Escaping from Sing-Sing

Listening to - Gala - Lush

There is a helicopter hovering about a mile away. It has been there for at least a minute and shows no sign of leaving. It is about 200m above the ground and as I said just floating there. Obviously it is the police helicopter.

It has just gone. And with no meaning whatsoever. There is nothing outside the text so you will never know. I may know what it was doing there but that is because I work here and there is a greater chance that the information will get to me. Having said that, this is not a novel and so I may post the information here should I receive it. Thoughtforms and little lies.

It's back though it is not hovering any more. The clouds at sky-height hide it from us and we start to read again. I feel in an empty sort of mood where anything I write is just chaff spilling out into space. There is no weather and all the days are playing holidays. On the edge of some featureless green hill, the wind cuts across the path of children on holiday. The happiness is real and you could package it, bottle it, slice it with a knife and keep it in a box under the bed to bring out in times of hardship. My favourite day ever was when I was 10 and I walked across some seaside greenery between the road and the beach. There was a path to the sand and no buildings. In a hollow, out of the wind, the sun came down and made the world pleasant. In the sky there were larks and other birds. Their alarms were our sweet music and we lay down with our faces to the sky and thought of everything that made us happy. Poetry came to me first on that day and I have lived with it ever since. I cannot keep the plot of my life in my head. I could not write it down. No detail other than a vague and fuzzy impression of what life was like. This is a memory book, a book of daydreams for that is what life is. Try and define anything other than now in any definite terms and you will fail. The further you go back (or forward) the less your memory or your wishes fit with the real path. If the Universe - space and time, exists all at once, then time simply keeps things nicely structured - it stops everything happening in one big splurge of emotions and events.

We make the Universe and anything in it. I feel a prisoner in this split second. I cannot go back and though I can make myself go to other places, I am still imprisoned by the speed of light and how I want to behave in a world or morals. The only consolation is that we are all in it together. It is never a lonely journey. We all live on top of each other in time so that we all experience the same things. The world made smaller by wireless and electricity is now here instantly. Antipodean experiences are seconds away and we all see them wherever we are. Nothing is hidden from us and no one can cover anything up. Government must become accountable and for the people rather than for itself. They name one person wrongly and the whole parade of ghosts will tumble, each naming and bringing down the next until the figureheads and the great and the good will fall before us and we know they were wrong and over-complex for the world we live in. Science is complicated but humans get simpler the higher up you look at them. I talk to a friend and there are many levels of interaction, little feelings and things known between is which are not known to anyone outside the conversation. Watch a Prime Minister or a President talking to his or her nation and you will see a masterly distillation of what they think we want hear into a few simple words that convey all within themselves. There is no blurry, fuzzy edge where subconscious meaning lurks, for TV or Radio cannot capture this edge. In that case, why bother using it? Say what you mean and forget about the rest. Annoy half the people and keep the other half asleep.

An emotional broadcast system - a piece of technology which can detect and re-broadcast those little faithless betrayals which make up our relationships with each other. A rainmaker for the mind. A recorder of feelings and meanings. A decoder of speech and lies. When we are all sensitive to these things then maybe we could make the machines to read them. Everything is a machine. The mind is a machine for processing thoughts but it links in deep with the physical world to exploit chemicals in the blood to create all the experiences of life. All the emotions within us are just chemicals but at the deep level, the universe and the mind connect and every time we think we are able to find this link, the Universe of the chemical composition of consciousness retreats into a realm too far away to detect with optics and electronics. By observing them we change how they work anyway so again, why bother? Maybe we think we need to know without realising that we never can know everything. The concepts at that low level are so complex that only a few brilliant minds with ever fully realise them. Maybe we need a new type of scientist - a bio-cosmologist - to link the worlds of the very small and the very large. This is a prose poem for science, a memorial to all those dead cats and their living twins - exactly one-for-one. How many times have they done that experiment. The answer is inside a box and 50% of the time will have been incinerated before the lid is opened.

I am back in that green meadow by the sea. All these thoughts were in my head then and though the matter that held them is gone and my brain is made up of a completely new collection of particles, my mind has held these images for all that time. At 10 years old, I had the whole world defined for it was what I could see and touch and smell and taste and feel. There was nothing outside the text of the novel of my life. The world has got bigger since then but as far as I know it has physically grown since as well. I did not know about the details of the war, or all that humans are capable of doing to other humans. These horrors did not exist. And then my life came up with a few horrors of its own. I have learnt to live with these but they are always there, making black marks on the inside of my head, visible scars to trip up the MRI machine, to silence its giant rumble and clank with a view of human history as an evil thought within the head of some insignificant human. If this was you would you feel important chastened by the weight of the world within a single mass of matter? It is all true for everybody. What is real? Where do you want to go today? You can take a walk to the shops or lie back and dream of worlds that never were, xenofictions that redefine your culture. None of them are the best route. Some people will die in these worlds. Pity them for the real world is more complex than anything you may make up. Try and record the whole world and you will fail. Complexity is nothing wonderful.

The electricity will fail and all this world within a machine will fade and die and where will we be then? I see people throwing rocks at each other as the world falls under clouds of poison and evil emotions. And then I realise that the world has been falling forever and will fall until the sun swallows it up and spits it out as gas to make a new star somewhere better than here.

45 Minutes? You must be joking!

I have just found a page with units to help you learn colloquial Lapine. This strikes me as a bit over the top. The beauty of Lapine is that there is so little of it around. To spend time making it up seems slightly sad. It is not like Klingon which begs to be spoken and developed. Some obsessed people out there. Then again. I have just written two Lapine Haiku.

Re-Lapine Haiku

I was going to put a rider on the above entry regarding it not being correctly 5-7-5 but it is all in that scheme. You are going to have to work them out for yourself. I did think it would be impossible to make any meaningful poems from the limited vocabulary provided in the book especially as there are not connecting words. However, I was browsing through David Crystal's excellent Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language and I came across some stuff about Chinese proverbs where the exact translation fitted exactly with what I knew I would have to do for these Haiku. I can now see why Haiku comes from Oriental language. These languages are more suited to the economy of phrase that Haiku demands. I do have to add the rider that I realise that proper Haiku have to convey a specific form of meaning and use only a very definite range of emotions which my Lapine versions probably do not. Anyway, Haiku was all I thought I could get away with so there you go. Don't write and complain. I was doing my best.

Lapine Haiku

Fu-Inlé, Hrairroo,
U Hrair, m'saion, Pfeffa,
U zen marli tharn.

Ni-Frith, Nildro-hain,
Hrairroo Rah,u Hlessil Rah,
u elil, u zorn!

The Gonzo Intelligentsia

Listening to :- Emperor Tomato Ketchup - Stereolab

After not having mentioned any books for two weeks (because that is how long it took me to read Watership Down) I have finished another book in two days simply because it demanded to be finished. I have been meaning to read Time's Arrow since it came out ten years ago and never got around to it. My daughter won a prize which we had to go to the library to pick up and while I was looking for another Richard Adam's book (which I also found) I saw Time's Arrow. I started it on Friday night and finished last night. The conceit of the book is that of a detached consciousness in the body of a Doctor. This hobbyhorse mind is created with a full set of faculties and intelligence at the point of the Doctor's death and experiences the life backwards, retaining its detached air throughout. If you want to know what happens in any more detail then read the reviews on Amazon but in best Empire magazine manner I will add - Warning Spoilers. My review here can only cover how I reacted to the problem of reading a book that described the whole of someone life backwards - really backwards. For ease of understanding, each sentence is written forwards but the order is reversed so the narrator is performing some form of interpretation but he hears the words backwards. People walk backwards and the doctor himself when acting professionally does things in reverse - putting bullets into bodies with tweezers, re-attaching legs etc. The horrific centrepiece cannot be more shocking if you do not know it is coming.

Immediately after reading a section, it is difficult to come to terms with the world in the right direction. For split seconds I found myself thinking that the correct direction of time was strange. It is difficult to explain but read the book and you will find out for yourself.

I had a dream about the rabbits of Watership Down two nights ago. I am not going to bore you with details mainly because I cannot remember them - I should have a notebook close at hand for making notes - but the one detail is that Thlayli - Bigwig was standing in some sort of election. He had been "humanised" and had had posters put up. I am not sure why I mentioned this. As I dreamed it, this seemed powerful and to have meaning but now it just sounds silly. I promise that I will keep any Dream Diary out of this blog. I hate going back and deleting posts unless they are really naff so Bigwig stays.

Poetry at Lunchtime - maybe.

I will not answer any questions afterwards

Good Afternoon to Everyone at Czech TV

CQ CQ CQ

Listening to :- Aion - Dead Can Dance

I used to listen to a lot of short-wave radio when I was in my teens. I started because Radio Moscow was stuck between the two frequencies that Radio 1 used on Medium Wave. (The link to Radio 1 is meaningless now - you won't find Dave Lee-Travis or Kid Jensen on that site). Radio Moscow phased in and out and was so difficult to hear that you only ever got half a story. I listened to it occasionally during the Falklands war but it blindly reported the "facts" from Argentina rather than from the dour-faced Ian McDonald of the Ministry of Defence (who sounded like a Speak-Your-Weight machine) and so would often report things like Aircraft Carriers being sunk. Maybe that was confusion over The Atlantic Conveyor which was carrying Chinooks. It was odd that the Russian presenter who had so obviously learnt their English either in the US or using US tapes, tried so hard to make the magazine programmes jolly and un-threatening. I got the feeling that they couldn't actually understand what they were saying and just read out phonetically spelled cue cards. All the possibility that communicating with the west might corrupt them was removed. I hear Antoine de Caunes used to do this for Rapido because he could not speak English. Contrast the Soviets' upbeat delivery with the slow talk of both Ian McDonald and the presenters on some of the Voice of America programmes who used a limited vocabularly and left a pause between every word.

What I really wanted to listen to was The American Forces Network (it used to be on 15430 khz but it was so fuzzy as to be unlistenable). Now we have the Internet, these things don't sound so exciting. Children will grow up without any sense of the mystery created by distance and the trouble you had communicating with people at those distances. I used to be so impressed that any phone in the world could connect to any other phone; now it is just part of the furniture shall we say - like TV or Orange Juice - no great shakes.

The heading for this morning's entry is visible just below where I am typing this and I have just said it out loud to myself. It is strange how a phrase in one language which to a native is guttural and earthy (making it great ammunition for profanity) sounds powerful and dignified in another. Silflay Hraka, u Embleer-Rah is the utterance of a great warrior. Say it in English and you have something for a drunk or a teenager just getting used to swearing.

Silflay Hraka, u Embleer-Rah

I apologise for the lack of entries regarding books. I also apologise for the profanity that heads this entry. I was so surprised when I read it in the book to which I have been giving clues over the last two weeks that I just had to use it as a heading. It is Lapine from Watership Down and if you want to know what it means, you will have to go to a Lapine Glossary. There is also a Blog with the same title which, the author explains is because rabbits do indeed Silflay Hraka and it seems a fitting image for the recycling of words which blogs seem to do.

Anyway, back to Watership Down. I read it first when I was 12 and then maybe again just before I was 20 so it is nearly 20 years since I last read it and I have to say I have forgotten most of it or missed the significance of a lot of the text because I was too young. The old statement "many levels" is often applied and it really does apply here. As I read it I kept thinking of allegories and analogies to human existence. Richard Adams makes it obvious that rabbit society is as complex as anything we might have - in some ways more complex because we do not have to contend with real danger. The allusion to Greek tragedy is also clear as it was in "The Girl in a Swing". There are also references to the human rejection of religion in response to material comfort - in Cowslip's warren, the rabbits are "farmed" and have lost the spark of belief in the old rabbit gods. The heroes of Watership Down rekindle the beliefs and this is made obvious by the absorption of the story of Hazel and Company into the stories of El-ahrairrah as told by the new does to the kittens after the final battle. Very Lord of the Rings you are thinking? Much more realistic. One of the reviewers on Amazon said that their teacher told them to look at the story as what humans do to each other. I actually thought that Adams did a wonderful job of giving the rabbits their own moral code which is not our own. You realise that you may not agree with how the rabbits behave - they are not romantic and they do not grieve in the same way that we do though they have a huge instinct for survival - but you wish for them to do the right thing by their own codes. Read it if you have not already and re-read it if you read it when you were too young.

Listening to :- Canario from Fantasia para un gentilhombre - Rodrigo

Bouncing off the Heaviside Layer

Trashing Complexity. There is no time for me to tell you what I mean here. There is no time to walk a mile or two before breakfast and then decide where you want to go today. I will meet the voice of an old dead soldier walking a mile or two before dinner to return the medal of a friend to the battlefield where he died, his finger in his mouth in panic at the gas and statues all around. This field so white has never grown a crop since then; sowed with salt they say, unwatered and the birds will not go there. They are reminded of the white light, like noise through the shell of their eggs and they fly away to other continents. We do not encourage this rambling. It is dangerous to us all and might turn up a shell waiting for a suitable pattern of weather, waiting for someone to put their foot down carelessly, to blow them high into the sky. Bruises were all they suffered said the caption to the picture but we know that those commandos fell to earth minus limbs and unconscious. It was propaganda that they survived. There is no identity in newsprint; we cannot tell anyone from this small and blurry record of the battlefield. The thickening of fear has taken over all men who walk this mile before their supper and the day's end. The light is pale and sinks with the battlefield until the flowers curl back into themselves and reveal the blasted dust beneath. The water swirls away and is gone.

Sea of Skyscrapers

I never thought I had anything in common with Barbara Streisand but apparently I do.

Listening to The Grid ... not the Philip Glass track from Koyaanisqatsi.

Beautiful painting-like sky out of the window this morning. The sun lit the last remaining tower-block on Sheil Road so that it stood out from the rest of the city around it and now we have a delicate collection of clouds in the far and middle distance like tentative brush strokes to test colours - mauves and pinks and wispy oranges. A single seagull is wheeling over the site just enjoying itself like Jonathan Livingston. It makes me think of the sea for some reason. Maybe it's the music, maybe just the clear air like at the coastguard station. Suddenly the sun has lit the long building opposite us and the whole thing looks like the Paul Nash (I think) painting of planes and vapour trails.

Looking for the painting I wanted to link to, I have found this one by him which reminds me of a short programme in the Homeground series which last night was about the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster of 1943 when 173 people suffocated as they tried to crowd into the station during an air-raid alert. The programme found that the panic was increased by the strange sound of Rockets being launched from a Z-battery in nearby Victoria Park. These were like katyusha rockets but seemed to be ineffective. It is even possible that the launch on the day of the disaster was purely a test firing and that there were no enemy planes in the area.

I have now dug out a really old Ambient House collection which has Last Train to Transcentral and An Ever-Growing Pulsating Brain that Rule From the Centre of the Ultra-World (though only a 6 minute version of it). Using the long title as a search phrase I came up with this page which being from 1995 must now be considered a very early piece of the Internet. This record is what made me think that I could make music with a drum machine and a DX11. I now have the computer and this suits me fine now. I am in the middle of upgrading the PI play program from a single instrument to four channels with complete control over pan, volume and instrument. I got the basics working last night and seem to have produced part 1 of a Steve Reich simulator - the addition/subtraction. Part 2 will be the phasing simulation and then we are onto the Philip Glass simulator. I never got around to the computer version of In C but now I can control all the channels and instruments, maybe that will come in time. All this has made me realise how simple it is to fit notes together to form pleasant chords in any key. There are no complex rules other than addition to the base note. My wife will hate it!

It was the Goth what won it!

I think this poem was used as a question in University Challenge this week. A very witty summing up of Toilets' epic of depravity. I don't know if you should call it depraved but the phrase 'epic of depravity' sounds good. Bearing in mind that one excised section of the Wasteland referred to a waiter and some unnatural practices with a dog, I think 'depraved' is probably a very good word for it. Doesn't stop it being a good poem though.

This reminds me that I wanted to say that the DJ Taylor Orwell Biography made me aware of the links between various other biographies I have read. TS Eliot was linked with Ted Hughes at Faber and from there you have Sylvia Plath and Orwell. It is easy to link musicians and film stars because they have definite collaborations but literary links are always more tenuous. The only possible criterion is if a critic mentions two writes in the same article. I don't read criticism anyway. It seldom fulfils the promise of its function - to inform readers what they might like to read and what they will hate. Why did I start reading Sylvia Plath - because the critic in the Sunday Times said I should. I don't get the Times any more by the way. It turned into a version of the Beano with simple primary colour diagrams to explain the more complex things to its readers. Unfortunately, all the other Sunday papers seem to have taken the Times as an ideal to be copied. Oh what rubbish. Give up now before anyone dies of boredom or worse still, clicks the back button.

Bangor won by the way - My dad's friends went there so I was rooting for them.

Reverse Dolly Zoom

Listening to Joy Division at 06:30. Not a recipe for a happy day heh?

Ian Curtis must have had more in his mind than we can know. Put anything to that melancholy beat and those sad chords and it will sound powerful and unhappy but there is something in the delivery that takes it beyond mere angst and despair. Paul Morely would probably take this to an extreme but I cannot. There are plenty of things, as I said in some roundabout way yesterday, that are too painful to think about. None of Joy Division's songs ever touch me in any personal way other than being the catalyst for that general feeling of pain which makes teenagers so happy(!!) when they don't actually have that much to worry about. Take despair to an extreme and you would make most Joy Division fans into gibbering wrecks. It is all right to be unhappy as long as you can do it in a comfortable long coat while staring out of a rain-soaked window over a bleak cityscape. Make them walk over the mountains as displaced persons and they'd probably be wanting to listen to A Flock of Seagulls or Haircut 100.

God came down from the sky and he looked like a mirror. He showed you a few chords and that was it; an icon was born on that rooftop, a burning collection of meaningful words to give hope to the disaffected, purpose to the lost and sight to the blind. Well maybe not the last one but sometimes in front of them you felt like you could do that. Maybe it was the drugs and the thought of all those girls out there. Where did the words come from? They seemed to arrive in the night, fully formed in your head like little gifts from the sky. You knew they meant something but you did not know what that was. The grey city took you in its mouth and spat you out as inedible and you felt you had survived something that would kill a normal person. On the big bridge you felt like you could fly and some concerned older person put their hand on your shoulder to stop you jumping. You weren't going to jump but you looked sad enough to be contemplating it. That made you laugh and feel mixed up in whether that old woman (in this context - over.. say ... 45) was interfering or charmingly concerned. You try not to think about it for she put the idea in your head and for years the thought came back to you at random times and connected to no thought before or after. Had that been when the universe split in two? And every time there was a news story about some poor, sad student jumping from the bridge, you sat there like Brody in his deck chair and the Reverse Dolly Zoom. God came down from the sky and showed you how to step out of danger and that was it.

Ni-Frith

There was an evil light in the sky this morning. The sun was streaming through very dark grey rain clouds and it looked like blood on water. Sometimes this is enough to put me in a bad mood during the whole day and though I might have got away without being too bad, events here have annoyed me beyond normal boundaries. Never mind. I don't have to walk 12 miles for water that I then have to boil. Having said that, there is a particularly bad smell coming from one of the cup disposal receptacles - butyric acid I think - which could be the source of a nasty problem for environmental health departments for miles around.

I do not want to write down music today. I am not actually listening to anything, as I have brought no CDs with me. Some things just make me so depressed, things that I do not need to write down. Before I was married and especially before I was a father, I could read most things in the paper without being really bothered by it. Now for certain things, it is a struggle to get through an article without feeling angry, sad, frightened or all three. If it is like this for me, then what is it like for children? I still think it is important for children to see the news but then there are articles like this which make me review that thought. Of course we have to know what goes on in the world but it is difficult to do anything about it. We are generally helpless against the tide of bad things. You can argue both ways, that things are better now or that they are worse and of course that all depends on your viewpoint. I may have ranted about the comparison of the seriousness of various events int he world but all this debate about the relativism seems to make any of them simply a point for argument rather than human tragedy.

Something (I forget what) in an entry by Salam Pax made me think about all the people who are living in situations which are precarious. Those living in Iraq both before and after the invasion, those who live with a never ending struggle for food and water - think of your own entries in the list - they all seem to settle down into a routine which includes the elements of their situation which could kill them at any moment. Sounds like a sort of worldwide Catch-22 doesn't it? I wanted to add in a Micawberish line here - that they have to keep thinking that something will turn up and solve their on-going problem or otherwise they will go mad. For millions of people it won't unless some outside force helps them. Do not expect any solutions here because I do not have any. My life is far better than 95% of the world's population and even that is a low estimate. I cannot be bothered to complete my thoughts for this paragraph as I was going to start with "most of us with our comfortable lives..." and that sounds so sixth form that I would be sick. Apply that to the whole thing. Yesterday I wrote a title "Naff Heading deleted" - you can replace this paragraph with "Naff paragraph deleted". I would do it but it is an entry and I should stand by it.

I stand up and look out of the window. The grey cloud has gone and the autumn day which threatened so early on has been swept away by late Summer returned to fight. I close my eyes and try to hear the city below but we are in the middle of industrial land and there is no movement here, even at lunchtime. No children playing, no dogs searching the dustbins, only silence created by the empty ground and the height. There is a fan nearby which fills one ear with white noise and makes me slightly giddy as if I had drunk a short. The few lunchtime conversations are dulled into unintelligibility by distance and the general air of lethargy. Now nearby, someone is reading out a list of numbers as someone dictates it to them over the phone. Everything is neutral - no conflict and no teamwork. We are ants or bees, creating a buzz but only noise. No idea stays with me for long. I think of one thing to interest me and before I have recorded it, the idea has gone to be replaced by the next chained thought. Chained thought! No thoughts are unchained - free. They are coloured by our entire life. At no point have I had one thought that does not flow from another. They go back to the moment the first synapse in my brain fired into life and started creating my mind. Even as I sleep, the tenuous links go on, connecting me now to me always. The salts I need to think are the most important things in my diet. They buzz around, making the journey from my gut to my brain in seconds until they are used in a fantastic idea that I then forget forever. The chemicals are wasted. I want a minute when not one atom of those chemicals is not used to create an idea which I will always remember. I stumble over a portal to another universe, a perfectly reflecting sphere and in it I see the whole of this new place - every person in it - every tree and every planet. I have a world in this sphere and the sphere is inside me - every idea is mine and the lives of all the inhabitants are mine. A bubble off this universe, brought into being by science and split off from us is creation begun again. There can be no connection between universes, no wormholes or space warps created by spinning black holes. Now is now and always is not now. We live always in our own little spaceship travelling unseeing and unknowing between the infinite other-universes and other people and other things. There are only people and things - mind and not-mind. Life is ours and mind is ours and all else is not ours.

[Naff Heading Deleted]

I thought I was not going to be able to write anything this lunchtime and now I find I can, the usual blankness has descended. I started using the handwrite application on the Palm to note down things I want to write about; the handwriting recognition system is too slow to allow it to be a spontaneous notebook. Actually, for a few days last week, I was carrying a notebook and pen which says something about the technology we still have. It struck me that some technological advances are not really advances at all; they are simply prototypes that are put out there to try and get some revenue from a gullible public. The videophones seem to be a good example and I remember that the service providers have been censured for using in their adverts, sample images that are of higher quality than one would get in the real world. Software is another area where this occurs. If you made a car with as many problems, faults and features and some software I could mention, it would fail. The problem may be that people just don't know what you can do with software. As you have complete control over the bits and bytes of the computer disk, the computer memory and the computer screen, then everything should be possible. It is like the statement at the beginning of the Six-Million Dollar Man which says that the idea of a bionic man may look fanciful and impossible to realise but the fact that Human Beings are walking around with functioning bodies is proof that a properly constructed artificial replacement will work. The key phrase is of course 'properly constructed'. So much software is not properly constructed possibly because it is so easy to put out something that looks very good but functionally is awful. You can make the Flash screen on a computer program in seconds and it makes your software look very good indeed. You cannot make the polished wing of a car without spending real time on actually constructing it. I hope you agree with me on this next point. Sometimes the best websites are the ones with actual meaningful content rather than the flashy add-ins and animations. I know I point out what I think are nicely designed sites but sometimes I do realise that they are basically form over content. Eyes bigger than my mouse finger you might say.

Tate Liverpool are showing some Government arty type films as part of their Paul Nash Exhibition. One of them was Night Mail which is always magical and another had film of Nash himself sketching in a junk yard full of bits and pieces of planes. I had a feeling I had seen the painting which had resulted from this and I was right - here it is. The other really famous Nash painting is The Menin Road which is huge and covers a whole wall at one end of one room of the Gallery. My daughter said that she could see a bridge in there somewhere but we couldn't find it. One thing that struck me about Nash's post WWI pictures was that he developed from painting stylised images of reality to almost abstract pictures and that the progression was almost exactly like that of Mondrian as he went from the pictures of trees to the geometric blocks of colour for which he is most known. Nash's progression was not as dramatic but it was there.

And something else about Nash. I always thought that the painting Over The Top was by Paul Nash. I am surprised to find that it is by his brother John who I didn't believe existed. It is lucky that I didn't ask where it was when we were there.

Sense and Non-Sense

We visited the Anglican Cathedral at the weekend. It is sometime since I have been and I forgot how wonderful bits of it actually are. I know main interior is so impressive and just well big but the most important part is the Lady Chapel (I am sorry to say that this picture does not really give any impression of the actuality). When I was first in the city, some long time ago, I would go into town on Saturday mornings and then go up to the Cathedral to sit in the Lady Chapel and listen to the Organ practice. We were there this Saturday and I am pleased to say that the Organ practice still happens on Saturday. The Organ in the Lady Chapel is high up at the back and if you walk backwards down the isle in the direction of the Altar, you suddenly see yourself in the Organists mirror way up on the back wall. I always feel that that this part of the Cathedral looks better if the light outside is subdued. The huge main windows of the Cathedral need bright light to be at their best (though being so bug they are quite impressive in any light) but the Lady Chapel is so compact and complicated that a subdued Autumn Saturday is just perfect for lighting it correctly. There are long narrow galleries at what you would call the first story between the main seating and the Organ loft and these have hidden lights that give the whole place a warm inviting feeling. As I said, the decor is quite complicated but its seems somehow less fussy than its Victorian predecessors, like the designer was beginning to get embarrassed at the excesses of his immediate ancestors. I have some pictures of the Lady Chapel somewhere so they will have to go on the long list of things to scan in and post here.

I dreamed of plane crashes again last night. This is twice in a month. It was probably because of seeing more pictures of September 11th on a programme about Imagine by John Lennon - Imagine IMAGINE. I suspect and hope that John lennon, had he not been shot, would have bought up every copy of this song and burnt it. I know it has a wonderful sentiment but all it does is prompt people to sit around holding hands and singing rather than going out and actually doing something about it. I am with Robert Elms who will not play it on his radio show (Unless someone pledges £500 for Children in Need. No Possession huh! How much is that damn piano worth now? Bono goes out and argues with presidents rather than the press so he is off his backside and doing something rather than sitting in a bag or a bed. I know you cannot argue with the overall sentiment of the song and that it very dangerous to have a go at a Son of this very city, but he was a bit limited in his outlook was old Lennon. Instant Karma got him. Obviously talking about Bono made me think of this second-hand witticism. Need to read some of my Wife's books on this subject.

I dreamed of the plane crash though it was second hand - I was being told of a crash from years ago when the person telling the story lost her boyfriend. The plane was some sort of fighter plane that crashed into a church and lay almost intact in the Knave. I could see pictures though I cannot remember whether they were real or my imaginings of the scene as it was related to me by the pilot’s wife/girlfriend. Dreams are never really like they are described are they. I read so many dreams listed on blogs and they all seem to be "this happened and then that happened" - there is no well the impression I got was of this but I cannot really remember whether it was here or there. This makes me believe the idea that dreams are just the brain trying to make sense of the mess of stimulation it gets when you are asleep. Sometimes you have a dream that seems so real and I have heard of people who "wake up" in their dream and then are surprised to wake up again. I have sometime had trouble remembering whether a memory I have is from a dream or really happened but I have never woken up and been not been able to distinguish dream from reality at the point of switchover. My dream trademark is that everything seems to take place outside. Even when I am in situations which only ever take place inside buildings, the sky is open; there are walls and furniture but I can still see the horizon and the sky. It is this weird ever-present sense of the world around me. Well all you clever clogs out there - what does that mean?

I really like Autumn. Howevere there is a danger that "the very corridors swim with autumn leaves and the smell of bonfires" (apologies to Sue Townsend but I cannot find the eact line though maybe I should be apologising to John Tydeman who supposedly wrote the letter.) so maybe an alternative approach it required. More later.

Everything will just STOP

Things get so weird and the multiple surreality which builds up can only come to an end when everyone realises how stupid they are all being and just give up.

Breaking out of Little Boxes

Apologies for anything which may be boring in the following page but I am going to talk about computers - sound of half the audience clicking the Back button - sound of cheetos being opened by the other half. Single yelp from the Aardvark who accidentally clicked here.

I have just written a very simple web-based application that we have to put live at some point. I worked on it on an NT box and displayed it in IE on the same box. When the web-server admin type people looked at the page I was immediately struck by the tasteful and rather attractive round edges to the buttons as they saw as opposed to how I saw them (stay with me - the end is worth it). This made me think for a while, through a circuitous route that ended up with a lament on how computers are still based around little boxes - the machines themselves and the stuff they display. I know of course how you set up irregular areas and strange shaped forms but even then the whole concept is based around lines. Now Tony Buzan has been trying to get us to make notes in ways which much better fit with the way our brains operate. I know you can get mind-map software for PCs but even then it seems limited in how it can fit with the nice little rows of data that PCs have to work with. Information Technology has sometimes removed all the clutter that business used to have. We have fitted everything into little boxes of disks but I am sure you know that putting everything on computer just gives you a lot of ordered clutter. At the bit level everything is nice and orderly but then again at the atomic level everything is uncluttered (in its own quantum type way). We need to break out of these little boxes and start designing organic type PC programs.

I know the Internet is big and that there have been some attempts to do this. It is quite depressing to see that Tony Buzan's own web-site only has a few examples of his mind maps. Most of the stuff is just lists, which is what I thought he was against. I have seen web-sites which are just seemingly random links between drawings but which seem to convey much more meaning than any text list could.

Meanwhile, for a site with some claim to be doing exactly what I say (yes I know it is all unoriginal and you have heard it all before) go here. You don't have to be able to read French and even if you do it probably won't make the experience any more enjoyable. See you next time. I'm Adam Hart-Davies - Good Night. No I'm not. Sorry about that.

Coffee Trades

Cargo to the islands, lifts the smell of cities
through the desert,
takes our ideal of safety
and of happiness to seed the clouds
with little sparks of mineral and gem
that men may find in sand.
The dunes have soaked away this rain,
the comforter of all
we might have wanted in our years away
and made us sleep so easily like statues.
This is poetry for everything.
A blanket moon sails to its own music,
raised by gravity, a galley, guttering
between the scudding weather,
at its own pace, in its own warfare,
armed, an airborne army,
trailed by spies and agents,
spooked by nothing in the dark
of noon twelve thousand miles away.
In the hedgerow find the claws
of animals equipped to kill,
and cut them with a shining wire,
drag them through the doors to save them
from the floods and flowers in the shaking sky.
We see our day as hours and counted,
and in the daylight; light as part of place
but in the world, the night has half our world,
and makes the universe a place,
a light, scattered, gutted,
taken from the fields and trees
to make place a world of all the senses
at all times and eras.


Listening to :- Pooka - Pooka

Three Part Electronic Invention in Blue

I had an email confirming that Spirited Away was indeed Anime though I now know that the term Manga applies to the comic book versions. The BBC has an article about Spirited Away here.

I have read somewhere about a Tory MP who declared that if his party win the next election (This recent news makes this seem unlikely), they will force the BBC to close their web-sites and also BBC3. Now I am not a fan of BBC3 but it is aimed at people ten years younger than me (a depressing fact in itself) and is quite valid. Stuff which you might call rubbish on the BBC would be quality stuff on any other channel such is the relativism in the media these days. Going back to our Conservative friend, I cannot see why he wants to get rid of these things; even he admitted that the BBC's internet presence was good. Maybe is smacks to much of left-wing propaganda or it is not open to enough competition. I know there are plenty of anti-BBC web-sites - this one for instance - and maybe I am being naive but the BBC seems relatively benign in a media which seems to have a lot of nastiness as its main theme at the moment. Maybe it is the old Commercialism Good - Socialism Bad or maybe there is some lobbying going on in the back ground but remember this about the Tory party - the most recent widely reported event they were connected with was the launch party for the new film - Carry on London - in the House of Commons. (Epedemic of hyphens today).

It was pouring with rain when I left the house this morning and yet here the ground is dry. I have an image of my house with a small cloud continuously raining over it like the house where the Munster's lived. Or was it the Addam's Family? The rain has caught up with me now so maybe I am more like Daffy Duck with the small cloud following me. You didn't expect to read a page with The Tory Party and Daffy Duck did you? Or maybe that is a common association. Daffy Duck is certainly on TV more Iain Duncan Smith.

I am getting to that stage in life where I wonder about what my character actually is; how others see me. They worrying thing is that all the little mistakes seem to come floating to the top of memory and colouring how I see myself. Like the time I apparently drove through a red light when I was driving back home with my wife's cousin and only he noticed or how over the years I have tried to use uninflected received pronunciation and it turns out like some minor aristocrat. My colleagues, knowing the area where I grew up insist I have a Worcestershire accent (like Eddy Grundy in the Archers) and indeed I can still do that if I want. However all this leads me to think I am some form of bumbling Twerp like Carlton Browne or Terry Scott. I must add that I do not look like either of them, which must be a relief to my wife.

Prince with a Thousand Enemies

Ed Broom has a page or two devoted to Freston Tower which has made me think about what follies we have around North Liverpool. There is nothing as tall as Freston Tower, though we do have a sail-less windmill, which as you can see from the photo has been sail-less for sometime. I should get a recent photo and post it for you but the trees are now quite tall and that is the reason it is not as impressive as it should be. We do have the new Blue-Cloud folly as the fourth grace but that is another story, which you may find in my archives somewhere.

Doesn't that sound good? My Archives! You don't expect to get to this age and have archives.

All the sounds through my head are sad ones today. Somehow nothing gets above a shrug in the how-are-things stakes. It is probably just the weather. Meteorology is not a job for the melancholic, though as I have said before I find rain very comforting. I sit out on the doorstep and watch it. My daughter has taken to this as well though she fidgets after a while. We don't have any particularly impressive view from the doorstep but that is not the point. The sense of being connected to the weather is there just as it was when I used to watch the rain from the holiday cottage we used to visit at LLandanwg. It often rained because we would usually come at October half term. The cottage had one long room on the ground floor that looked out over the bay and so we saw all the weather either about to reach us which had just passed over us. There was no TV and my dad used to torment us by saying that there was one but that it was locked away. Maybe he was joking or maybe he asked the owner to lock it away so that we had no distractions. It was definitely a room for listening to the radio. Once we witnessed a yacht founder on the rocks on the beach below. The crew escaped but when the craft had been salvaged we found all sorts of things from it. Dad got a Stanley knife that I think he still uses and we found a flare. I have mentioned this before. My brother and I were going to let the flare off but we bottled out because RAE Llanbedr is only a few hundred yards away and we knew we would start up some form or air-sea rescue. Anyway, we pointed it into a sand dune and pulled the trigger string. I can't quite remember what happened but we didn't get burned or anything like that.

I keep meaning to ask my dad if the cottage is still rented out.

Goodnight Hrairroo.

Captain of the Sandleford Owsla

Soundtrack hint - Our eyes are magnets in the darkness. Answers on a postcard.

I am going to pretend I was in Hurricane Isabel. Everybody else is. The remnants are expected over Liverpool any moment now and then I should be able to get some juicy stories - or at least make them up. Oh - is that in poor taste. That would never do on the Internet would it. Anyway, Hurricane Isabel is prompting a shutdown of Government in the DC area - I could ask how would we tell but the answer would be all too obvious - things might get better. Sometimes I think democracy is a scam but that will not stop me fighting (though perhaps not actually dying) for it. Local Government especially seems to be a platform for sad beer-mat collector type people to grind axes in public and make huge amounts on their expenses. We are back to the idea of the only people suitable for political office are those who do not want it. Thank you for that Douglas. Well the wind is getting up now so I will close down for now. Good luck everyone.

Sound of wind and rain - calmness - Sound of wind and rain again. Inane comments of TV crews as they arrive and start working out their expenses.

We're back! Well that wasn't as bad as I thought. Blew away some cobwebs and cleaned up all the litter. I am not going to feel guilty here. There is so much downright evil out on the web - along with some really positive stuff of course. My satire is hardly - well satire I know - but not particularly nasty. The Internet is really a giant editorial where you can find anything on the spectrum of human opinion. It is like the Christian Science Reading room got mixed up with the Leafleting department of the BNP and the Tattooists and Piercers monthly. It is all there in easy reach; you do not need to go to a special place to get special information. Everything is together. I can only think that this will make children grow up very confused. It used to be that Children either took on the values of their parents or rebelled against them completely. Now with what appears to be the abdication of parental responsibilities to TV, Video, The Internet etc, you are going to get a generation growing up with no real hard and fast opinions on anything. This may be a positive thing; extremism and black and white opinions may not be possible but on the other hand it may turn us into a world of Zombies with no passion to try and make things better.

This goes hand-in-hand with the bureaucratisation (had to look that one up) of management in all fields and I fear this will clog up any system. I find sometimes that even here, the only way to get something done is to walk around and ask people. The systems are so moronic and complicated that following them is just like entering a maze. The problem is that these systems are designed by people who have no real skill at the job. Designing a system requires a worldview; you cannot make these things piecemeal - they have to be designed with all inputs, outputs and processes in view. All duplication has to be removed. All redundancy has to be removed. How many times do you find yourself hearing someone explaining a bit of a system that you never knew existed. The worrying thing is that the functions of these systems are always quite simple. My favourite analogy is that the systems I have to deal with involve additions and subtraction most of the time, multiplication and division some of the time and Integral and Differential calculus - NEVER. A simpler saying would be it is not rocket science. Managers almost seem to think that systems should be designed by evolution. Now this might me a good thing. In its simplest form this is like finding the balance point of a ruler - you could find the mid-point by measuring and then use trial and error to get the exact point. However the easiest way is to put the ruler on the index fingers of each hand so that each finger is at each end. Then simply bring your fingers together without restraining the ruler. As the ruler overbalances each way, the friction on one side will be overcome and that finger will slide. As the balance changes, the friction on the other side will be lessened and that side will slide. This process will increment until your fingers are at the centre. A simple elegant solution provided by nothing other than thought.

This reminds me of the old cartoon which is a favourite of systems analysts - the design and production of a swing. I know it is a cliché but sometimes a good cliché can cut through all the trendy originality. The Emperor’s new clothes and all that.

After all this I am off to get Pat Robertson to pray for me to win the lottery. What? You don't believe he can do that? He can steer hurricanes so he can certainly make those balls come up. Maybe he just doesn't want to.

Music for Airports

While possibly travelling to their fiery death? Now that is what I call encouraging.

A fun link for you here. I could play with this for hours. Right click and Zoom in to get it bigger. Martin and I were speculating over whether this is based on the slices from the Visible Human project. It opens up the possibility of many other things of a similar appearance.

My daughter made up a story yesterday. She chose as her 'book' for bedtime, a folding two-leaf photo frame with one picture of her and one of her and me. The story goes as follows :-

Once upon a time there was a lovely daddy who was just under 48. And he was around for a bit and then he made flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers ......... (enough 'flowers' to tip it over from being charming to slightly niggly)..... The End.

We then had a guessing game so she could guess my real age though I am sure she knows really. (In The story she was over by nearly ten years). And it is criminal she did not make the Booker Shortlist. I apologise in advance for all the pop-ups over the Guardian website.

I am now off to regress to a simpler and richer life of ease. Oh well - no I'm not. I am off to start work for the afternoon. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Hack the Booker

My cousin wakes in the early morning, and in that sudden rush of memories refreshing the mind from days previously, she regrets some things and smiles at others. Autumn hits hard here and the windows are blurred in the cool of the night but over the mountains there is blue sky and promise of a warm day to burn away the mist. Life in this valley is indeed sweet.

Here, I dream of rigging votes. I will write the worst ever book and make it win. Now the sun is laid to sleep and I can work at my plan. This book is started and tells of empty passion, the lusts of the disenchanted elite and the acts of those who cannot live proper lives. They are the arbiters of our morals, They decide on what we see and what we read and they alone can choose who lives and dies. In my simplistic dream of the way the world was when I was born, I filter out the wars and famine and see a land of fields and eternal summer. Our programmers see the same thing but they steal these visions from us and turn them in to plastic nostalgia, a past time where the values of today are plastered over the images of then. Real history is one of illness and danger and not the calm, well-ordered world they make it out to be. We are fed and kept like a farmer keeps animals, always with the unseen and unfelt threat of death and sale. We kill our gods and monsters and believe in only nothing. Our art is reduced to its simplest terms - they sell us crumpled bits of paper and lights that simply turn on and off as the pinnacle of artistry and we buy it on every level. These cultural thugs say that they do it because they want to overturn the old ideas and that they do. They want to take away the love we have amongst us and replace it with the love of things and non-things, the electronic, microscopic things that make up this world you read on this screen. How big is this paragraph in the computer it lives on? It takes up a tiny area of disk and yet you see it large upon your screen like all the other people who may read it. The whole of experience becomes nothing, in blank white boxes in unknown, unlit rooms across the continents.

They have medieval tastes, an austerity that comes only because they cannot have any thing other than that which makes life better - just a little. The ornaments are plates that must be used. The walls have colour made from earth and plants. In the fire they make an illusion of penury, a cramping lack of anything which we might consider a comfort in our life. The water is carried in from streams many feet away and boiled to make it drinkable. The food contains the grit from the quern stones and the husks of the rough unengineered wheat used to make the bread. It tastes good but gives no nourishment. In the winter, the cold is kept from the house by more illusion. The gold of the walls drinks in the sun and buries it in hiding places round the rooms, to be let out at evening to heat the freezing air.

The music here is simpler still. There is no polyphony or complex instrumentation. A scraped string and a rhythm beaten on the table are all that is required to make all guests dance like madmen. The executrix leads us all around the house to bless the windows and to point out witch bottles. In the future we will find these idols and save them up for museums like we saved the Trilobites we find in the fields. The world turns at the same speed for all of us and this history is ended because we are at the end of history. We love the world and it loves us back and gives us shelter and the minds to make the technology we use to help us live in comfort and safety and free from hunger and illness. And poetry will save us all.

Wounded by the Magic Arrow

Yesterday, something made me pick up Birthday Letters as my reading for the Tuesday bus home. I have started this book several times, each time recognising that these poems are in some way special because of their length and their subject. And each time I have found the first few poems disconnected in some way. Well yesterday I got beyond the first few poems to where Ted Hughes actually met Sylvia Plath and the verses took off in a passionate way which I was not expecting. The rhythm, which at first seems to remove the meaning by virtue of being ‘ordinary’, becomes a proof of the honesty of the words. The metaphors are rich and numerous without being overwhelming. Usually a poem has one or two central images to convey the meaning but these assault you like a literary scan through the radio frequencies of Hughes' mind. They could be diary poems like Clive James' dirges but the passion and love and guilt and everything else pour out of the Hughes poems like an emotional cornucopia - a death note maybe but a special one. Read it and be amazed. Of course then you must read Plath's collected poems, the Letters Home and the Journals to get the whole picture.

Mark Rothko

I watched what I assume was an Open University programme on the artist Mark Rothko this morning. He is the producer of the giant purple paintings which were designed for the Seagram restaurant in New York but which eventually ended up in Tate Modern. Now whatever you may say about these paintings I have always quite liked them since they were at Tate Liverpool but my point is not regarding the artiness really. I was watching the programme on the Digital box that at certain times shows a measure of the compression that is used to transmit images. It may due to atmospherics or the fact that our aerial is not wonderful. The compression works by only retransmitting the bits of subsequent images that are different from previous ones. All this is usually transparent. However today as the camera panned around the room where the Rothko canvasses were hung there was a very marked graininess to the picture. This struck me as odd because the walls of the gallery were flat white and the pictures themselves are flat expanses of purple on purple (maroon or whatever). In contrast, the self-portrait by Rembrandt that consisted of very detailed brush strokes showed no grain. Maybe it was covered up by the detail. Maybe the grain in the pictures of the Rothko paintings is an artefact of the compression/decompression. It will be interesting to see the result when we get out aerial sorted out properly. The presence of the graininess actually complemented some of the things the commentator was saying. Of course a lot of what he said was pretentious rubbish but that is normal for art critics.

Did you notice that the final stanza of yesterday's poem only had nine lines instead of the ten in all the others? Well I just miscounted but the word completeness is in the last line so I am taking that as a bit of serendipity. Do you remember a programme called Serendipity? It was a studio bound arty/crafty type show (though not like William Morris) with Katy Manning presenting it (Jo Grant from Doctor Who around the time of the Demons and who once posed nude with a Dalek I think though I have no proof and no inclination to look for any as I am on the Office PC). I don't really remember much about Serendipity apart from the fact that it involved a lot of stone polishing but it was one of the shows I would never miss like Doctor Who and unfortunately The Pink Panther Show. My father now has a Stone Polishing machine which he uses to create tasteful stone displays round the house. That sounds so critical but I like stones as much as he does and my daughter has a huge collection of them that she has treasured far more than any bought item. (We are thinking of having the pebbles in the back garden replaced with turf, so she may get upset). See TV Cream for an interesting snippet regarding the programme.

Soundtrack - Among My Swan - Mazzy Star

This album is like poetry. Not the words - just the whole feel of the songs - the gentleness of the Hope Sandoval's voice against the distorted guitars. All means nothing and that is fine - the best poetry never does, just like the best art. Everything else just fades away - nothing means anything anymore and even in the depths of the saddest of the songs and they all sound sad, you leave with your heart lifted and the day looking brighter. Beautiful and nothing else.

Recording Live

The Sea and Dark

A rhythm of the body would not stop
the flow of chemicals from here to where,
and never end the feel of music
in our heads and fingers like the breeze
that lifts the sky and trees
to heady excess through the moonlight.
In the dark we lived like whales;
no home, no things; a simple life,
becalmed between the forties
and the freedom of the ocean.

At seven years of age we left this world
for life and love and work and dance.
Our minds were filled with things;
ideas and ambience for living easily.
The world came to our feet like poetry
to force us down the roads to poverty.
The sickness of the things we do
has overcome the feel for what is right
and what we know had made us metal,
automata and drones in silver skies.

I would become a cloud of thoughts,
a fabrication of the chemicals that make us,
to cloak the world with my last breath,
and flood the empty desert with a rain
of passion for the lost and empty minded.
In a thousand dreams, the people meet
and fall into each other's heads,
breaking patterns with a spark of life
that lives and flies in one another's hands,
to break the river banks with reason.

They tell me take the passion from the poetry,
avoid the red and heated arguments of love,
live calmly on the beaches in the sand and lie
to read the rights of those who tell you all.
And I would scream at anyone, the tales of Earth,
the tales of Sea and all the animals that make it.
My enemy would wither, waterless like whales,
driven to the shores so understanding
by completeness and the theories of now.

Leoni! Wheres the Shed?

Soundtrack - Red - King Crimson

Newly bought and not yet listened to. No Comments please. All mail should be addressed to ... Oh well it doesn't matter.

Loud guitars are a fine thing on a crisp autumn day. They are a fine thing at any time. I was speaking to someone who was at the PJ Harvey gig at the Eden Project and it made me sad that I missed it. I said some weeks ago that I needed to get to a gig sometime and I still haven't. I scan the back pages of the occasional music magazine looking for Stereolab or something similar but no luck. Then again there are all the responsibilities which make such excursions impossible. My daughter has expressed interest in going to see one of the classical concerts at the Liverpool Phil. Looking through the programme has shown me that Whale Rider is being shown there as is Veronica Guerin. I will have to ask my daughter which concert she wants to see.

We had a bat flying around the outside of the house again last night. This might sound rather routine but on the edge of a big city it is quite comforting. On Castlemorton Common where I used to live, there were owls and bats and all sorts of other wildlife that I did not appreciate at the time. We do really live on the edge of the city. Not quite as much as edge as some places. Up by the Liverpool Coastguard station, the road just goes along the Edge of the city. Last week I came back from Southport by train for the first time and most of the route was through golf courses. One minute you were on tracks in the dunes and then the train powered into the big houses of Blundellsands. This has reminded me of coming back into Fort Lauderdale on the day cruise to Grand Bahama. At night the ship just steams away towards the bright lights of Florida and just when you think it is going to run aground on the beach you realise that you have gone between the hotels and are in a large stretch of open water. Quite weird but not as impressive as the ferry turning round on a penny in the dock at Douglas on the Isle of Man.

Writing Music

How do you write a piece of music? I don't mean how do you write music; I mean exactly how do you write prose that captures the rhythm of a piece of a music. The stuff in my head right now deserves recording and I can feel my fingers trying to work out some sequence that will match the music and capture what emotion it creates within me. I see you are worries that a random Friday is approaching. Maybe it is. This could be automatic typing of music. That note means this and this note means that. We came ashore at Flushing and watched the milk being delivered by dogcart. It was like swimming that morning; the air was thick with the summer and promised a hot day. We crawled through the syrupy clouds from the baker's shop and went to find the harbour master. We found him smoking a long thin clay pipe, leaning against the whitewashed wall of the little hut that was his office. We had to walk all round the four sides of the harbour to reach him but he seemed pleased to see us and gave us milk to drink. It was not until then that we all realised exactly how thirsty we actually were. The boat had had no water other than a gallon tub under the forecastle and it was too difficult to get to while the boat moved about. The seriousness of what had happened hit me hard. I was in trouble for this.

The harbour master smoked on in silence for a few minutes and then sat down to help us file the report. The music fell around us like snow, little impacts causing high pitched hissing like cymbals. As it built up, the sheer bulk began to swallow the sound until anything we said felt dead and empty because it no longer echoed. The trees made shadows against the grey sky, touching the clouds like fingers dragged through water while our panic rose and I began to lose sight of the reality of what had happened. I was ill I knew. The blood was leaking from my head into my ears and swallowing the radio sounds that crackled in the corner. The world span about me and fell upwards. I was six again. My head pounded and the music played on like dead things decaying; dry, black leaves and jet engines. I had something serious I knew. I should be in hospital, under those crisp sheets being looked after and everyone here wanted me to get up and walk around. I shouldn't be here. One atom this way in the Universe and I would not have been born.

32 Minutes past the hour

Well I didn't know this was happening. I am shocked. I can't imagine where all these people are. I certainly don't know any of them.

This of course leads me onto idealism. I used to think that everything could be solved by people being nice to each other. Even when heavily into squally rock music and nihilistic stuff like that, I thought the world would get better. As I get older (and I realise that this happens to everyone eventually - except maybe some of the baby timers) I begin to accept the cynicism that is the driving force behind most of our lives - in this country at least. The drive to bring the rest of the world "up to our standards" is a rush headlong into a mess of despair and nastiness. I try to note this sort of behaviour as I see it but more often than not I find myself saying to myself that there is nothing I can do and I should just accept it. Advertising is the pinnacle of this. It seems that as the people who were teenagers at the beginning of the '90s came into the agencies, they infected them with a misanthropy and a desire to show everyone as being horrible and out for themselves. Only occasionally do you get a 'nice' commercial or even a good one. Get that stuff out of your nose and start thinking. Talent is not something you can get by taking something. I was just about to write that it takes hard work but that struck me as so Daily Telegraph - a horrifying thought. They make you pay to get the Crossword online now you know. I am still bitter about that.

Now onto Manga. Well I am not sure if Spirited Away actually is Manga but it is Japanese and that certainly would give it many points on the plus side as being Manga. It is not on anywhere close but it may be soon. I am not a big Manga fan. I watched Akira a long time ago but nothing else. Someone write to me and tell me if Spirited Away actually is Manga, Anime or something else.

What is a Rostrum Camera and why is Ken Morse the Only Person who has one?

Read this by way of the Recently Updated Blogs just now. I love the misspelling of Laundromat as Laudermat. I have images of a lino and Formica decorated shop with nothing but images of the late great professional Scotsman. The world is weird isn't it? Weirdness is good when you are writing a blog or making an entertainment show but becomes worrisome when it becomes part of the day-to-day management of multinational companies. Or the Military. Or the Medical Profession. Or ... Well you get the message. It seems that people try to make a mark in business and the other disciplines in the same way that artists try to make a mark by being weird or reducing their output to the simplest thing - crumpled paper balls comes to mind. However, at least art has some sort of meaning. A lot of management speak is empty drivel which the people who spout it do not understand. We have all heard it and we are never brave enough to ask exactly what it means. I once asked someone who had just used the word "paradigm" what it actually meant and provoked a debate which made it obvious that the meaning was not clear to anyone in the room. It was used because it sounded vaguely scientific thereby stringing out what should have been a simple presentation of an easily understandable concept into a deep and apparently meaningful hour. Question all the buzzwords and you will find that "buzz" is the apposite one - a long low humming which conveys no meaning. Except perhaps to Bees and the Audience for Barrymore (Michael not John).

We watched QI last night. This is new opportunity for Stephen Fry to be really clever. It is a panel game with Fry in the chair and four guests - one of whom is always Alan Davies. It has no cuts to rostrum camera (So Ken Morse is out of work) or music. It is just five men talking and occasionally answering questions. It could very easily have been too arch but Stephen Fry is very good at making things like this seem like a chat down the pub but still with the intellectual depth to ride above the normal tat of TV these days. Subjects last night were Caravaggio, Adam and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Llamas. Actually there were no Llamas but there should have been. We need to see more Llamas on intelligent TV shows. Better than tubs of lard anyway.

Company Synergy is the cornerstone of our vision for the development of conceptual and constantly improving performance metrics, which enable us to leverage our ability and perception in the field of International gobbledegook.

Arghhh.

Footprints

Sometimes the music I listen to inspires an entry and sometimes it just makes me sit and er ... listen to the music. A few seconds ago I was in the latter phase and yet here I am writing about it. Is this meaningful or just pretentious self-reference? I wasn't asking for comments. I won't tell you what the music is.

I am like Zellaby at the end of the Midwich Cuckoos at the moment. Trying to write about anything but one thing. If you look at last year's post for this day you will see that I managed to avoid all reference. By mentioning this avoidance I have not avoided it. I don't hold with celebrating particular dates. If a thing is worth remembering, then it is worth remembering all the time unless of course you are letting that continuous remembrance affect your life. I think you know what I am talking about but I have not mentioned it so I have succeeded as far as you reading this are concerned. Whether I have succeeded in terms of not thinking about it while writing is another matter. The wall is falling. Having said all this, remembrance is for those involved. Do not drag me into using that remembrance as a rallying cry for your own battles; they affect us all anyway. Cluster bombs, Mines - all the same thing.

Somewhere like D-Fens, there is a man - a decent family man who is paid to think up ways of killing people using the most cost-effective means available. Maybe it is a team effort so no one person feels entirely responsible for the actions. Who commissions the weapon? Are they the evil people? Do they have in their mind pictures of what the weapon actually does? They must see the burned flesh and the shattered bodies. They have to be able to think of this or they would not be able to think up the weapons in the first place. What then happens when the request reaches the engineers who have to design and build the equipment? My boss tells me to do things. My company does not make weapons but would I refuse if he asked me to make a weapon I knew would be attractive to children? I hope so. Paint them yellow like toys. Then all the argument is that is to make them easy to find if they don't go off but I say why make them in the first place.

I have said before that I always have problems with the international treaties that make certain weapons illegal. How can a weapon be 'illegal'? Maybe we would end up with hands - two brothers in a straight up fist fight. No - if there is some way of stopping weapons that have a lethality beyond the time in which they are in flight, then we must accept it. Banning the weapons is the only way. Be consistent. All international treaties seem to end up the result of an eternally changing process of negotiation that I find vaguely repugnant. I know it applied to the climate treaties and can imagine that the same thing happens with weapons negotiations. Sort of "we will let you keep your napalm if you let us keep our anti-personnel mines" which glosses over the fact that one change of a sentence means that thousands of Children will die. What would an arms manufacturer do if you asked him what his feelings were about toddlers picking us the products of his industry? Because on this day when so many people are talking about the thing I cannot talk about as the worst thing to happen for years, I can only remember the fact that babies and children are still dying - thousands every year because of these weapons. Where does that come on the scale of bad things?

I like to think I live in a civilised time and on the whole I do. Things like I have been talking about do not affect me particularly. Every day I am grateful that I am not living in the dark ages when life was cheap and law was harsh. And then I look around at what happens in the world and think that for a lot of people, this is the worst time ever. We have the power to make it the best time and we do not use it. Just a tiny shift in the flow of money between various worlds would result in life getting so much better for millions of people. All the bluster and tough talk does nothing. Actions and decent actions are what are required. You may think yourself a decent human being - and here I am going to echo something someone said recently - but we (and I am included), are sort of responsible because we do not complain about it. We can open our eyes in horror but we are grateful that it does not happen to us. We have to find all the ways to make things better. I was going to say "if you are not wish us" but that seems too simplistic. Find you own terms for this but I hope you know what I mean.

I know you all want solutions but don't look for them in other people. The answer lies with compassion and acceptance. We may be all PC internally but our actions in the wider world are difficult to distinguish from racism.
"

Crossing Gondwanaland

Soundtrack - Glow Stars - Heather Nova

I do not recall buying or listening to this album. My wife denies that it is hers either. Exactly the sort of record I would buy though - very much like Lisa Germano in places. The picture on the back of the CD case is familiar; it is in my scrapbook. I do have several records like this where I don't actually remember them. My CD buying has tailed off in the last few years; I used to buy at least one a week but bearing in mind I have 1500 now, that must be more than 1 a week since I got my first CD player. More like two a week. It would not be possible to listen to them all through without a great deal of effort and skiving. Roll on retirement!

Welcome to Plessey

Well it stopped raining.

That could really be it for today but I should write something else. Just typing this seems very weird, like a cross between proper touch typing and Riviera Gigolo's two-finger style. Maybe I have been taken over by the ghost of a long-dead journalist. Reading past posts - perhaps not.

Off to read something interesting as opposed to writing something boring.

Mysterons

I got the bus home yesterday and had to put up with a loud conversation from a group of teenage girls at the back of the bus. One of them seemed to be adding up the volume of her mates' conversation and sending it right back at them. Now I know that this is a habit of some people and even the source of some interesting and funny discourse but this girl's idea of punctuation was the blunt Anglo-Saxon Noun/Adjective/Verb/Adverb. After about a hundred I decided to start counting them (at risk of the repetition sending me off to sleep) but after another hundred, the frequency of use became far to high to keep up with. She will make someone a lovely fishwife. Liverpool - Capital of culture. Remember that.

There was a response on the BBC's Have Your Say in answer to the question of whether the world should send more troops to Iraq which basically said that if the people who keep complaining about the US, actually tried to help solve the problems of the world then the US would not have to fight wars. Now you can probably guess my feelings about this but the point of this particular paragraph is not to knock the US. My problem is the way that great numbers of people think that the world is a) Smaller than it actually is and b) simpler than it actually is. It seems that the people who use the term 'Free World' without irony, always think that the US/UK style democracy is the answer to all the problems. Yes there are parts of the world where the Governments act in ways that I certainly find repugnant but putting pressure on them to change and allow 'Free Elections' etc just causes friction. The UK Parliament and Judicial system evolved over millennia; the US equivalents are based on these and are basically only tinkerings with the systems of the Mother Country. They have had time to bed down and be accepted. Trying to understand how Governments in the Middle East work is, for a great many Americans/Europeans, like trying to imagine four spatial dimensions; unless you have grown up with the concept then you will either never understand it or you will have to train your mind over years. Going in with Stealth Bombers and Armalites will never be a good basis for stable Government. Having said this, there was no way that the two most recent overthrows would have happened without them. It is just that we should not be surprised when there are problems with trying to stabilise the country afterwards. As you probably found out about six sentences ago, most of this is Crass over simplification of exactly the sort I am complaining about. For a real insight, read Where is Raed ?. This is right about everything by being where everything is happening. I am not in on the gig as it were.`

I just re-read the section about the troops raiding Salam Pax's parents' home because of the meetings held there with various mysterious Sudanese people who turned out to be Carpenters fixing the kitchen. I suppose that this is a direct opposite of people over-simplifying things in that the US troops acted on intelligence which over-complicated a pretty simple situiation. Trigger happy grunts become the muscle of an over-worked intelligence service and you have a fuse and a detonator.

Back to now and here. Soundtrack is Dummy by Portishead, Weather is drizzle from a grey sky. Mood is through the floor into the basement and half way to bedrock. Delight in gloom. I feel like I am fourteen again; when I never knew why I was gloomy and therefore always enjoyed it. The wind blows dry. No turning from DC.

Whatever happened to Riviera Gigolo?

Soundtrack - The Hours - Philip Glass

Finished the Orwell book last night and strangely there was a visit to this page from a user listed as DTAYLOR. Now DJ Taylor is a family man as far as I remember and this visit was at something like 4:00 am. So unless there were night feeds required for a new arrival, I cannot work out what he was doing up so late, which makes me think that it was not the man himself. If it was then there is an irony in him looking and in me knowing that he is looking. As what I wrote was not insightful and probably very crass considering the depth of the book itself, then I expect he was not very impressed. Spooky nevertheless though probably well within the acceptable level of weirdness to satisfy Richard Dawkins that it was nothing more than coincidence.

As to the ending of the book itself, I was not quite as tear-jerking as at the end of the Laurie Lee Biography but then again this is understandable bearing in mind the differences as men and as authors. Laurie Lee died in old age looking out over a beautiful garden with all his family about him. Orwell died suddenly and alone in a London Hospital though knowing my soft spot for sad cases this should have made me sadder. I did like the section following his death - Orwell's Dream. It summed up his life backwards in one short paragraph and swept away all the political stuff to identify that Orwell was a man and a man more passionate about human kind as a whole than many of us are today. Try and identify the last thought of anyone and you get into severe philosophical territory.

I should really read Homage to Catalonia next. It has been sitting on the bookshelf for years since I got it as part of an offer at Waterstones. Whatever happened to Waterstones? This is the sound of a tree falling down - in the Quad?

On to Robert Hooke. Wasn't he the bassist in New Order?

A Tube of Hindustrial Hadhesive

What kind of friend ... would fall down in the mud for you? We can never return explaining our absences as just part of history.

Iatragenia - a history.

It looks like the whole city is on fire - there are a few wisps of real smoke and steam coming from various smokestacks, but the clouds are low and give the impression of a flameless conflagration - a burning off of pestilence and greed. It could be the start to some epic story of displaced peoples and tragically decimated villages. In reality it is just the misty start to an early autumn day. It all washes over us. I keep seeing a grey-lit building somewhere between a hut and a summerhouse, made of wood and bleached by the salt air. It looks out over some muddy estuary; there is one large window, which gives the whole interior an airy feel even when it is overcast like today. I only have a limited set of adjectives to describe this building. The viscous, black mud revealed by the tide swallows any sound. It begins to rain. As the rain strengthens, the roof begins to vibrate setting up a resonance, which makes the whole room buzz. It is good to be inside though the door is open to let in the sound and the smell of the rain. It splashes across the doorstep and dampens the scuffed floorboards. There is nothing under these other than the bare sand and mud. It is home to a few insects but otherwise, this hut has simply made a desert in this damp estuary. A hidden desert. My dream is impossible to silence, a desire for calm and rest in a world empty of everyone.

The world is just a notepad. We do not need to write anything down for the world has its own memory, a list of events and people - no a list of all events and all people. There are the people who make a difference listed next to people who were vaporised before they could make their difference. One person dies and the world is forever different. We never know what one person's affect on the world will be. In our darkest hours we can imagine that no one would miss us and what the world would have been like had our parents never met but I know that this is an empty wish for every person not born changes the world for all those who were. The absence of just one child can stop or start a war. We are all the most important people. There is no point in wishing for what is not because the result may be worse. Destiny is only for the next day. I travelled away yet I cannot not be in this desert. We can only dance and hope that what we do for the world makes it better. The sugar builds us up and turns us into maniacs, thinking that we are supermen, ubermensche and un beatable scholars in this waterless sea.

The fiddles scratch a happy tune, are joined by pipes and singers to make the world happy and lit in the grey that is forever our lot. Destiny dances with dictators as they laugh and sing, their own futures unmapped and wanting a direction to take them away from the evil they will do. We turn them round with random moves, until the world has changed. You meet a friend on the street and your conversation in your own language enrages just one person passing by. They take offence at all of our kind and in two hundred years the world will burn with the passion of that hatred. We create the world just by waking up. We tell each other dreams, which mean nothing in our heads, but when they are told to another become the foresight which we use to explain the randomness of the world. I cannot explain my dreams but others can and doing this destroys their impartiality. My dream kills and causes floods. The stars explode because we dream. The nastiness of random acts becomes the greed of designed colonial building. All time is all time. All acts are now and I live from one end of the Universe to the other seeing everything. I love everybody. Poetry is created from the forces between atoms, the random decay of nuclear material causes words to spin into being. Take an arbitrary measurement of the creation and annihilation of quantum pairs at the boundary of a black hole and sooner or latter you will get a sonnet, a random but beautiful poem created by your choice of units. Pi has all the world's books embedded in it somewhere, and every great piece of music, every piece of music, written and unwritten. The Universe is ours by default.

Great Driving Moments No. 317

Early morning September, rainy, just before it gets light. Music was Eric Coates' Saxo-Rhapsody.

I picked a video for the weekend at random and got another film starring Tobey Maguire - Pleasantville. I don't know if I have the words to describe this film. It had all sorts of ideas and yet they were all boxed-off neatly with the ending comment about no one knowing what will happen next - a quantum universe created from a classical one. It seems from the comments on the linked page above, that most people see some kind of religious motive behind the film though the director seems to dismiss this. Maybe he made the obvious religious references because he could rather than to make any point. You could see the film as a final burying of the myth of what we think recent history is about and a recognition that the future is the only thing we can make a difference to, albeit a future which we can never know. We (and Americans especially) seem to hanker after a perfect milk-and-cookies past which never really occurred for most people. This reminds me of Charlie Chaplin's dream in Modern Times - the little wooden house with roses round the door and the cow walking by to provide the milk to go with the cookies. If I remember it correctly, at the end of the film, the main characters walk off into the sunset - the old version of not knowing the future. There is nothing outside the text - except the director's commentary on the DVD special edition - and the alternative shooting script - and the writer's original idea etc etc.

I am nearly at the end of the Orwell bio and I have to say it has been a long read. It is not a difficult read, just amazingly wide-ranging. It seems to switch from comment about political positions to straight accounts of events without any signposting. There are separate chapters on various meta-themes - Orwell's face, Orwell's things and even a strange 'case against' chapter supposedly made up as being by an arch (Communist) critic of Orwell which I assume is not the feelings of the biographer. Unless the strain of writing the whole book made him so hate Orwell, that he wrote this diatribe as a way of releasing the pressure. Anyway, I am in the last chapter but I was falling asleep so I had to put the bookmark back a few pages and leave the end until today. The next book is the biography of Robert Hooke - The Man Who Knew Too Much. Report on that this week hopefully.