Some Needless Sentimentality

Well I did write that sonnet and unusually here it is.

Dove With Poppy

Your taking, as requested, was as you had defined,
With lofty passion; showing much deceit
The hundred drops in one, your failure to eat,
Becalmed and in your lover’s arms entwined.
The dove has taken you across the poppy sea,
This bird, a haloed angel taken by the hawk,
In arguments and faces split with angry talk,
That always tears apart your gilded symmetry.

And now we live with all these faults and doubly,
Paint you over, redo the arc and only praise,
With fading images and much dispersing thought,
Of how we failed and let you sail away; we ought,
To love you still and as Virgil’s sad saint, raise,
To scintillating void, you at your end and free

What do you think? Too Much? Well I like it.

I was feeling slightly let down by the first chapter of The Tent, The Bucket and Me but the second chapter has taken off and rendered the book far more than a cheap 70's memoir. It is hard to reconcile the use of decimal money with the lighting of gas lamps and the total lack of indoor toilets in some parts of the UK; it gives the book a strange timeless air with the date somehow floating back between the eras of depression and space hoppers. Reviews seem so suggest an obsession with bodily functions and some proof-reading issues - ho hum.

Oscar Wilde! What a Git!

I finished the Lizzie Siddal biography last night; there were no real revelations though the author Lucinda Hawksley does seem to assert that there was indeed a suicide note based on a 1949 biography by the Granddaughter of one of the main figures in the tale (probably Ford Madox Brown but I can't remember). However, one of the last tales is the gossip regarding Lizzie's death put about by a certain wit and playwright of Irish origin who claimed it was murder on the part of DGR. It is poignant then that in this story, the school aesthete gets named after Wilde. The idea that the PRB "were the spiritual forebears of both the Happy Mondays and the Blackpool Illuminations" is maybe a candidate for Pseuds' Corner but I can see where it comes from. I've just noticed (sparked by the slightly fuzzy notion that Lizzie and DGR were a bit like Ted and Sylvia) that Sylvia died exactly 101 years after Lizzie on February 11th 1963. Slap me someone!

On to The Tent, The Bucket and Me. I feel a sonnet coming on.

Ursa Calculus Machina Deus

Ever get the feeling you are being watched? The tools at our disposal to rid us of this blue-eyed menace are being ever-reduced by international legislation. Sue me if you dare!

Enough of cat wars! Time for the Water-Cooler discussion. Anyone see the last of Desperate Romantics?. Seemed a bit harsh to have Rossetti digging up his poems from Lizzie's Grave the day after she was buried, in the dark like a grave robber when in actual fact it was years later with official sanction and without Rossetti being there. Of course the whole thing was a concatenation of 10 years into one and most of the events happened in some form or other. Watchable and funny is the summary of the summary I suppose. The book on which it is based is as accurate as any biography can be after so many years. Of course what really matters here is what almost anyone knew about the PRB and that is the art itself - the private lives were just so much distraction. Nothing about Christina either which was a bit of a pity but here is a rather good picture by Gabriel. (We can of course use first names here now can't we?)

The notebook is approaching its limit in a sort of reverse Achilles and the Tortoise manner in that if I fill up half of each remaining bit of space each time I use it, I will never quite get it full. Of course this will mean that the writing will have to get smaller and that will mean it reaching the quantum size limit at some point and it will be full in terms of what the universe can handle physically. However, like a fractal, numbers go on for ever, infinitesimally and so in that imagining, it will never be full. Or will it? I can't be bothered to work out the flaw in this so Achilles will have to remain forever behind the tortoise. I wonder if it was the same one which did for Aeschylus? Alright - I know that's probably a bit Nana Mouskouri but it was fact on Horrible Histories which the kids love so in it goes.

An Old Boiler

Lots of book reading here in la-la-limboland. I finished the Roger Deakin book - Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees which included a magical sojourn to various Ex-Soviet Republics for the Walnut harvest - more magic realism than a straight travelogue and have now found out that Alice Roberts is planning a programme about another of Deakin's books - Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain. Having finished the Wood book I was planning some light relief in the form of Emma Kennedy's The Tent, The Bucket and Me but there was a last-minute substitution in the form of Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel though this seems to be a bit pedestrian compared to Desperate Romantics and of course a model of decorum when compared to the TV version of Desperate Romantics. There hasn't been this much bare flesh on TV since Mary Whitehouse died. Hook her up to The National Grid quickly!

Lots of ideas as well though mostly just as scribbled notes. I had another thing to note last night but it sank back into the murk of my cortex almost before it had surfaced leaving me quite upset at its loss. I have this though :

A plotless description of a town in a Magic Realist style. Imagine a town you know but process it in your mind until it seems like a picture on a scraper board - a barley populated place, seemingly set in a permanent afternoon - describe all the places, all the routines, and all the people you can be bothered to have living there inside your mind. Have events but only those which are regular - make it like a travelogue - a travel book like Last Letters From Hav. Imagine it perhaps in the detail that Sylvia Plath gives to the hotel room in her Journal exercises; make nothing bad happen and make nothing related to bad things be a part of the routine.

This article chimes exactly with how I feel about rain. Why does the rain put the kibosh on almost everything? I love being out in the rain - inside watching the rain. Maybe getting absolutely soaked isn't that nice but that rarely happen. Forecast is heavy showers and then prolonged rain. Happy days.

On Being Caught Up With Other Things

We've been away for the week in The Land of Giant Spiders. Well maybe not but we did see this arachnid getting bigger and bigger over the week after locating what must be the best web space in the world. The house was also full of large, indoor, black spiders which look far more fearsome than this fellow. Actually it may have been the same one over and over again which being local was able to find its way back inside after each of my cup-and-postcard evictions. Weather was glorious since you asked and much fun was had by all. What is most surprising is that we went to Hay-on-Wye and I only got two books the size of passports. The children made up for this with a haul befitting such a book town. So back to the daily grind and again we find that pesky codepage 1252 is required for something to work properly. Och a Vay!

Under-the-bus Instructions

I do not like making personal attacks anywhere but inside my head but it is this point that will lead you to accept that at the moment my head is full of the worst possible names for a certain MEP, a man with a bucket full of axes to grind and no way of doing it than through clever, swinging-in-the-wind, rhetoric. The lies about the NHS put about by vested financial interests in the US are the worst kind of class-warfare I have seen for a long time. Comments like "I have never used the NHS and would like a refund." are patently absurd - even if you went around with that tattooed on your forehead, all NHS medical staff without fail would still pick you up from the gutter and do what was necessary to patch you up. Of course the NHS could be improved but so could any health care system. Without skillful management, administration always swallows up more than its fair share of resources. I imagine that the problem we have in the UK is that while the medical staff are highly trained, the admin staff are not really ingrained with the plain attention to detail that is required to be a doctor or nurse. Emptying the front line NHS of frivolous demands will go some way to freeing up resources for the people who really need it. The NHS is a brilliant but flawed icon. I support it and I hate to see it used a punch ball for the medical equivalents of the financial experts who still seem to be in charge at the moment.

Inverse Square Law

It's just playing at soldiers isn't it? Time to grow up I think.

Much more interesting is this article about a new Arthur Ransome book (which would obviously have our friend in the previous link rendered incapable of intelligible discourse through apoplexy). We are currently nearly finished reading a beautiful new hardback version of Coot Club and wonderful it is too. I was slightly annoyed at the sniffy tone of the article when referring to the Swallows and Amazons books. They are escapism as most novels are so they might not actually be close to the realities of life as lived by most children but the possibility of such a life is closer than for most books. Novels are usually interesting because they are a separate slice of existence. And as regards AR being a double agent, how exciting is that?

Wave After Glorious Wave of Deja Vu

A fact to start with - though obviously you can dispute the source if you feel like it. The World Health Organisation (WHO?) put health care in the UK at the 18th best in the world while that in the USA at 37th. Life expectancy and mortality rates in the UK are marginally better than the USA. I start with this because of the campaign against the NHS as part of the opposition to Barack Obama's proposed health care reforms. Please don't take my temperature anytime soon. I'll just go back to my hovel and die of something treatable. I wonder if there is an operation to stop one's knuckles dragging on the pavement.

Just got my next Moleskine just in time to catch the filling up of the previous one. The problem is that the only thing going for the contents is sheer quantity as it does not live up to the beautiful pages you can find here. I just cannot draw or lay anything out artistically thought I suspect that a large proportion of this inability is my extremely short attention span. I do so like Haribo Tang fastics. Don't you?

Today I Have Mostly Been Thinking About Icosa-10-Topes

I have! I really have. I'm trying to think of something useful I can write which will spit out information regarding higher-dimensions. The trouble is that apart from the lovely, rotating Tesseract up there (which is way beyond my ability - at least The Mandelbrot set stays still), there isn't much you can do to visualize such things. I could write something which takes in the n-dimensional coordinates of two points in n-space and returns the 1-dimensional distance between them. Distance is always 1-dimensional and despite this it still amazes me that distances between any n-dimensional space are always 1 dimensional. Standard Pythagoras is all you need.

My understanding has been greatly helped by working out how many faces and cubes a Tesseract has just by looking at a still version of the picture above. You can see all of the 8 cubes - the inner one - the outer one and the six which join these two together. However, it has not helped me see into the fourth dimension which I think needs some mental rigour in visualizing three dimensions. Actually thinking about this, we do it all the time. I can only see a part of the inside of my house at any one time and yet in my head I have a mental picture of the whole thing. Generally thoughts are abstractions of what they refer to to - the mind has ideas and concepts which only turn into words when they are voiced or written down. Similarly, the mind has images and maps of things in the real world - three-dimensional models as well as templates for recognition of those objects. So in a way we have the mental information to imagine four dimensions. It's just that we have no experience of four dimensions and just cannot imagine anything at right-angles to the existing three. Frustrating hey?

Looking again the rotation up there has made me wonder how it was produced. I suspect it is simply done in three dimensions, with the programmer allowing a plastic flow of the matter at the vertexes. It would be much better if the application had simply been programmed in 4 dimensions and then rendered the 4D information to the visible 3D. I am sure that computing power is quite capable of handling information in any number of dimensions. The program should be generic - starting a new project with "Enter number of Dimensions". Creating 4D objects and then examining them in 3D would go a long way to helping someone to actually "see" the 4D. Obviously the real problem is that to really see 4D we would need 3D retinas (I know our retinas are actually 3D already - they are really just 2D planes wrapped around a 3D sphere.) The problem is that light will not travel through solid matter. At this point I have to give up having to think about this; maybe there is a solution.

GoodlyBydeLoad EngleeBold that Nebbly Wost.

It's beginning to look like some sort of military base from an unfilmed Gerry Anderson live-action show around Mount Pleasant in Liverpool, rather than a centre of religious devotion. I can imagine the whole Cathedral dropping slowly into a giant underground cavern as alarms echo out across the area. Still, I don't want to sound like I'm dissing religion at all - it all looks very pleasant indeed doesn't it? No need to shout any more.

Talk of Gerry Anderson reminds me of a recent U-Tube diversion we watched called The Secret Service, a strange mixture of standard GA puppetry and live action in a way that doesn't quite work but is instead really, really funny. On top of the general ludicrous execution is the fact that the main character, as well as being a priest, is played by professor Stanley Unwin. Penance viewing of a whole episode can be found here.

A Day for Maintenance

A Phoenix in the sky above the Country Park (Formerly known as The Tip). As the local representative of The Cloud Appreciation Society, I have to post such views though always with the rationalist rider that any perceived shape in the sky is just a coincidence of water vapour and wind.



Friends loaned us a DVD of The Riddle of the Sands yesterday, the title of which has always put me off in that I imagined it as some desert-based swashbuckler in the style of Rider Haggard. It turns out to be the mould from which all later early 20th century espionage novels sprung. The Thirty-Nine Steps is very similar and from ten years later. A very sparse film it is too, though I'm not sure how much of that comes from the book. I'd just about heard of Erskine Childers who wrote it but the usual Wiki scan shows him to be quite a character, his demise at the hands of the raggle-taggle administration of the early Free State after being part of the complexities involving Ireland at that time. His son eventually became the fourth Irish President and his Granddaughter Nessa is an MEP. Cracking plot though.

PS. Late and intersting information regarding the yachts from the book.

Field and Ground

Is this the least amount of matter than can remain to indicate the presence of something once living? How much of this is actually part of the original jellyfish? It takes thousands of years for humans to completely return to the earth - sometime the remains last for billions of years. This scrap of DNA and water dessicated and vanished in hours leaving just the blank space where it had been.

I'm not sure whether this is depressing or not. It does come in the wake of some pretty distressing dreams which I have been unable to spin into some thing more positive, even if I can determine the triggers, all of which have turned out to be innocuous things. After my minor despair at the continuing routines of my life and my inability to break them I did follow some of the recommendations of a commenter but one of them just resulted in me falling over when only just awake. Not that it was a very big step away from the standard morning routine but it was a start. I've still not been able to park the car anywhere else on arrival at work. The muscle memory of the drive is just too strong to override any conscious effort. This does not seem to allow for free will to exist in this part of the world just at the moment. Philosophy Now may have some of the answers but it is quite dry even if I have managed to read quite a bit of it. The last-word-type article is about names, sparked in the authors mind by the "Don't tell him Pike!" line from Dad's Army. So not all dead and heavy thinkers then.

Night on the Tiles

This is a nice bit of Escher-style tiling on the outside of the Echo Arena. Notice how each rectangular pane has the same design and yet the tiling still works. It's the first time I've noticed windows like these but I suspect that they're quite common. My eye for this sort of thing is a bit better than it was because of the Marcus du Sautoy book on symmetry.

Having said that, my real eyes are beginning to show signs of age, in that I'm having to hold books further away to be able to read them which means of course that it can't be long before optical accessories are required with all the attached grownupness* that they bring. I can remember being able to focus on the end of my little finger while thumbing my nose at someone but now I'm just about two hand lengths. I always used to wonder what it would be like to not be able to see properly and no explanation I was given ever conveyed anything I could get a handle on. Despite this obvious deterioration, I'm not seeing the world any differently - the colour and definition of everything is just the same - but the noticeable change in the focus is disturbing - a first sign of being aged and decrepit. I'm so frustrated I could just about hit someone with my walking stick.

And finally a beautiful song for Harry Patch from Radiohead.

* Spellchecks to grumpiness.

Offset verticals

In the flooded streets of future London, where the country sinks and rises across some mighty pivot, a fulcrum made of dust, the clouds are thicker than they were when we were kids, playing in the bombsites.

How to Write More Neatly in the Field

These faces seem like injuries so far from home,
The normal eyes and mouth of love lost in these lands,
The lines of tendons flow down unfamiliar routes to hands,
That will, just the same, caress a friend; Light will be shone,
from sun and moon that rise much higher in these skies,
The scales of which defy all that is known to you,
And show how all these multiplying entities cannot be true,
No matter how compelling, all their easy ways are lies.

False scientists abound and trail their angry theories as facts,
From which the disenlightenment expands and then attacks,
The pillars of technology and all the sub-atomic zoos,
Of countless particles that bear their words and whose,
Empty minds dismiss the obvious as just against the faith,
We all must have in gods and monsters, dream and wraith.