We Walk Along We Could Be Famous

The desk here has a high board in sight line, on the top of which is a lockable cupboard with a hinge-and-slide door. It has a number of developer-type books inside it along with a calculator (who still uses a calculator?), a dirty mug and various un-sorted piles of white paper. To the left of the desk, creating a second wall, there is a metal filing cabinet, which allows me, at last, to put up a bit of the magnetic poetry set which has remained unused since the move from building 2 to building 52. I cannot find the tile with the word ‘Nigellike’, which we made up with the transfer set provided. The word is used in the poem in this post that we made up on the old filing cabinet. Today, the first line of the poem on the cabinet is ‘The delicate language shadowing their music.’ because this is all the words, I have lifted from the box so far. There are a number of photos stuck to the metal as well. There is one black-and-white one of a standing stone at Callanish and a photo of a collage I did which combines the drawing of Sylvia Plath from the cover of Collected poems with a page from the Codex Mendosa. There is also this strip cartoon.

The desk itself is just a mess with various bits of technology. I have one computer but use two screens most of the time, which is an advance of having to print things out and match electronic and paper versions of the current operation. To the right of the desk, there is a row of offices, usually empty, which have glass on both sides with blinds. The view from these offices is of the main road outside the site with fields beyond. This is a change from the sixteen years I spent with a brick wall as the view from my office window. One floor up from that and I would have been able to see the welsh mountains.

Try 2.

“Oh! That was too fast!” she says angrily. Immediately she worries that she has been heard but it is too late to fret for long; there are other things worth worrying about in this world. She thinks about the sky for a while, the detail tonight is unusual, something for which she cannot find words, though the internal impression is enough to not need translation into language. The clouds boil and roil on a single plain, caught by the low sun and she feels like some tiny organism held in check under the surface of a shallow puddle, watching the oil on the surface. And of all this, mostly it is not seen; we all go around with our eyes on our feet or the ground in front of us, not seeing the clouds and the sky and all that is above the horizontal. It takes space-bound men and women to see the possibilities, the chance of traveling up to those clouds, so stir them around with a ballet of technology as you whistle through.

The colours range, building in depth from the pink-tinged grey at the start, through the deep reds of sunset and on to the subtle contours of twilight. With few cars, they have the road to themselves, a mile-long stretch of rapidly vanishing tarmac, radiating the heat of the day back to them. To the right, straggly bunches of thorn have given way to sparse woodland with promise of full-blown fairy-tale forests in a few hundred metres. There is some drizzle though she cannot tell when it started; it has been gradual and maybe it has been there all day. Her clothes are not damp and rain feels the right thing for now. I cannot leave all this she thinks. So much to see and do here and I’ll be homesick, planning my escape back to dad and that lovely calm in the house when we read. She thinks of the low music in the background and the fires and the books and records that occupy most of the space in their house. I would learn more there I think. They want to teach me things rather than teach me how to learn. What dates, what maths? It’s all rubbish. I want to sit and learn and write and be happy. Sending me away will do nothing but make me sadder than I am now. So badly is she worried by the future that she begins to feel herself starting to cry, tears on the edge of bursting their surface tension. She thinks of other things, neutral things, Cricket and the Fibonacci sequence. I must look that up she thinks again. This is all she thinks. Maybe I could write this without the instructions. Plays are so much easier to detail; you give some meta-instructions at the beginning and the make-up artist and scene-makers do the rest for you. So much to think about! I will steal some of dad’s records, he has so many, that a few will be Ok. With this she is happier, thinking of the cosy smells of home seeped into the cardboard of the sleeves of these vinyl gems. She is the Vinyl freak, made happy and real by old blues and growly voices from across the water. I ran into her sometimes, her with her coloured hair and laconic replies to my obviously pointless questions. I wrote her poems occasionally, and she curled her lip at them, missing the point possibly. Oh poetry! She thinks. I wish someone would write some to me. Quite the little feminist she often thinks she is but doors opened and little kindnesses secretly thrill her behind the snarl and taciturnity she puts on to mix with the others of her type and accent. Cooly she has turned down so many casual requests for drinks and back she is alone with her dad’s records or walking out taking photographs for her art. She loves nobody outside her small family.

This Is A Guess

Listening to Best of Yes. Yes! Yes! Yes! I was actually looking for some Vangelis after my daughter chose Chariots of Fire as her going to sleep music last night but I must have deleted Soil Festivities. This is good enough for the moment.

I hope Simon Singh is being ironic with this piece about bad science in a Katie Melua song. I’m not sure; I still get his email newsletter and this sort of satire is not normally a part of it. Still, Big Bang was good. I look forward to his popular science book on the proof of the Riemann hypothesis.

We started watching All About George yesterday mostly because Rick Mayall was in it. The whole thing was just too complicated – the basic idea of five generations and second marriages gave it too many things to have to concentrate on or maybe it was just not written in a way that could manage to bring all of the various people together. There have been plenty of drama with large casts which do work but we gave up on this one. Which is good because Love Soup was just so good and we don’t have two comedy dramas to watch in a week. There maybe mention of that next week.

A Bell Huey chopper flew over me yesterday as I was driving home which together with the lone Spitfire which went over last week is making me wonder if I am some sort of conduit for fractures in space-time. I wait for the Swordfish that sunk the Bismarck to go over any time now. I suppose if the Bismarck sailed up the Mersey that would prove it. Rats! This is the Philadelphia Experiment.

Very clumsy writing today. I will try better next time but I did the month Ed.

Visual Acuity

Listening to Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ by Steve Reich

Very sad bit coming up though only sad in one sense of the word.

I have recently had to start using c# instead of vb which has required some ancient area of my brain to start working again. However, there is one bit of c# about which I am happy. It is the increment construct, i.e. integerValue++. It just seems so elegant and right rather than all that mucking about in hyperspace … er …. with integerValue = integerValue + 1. I feel that maybe I should do all my programming in c# from now on, not just the web stuff but windows apps as well. I don’t suppose there is much of an efficiency gain; I just don’t know enough about the deep stuff of compilers to say whether there is any real difference in the processing. Anything you can do in VB you can do in c# so its just a case of what you know and like. C always seems like Zen compared to the western philosophy of VB. Then again, humans always either destroy what they don’t know or give it an undeserved air of mystery. I am sure that after 1000 days, the rarified and spiritual atmosphere of a Tibetan monastery can get a bit mundane. I remember once writing about the idea of staying in a different house every night of your life just to get over the boredom of real-life. This leads me on to something which isn’t quite bathos because bathos is an unintentional lapse into the mundane from the midst of something higher while this is meant. (You can dispute whether the previous stuff is higher discussion later). The family in the Giles cartoons never lived in the same house twice. The punch line of each cartoon was always different but why have a different house each time. I suppose, it would have got boring for both artists and reader the settings were familiar. That is the beauty of Giles, the initial joke (sometimes good – sometimes very poor) was one thing but the real joy was in the depth of the background, the detail in the shops, the impending accidents usually initiated by the hairy friend of the family children. There was always the book that Vera’s husband was reading, the fact that the youngest girl was always acting like mother in training. And of course there was Grandma who must have really been some Central American dictator on the run from justice.

Yes Prime Number!

Listening to Dance Hall At Louse Point

Spent two years thinking this was Louise Point.

It sounds like someone else had the same idea about the Squid.

Talking about wildlife, I was nearly mugged by a gang of rabbits the other day. Being out in the country, we have to run the gauntlet of the local fauna just to make it from car park to desk. The rabbits normally cower in the bushes being slightly more timid than the more predatory inhabitants of the green stuff. However, this day they were gathered together actually on the paving right by the automatic door, looking up as if to wonder why the sensor wasn’t picking them up. I imagined they were planning a mass break-in as soon as someone went in. My image of rabbity chaos in the computer rooms was dispelled as they returned to the form more normal for those in the middle of the food chain and scarpered in a fuzzy cloud of scuts.

The BBC had a number day yesterday with Terry Jones and The Story of One, which was far better than I was expecting despite the overuse of computer generated versions of the Number one. The decimation of a roman section of ones has never been made more clearly. This was followed by The Music Of The Primes with Marcus du Sautoy which struggled to explain the Riemann hypothesis though it had beautiful graphics. Number One Son was rapt for about five minutes before he joined his mother in sleep. I nearly bought Marcus du Sautoy’s book about primes but it had too many equations in it. More later.

Calamari All Round Then

I wish I had some archive of stories to put up for when I don’t feel like writing or just can’t be bothered. Today is one of those days. We are all waiting for the rain or something more undefined to give us direction – well me anyway. Some things in my head that really belong in the secret blog – though sometimes what I am prepared to put in each (remember that the secret blog does not exist) varies with the seasons and the mood.

It's Incompetent And It's Unspellchecked!

So many other blogs contain wisdom and good writing far in excess of anything here. However, sometimes I feel that they may be giving this impression through over complication rather than by the use of any skill. Complexity in daily diary entries very often highlights contradictions in the way people think. I know that I can completely change my view on something without going through any intermediate stages of ambivalence and this is wrong or just plain hypocritical. I have been feeling rather shallow in view of some of the posts I have been reading. I have to tell myself that the content of this blog is exactly what I intend it to be. There is a measure of censorship, which I have already mentioned, a sort of excision of all the stuff which could go into a deeper and more secret journal (which does not exist). The disjointedness of this writing also strikes me often and deeply. How does a great writer or even a mildly competent one manage to keep a flow that means that long sentences seem balanced and that a concept comes through the complexity that is inevitable with such stuff? It is all hard work. There is no shortcut, no stream of consciousness which allows sloppy construction; it all comes down to being able to put down a sentence and then shape it further until it says what you want it to say and still flows. Blogs are almost by definition, always going to be instant channels that take the 'you had to be there' thing to the extreme. Most of them are like listening to someone report their dreams which apart from a few strange people, are very boring things. Can't be bothered any more.

This Is No Time For The Monkey Dance

Big science in the Guardian today. There is an interview with Stephen Hawking, a report on the challenging of the teaching of intelligent design in US schools and something on scientific determinism, which I have not yet read. I want so much to pick over the idiocy of intelligent design; how it is almost an admission of the failure of pure creationism – it just seems pointless. Richard Dawkins always gives me the feeling that he is giving a platform to the creationists just by putting them down all the time, though I suppose if you do nothing, you will find that the un-scientific public will fall into believing what is taught to them. It is not enough to know that the vast majority of scientists in the field have no truck with the idea. Maybe we will have an sort of evolutionary division, with two sub-species of humans each of which believe the opposing views. I was going to give these two divisions names one being rationalists (I won’t give you the name for the others) but I have read a recent post that quite logically put it that you cannot be a rationalists and an atheist. The least you can be and still be a rationalist is an agnostic. I am sure that people with stronger views of the correctness of rational theories will disagree with this but I was prepared to take the idea on board – deities worming their way back in there I think. But back to rationalism. Intelligent design though! What mechanism do you have to have in place to keep that idea going? Where is evidence that comes close to matching that already present for pure evolution? Without faith, I am nothing.

I finished Atonement last night, having guessed (almost) the full picture some way before the end, though this fitted very well with my earlier idea about the author picking a way through a wider set of truths. No spoilers though; you will have to read it to get the full picture. It is excellent though. Read it!

Demud

… and working your way through this space is enough to kill you without those trying to do so anyway. That is paradise in those trees, some future stone gate, making shadows over these fields to tell everyone what you did here, in this mud and blood and rain and sun. This is nothing; now is not a trouble, no illness, no pain, no metal rain or strange perspectives as the planes use this road as target practice. The bowmen will not come again, those rattling saviours from earlier and still wasted battles; they are dead many years ago, trampled into the mud and rotted away to stains and leather; no more able to help you than help themselves. And away in the future again, this rout will be our greatest victory, the making of this country as it is, a failure brought to mind for children centuries from now. Those abed would wish themselves here? Give me seconds with them now and I will have them up and in this ditch for a minute; see if they still regret missing this.

There is a howl from the sky, a sound that would make one question the concept of hell, something invented for the very reason is makes you think like this, to turn rational men to superstitious hulks, just waiting for the end to come at the end of a fuse unwinding. Some man calmly sat down and drew pictures of the scoop on this plane, a little add-on of his own to add fear to injury, the first of a line of horrific escalations that will lead us all to permanent peace in the mud and blood.

Kicking Over Bonfires – Ha Ha!

Many strange dreams recently. One about following a car which I knew to have bombs in though the occupants calmly stopped when asked, drove the vehicle to a safe place where they left it and stood around waiting. Maybe it’s not that strange then.

We have made a conscious effort to have a quiet weekend which has left us with cabin fever thought the children seem as tired as ever. Number One Son is asleep already having keeled over into his cheesy crumpets and daughter is quietly humming along to Moonlight Shadow prior to being settled. The rest of the world seems far away. We’re all very lucky really.

I am racing through Atonement despite having the impression that a well-defined denouement is not the likely outcome of such a well-written, deftly crafted story. Maybe I’m wrong. I gave an audible gasp at some of the details in it last night. While the writing is of the highest order, beyond criticism from non-literary types such as me, it also seems effortless in such a way that it seems that the author is simply choosing his own path through a wider landscape of place and action that exists in his mind. It could go any way and though I am sure he had the ending crafted before he started the first paragraph, the delightful idea that nothing is yet decided even with only about a sixth of the book to go, is something that makes me shake with delight. I have read that this book has been compared with various writings of Virginia Woolf, though I cannot see it myself. Of course one book from a notoriously difficult and varied author is not enough to allow those comparisons. Not sure I have the words to review Mrs Dalloway in any meaningful way though some of the passages were off the scale in their descriptive power, a sort of more defined Ulysses though no less wide-ranging and gloriously candid.

Rossetti Lamenting The Death Of His Wombat

Does this preclude the existence of children full stop? I was looking for the child-catcher when I read it.

Our tea breaks are often occupied by watching the big yellow trucks that criss-cross the earthworks over the other side of the railway from the office. They shuttle back and forth over the dusty tracks, simply shifting dirt from one place to another. There is lots of building going on. Yesterday I think I managed to work out exactly what they are making. It’s a launch pad! The International space station is to be supplied direct from Chorley. Honestly, far in the distance, safely away from the headquarters of Chorley FM, there is a tower with gantries and supply trucks and a bunker for the mayor to come and watch the launches from. I haven’t read the company manual enough to know if I allowed to take photographs so there is a chance I will be able to document this secret construction which has been glossed over as some sort of Keynesian work-generation project – no one could live in houses with walls that thin.

How Do You Use These Toothpicks?

I’ve just noticed a switch on the wall by the shredder, which has a sign below it saying “Do Not Touch This Switch”. I’m so tempted to press it. Douglas Adams would be proud.

It is nearly dark for the whole drive to work now. As Martin said the other day, you know it’s autumn when the garden lights come on before Emmerdale. His wife is the soap addict by the way; Martin would have the whole Eastenders/Corry/Neighbours mediocrity up against the wall, being the nasty old misanthropist he is. I went cold turkey from my 20-year addiction to the Weatherfield soap as soon as I was sure that dastardly Dicky was no more after his dive into the canal. I can watch it now without being sure to set the video for the next episode. I can handle it. I really can!

Anyway, back to the drive. The clouds had a delicious 3D effect as the sunrise caught them, matching the Villa-Lobos music on the radio quite well. Finally, as I pulled into the car park, it started to rain, creating an almost semi-circular rainbow off to the west. Now the sky is just a dark grey mass. I seem to be on of the few people happy with new BBC weather forecast. It tells you as exactly as forecasts can how the weather will appear in any point in time or space, the cloud cover, the rain, the wind. The problem is that people want everything simplified in some sort of nannyish way. Those little cloud symbols have become the equivalent of the clichés that everyone seems to want to use today to save time in some sort of newspeak way. All news seems to have to use a set of defined phrases to explain everything. The problem is that the short sets of words become words in themselves; they don’t trigger the required images in the brain because they are filtered out as what is to be expected. I requote my ‘paradigm’ example when I asked a number of people who received an email with that word in it, what it actually meant. None of them could tell me without looking it up as I did. It is shorthand for something that requires explaining in sentences rather than with a single word. The jackbooted octopus and all that! Pretend to be stupid, say you are stupid when you are stupid, but make sure you get everything explained rather than just nodding as if it’s all clear. My name has been Pot. Kettle will be back after these messages.

Philosophy Is All Just Thinking!

The building here is one street back from the Liver Building. The architect also designed the Old Scotland Yard building, which you can see is true if you can be bothered to do a search for it; I can’t, which pretty well sums up how I feel about today. An incident in the night led to three quarters of the family being downstairs at Midnight watching Dan Cruickshank on UK TV History. He has exactly the sort of friendly voice that Kate Bush mentions talking about stupid things on The Ninth Wave. She used the shipping forecast as the backing for that line but Dan the man would have been just as good and probably a darn sight more interesting. I am sure he would have known about the Old Scotland Yard building as well. Anyway, the incident is over with and everything is back to normal. This is what comes of finishing Harry Potter 6 just before you put the light out. I told you it was <<<<<<<< …….s.d.d .d.d.s.s .s.s……4646&&&……

I was going to recount a tale today but I realized I must already have mentioned it so I searched and here it is. It’s about Morse code. This was prompted by some mobile phone alert that goes off regularly here. It is Morse, though a far longer message than the SMS Morse that you might have heard. I keep meaning to try to write it down to decode but I’m never fast enough.

Don’t Call Me Ska Face

Listening to Ska – and lots of it! It may be today when I reach the point when there is nothing more I want to say on anything. Probably not though. Thought you might like a picture of a fat plane.

My daughter is now learning silent maths, which involves numbers and symbols made with fingers. Maybe we could extend this into silent differential calculus or silent systems analysis. Sign language is big in our house at the moment because of Something Special on CBeebies, which is fronted by the voice of Tweeny Jake, Justin Fletcher. (I can’t quite believe it because he doesn’t have the hair). Quite a few people in offices I have worked in knew sign language for various reasons including Martin’s nemesis. I used this as reason for her rehabilitation but he won’t have it and just mentions that he knows SL anyway. He didn’t know the sign for cat though. (Make whiskers on your top lip with the first two fingers of each hand). Surely there must be the mathematicians sub-set of sign language, with proper signs for root, delta etc. If there isn’t, someone should invent it though it might look dangerously like the Cheese Impressions from Men Behaving Badly.

The Skies Went on For Ever

And reading in silence by a window is a gift, but maybe one to make to yourself. She did not care that it was rude in others eyes, to take a book when visiting relatives. She always asked for and was given at least one book at Christmas and it would be finished over the weeks away from school, during the un-regimented moments at home, or sitting in the alcoves of various big houses belonging to ‘the relatives’ as she called them privately.

By sweet degrees, they closed the gap between them, without eye contact but each sensing a gradual, tacit agreement made over weekends away.

Arguments are tiresome she thought and so she stopped asking for things that she knew would be refused, knowing that the gentle reproach for the misdemeanour after the event was less intense than the forbidding of the deed in the first place. She would carry vast numbers of aging and dusty books around with her, and soon enough this was expected and no longer questioned by the adults. What things there are out there to learn, massive understanding of the world is still far away she thought, beyond some horizon that seems to recede forever, a boundary to our own space, where coloured art and science meet in what she saw as a distraction from the real life stuff of maths and equations. God is hiding, always retreating from us, taking each of our tiny advances towards his own world and adding conditions – destroying information with one paper and proving it cannot be destroyed in another. They still think they can determine the world in terms of numbers; button everything down until out of the long and winding mill of human knowledge comes a single set of numbers and letters which will explain everything - the universe, the life that holds on precariously within it and all the abstract stuff of numbers and shapes that exist only in the heads of the people trying to see it all.

This she saw in each new book and while she knew deep down that understanding was required to voice these concerns, there was a painful tug at her mind whenever she thought of it, some idea that you could simplify everything with a bypass of some form. And what is the extent of all this understanding? Where is the end of what we can explain or even just know we have to explain? Numbers have to go on forever and indeed, they do. You can define a whole universe with a set of numbers that will fit into another. Or can you? Is there not some barrier to understanding and definition, an aura of reality than is required to spark things from the mind into real existence? Call it the soul of the universe, where atoms, gravity and consciousness meet in one singularity, the dot that lives in everything and links God to the universe to us to everything that is inside and outside all that can be explained and all that cannot. And time goes on forever, with no end and no beginning, like an elastic band stretched over a sphere; it begins, and ends where it begins out of the time we see, extended infinitely.

I Think They Should Play the Whole Day at the Wrong Speed

It is dark when I leave home in the mornings now; the sky lightens as I go and this morning it was particularly beautiful. There was no colour in the sky, just a succession of patterns in the dark grey clouds, calling to mind animal spots or stripes. I suppose the chaos and math that produces both are related at some deep level. Maybe rather than striving to link the various branches of physics with their boiled-down equations, humans should be working to determine how to relate the simple things with the chaotic at a deep level. On the one hand, you can have the clear equation for the spirals of seeds in a sunflower, while on the other you get the fractal growth of a fern. Maybe one boils out of a simplification of the other and I am sure people far cleverer than I am, have been working on this for years.

The solutions to human issues probably lie in the same direction. I know Richard Dawkins believes that religious belief is a meme, which I think he likens to a virus that not only infects its host but also causes the host to disagree with people infected with other varieties of that meme. I don’t know enough to say whether he advocates complete vaccination as it were, though I do know that he enjoys the artistic trappings of religion. Maybe we should work out a balance sheet of positives and negatives. Like my assertion that, while I understand that peace deals with terrorists upset some people, the greater good is served by the fact that people are no longer killing each other; maybe the ending of religious war is worth the loss of spirituality. As my wife says, religion does not cause the wars; it is used as an excuse. To believe that a terrorist attack can be justified under any of the main religions proves that you are either mad or secretly do not believe the rubbish you spout. I can understand why the UN has failed to define what terrorism actually is; there are a great many fuzzy areas even at the heart of the current debate. But you are not allowed to say that in case you are seen as weak. You can never make a mistake.

It’s a Cruel Way to take Her Away

And still Mr Dawkins has to wait. I finished Mrs Dalloway last week and having found Atonement by Ian McEwan at Oxfam for 99p, I have gone on to start that. It is odd that my first attempt at Mrs Dalloway led to an early jettison without understanding; as I said I wasn’t ready to start a book that appeared to be as disjointed and stream-of-consciousness as Ulysses. However, after seeing the film I gave it another go. The film acted as explanatory notes and made it so much more interesting. For reasons which are clear in my own mind, this reminds me of the issue of the Babel Fish from Hitchhikers, where the actual speech heard acts as some sort of decode for the brain waves which the fish puts out after it hears the speech. The film and the book seemed like these two components. I know! How pretentious do you want Mondays to be?

Atonement is supposed to be Ian McEwan’s best book though after getting a sixth of the way in, Amsterdam still seems better. It does seem to have some self-referential things; stuff that must be about the author himself, or maybe I just can’t imagine any authors not writing about their own experiences or beliefs. There is always something in any writing that betrays the author; witness Adrian Mole forcing in all sorts of things about his own experiences – newts, the fall of the Russian Communists, the sun on the shopping precinct. Actually, I am sure Hemmingway would have been happy to be close to a tank during that day in Moscow. Word is shouting at me about wordiness, which obviously means that no writer am I. There! Happy with that?

How far away are we from designing a word-processing program that can go beyond the standard grammar checks and force you to write in the style of an author of your choice? Word very often throws up what it thinks are bad styles when they would be considered creative in real life so the edge of the envelope, the definition of what is correct or incorrect must be very fuzzy. We could manipulate that fuzziness to provide a gentle nudge in the direction of a particular style. I see a list of authors in a drop down in the grammar and style settings. Its probably already available as are most things you can think about.

Not Read The Bit About Her Knickers Before.

Walking to see the Clipper race heading out past the coastguard station, we took a short cut through the park and found this car in the duck pond. Sunday is the day that the local model boat club meet and they had quite happily gone ahead, using the car as some sort of obstacle. I am still trying to work out how someone got a car through the narrow paths that lead up the pond but this must be possible because on the return journey we came across a large breakdown truck winching the car up onto its flatbed. I can just see the excitement on the face of the local reporter.

The Secret Life Of Arthur Ransome was a gem, which makes me wonder why the BBC don’t trail such programmes any more. It’s almost as if they are ashamed of the things they do best. I know that this is all to do with ratings which even the BBC has to pander to these days but some sense of loyalty to their past remit should come through occasionally. Ransome’s autobiography mentioned most of the stuff that was in the show. You may suspect that some of the programme was drammed up but he mentioned almost all of it and if you were crossing the lines of a Russian civil war, some sort of precarious journey would have been inevitable. Of course the whole thing had no conclusion, something which will have to wait for the discovery and release of further KGB and British Intelligence files. As I said yesterday, all this good spy stuff shines out of the Swallows and Amazons books.

Belay That You Galoots!

Not much this evening. I am aiming to watch The Secret Life Of Arthur Ransome in a few minutes which will no doubt trot out all the stuff about the intelligence services and double agents etc. I have often promised myself a complete set of the hardback versions of the Swallows And Amazons stories, the ones with all the illustrations strewn over the covers like stamps on a suitcase. They will have to wait and I will have to rely on my disparate paperbacks if ever I want to calm myself with some rose-tinted thirties nostalgia. Actually, I have to say that Ransome’s abilities in the old cloak-and-dagger department are so obvious when you re-read the books. The structuring of the stories is good as well. I used to think that Great Northern? was my favourite but now the tales of the Broads seem better.

Write Like An Egyptian

I was on toddler-minding duty today as my wife was assisting with a trip at daughter’s school so I pandered to Number-One-Son’s train obsession with a trip to Southport on the train, topped of with a visit to the model village and railway. We were unable to get him to sleep last night until he had watched all of Victoria Wood’s Great Railway Journey around Britain (courtesy of BBC 4). His shivers of excitement at any train are quite extraordinary, and watching the one we could not board with our cheap-day return, he giggled and shook until I though he would break out of the buggy straps. As you can see from the picture, I took in the bust of Dan Dare as well, which may give the impression that I was adjusting his jacket.

I caved in and bought a second copy of the new-look Guardian (the guardian), which the newsagents seem to be calling the Berliner in place of its real name. This was obviously a shallow design-led purchase rather than for any reason related to the content, a fact made clear in Private Eye this fortnight; there have been many lines written about the new format (mostly self-referential) but nothing about whether the writing is any different. But I am shallow and weak and just a tiny part of the blip in sales figures. Of course, we’ll have to get a Saturday edition tomorrow just to see what they’ve done to that. Back to the online edition next week: that’s exactly the same.

After the powerful and totally absorbing programmes that went to make up Coast, Nicholas Crane is straight back on the screen with Mapman, where he can demonstrate how he could also be called Madman. His attempt to traverse the dark heart of the Lake District using a century-old map and a seventy-year-old bike was folly for most people though I have to agree with the reply to a letter questioning the wisdom of his travels that he is probably the only person who should attempt this sort of thing. Anyway, he always had the crew, the mobile phone and the GPS to fall back on should he fall back on the track. This week’s programme was about a sixteenth-century map of Sutherland and points North. It started at Loch Maree, which we know from a trip there, in the same wintry weather that plagued our hero. This is a place and time to sit inside and listen to the surf and hail outside, not go yomping across the Scottish para-permafrost in search of lost mountain passes, last traversed by a hairy* clansman who took a wrong turn at Ullapool in 1532. Anyway, Mapman got all the disparate groups at work talking about the same thing at the same time, a programme to make you tingle with delight that the BBC can produce both this and Dick and Dom in da Bungalow.

I can safely end with Och A Vay today.

* He would have been hairy; it’s a fact so get over it! Of course he might have had alopecia. **

** My wife made me put that as she might be descended from that very man. ***

*** She doesn’t have alopecia by the way.

They Might Have Been French

Listening to Baggy Trousers by Madness – accidentally.


This is the outside of my Sixth Form House upper sixth common room. When I was there, the French Windows opened onto a shrub-lined bit of lawn, which faded into the more robust grass of the main school field. The lawn has been dug up to provide a turning circle for the buses that used to circle the big tree in the village. Inside we had a collection of very old and very smelly settees and other soft furnishings, which didn’t provide more than half the seats for a full complement of pupils. We all had our defined areas, with the top echelons of the pecking order getting the seats by the window. My little group had the corner by the waste paper bin though I like to think that our trying-too-hard poses were the coolest of the lot. Across from us, sat both sets of girl twins, which was confusing, though having grown up with them, it was very easy to tell them apart; the boys of course divided the twins up as the attractive one and the not-so-attractive one. I think my brother went out with one of them but don’t ask me which. The head boy and girl and deputies had the corner parallel to ours. All this makes it sound as if there was some sort of social division but I don’t remember it like that; it was all quite civilized really. As I have said though, I was not really attuned to the emotional signals that float around so there may have been some sniffy stuff between the various factions.

I’ve just read the only entry by a teacher for this school on friends reunited and she says that she expected to teach science at an allegedly quiet school in rural Worcestershire but instead acquired no new friends and clinical depression. Never knew the pressure was that bad. I felt like emailing and offering an electronic there-there but I know I shouldn’t. All that new wave stuff we listened to at lunchtimes, probably suggests that the school has a high population of the trench-coat brigade, which may not help. Oh well! Back In The Jug indeed!

Depends If It’s Been Pasteurised

I’ve just noticed that one of the sort criteria on Windows Media Player is year of release, which means that this morning I am having a 1967 day. Like the weekend, cup of tea to anyone who correctly tells me what album is playing now.

I am missing Pass Notes. They have been expunged from the new-look Guardian due to space restrictions. Doonesbury also went temporarily but has returned after protests. The response of Steve Bell’s penguins was quite funny as well. I can’t find a link to a copy of it but it involved a reduction of the space for the strip with echoes of the trash-compacter scene from Star Wars and the introduction of colour. I am almost tempted to start buying the paper edition of the Guardian again. My wife got a copy of the first Berliner edition and says she finds it quite ‘dinky’ though I’m not sure that Alan Rusbridger wasn’t after a little more considered opinion. It did have echoes of the kiddies diagrams from USA Today at points and maybe it is still being produced with a view to getting opinions on how it should look.

Some of the Ones We’ve Seen Did

I just wrote a whole paragraph about the secure turnstile at the bottom of the stairs in our foyer. I have been wondering whether it has a net loss or gain during the day. Sad isn’t it. It is a random walk of sorts if you can be bothered to chase up what I am going on about. (This is something up with which I will not put.)

My daughter said that one of the boys in her class is reading Macbeth. (I assume that this is one of the Macbeth for kids.) She said that he is going to read Hamalot next. I am sorry to say that it took us some seconds to work out that this meant the Danish play and not some book about Miss Piggy’s character from the next Muppet Movie. They do a Midsummer Night’s Dream for kids, which she may like.

I don’t want to work; I want to write. I want to know whether the full stop goes after the brackets or before. I would have known once. I am listening to Six Pianos again by the way – the Piano Circus version. This is the second time in two days. Yesterday, a tinkling teaspoon came in exactly in time for two bars, which was most disconcerting. Now would Jung have said that this was synchronicity? I am sure he would and in best Clarkson mode, I would have had to shout him down, if that was all right with you. Clarkson got pied yesterday because some students at the University where he got an honourary something-or-other disagreed with his robust stance on the environment. I like Clarkson in the same way I like car crashes on the motorway; you know they are bad and you wish that they didn’t happen but you always slow down to look as you crawl past with all the other rubber-neckers. The spell-check wanted that to be rubber-knickers – I just thought I would tell you that and of course, it may get a few more hits.

All That Is Seen and Unseen

What goes in here and what do I reserve for myself? I have something about night sounds, like the daddy-longlegs that got itself stuck in the nets yesterday. I was reading trying to work out what the tiny rustle was. I put it down to water in the radiators at first. I’m not particularly bothered about insects and spiders though one in a room at night will make me eject it as the thought of something on my face in the dark is quite upsetting. I do not like wasps and they will make me bat the air to get them away despite me knowing that this winds them up. I haven’t actually been stung for ages and even then it was less of a trauma than I was expecting.

All that happens on the news, off the news, the little deaths unseen by some dusty roadside far away, from where I am to dead in a week; they fill me up, block my head with questions over why things like this happen when I have always known that there is no answer to this. The future lies unmapped, and unseeable, outside any world line accessible from here and yet we think it is all defined, down in some book of the maker who has his clockwork and his tables laid out on the desk, plotting our fates like a man playing dice with himself. We need concrete points in our days just as much as we need them in our lives. Well I do. They are things to reach to tell us that everything is progressing properly and yet in the slight organization that we call civilization, we are thrown about like dust on the wind. I only remember one Doctor Seuss book, the one about the entire civilization on a speck of dust (Horton Hears a Who). Just thinking about this has made me realize that I have often thought that we are just like these little people under threat from a cosmos so much bigger than our own local area.

Rolling Boil

We watched the first part of A Beautiful Mind yesterday. The second part is on tape for tonight. It started well with the scenes in Princeton flagging a good academic drama – a sort of mathematical companion piece to Sylvia maybe. I’m not sure about the Pentagon/Secret service stuff. It seems overdone though I am aware that the story has been dramatized to make a better film. The radium diode seems an unlikely piece of technology for the 50s though I may be wrong. I bet you would have to have someone to read it rather than scanning it for access. Six numbers – that’s just like my secure id.

No it’s not me!

We went to the beach with the Gormley statues again this afternoon. I mean we went to the beach that has the Gormley statues; we didn’t travel with the Gormley statues – the chassis wouldn’t take one of them. Actually there are the well-known Gormley-Statues of Wiltshire so I suppose we could have travelled with them. We didn’t. Daughter came home with loads of shells as you can see which I am told are for some sort of artwork. She carried them in her hat. There are thousands of shells on the beach; we could start a business. You know the stuff, shell-encrusted mirrors and toiler roll holders.

Someone close is having a crisis of faith. Not sure what has prompted it but it seems serious. You know my feelings on this; well you can pick them out of the rants about evolution and other such things. I think I will be able to help them to resolve the issue over time but how do you do that without colouring their views with yours? I am sure that it will work out in the end.

It is coming up to 19 years since I left college for the wonderful world of work; that transfer from molly-coddled student to dropped-in-it-and-confused graduate has been a major barrier to my backwards view of my life. It sometimes seems that I can see all the stuff at the Liverpool site as one continuous thing, changing yes but all visible as one thing with the same colleagues, and the same location. College, in contrast, is hazy, some of the names have gone for good and it is coloured with a nostalgia that borders on the cardigan-slippers-and-Vera-Lynn style that goes with my views of WWII and beyond. Sometimes, schooldays seem clearer in comparison. I have just realised that this sounds as if the reason could be a high intake of certain dodgy substances, which is not the case. I got drunk more often at school. For Civil Engineers see Boring! I know! I should make an effort to document some college stuff but to be honest the course I took was not one which attracted a high number of interesting characters. They were nice enough and one or two of them were good friends. Steve Poole – drop us a line if you have time.

I have just had to explain the Gormley-Statues stuff. Email me for a deconstruction. This beer is quite strong tonight. No cheese though.

Harry Enfield Will Be Pleased

Queen Elizabeth looks down on me as I write. Not the one we’ve got now and not when she was Queen. Cup of tea to the first link to the actual picture. There must be live animals in the picture on the cover of Another Day On Earth, some in tanks ready to be bought and eaten. In Behind The Wall, Colin Thubron describes how he buys a live owl, which is destined for someone’s table. He releases it from the window of a train carriage he is sharing with a group of Chinese soldiers. He thinks everyone is asleep but is startled by the open eyes of one of the sleepers, probably annoyed at the loss of the delicacy. I think he mentions that he feels that this goes against the code of the travel writer, like those wild-life film makers who stepped in to care for a wild-dog pup which had been abandoned.

I asked for some Danish Blue at the deli counter this morning, possibly to offset the five portions of fruit and veg per day, which I have been managing to stuff in over the last few weeks and to go with the cool glass of Abbot Ale which stands beside me as I write. The stuff I have here is labelled Stilton, I have been charged for Stilton but I asked for Danish Blue. Now what with all the confusion around getting the beer from the fridge, locating the bottle opener, finding a suitable glass, I’m not sure whether it is Danish Blue or Stilton. The question I have to ask myself is do I feel lucky.

Sorry about that!

The children are in a funny mood, probably for the reasons I mentioned in the earlier post about back to school. Not that Number One Son is at school yet, though if it included a media studies course on the impact of Postman Pat on Pre-school viewing habits, I am sure he would be in after his sister, dragging his pump-bag behind him.

I think it was Stilton.

Salad Days? More Like Burger Days!



This is the village where I went to school. I don’t mean just infants school; it was a high school for 14 to 18 years olds. I don’t know what the year number is for it these days but it had to expand to take everyone from 11 up when the box that was the middle school fell apart because the cardboard walls got soggy. The school is hidden away to the left of the Church though the arrival of the pupils quintupled the population of the village. I should have made a full panorama for it was such a wonderful day. Sixth formers were allowed out of school for adult pursuits such as a gentle walk to the local post-office for Army and navy sweets. We even had our own path to it called sixth form alley though I am sure the villagers called it Tom’s Bottom or something equally carry-on-like. Not sure if it was the intellectual high place you might imagine but I think I enjoyed my time there. Of course all I remember now is the rural atmosphere and the occasional sniff of stale football boots. Yes! Football – not rugby. Rugby is another story; my Grandfather was head boy of school house at Rugby. I am a state-school boy.

Martin and I were, as ever, absorbed by the activity in the massive building site next to this office. For months, big yellow trucks have been passing back and forth across this scrub and earth, carrying various loads of hillside to some new estate. As the source of these diggings has moved across the horizon, we have eventually been able to see the trucks lined up, waiting to be filled by the digger. After a very sad conversation about why diggers are always yellow and a promise to request a blue JCB should one of us win the lottery, we both realized how sad we have become. We are Pete and Dud without the funny bits. I speculated that somewhere, at that moment, a few of our school contemporaries might be drawing the curtains on a Caribbean sunrise or finishing off a doctoral thesis. Martin said that his contemporaries were more likely to be slopping out. Can’t be true I said. Slop out is early morning. And I am turning into A. Mole.

Kate Bush has a new album called Aerial out on November 7th. It is double so 12 years have not been wasted. I think that is all I want to say about that because having read the exaggerated comments on some of the fan sites, I realize that I am not that obsessed about anything. Maybe it will be rubbish.

Trash! James Joyce! Cosmic Forces!

Listening to 12" 80s

I seem to start so many posts with a sentence about how grey it is today. Well it really is today, rainy and dark, maybe to help the cricket. It is all very much in the back-to-school range of weather though we had a teacher who claimed that September was always better than the summer that preceded it and I seem to remember, that he said that this weather made children behave in odd ways. Nothing to do with being back in a regime of learning after six weeks of fishing in ponds, cycling to nearby landmarks just because you could and general not-being-told-what-to-do then!

So many times as well, I will mention here that I still don't feel grown up enough. With the idea of a regime from the above paragraph, I could mention that being able to do what you want, when you want is quite a powerful idea. I know that we all have family commitments, which mean a certain amount of routine is good for children but in general, I am like a kid in a toyshop with no assistant. What should I feel like? I look around at the general me-first attitude around these days and this makes me think I am grown-up a bit. But what defines how old you feel? I feel no different now in general demeanour to what I did when I left for college. I might know a few more things and be a bit more self-aware I suppose but there is no real difference. Maybe there is some de-radicalising in there somewhere though my wife will tell you about some un-structured rants about why the world is a horrible place. The bottom line is that in this country it is not! I don't usually agree with Alastair Campbell but his pondering on why the editors of the Daily Mail think the UK is as bad as Albania is spot on. I will grow up one day, be dignified as they lay me out I suppose. I'll wear my suit then.

This sounds so much like 'I'm mad I am'. I am alone here today; my fellow transferees are back at the old site for some leaving drinks but I cannot connect to where I need to from there so here I stay. Martin the misanthropist is here and will be good for some conversation I suppose. Good music and rain! Today is a good day.

I Wish I was This Good

Nap Time

This is the little artists’ version of Bloodhead by Marc Quinn. Now rumours have been about for some time, that Nigella Lawson had builders unplug the fridge in which this was stored resulting in red ooze across her normally pristine kitchen. Sounds a bit unlikely and I cannot be bothered to find evidence to debunk it.

Daughter was back at school yesterday; it is her first year in the juniors. I was expecting some first-day enthusiasm instead of the usual shrug in answer to the question “What did you do at school today?” but I got a cheeky reply saying that she spent all day asleep. How can someone that age have perfected a knowing smile for such an obvious falsehood? She does not seem to be bothered about first days at school in the way that I was. I can just about remember being three and taken to nursery school. I said that I hated it and would walk home. I might have managed it as well if it wasn’t for the pesky nurses; only three main roads and a labyrinth of leafy suburban streets lay between what I considered a prison camp and my goal. I cried and cried though I seem to have only been there for a few minutes. Maybe they called my mother and had me taken away. Maybe I was just too loud. My wife was watching Supernanny yesterday and the kid on it cried and screamed which was difficult for me to take because it triggered memories of how loud I could actually cry; not that I had the language that the kid last night had. Anyway, my daughter has none of this hang-up and seems quite excited about school. It would be nice if she would tell me about it though.

Tripping on the Water Like a Laughing Girl

A day out with work today meaning a drive from here to Chesterfield. There was a lot of red in the sky first thing and there was mist on the moors by The Cat and Fiddle. All this time in a reasonably fast car equipped with hi-fi of good order meant a lot of great driving moments and a lot of fun had by all. Conclusion is that the best track for such a journey is Stupid Girl by Garbage though best album is Lovelife by Lush. Stories from the city, Stories from the sea is still good however.

Leaving at the far end, with the thought of home in your head and good loud music in your ears is powerful magic. This drive is through green and pleasant, real countryside, just losing its summer shine at this time of year. It goes from the bright edge-of-the-moors provinciality of Chesterfield itself, through bucolic and seemingly sleepy Bakewell, genteel Buxton to Macclesfield, the missing link between mill town and farm town. This journey must also be one of the few drives of a hundred miles where it is possible to see the final destination when not even half way through. The twisty descent from the tops after Buxton down towards Macclesfield has views of the whole Cheshire plain, spotted with towns and heading towards the Welsh midlands. In the distance are the various landmarks of Merseyside and South Lancashire, while nearside are various peaks, which always surprise me in countryside so close to where I live. The PJ Harvey Mercury Prize winning album is a good start as music but it makes me miss a useful stop in the still-green valleys near Bakewell, a café and bookshop, so unexpected but by the time I have seen it, I am past the entrance and on the wrong road as well. This means I have to go through Bakewell itself, though this seems like going back in time, with old cars, and no clone town this. I want to sound like Pevsner here but Architecture passes too fast, a blur of stone, the opera house gone and in last week already.

The high tops might have meant a stop for coffee at the Cat and Fiddle but the long road and long views towards home keep my foot on the pedal. We are into the Lush now. The jangle and rock of Ladykillers keeps me happy for the downhill stretch to Macclesfield but the Auto-Eroticism of 500 seems most appropriate for the gradual population of the roadside. At these lights in half-village – half town suburbanity, a languid couple, skater kids, sit or lie on some street furniture, tapping away to something I cannot hear. And we are back in a landscape I know, almost like where I grew up. Slowing for a turn, I rumble by another couple, teenagers I think, though sensibly dressed for possible rain. She is long faced with hair to match, walking ahead of him by 10 paces, though I am sure that they are together. The whole world of their day has filled my head, each thought, each reason for them being here and separated by this distance. What quarrel has happened or has it been gradual tiredness overcoming their day between A levels and college. There it is; Nascent love, split by different degrees. There is no argument, just fear of the future. Now I have their thoughts in my head from so far back on that road, all the mixed up ideas of what has been and what might be. A powerful thing is love. Forget that old thing of dumping boyfriends/girlfriends when you go to university.

What is the world like when no one is there?

This is from Mrs Dalloway.

There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and grey, spotting each window-pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again. I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regent’s Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where—such was her darkness; when suddenly, as if a shelf were shot forth and she stood on it, she said how she was his wife, married years ago in Milan, his wife, and would never, never tell that he was mad! Turning, the shelf fell; down, down she dropped. For he was gone, she thought—gone, as he threatened, to kill himself—to throw himself under a cart! But no; there he was; still sitting alone on the seat, in his shabby overcoat, his legs crossed, staring, talking aloud.

I read all this to my wife last night, as it is just perfect. It says all I want to but cannot, about those little calming places I think about at night. As I drive past a wood in the rain, I imagine it while I am asleep, the rain falling on no one, just the dark and patter of the rain. And this is the argument about sound when no one is there. I hear the whole world at once, like the thoughts of these two who should be in each other’s arms, not silent and separate. They talked some night months ago, and kissed, drunkenly, their first time drunk perhaps, trying not to admit they don’t like the feeling, but she thinks of poetry and hopes he will write her some. Maybe he is not the sort she thinks but there is always the chance. She thinks she loves him but thinks she might be too young to know. I thought in cliché at that age but knew I shouldn’t. Still what’s wrong with a good cliché? Most pop for the last forty years has been full of things already said but the best of them are still good songs, good enough to give a chuckle of recognition when spoofed to people who do not even know the song. Don’t you want me baby? Woe We We Woe Woe! They have a whole story to themselves, and now they are together still, with grey hair and Bupa.

The last stretch is always powerful; entry to Liverpool is always on long, straight roads, powering down from the high moors, with dramatic sun and dark clouds. The music ends and home opens like a dream. Coffee keeps me awake and thoughts of all my life make me sleep.

Breakfast Juice

Cleared Up Mate? Yeah! Freshly bombed with ‘biotic and that made it go all psychosomatic and fading into brain cracks. The shrewish mother nearly died on us and went away in this hospital. She laughs to hide the pain, to call her saviours evil. In the end, we won’t believe her. If only I could make you see how all solutions end in this music at this time. Here is the answer in everything I obsess about, the future perfect. Hear that chime of the last piano note fading out with the breathy flute. I’ll have them out of my house and kicked into river if my friend turns up. They use to say he was mad but not his head is together, we may start something. Anyway he can take these two any day; they’ll be in the river you seem, floating down to the sea and not able to string two words together to ask for help. That’s what’ll happen I know. Mustn’t say anything now or it will tell them what’s up for sure for sure for sure. You are with me I know but as I am not speaking you can’t hear this. It’s just my own voice within my own head, pounding tired down the hours after the light goes out with thoughts of void and ending things. And in the morning it is misty, was today anyway, like some blanket came down over us and took all the air. It’s all gone now, kicked off, blown away by the little birdies flapping back and forth over the river. Maybe the birdies will save them from the sea. Couldn’t lift them I think. I heard there’s an execution today, something with electricity and all your nerves burned in a line. I want to say that will hurt but of course it will. I’m not stupid. Why do we want to do that? They’ve not killed anyone I think so it’s just revenge on them for giving something away. No worry anymore for them though. Who will remember them when they have gone. I can’t even remember their names now and I just read about them. The paper has no comics today, the funnies they call them here. No funnies! That’s it!. They made them smaller and they’ve just vanished into nothing, like all those tiny screens at the cinema. Oh well. Here they come again. She looks down manically. Hello again. A hand at her chin to lift it smells of cigarettes. She smiles a weak smile, like the sun just through the fog this morning but like the sun it fades again.

You Got It All Planned Out?

Listening to Three Tales by Steve Reich

We are sort of alive. This gives me Pause. Must post! Must Post!

Three Tales is a Reichian Opera based on three events from the last century. Firstly, you get a spooky recreation of the crash of the Hindenburg, with dramatic newsreel style voiceovers. In the next tale, the newsreel talk becomes more light-hearted despite the fact that the subject is the use of Pacific islands for atomic bomb tests. Finally, we have Richard Dawkins raving manically with others about the intelligence of robots and cloning (especially that of Dolly). I have so say that it is the typical Steve Reich cut-up-and-paste style which makes Dawkins sound as if he is raving – Are machines – are machines – are machines – are machines – are ………..

You might lump Three Tales together with The Cave and Different Trains though I have to say that Different Trains is far ahead of the other two in both concept and pure technical excellence. Different Trains is a contrast between the trains across the United States on which Reich travelled with his nanny, shuttling back and forth between his estranged parents, and the cattle-trucks used by the Germans to transport Jews to concentration camps. It has three sections - before the war in America, during the war in Europe and after the war. All the way through it has a pounding and clanging rhythm, helped along by recordings of real trains and whistles. The conclusion has a sense of humanity dragging itself up from as deep as it can be and starting over, a powerful obscene gesture at the black heart of the worst depths of what people can do to other people. The strange thing is that is has a rocky feel, even in the Europe section; it drives forward creating a conflict between the enjoyment of something which ostensibly is not there to be enjoyed. Maybe you could take this to be an affirmation of the future over the past. Did I not say that this is performed by a String Quartet (The Kronos Quartet in my version) playing against two recording of itself?

Back In ‘52

I found my wife listening to The Freak Zone on BBC 6 this evening. At first I thought it might have been the ‘It’s that nice Stuart Maconie’ factor but she was actually enjoying it though something over the edge sent her back to Classic FM. I have also found out that the enthusiasm for the radio is probably more due the fact that I am more likely to do the washing up with BBC 6 available in the kitchen as well as from the TV. Anyway – digital heaven has arrived in this house.

The cinema trip this afternoon was almost free for both my daughter and me. She had a free ticket for Herbie: Fully loaded courtesy of a certain fast food outlet while in best Beano fashion I had been handed a reward after returning a lost purse. I refused it at first of course but was threatened with something if I didn’t. Well you can’t just drop it on the floor can you? It was either that or a ‘slap-up meal’. What is a slap-up meal? There are always curly sausages in mountains of mash and tongues hanging out. Never had one myself. Saveloy and chips was my reward meal of choice. Anyway, film review is short. Great effects, great races, naff plot, cut so bad that it makes the relationships of the main characters difficult to believe. They did manage to avoid to many digital manipulations of the car but there were no real laugh-out-loud moments. The Wallace and Gromit movie is still ‘coming soon’.

We watched Mrs Dalloway yesterday. I have had the book by the side of the bed for some months now but I have never really got started with it. I was beginning to wonder if I could manage another Ulysses even if it is a lot shorter but after seeing the film, which was wonderful, I may restart it. The production notes on the DVD also made we think about dragging a biography of Virgina Woolf out of the library. I may be forced to finish all the other books I have to read before this is allowed.

Selggub

Well as you can see the digital radio has been purchased at last and got a high approval rating from all the family. Number One Son’s thumb is somewhere behind this picture playing with the mains adapter but it’s OK everyone; he’s not hurt.

I have just heard a sprinkler hissing in one of the back gardens behind the house and this has reminded me of a theme I have been meaning to mention for some time. There has been an advert, in the style of swingball and other garden fun stuff, for an attachment to your common-or-garden hose, which stands up in the ground with a flexible bit of trunking. When the tap is turned on, this trunking flaps around like hoses always do in cartoons (my image has Tom clinging to the end while Jerry giggles in the shrubbery) spraying everyone and everything with water in a random and mathematical chaotic way. So we spend all this money on some mechanism which means a sprinkler gives an even covering using some regular process and all along, the simplest method is a bit of flexible hose with a fixed end and an free end. The other thing in this theme is a toy, one of the kids in the street has. It consists of a battery-powered mouse on wheels (clockwork versions were also in Tom and Jerry), which sits inside a clear, plastic globe. As the mouse runs around inside the globe, it rolls around the floor. When it hits something, the mouse just falls to one side by gravity and rolls the globe in a different direction. It has no other sensors and never gets stuck. Why spend loads on fitting some bit of Mechano with bumpers, servos, eyes and trip wires? May keep this in mind when programming. Och A vay.

Funny and Zooey

Type a sentence randomly and then take it back. Delete it. See how far you get before you decide that it needs erasing. I was readin the food and drink section of the bee book yesterday. It quoted a 17th century recipe for mead which seemed so lacking in detail, as to be meaningless. These days we expect our recipes to have a Deliahesque amount of detail. Lets face it, deliah's recipes always work. My wife actually has the video of one of her shows in which she demonstrates how to quarter a chicken. It has to be dead first! Before I read the mead instructions, I was contemplating having a go but after that and the description of the taste of mead (horrible apparently) I don't think I will bother.In my final year at middle school (three years - 11 to 14), a couple of us made some ginger beer which we left in the biology lab ready-room (The bit where the science teachers go to make their tea in the lab equipment). We never got to consume it for whatever reason and I suspect it remained undiscovered until causing a minor explosion as the building was demolished. The lab also featured live chinchillas which escaped from their cage and made a frugal living behind the plasterboard walls, occasionally livening up a lesson with their mating squeals. Practical biology! You can't beat it!

We were also taught how to kill and pluck chickens. I have probably told you about how I was lucky enough to have to do Rural Science until I was 14. I bet there aren't many people in my town who can draw the insides of a cow and thankfully, having managed to forget the trauma that was RS, I am one of them. We did have bees I remember. OK! I told you that already.

I Knew You Were Going to Say That

Listening to Joy Division (Oh No! One of those posts)

I hate the future! It creeps in whenever I wake up before the required time and fills the gaps of calm that sleep creates. Maybe it is never going to be the real future; that is reserved for the wackos who see major events. I see myself in some one-room hovel, hands over a guttering gas ring, surrounded by empty tins, a hostage of the kiddies in the markets who can’t see beyond next week and then only because they are off to some do with their cloned mates. The major worries usually pass when the cold of the day seeps in but like a bad dream, half-remembered, it colours moods and creates depression over time. And I am safe here.

I am glad that the BBC apologized for the programme (Bring Your Husband To Heel) last week where dog-training techniques were used to bring husbands to heel. There is the obvious and probably clichéd argument that if the programme had been about using the same techniques on women it would never have been shown. I know as well that some radical feminists might well say that it was redressing the balance of years of oppression of women. The BBC did say that it was just a bit of fun but even without the emotional element of an interview with whoever said that, it did seem as if they were trying to adjust the scope of the programme. After being slightly concerned by Michael Buerk’s comments about the women running the BBC, this does seem to have confirmed at least some of what he said. Am I straying into dangerous ground here? We have been given the idea that women have a greater intuition and ability to solve problems in ways that just don’t occur to men and certainly this is true. However, going as far as to say that if women ran the world, there would be no wars because of these abilities actually conjures up an image of a world as screwed up as this one. It would just be in different ways.

WARNING! Very Old Actorial Joke



Listening to The Guitar and Other Machines by The Durutti Column.

My wife actually hid the Radio Times yesterday so she could be first to read about Johnny Vegas’ Bottom. I feel like adding a ‘Geddit!???!!?’ like Private Eye’s moronic columnist Glenda Slagg.

It is sad that the version of Midsummer Night’s Dream is not in the original language but rather a modern interpretation much like the versions of The Canterbury Tales from last year. Still, a good story is a good story and Johnny Vegas with pointy ears is fascinating in itself. I tried to watch his show but he just seemed to be a very loud shouty drunk – playing to type, you say? No! Worth a go. At least the Canterbury Tales were originally in language requiring translation of some sort. I have probably already raved about them in this blog due to a crush I had on a Sixth Form girl who would list the plots as we walked home across the common where we lived. Of course, my adolescent ear filtered out the boring bits and my memory is now full of the more racy passages. I like the idea of Chaucer more than Chaucer itself. Iff Lyffe bee so muche payne, theyn coulden nott thye lyffe be forsworne for eteynety. It is code.

The notebook has come up with mention of an Oboist which refers to the winner of an oboe competition who was on In Tune yesterday. Her name is Holly Fawcett who seems to be quite web-wise as well as being a brilliant musician. I arrived home just as she was playing something by Schuman (It’s not on the playlist). My daughter was sitting on the step with an ice-lolly watching the rain and I opened the car window to let her hear the end of the piece. All this has reminded me that a modest windfall has prompted me to think about getting a digital radio at last. I was hear so early this morning and I was hoping to write so much more but things have gotten in the way.

Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian.

Read, digest and know you are right.