. Whichever way you think about it, we are quite stable. I think a lot of the Sabre Rattling is simply to get the public prepared for things which have always been on the agenda but which are not obviously necessary. Sorry Alice. "Solutions not committees" should be another slogan alongside "speaking on Channel 3" but then again slogans are a major part of the problem - how many health-authorities have a mission statement of the obvious? For once wouldn't you like to see :-

We will try our best but at some times you may find yourself on a trolley for anything up to - oohh how long was the longest wait? - but that was an exception.

Sorry! I know that all the horror stories about our health service are just that. You never see tales of good service. There was a terrible programme called "Intensive Scares" on BBC1 yesterday and it was just that. It put dramatic music over routine operations to make you think something had gone wrong. It cut away from the 'action' in a filmic manner to increase tension. It was in extreme contrast to "What are you Staring at?" the other week. Read Barbara's story and be amazed. I was trying to sum up the programme but it is all on the web-site.

Rant II over.

The Blindfold Dowsers of Alabama

I have listened to the new Kraftwerk album over and over again. Forget Techno. They are just as good as they ever were. Well maybe it is not quite a new album but it sounds pretty much like it. The problem - how to make yourselves sound like you always have and at the same time sound totally new. Brilliant! And while we are about it forget all those new polyphonic ring tones. I thought they might add something to the naff beeps that we have had up to now but they are naffer. Most phone conversations are pathetically unnecessary anyway so why inflict further misery by playing terrible versions of terrible songs? How many of you have set Kraftwerk as your ring tone? Sorry! I don't care.

I think reading some of the other blogs has made me change my style slightly. Am I angrier than I used to be? It does seem that I write short entries with little substance rather than long reflective ones. Today will be different I hope.

My daughter has just found a pink star on the ground at the park. I told her it must be one of the Perseid meteors which were visible last night. I went out at about 11 and saw one or two streaks though it was not very impressive. I did see one satellite go over though. Years ago that would have been very exciting but now it is just another light in the sky. Now is that because I have generally got more cynical or because there are so many, more exciting things to see? Just writing about this has depressed me somewhat. Maybe I should find something else to write about.

This is not a rebel Blog.

We all want a quiet life - apart from those who want to go jet-skiing or bungee jumping or car-bombing or making religious points. What is the difference between racism and evangelism. If you accept the fact that not everyone can be correct in their assumptions regarding religion, then it is only a short step to regarding that all religions are either completely wrong or are windows on the same spiritual reality. It is a form of racism to suggest that one religion is right and all others are not. I regularly argue that we would be better off without religion and of course, our secular society is doing its best to supplant any spiritual belief. However, there has been no thought as to what would replace it as the guardian of morals (not that all religious practitioners seem to hold with any morals either those of their own religion or anyone else’s). I like to think of myself as quite moral but then again my definition of morality is far removed from a lot of other people's. Blowing up a building can be considered well within the bounds of morality as defined by some people. I know you are thinking maybe of one particular religion but I mean all of them. The church is used as justification for acts in a lot of cases.

All this has gone pear-shaped in my head. I did know what I wanted to say but I have got really wound up at the injustice of it all. It is very difficult to justify anything even to myself when my head is like this. You know that the ultimate end of morality is to make the world a better place for EVERYONE, but you also know that it never will be perfect no matter what you do. There will always be the I'm all right Jack figures who accept that anything goes as long as their life is happy. I am thinking of a certain arms dealer at the moment who thinks it is alright to be a pillar of British Society AND to sell missiles to people he thinks are going to use them to shoot down commercial planes. However, there are also people IN GOVERNMENTS who do not see incongruity in THEIR actions. Blowing up buildings makes them blow up more buildings and we have a big circle. I was going to make an analogy with the ructions I had with my daughter this morning over her getting up at 5:50 am but this is too simplistic. All this sounds like Sixth form ranting without any realisation of how things in the world work.

If you read many blogs it is clear that many people do not have a real idea how big the world actually is and how many people there are. Solutions are for thousands of people not billions. The sooner we realise that we have to design world-wide solutions which help all of us rather than some tiny portion of civilization. None of us makes the effort to understand how the rest of the world acts. It appears that the US thinks that its own version of freedom is the ultimate civilized society. It thinks that by fighting for this version to become the model for the rest of the world, then everything will be better. It is the arrogance that this betrays which is the problem for a lot of people. Of course, the reaction is far worse than you could ever expect. Conversely, the superstition which rules a lot of the world (and the US is high up on the list when it comes to superstition - more on that in a bit) is also a real problem for us all.

The superstition bit - A US veteran's association has begun investigations into dowsing for evil. Now when this sort of thing is promoted, you have to worry. Actually, I am not as sceptical of dowsing as you might think. I used to really believe in it though I am prepared to accept that I was so enamoured of the deal, that I falsified results in order to 'prove' its existence, like when I forcibly bent the fork during a Uri Geller programme when my Dad wasn't looking. Hey Dad. You knew that really didn't you. A few of my friends and I convinced ourselves that we had managed to follow the water pipes under the common outside our house. A bit of me still believes that there is some bio-physical explanation for dowsing.

Sincere apologies for the upper case - yes I was SHOUTING.

I enjoy drinking bathwater. Really? So do I.

Actually from a section about congruent triangles but very funny all the same.

I cannot help thinking that all these terrorist alerts are simply to keep us aware that the WOT is still going on in order to justify any actions required. That is going to sound terrible if something bad happens but then again something bad happens all the time. I would say that many thousands of people die everyday as the result of things which require a positive solution - hunger - illness - and that relatively only a few die of terrorism or war. Are we not concentrating on the wrong thing? Of course all this is related in that a few people (terrorists nonetheless) see that the only solution to a negative problem is a negative act. How can blowing something up make someone say 'Oh Dear! I must be nicer to people." It simply breeds more terrible acts. Oh you know all this do you? Sorry! It just seems that the obvious is not .. er ... obvious to many people. I sound like the poor woman in the cafe in Rickmansworth who worked out how the world could be a better place just before the Earth was destroyed.

A Short History of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Borders

It is the wake of ages that destroys us in the end,
a wave of enmity that comes from then to now
and makes us each destroy the walls that keep us
in and out of all the paradises we desire.

Loads of fragments of things to write about but I can't get started with any of them. The poem above is all I can manage so it will have to do.

I have just been reading the Baghdad Blogger and I agree wholeheartedly about Channel 3 on the instantaneous translation should be for the truth. That should become a mantra for every honest politician - Channel 3 - "I am speaking on Channel 3" will mean "I am telling the truth". Lets us hope that it is so. Criticise Plato and Campbell.

I have also been trying to pay attention to the Hutton Enquiry but it is difficult to get excited by the quibbling over who might have done what or said what. It sounds like boys' toys to me. The bit about Susan Watts identifying some statements of Doctor Kelly as glib comments of the nature of what everyone thinks Alastair Campbell is like rather than being genuine statements of fact made me wonder about whether lawyers and the like actually pretend to be stupid just to make points. I think we could all identify the various colours in that statement.

Slow waltzes across the plains of North America

Some slow music on the headphones has linked up with the pictures from 1980 on some Blog I was reading. Imagine the ability to see the past as it was and link it up with how you feel right now. It is always possible. One day, all time will be one thing; we will live at every moment and know everyone.

When I was younger, nothing really phased me; I was never bothered by the more harrowing news stories as they did not affect me or anything connected to me. Now, with responsibilities, I find myself upset by the strangest things. I just read this article about a young whale in Hong Kong. The thought of just one whale going through this pain and loneliness is enough but when I extended it to the pain that will be created by the re-commencement of whaling, I was quite shaken. Iceland is still maintaining the charade of scientific research for this but can you see the smirk on the face of the Commissioner as he says that Iceland must understand how the Whales affect the fish stocks. Fish stocks are low because of man, not whales. In true James Burke connections style, this leads me on to how the Japanese pay out huge amounts of money to developing nations in order to buy their votes on the International Whaling Commission. If the moratorium is ended (and I am not sure of its current status anyway) I can forsee big battles on the ocean.

By the way, I found the article because the photographer was at the same school as me.

If you must see a New Zealand film this year then don't make it the obvious one. See Whalerider instead. It hasn't been on round here yet, the closest I can find it is in Bolton and that is 30 miles away. Video! What a wonderful invention.

I think the word 'Metallagenic' would be most appropriate.

The dust of years has covered up the photos on my desk here. We have waited for the death of cliché and it still does not come. The passion, which affects most of us, is rooted in cliché and will always be so. You think that you can change the world by writing something original but like guitars we will always return to songs about love and stories about love and poems about love. And of course love is the end of the death of cliché, for love comes from the past where life was simpler. Let's face it, even the best writers, the coolest stars of the literary world, turn into idiots when they fall in love.

You say that you have never fallen in love and we can believe you. You are probably getting annoyed about the lack of acute accents at the end of the very word you claim to hate. We write what we see. Sylvia Plath wrote all those detailed observations of the peeling paint on the pipes behind the sink in some room she stayed in - in Paris I think. What is the small gap that separates the best from the worst? Some tiny concept makes something original. She was of course just exercising and we would never criticise someone for a diary, which they thought no one would ever read.

And so we turn over and look the other way. The wind steals our voices and we are silent in the storm. 1976 was when we started to understand you completely, a poetic giant in a world of silence and tat. It was your freshness that blew away all other attempts to usurp your father's position. We did not know of your paternity then but the tragedy of your life has gradually revealed this to us. How can you take the language you were born with and make it something so different from its basic purpose? Language is for requesting food or shelter or sex and yet, in your dimly lit visions of the world in which we all live, you have turned English around, faced it into the wind, sucked it in and spat it out until it becomes an instrument of deity, the very thing that God would have needed to start this universe on its way.

The chasm I sense between the first word of this sentence and the next is not evident when you read it but the pity and despair it builds inside me creates a moment which you must be able to sense across the gap between now and then. We are creating a new grammar to determine a new form of writing. We will build a new language with the very words we are using now and yet it will go beyond love until it has taken us all away from the dread and pain that language is for today. We will love our lives and love God as we love the possibilities of new language. We write in meta-language, describing everything with fewer and fewer words until we can say anything with a glance or a sigh. The world will end and begin again.

I crawl back after poetry has died and fall to earth with you, an angel taking me, not dead, to perfect heaven from all these trials. An end we seek will never come; will simply leave you watching for the signs of it. Do you want to spend you whole life nervous of the shadows and the trees. My childhood ghosts lived in those trees and sucked in the light until the whole wood was dark and shadowed with the breath of monsters and of those humans that I hated. We were heroic then; children dressed as warriors, knights and soldiers for the good of good, beatific females at our sides and fighting evil with us until the enemy was sent home in buckets and ash-boxes. Sweet Joan showed us where she met the Saints and never dreamed of matching them in stature. I am scared upon the woodpile; they dare not burn me for my God will come and save me. I catch the eye of some scared soldier as he glances, horrified at me. I ask him for a cross, which he makes roughly with his sword, a symbol of our God to prove to me that I am not forsaken. He hands it to me and briefly touches my fingers and feels love conducted down through me to him. His sword, already drawn turns quickly through the air, decapitates his Captain and lieutenants with an arc of beauty. I am taken up and carried gently to the ground unburned. We will not die today. We will pray and plead for and end that never comes.

What word would you use for the bassline in The Model?

"It is an unfettered truth uttered amongst certain groups of people with slightly less productive functions than the rest of us, that a person in want of a quiet life is a bore."

Monsieur Jean de Valieur - Assistant Keeper of the King's Geese to Louis XVIII

Of course a quiet life could mean the freedom to do what you want to rather than just sitting back and reading or watching television. Maybe something got lost in the translation or is it that working with Geese all day long has sent this man mad? How productive is looking after geese anyway?

Top Quark Withins

I think I started an argument last night. We taped the Brontë programme yesterday and then I watched some BBC puff which followed a drop of water around the world - all style over actual content - so we had to wait to see the Brontë thing until quite late. This of course was much more worthy and interesting what with having an actual story line to follow. It was very sad to see Charlotte's life broken down by unrequited love at all turns. I have still never managed to complete a Brontë novel but I am sure I will one day. Maybe I should not get so hung up about having to finish something. I feel slightly shallow having got all my information about the sisters from the TV or my wife though I have read Mrs Gaskell's book for some odd reason. At least I have read half of Orwell's output before starting on a biography.

The argument was over science v art as usual though it might have been sparked in part by the programme we watched earlier regarding the future of the Catholic Religion.

Arthur bruised his upper arm.

I feel inspired to write again so bye for now.

The Burning of Emily Brontë's Second Novel

Today's use of the dash (-) in preference to parentheses, is a tribute to Bill Bryson.

We had a spectacular thunderstorm here yesterday along with enough rain to turn the back garden into a lake. It is thundering here now and the whole building shakes. So the question for us in the North is Heatwave! What Heatwave? So you broke the temperature record yesterday. The papers with their old-fashioned desire to decry anything new-fangled like the Centigrade scale (developed in 1742 many hundreds of years after Fahrenheit - oh well - about 20 years after) revel in the fact of the 100F mark being reached in the UK - like celebrating an arbitrary birthday. I fail to see how the headline 100F can mark an newspaper out as being a serious news-deliverer, especially bearing in mind everything else which goes on in the world. Life is made by experience not by measurement. That was the best thunderstorm I ever saw but of course it may not have been the loudest.

The soundtrack for today - and it is called Soundtracks - is Tour-De-France by Kraftwerk. This is their first proper album since Electric Café in 1986 and I am sure no real fan is disappointed. Kraftwerk were never about big use of technology. I know that sounds opposite to the perception of the boys but they know when not to add something to mix and leave it laid back. Were you expecting the Aphex Twin?

I was going to write something about the Brontës but it has just struck me how strange it is to be thinking of the aforementioned sisters while listening to Kraftwerk. I know that some historical dramas have been set to techno soundtracks and that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't - does nineteen-eighty-four count? - but you wouldn't expect many to work. Maybe I will leave my thoughts until some more appropriate music is available. My wife is reading Jane Eyre again. I am still struggling through Wuthering Heights trying to work out if Heathcliff is hero or villain. As I said, more later.

What should be written about while listening to Kraftwerk? The thunderstorm has finished and the news is simply the start of the Hutton enquiry. Well that reminds me of the article in the Guardian last week after Tom Kelly had to apologise for calling David Kelly a Walter Mitty character, which pointed out the irony of how David Kelly was - far from being a fantasist - exactly the sort of person Walter Mitty dreamed of becoming and that Tom Kelly was probably the Walter Mitty of this tragedy. Well at least we have some morals at work here and the people involved have realised how badly behaved they have been. Or is all that just a front to try and redeem themselves in order to try and retain the support of the public. Surely no politician would resort to crocodile tears. Very disillusioned at the moment. What alternatives do we have? We are back to the old no one who wants political office is fit to be in office. I assume that a person wanting to go into politics with a view to being top dog must have a certain amount of morality override in order not to go crazy worrying about all the people you have to do the dirty on in order to get there. As the electorate is more sophisticated these days, it is not enough to have simple and stark messages. Maybe we need a return to the simple rhetoric of past campaigns. Who is your choice?

Ceiling fans are great

Well actually they're not that great here as they meander round idly without any noticeable effect. When you query this you are informed that they are not designed to provide a cooling breeze but to move the air round. So all the warm air we have in here is simply being moved around. As you can guess, the fog has gone and the temperature is rising. Roll on November.

Try and remember what it was like when you woke up this morning. I never seem to recall any particular moment of waking up - of being asleep one second and awake the next. Every time I go to sleep, I try and keep some idea that I should recall what I was thinking about when I wake up. There is never any sense of being awake a second after falling asleep. There is always a sense of time having passed. Dreams are simply daydreams at night. They are just thoughts with a little less direction. I like to trace back what each thought came from so that I can assure myself that I am in control and that no part of my visions are premonitions or controlled from outside my head. There is no reality that cannot be imagined and no imaginary realm, which cannot be created. Even if we are not thoughts in the head of some super-being, we may eventually turn into pure thought.

Prepare for boarding. All thoughts are secured and fixed to a concrete reality, which we may not alter through our imagination. I do not have to rely on anyone else's vision of the world to provide excitement and adventure in my own. Remember those boys' stories, the Adventure Series about Animals and sometime Volcanoes. I tried to read all of them. Never quite sure if I managed them all but I read Volcano Adventure several times. Do children still read books like that? Could I write this whole paragraph as questions? Probably not.

I don't feel like continuing with what may or may not be a random Friday. My head is full of something like cotton wool and that is not helpful for trying to detect your own thoughts. They hide behind things, like Zellaby trying to hide the bomb behind a brick wall in The Midwich Cuckoos. Why did they call the film, Village of the Damned? Just to get an audience I suppose. While we are talking about this, why do black and white films, especially ones set in the UK, give one such a sense of calm and comfort even if the plot is dramatic. The Robert Donat version of The Thirty-Nine Steps could be a travelogue for Scotland.

I will have to end here as I feel that this entry has become too fragmented. I don't feel that wonderful, probably because of the heat.

It's Gonna Rain

Today's Weather Report - Foggy - Really Foggy. Why do some people not think they need lights on days like this? There were loads of white vans suddenly appearing out of the gloom like mobile buildings. Yuk!

Today's Soundtrack - Reich Remixed - Steve Reich and oh other people like Tranquillity Base, Coldcut and Howie B.

Look for the risk in everything. You get people who complain that police should be out catching real criminals when they are stopped for speeding or bad driving. Now when one of those drivers kills someone, who is the criminal? Even if they don't mean to kill someone, there is still Manslaughter or Murder of a certain degree. They have still killed someone. I would suspect that like for like there is far more risk of killing someone with a car than by breaking into his or her house. Obviously you could analyse this into the ground (Reductio ad absurdum?) and come out with all sorts of reasons for the police to concentrate on either. However when I read things like the letter sent into our local (very looooocaaaal) newspaper in which someone complained about the wear and tear on her car caused by the breaking and acceleration due to speed humps, I despair. It seems that people think that such things are put there specifically to annoy them rather than to slow them down. Our road is quite quiet but it is used as a cut-through by a few people at rush hour, which is quite annoying. It is one way but as far as I am concerned it should be blocked off at one end. My application to become a citizen of Tunbridge Wells is in the post and WILL be accepted I am sure.

I have just read this article (Where Bob? Where?) regarding the six degrees of freedom theory applying to email as well as other more physical relationships. I was thinking that maybe we could use this linkage which is defined in address books, as some form of gigantic computer. The links are like neurones and so this fits nicely with what I was talking about yesterday. The email network would become one giant neural net. How would you program it? This reminds me of another article about a soupy collection of rat neurones used to control a robotic drawing arm many thousands of Kilometres away. The rat brain is no longer conscious but it is organised in a way that produces information like a computer would.

There is so much for a person to do out there. My daughter keeps asking me if I know everything which is flattering for a few seconds until you realise that you have to dispel this idea and say something along the lines of no one person can know any more than a fraction of everything there is to know. Anyway, how do you define what is everything? Do you include the positions of all particles in the Universe like the great clockwork. Quantum reality means that physically knowing that is impossible. Is it the ability to answer every possible meaningful question? Does that refer to the past, present and future? Remove the Future, as that is always unknowable. You see that it is impossible to know even what knowing everything actually means. I know that is semantics but it is frightening to realise that it is impossible to even know something like exactly how many people were born on this planet yesterday.

The gradual realisation of the complexity of the world as you grow up is one of the most disheartening things there is. Young children think that the world is defined and that everything in their experience and that of the people closest to them is knowable. I think it is useful to keep some of that childish desire to understand everything or at least think that it is possible to understand everything if you want to. My daughter is reading the first Mary Poppins book at the moment (Stemming from an obsession with Dick Van Dyke - more on that later) and the chapter we have just read is one about how the baby Twins, John and Barbara, are able to talk to the wind and the sunlight and animals just as Mary Poppins herself is able to. I felt quite sad at the end when the twins grew up and forgot all this after having denied fiercely that they would ever forget. It seems to stir something as if we all have a residual memory either of ourselves as children and having a real connections with the natural world or through some genetic memory of a time when we were closer to the natural world. Of course this suggests that we are a special species, the summit of evolution, where in reality we are simply the biggest beneficiaries of a series of lucky accidents to this planet which evolution takes advantage of.

But are we not all connected in one long line of descent back to the slightly complicated chemicals, which combines all those millions of years ago? There is a double episode of Star Trek (TNG) which explains why all the various species scattered around the galaxy are of the same basic plan. It involved some ancient race that spread their own DNA around resulting in Humans, Cardassians, Vulcans etc. It was obviously simply a way of removing some of the more glaring inconsistencies of the show and hence getting rid of the need to create really strange species like super intelligent shades of the colour blue or the giant intelligent mould in the Rama books. The Star Trek plot actually had an intelligent species being the agents for the spread of their own patterns through space. Now I am not completely ruling this out; we may do this ourselves one day, but the fact that life has evolved on its own on this planet and has so many different forms, means that you could get the same result without any big co-ordinated effort. In fact, that is more likely. Deus Ex Machina indeed.

This was where I came in yesterday but could not remember all the stuff in my head. Something has triggered all this off. All this complexity, the imagination, the industry the ability to write Mary Poppins books is simply amazing. Even without any intelligent life or even matter in the Universe, there would be maths and this exists by default as it were. If you suddenly removed all matter from this universe maths would still be there. A single God-like observer would be able to determine the maths from first principles. I can't imagine a universe where 2 + 2 does not equal 4. It may be possible but we will never know. There you go; an unknowable thing. Does 2 + 2 equal 4 everywhere? This sounds dangerously like the mutual exclusivity of The Answer and The Question in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The signalling of which I think suggests it is time to stop. And you thought all I was going to write about was the weather.

Welcome to the ICA

As a country we are supposed to have the hottest day ever but here in Liverpool we have sea-mists and even rolling fog. The temperature is consequently not much above 22 c.

So having got the weather out of the way what else can I write about?

I had one of those rare moments (rare for me anyway) when the complexity of the world got the better of my rationality and I began to think about how all that complexity got created. I hate going into this in any detail because it goes against most of what I believe and it is very difficult to put into words. It is one of those things that your brain 'understands' in one of its many non-verbal modes but is impossible to write down.

I got the latest News letter from Simon Singh today. The first entry had a link to an article he had written to the Telegraph regarding Derren Brown. Click here to read the article which I agree with quite strongly. There was a magic revealed program on TV this weekend and I am sure that the magicians were bluffing with their revelations. The solutions seemed in-elegant and although I couldn't think of possible alternative methods in all cases, you know that ALL magic is simply conjuring so there must be a way to do it. It has just struck me now that all of the mysteriousness behind all this means nothing against the amazing things that exist as part of nature anyway. The creation of the complexity of all living things is magic when compared to our general experience of the world. We accept that our own minds can carry out tasks of extreme complexity simply because they can rather than because we understand how they do them. As I have said before, consciousness is not yet fully understood in terms of the way the chemical side of things interacts with the physical aspects of the brain and yet it must work because we exist and carry out these tasks. This of course denies the existence of any super-natural machinery at the level of the soul but even without a full scientific explanation it still works using simple components put together to form implied complexity. Like they used to say at the beginning of the Six-Million-Dollar Man, the existence of the human arm is proof that a properly constructed mechanical version of the arm will work. The key being the words "Properly constructed".

What if there is a soul? Maybe it is a sort of mathematical concept that fits into the real-world spaces created by the mess of neurons in the brain. Maybe in this version of math which exists in this universe, some form of intelligence is inevitable. It would be like a meaningful text falling out of a mathematical formula. Well that does occur doesn't it? Somewhere in the digits of Pi is my Phone Number or if you like and can be bothered to convert Pi in to letters, there is my thesis or maybe you would like music, there is a Mozart piece, all Mozart pieces, all Pieces, all the knowledge and intelligence of mankind. Funny that.

Low-Fi Heaven - Hi-Tech Hell

All vision simmers in this heat;
all rhythm breaks like bad guitar
and we could melt into the ground
to damn the world for hatred
of its short existence.

Head out across the loopway
where derelicts collect
and sit with them remembering
the blues they heard
and steal their drink.

The weather breaks the pavement
with its un-steered malice
brought from Europe
to the final empire builders
for their urban dreams.

The highway loves you,
drunk and spinning, singing
with the wind from oceans,
flagging voyages with
meteorology.

Under the white bridges
where the paper lifts
in powered flight
from ages we will never see,
the angels sleep.


I have just been looking for a picture of bridges to go behind the title up there and I just found this website which came up on Google because of a black and white picture of the New York Bridges from the site owner's Office near the top of the North Tower of the WTC. I have looked up the name and he is confirmed dead. His whole life detailed on this site and it just stopped. The site has just kept going. That says more than any poetry ever could.

I am not sure my colleagues found this as sad and strange as I did. Rationality in everything Bob. Get a grip.

The Madness of Seagulls

Soundtrack - The Kathryn Tickell Band

There is a beautiful orange glow along the top of the long building outside the window. It's going to be a hot one Dano. Unfortunately I have help desk duty this morning but with luck this will be my last go at it - ever ever ever. I didn't actually have a tape running when my boss said this but I have enough evidence to believe him. And this music (see above) is happy enough to match my mood at this prospect. Folk is not all fingers in the ears you know. I do not own one fisherman's jumper. I used to when I was about ten but I got that in Shetland so I have an excuse.

Building the Frigates

At the end of this you have a thing. This comes from the mind of one person or at the most, two people and filters through a process that has not changed for hundreds of years. Someone draws out your ship for you and then it simply gets cut out of the steel that we stack up to the ceiling. There is no committee sat around debating what colour it should be; everyone knows what colour a battleship should be. We have a boy who takes the rolled up drawings from the drawing office to the cutting loft. He lays them out on the huge steel plates and then someone marks out where to cut and where to bend. We move the steel across the loft using the cranes but it looks as if the men here can simply carry the great sheets all on their own. The sounds are large and painful to the ear. We used to make our own ear plugs but now the company give us proper "defenders" - the bright yellow phones look out of place here because after a few minutes at the steel, we all look rusty and dirty. We bend steel into ships, we rivet them together and we send them down the slipway into the river. Other guys fit them out of course but to us they are like the plasterers and carpenters who come into a house after the brickies and roofers have finished. We do the hard work. And we make the bits, which have to survive the mess of the sea. We keep the crew alive and warm. We go home happy and drink ourselves into the ground because we deserve it. Reserved occupation? Certainly. All this comes to me when I close my eyes. Some nights I man the AA guns in the park but we rarely have to fire now. No bastard makes it this far up any more. It isn't the threat of our guns of course. It may be our ships out on the ocean.

We are all one now. The office boy with his drawings, the girls who come in as welders and riveters, the old boy - too old even for the last war - who comes in and makes our tea. You realise that the world will never be the same now. They talk of all sorts of good things now. The company look after us all very well. Maybe someday the country will look after everybody. How do the poor widows live when their men don't come back? The company helps them too. Sometimes you wonder what all this is for but then you tell yourself to stop being stupid because you know exactly why you do this; why everybody does this - it is the right thing to do. I bet the shipmen on the other side say this and probably they believe it. We had a group of them over ten years ago and they were good men. I don't know if they have reserved occupations over there but I can see them in my head, sitting by the slipways drinking their ersatz coffee. I wouldn't want to shoot any of them but in these times what can you do?

If only I could write a North East accent.

I have just heard that a bomb has gone off outside the Jakarta Marriott hotel. I had a few letters from an Indonesian girl who worked there. Saying I hope she is OK seems redundant seeing as I only wrote to her a couple of times never very seriously. I met her in a boat going across Lake Batur to the village of Trunyan. Bali was as much a holiday for other Indonesians. She was with three friends who seemed extremely happy even when we got taken to the local cemetery to see the bodies (which are simply left out under simple bamboo 'tents'. I have a picture which I feel slightly guilty about taking, of one of them holding up a skull. It was this that made me realise that there is not a great deal of difference between teenagers any where in the world.

Time to finish though as I am on helpdesk you may get some more later.

PS.

I have just found out that the hotel did not open until 2001 and so it cannot be the one where my friend worked.

On and On to Wigan

Soundtrack - Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich

Let's face it; poetry is never going to change the world - but it will make some of us feel better for some of the time.

Every time I close my eyes I see a damp and reflecting world of rain on city streets, an empty existence sustained by drugs and cheap encounters with various other low-life human beings. The world of childhood is far behind us now and all those long, hot summers are just family myths, brought to earth easily by a look back at the statistics. Humans are doing enough to make that endless summer a reality. The Ozone may be healing itself but the relentless pumping of Carbon Dioxide and Carbon Monoxide is continuing to damage our atmosphere beyond help. I am like a teenager who thinks that just by mentioning the negative things they have just begun to notice in the world, they will suddenly get everyone to see how bad things are and start making them better. Those days are gone forever. I am lost in those dark streets, the only conscious soul in a desert of pathetic creatures, struggling day to day to get their next meal, walking hand in hand with disaster and waiting for the end to take them to oblivion.

I am sitting on the steps of our sixth-form school house, watching a friend and his current partner, grapple good naturedly with each other. She squeals in a ways that makes the chess players inside look up briefly from the game and then continue with a sub-audible tut. I am hidden behind what I think are the coolest mirror shades in the world. No one can touch me for being cool; it is no crime here or even against the rules. My teachers do not care anyway and even if they did what could they bothered to do to me. I am their star, their killer application, version 1.0 of a package which will never be bettered. You would think that they had built me in one of their modestly equipped labs between the lessons on density and how to make hydrogen.

My eyes are moving beyond the mildly erotic games in the foreground, to follow a dark shadow skimming the horizon, a warplane I know for only they fly that low around here. Now I can hear it, just a slight roar of jets in the distance, divorced from its source by the speed of sound so that it travels a few degrees behind, a desperate race to return to its mother. Now it is too close for anyone not to look up. Even the chess players have moved to the window to follow it. The sound has changed quality as well as degree and in it we hear gasps and cracks and I know it has swallowed something bad, a bird maybe or some dust swept up by the combines combing the wheat fields. Now we all know it will die. We laugh together unable to connect the spectacle of this impending disaster with the plain fact that the man within it will end up vapourised if he stays with his craft like a captain with his ship.

Not half a kilometre away, it starts to climb in a steep arc until it is pointing straight up. The engine is very sick now, sparking, flaming and screaming as it disintegrates internally. Black debris falls away from it and we see it shaking trees in the distance as it reaches the ground. And at the very end of the engine’s usefulness as a propulsive force, we see a further black shape detach itself from the plane. The pilot has ejected. He was gaining height to give his parachute time to open. The plane and its master follow separate arcs until the pilot is brought up short by his 'chute which opens in a wonderful ballet and makes us all gasp audibly with the connection of the fact of the pilot's possible death.

None of us has said a word but now there are a few fragmentary phrases as it becomes clear that the next tragedy could involve us for the plane, engineless now, is looping over on its back and is foreshortened. Of course we are not in danger. Without its power, it is quiet and so close now that we hear the wind flapping the useless control surfaces; the rattle of bones it seems like. In a second we are safe as it passes over our heads and we cannot see it any more. There are exactly five seconds of complete silence; I count them on the room clock.

And then the floor shakes. There is no explosion, just a sort of short earthquake which knocks over the chess pieces. We all start talking properly now. The realisation of our salvation is not voiced but soon it is clear that we are all unhappy with how close we came to this. In the playing field at the bottom of the garden, the pilot has landed and is calmly gathering up his parachute. Two girls are walking towards him, not running but walking and giggling for he is a pilot and that is cooler than I could ever be with my kiddies shades and bad haircut. We don't know where to go now. The plane explodes.

We follow the chess pieces to the floor and cover our heads. Don't mess with the haircut. I stand up slowly, covered in dust and without a worry. We are running outside; towards the huge cloud in the distance behind the school. It has come down in a field with no one around. Something tells me we should not be doing this. How many crew does this type of plane have? Only one got out. I don't want to sound pompous and I am gauging which of the girls with us had to be escorted, sick and fainting, from the labs when we cut up pigs' eyes. I do not say anything. The fire is too hot for us to get close. The pilot is laughing in that desperately relieved way that people do. He was on his own and the fault lies with a mechanic. The girls laugh too and we all return to school. The air smells of some sort of fuel but I cannot remember what planes use. I am not so boring that I know what planes use for petrol. It starts to rain from the blue sky. The head boy lights a match for his furtive cigarette.

My life is one long oblique strategy

Soundtrack - Message from the Border - Orlando Gough

I have a beat up old book, which I rescued from the skip when they cleared out our school library. It is called RAF parade, a compilation of short jokes, longer anecdotes and many cartoons of the RAF during the war. Apparently it is one of about 10 wartime humour books compiled by S Evelyn Thomas all with Giles covers. There is one piece in it about going round an airfield trying to find out what puts the 'It' in 'Spit (as in Spitfire). The language describing the icy wastes of the outer edges of an airfield in winter is worthy of high literature; in my mind, I can see the flapping tarpaulin hastily thrown over the parked aircraft to keep out the ice and hear the distant clatter and buzz of the hangars.

How nostalgic does that make you feel for rations? I had another of those moments of never having had to spell a word before. I could not spell 'rations'. Am I aphasic? At least I remembered how to spell that.