What’s That Barrel The Sherpas Are Carrying?



So much white space; so little intellect to fill it!

Someone is listening to the radio in the distance. I can hear a squawky voice reading what I think is news. The pips went off at some point so it is probably Radio 4. Being a new office I haven’t felt able to bring in the headphones to listen to music though many people here already do. This means that what I hear is the office itself, the hum of blowers, the flap of paper being moved about and the click of the security doors (No Tailgating please!). So today is just random stuff you guess? Probably! Nothing to write about that’s worth writing about. I have thought about a secret blog for sometime now, a document of the things I really feel, all thoughts that are just not suitable for wider reading. I’m not sure what the point would be other than to have a record of how I thought for sometime in the future. The first proper diary I mentioned in yesterday’s entry was closer to that as it was just handwritten rather than published to a medium accessible by billions of people. It would be naff to mention that I have no illusions that billions of people actually read it – most accesses are I'm sure, simply robots trawling for email addresses – but I will mention it anyway. The potential for billions of people to read it is there and that acts as a form of censorship.

Thinking about this has made me aware of the continuous micro-censorship which I have found myself doing on this blog and in other forms of communication. The teams we were in at the old company have been scattered across the North-West and we all keep in touch for professional and social reasons via instant messaging. I find myself having to read everything before I send it, often deleting whole lines. Instant messaging is like speech in a way though with speech you are not able to drag things back after you say them. IM is therefore removing any of the emotional content of the communication at least for me. All the inherent colour of language is removed. I resort to the Ceefax subtitle method of indicating irony by using exclamation marks but that gets annoying and it becomes difficult to tell if you are using irony/sarcasm or just emphasising something in the normal way of exclamation marks. If you are my one regular reader then you will detect the imminent arrival of my request for an Irony punctuation mark. I have a sneaky suspicion that this already exists - possibly that upside down question mark – but I am too lazy to do the clicks required to find out any more. I have just noticed that Word indicated that the single word – Probably – in a sentence on its own was grammatically incorrect. Putting the exclamation mark after it seemed like the right thing to do and it has indeed kept Word happy. I love instinct; the day I tried doubling quotations marks on a whim in a batch file and it worked was a good day. Small things hey?

So what is happening in the world? How can we give the right emphasis to the impact of these events on the world? War and Peace! Poverty and Richness! Hunger and Obesity! We have given a pound to each of the people at risk of starvation in Niger. Well we have given 33.3p and the other 66.6p has come from the rest of the world. In the spirit of thumbnail calculations, that’s probably the insurance for about 100 miles of the journey of one oil tanker.

I make no judgments! Oh those pesky exclamation marks! And here comes another one now.

Not rainy today but grey in the extreme. Thunder is due early tomorrow morning. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.