New York, Ice-Cream, TV, Travel, Good Times

So what Mr Grimsdale?

Have you ever heard of Jamais Vu? I thought Oliver Sacks had just made it up to contrast with Deja Vu but thinking about it, the feeling of never having experienced something which rationally you know you have actually experienced many times must be as common as Deja Vu. Anyway Deja Vu is almost always not real. I think this is getting dangerously close to what I was arguing with my Brother about, so I will leave off.

I want to lie shipwrecked and comatosed. Maybe I don't really. Having talked about Deja-Vu and Jamais above, I suddenly feel very strange though obviously that maybe lack of sleep. I have to keep looking out of the window to prove to myself that I am in the same location I last remember. Ok so thats a bit over the top but I do have that odd papery feeling you get when you are tired. I am in Zelig mode. Having just read about a Surgeon with Turette's syndrome am now convnced that I have it, not because of any tics or uncontollable obscenity but because of the internal feelings of not being in control. All rubbish of course. Apparently there is a rise in the number of people visiting doctors with specific conditions when those conditions are described in TV soaps. If it is the case that TV soaps affect things like that why isn't everyone dumber than a bunch of rocks? Oh! Maybe they are or is that just the writers?

There is a simulacra on the way to work. Just at one corner on the right hand side of the road there is a plastic bag stuck in a tree in such a place that it combines with marks on the wall below it to form the image of a slightly hunched old lady. I get spooked by it every time I see it even when I remember it before I pass it. Sometimes I just drive by without seeing it. It is amazing how the human mind attempts to turn everything it sees into first a face and then if that is not possible, a human figure. I have just drawn a very simple doodle of a face and then tried to draw more lines over it until it no longer suggests a face. You need a lot of extra lines to turn a face into a non-face.

Rebuff and Rebuke

My brother responded to being mentioned in the last entry regarding his advocation of synchronicity. His email reply is :-

Why are you sorry for something that you cannot prove or disprove.Is not
a more mystical experience of life more fascinating than a
cold,hard,black and white experience to one's walk from birth to death.
Some questions have no answers and are best left that way unless you
KNOW (feel) the answer without the use of mans languages.Does a word
exist for everything. "it kind of feels like ******* but I can't quite
put it into words" To KNOW something goes beyond the understanding of
Man,or woman for that matter. To feel IT and be IT you must kill
yourself and give birth to another who is also YOU.

Let this be the lesson of the day.
When you stop trying to prove or disprove something and except it
without a mere thought towards it the it may lend itself to your
experiences.If this were to happen enjoy it for what it may be but do
not pull it about like some new creature that needs to be cut
up,photographed,written about to say what it is,where it comes from or
why it exists.

When he called me I did ask him what he was reading at the moment but it was something to do with investment. For the sake of completeness, my reply is as follows :-

You seem to be joining [my wife] in an Anti-Analysis bloc which I have to tell you both is not necessary. My Blogging is simply a train of thought and I suppose I should put some form of disclaimer that I myself don't actually agree with everything I write. Yes! I do like breaking things apart; taking the back off things as it were, but only to understand them where possible. I am quite happy to admit that there are things which we will never and indeed can never understand. As I said, I suspect that all fields of science will attempt to define everything and yet the real world will 'retreat' from our attempts at understanding. Believing this notwithstanding, it is still interestng and productive to try and understand them even if only be means of a random analysis in one's head. You and I both work in fields where a strictly materialistic analysis of
things is required in order to provide the best result. I am quite happy to join with you both in an appreciation of the beauty of the Universe and yes maybe I do try too often to provide myself with an explanation of things in purely scientific terms. This does not mean I am lacking in an awareness of the 'spritual' dimensions of this beauty. The current crumbling of the idea that there was nothing; no space OR time before the big bang has almost proved my point.

Anyway on to something related but probably against my argument. I watched Mind games on BBC 4 on Friday. This was the first episode. It was very much a radio show on the TV. The visual aspect was absolutely necessary though in order to show most of the various puzzles many of which I had seen before and therefore knew the answers not by virtue of my intelligence but because I remembered the answers. I can't actually believe that the panellists had not seen most of the 'tricks' before; maybe they had been told to behave as if they hadn't in order to make it more interesting. Anyway, to my point. One of the items involved taking successive pairs of digits from pi (3.141592654...) and using each pair to create a value from 00 to 99. Where the value of a pair was 1-26, the corresponding letter from the alphabet was substituted. The question was the name of Which British playwright would appear as consecutive letters in this string? The answer was of course any one as Pi is infinite, then any string you care to mention from the word 'an' to any book ever written, any book that will be written and indeed any book which could possibly be written will appear somewhere in pi. This of course was mildly interesting but what intrigued me was what if you used the values of Pi to create not letters but musical notes. So I dutifully went of and downloaded a million digits of pi from here and simply fed the value of each digit into a midi control at regular intervals. I defined each value as being from a genuine scale to avoid using all 12 notes and so I had one octave plus three notes from the next octave. The raw result sound reasonably Ok but I added some emphasis on the every first and third note to give the bars a length and then left it running. I am not sure it would ever be called expressive but at least it was unrepeating even if it did have a long term similarity at all points. I left it running for a while without actually listening to it and when I came back to it it seemed to have changed its mood slightly but that may be simply because my own mood had altered. Of course there are plenty of arbitrary decisions which I made about which scale to use and which octave. I could go further and define a far more complex interpretation of the values, for instance using the first value to define the length of a note or making a chord accompaniment but all this would detract from the purity of the interpretation. I suppose a true sound would use simple ratios and frequencies rather than arbitrary note decisions but are not the notes of the Western 12 note scale defined by maths anyway?

All of this has led me to a greater understanding of how the midi control for the PC works which means I am a step closer to being able to program the self-playing version of In C. I will define a set of instruments and faders with a simjple melody to prove that the mix will work and then define a way of getting each of the channels to pick up the next bit of the score. In addition to this I can program Bell Ringing etc. Now there would be a group to annoy by computerising something.

I didn't sleep a lot last night. I tried to read at about 1am with a view to making myself drop off but unfortunately the book I chose was so interesting the usual heavy eyes did not result. The book is An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks and is in the mode of an earlier book of his - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat which strangely was turned into an opera by Michael Nyman. The first case was of an artist Jonathan I. who through an accident or stroke lost his colour vision totally and found the world after this a strange and dirty place. He was able eventually to use this devastating loss to create his own powerful new art. I never realised that Goethe wrote lots about the theory of colour. Anyway, lack of sleep means that I am losing my concentration and I should direct it all at work rather than this indulgence.

High Tech Looms

How about throwing it all in and going off and being the warden on an island somewhere? Bardsey would be nice and not too far away though not always as sunny as in this picture. My problem at the moment is too much worry. Having said that, over the last few days some form has calm has returned, almost like the heady days just after I started work here all those years ago. I never really worried about anything other than little local difficulties. The recent philosophical attitude of mine may be due to an increase in the amount of work I have to do but it could just be acceptance that I can't do anything about the things which I worry over and hence there is no point in worrying about them. Zen Hey!

I heard that live recordings of public Classical Music are now virtually impossible because of the almost continuous sound of mobile phones ringing in the auditoria. Is that sad. Nothing was said about the fact that the performance is actually spoiled for the majority of the audience who have switched off their phones. Someone will invent a machine to filter out these sounds. Actually, the processing power is probably already available. In fact I did read about a fantastic new device which can listen in on a hubbub (lovely word) of conversation and pick up each individual speaker and transcribe the speech. Sounds a little fantastic to me. There is a problem these days in that technology does so many fantastic things these days that is is almost impossible to determine the border between what is and is not possible with the technology. This border is not a smooth transition. Some fields advance far ahead of others and not usually because of any technical issue, but because the people working on the various fields are pushed by more down-to-earth reasons, usually of economy or military need. The average person, told that a spy Satellite can be contacted via the web and instructed to point a camera at them to check what they were reading and that it could do it even though they were in a house with the curtains drawn, would probably believe it. This is not to say it can't be done. If I stick my neck out here and say that it is currently impossible to do this, then I am opening myself up to being proved wrong possibly because it can already be done. I don't think it can but I am ready to be proved wrong. Within ten years I think it will be possible to do this and to have a computer which will simulate the entire world to a level where you can walk through a photo-realistic version of it and interact with 'intelligences' within it. I am sure that small portions of the world are already modelled like this. Yes! I know about 'The Matrix'. This has reminded me of a story in Fortean Times which said that some people believed that we were all intelligences in giant game. Some philosophers believe similar things regarding us being pure thoughts in the mind of God. It could be that only one of us exists as an entity with full intelligence in the mind of God. All other entities are purely sensory input to that one entity. In that case, which one of us is it? It is me of course unless God has put these words into your sensory perception and the one true entity is you. What happens if this idea is propagated through the mind of God in the manner of a meme? If the idea becomes popular with many people, then it can be propagated to the one true entity through its myriad sensory interactions. God does not have to think of a lot of things if there is only one True entity. Only the things which affect that one true entity need to be thought about in the mind of God. If the OTE is me, then I cannot be in all places in the world at once. I can go to weird places on a whim and having previously read about them and seen pictures of them, God only has to 'flesh out' these places to make them real and to fit with my ideas of what they should be like. Actually, He doesn't even have to get it 100% correct. How many times has a place not met with your expectations of it when you get there. It only has to fit a basic description, and even some plainly wrong things can be explained away as Deja Vu or other such weird mind tricks. The world is consistent as far as I can see. I never see things which make me think that someone is controlling me. There are the occasional odd things where something you have just thought about for the first time appears in print soon afterwards, but with the world so complex, and with so many interactions, this sort of co-incidence is bound to happen (Sorry Bro. There is no such thing as synchronicity). Does it not amaze you what you can actually think about? The Universe is complex and yet the mind, your mind, my mind, is created in a physical object which constitutes only a tiny part of the whole universe. We can create worlds as different from the real one as possible but they will be just as complex if not more complex because we can imagine whole things in simple concepts. I know what the Universe looks like, out as far as the furthest stars that exist 'now' (now as near as we can define it) and as far back as the earliest possible things which happened and before that. Even if there was nothing before the Big Bang ( and that is now not clear because of 'brane theory), I can still pretend in my head that there was. Can it not be true that we can be our own gods and have our own universes. Just because I sit here and can quite clearly feel certain that my mind is situated in my brain behind my eyes, does not mean that I am a physical person. I can write a computer program which simulates a tiny part of intelligence and for that program I can tell it that it is a person within the confines of what it knows about its world. Could we not just be the same only to a much higher degree? We get into recursion then. I could write a program which I make believe has written a program which it makes believe has written a program and so on.

I suspect that this comes across as self-indulgent sophistry though if you look I have not said that anything above is true. The problem is that physics suggest that at small scales, the Universe behaves in mysterious ways as staggeringly complex as anything I have said above. Could it not be true that we believe that our existence to be normal and un-mysterious as we do because it is familiar? The Universe is complex and set in the realms of equations but it is still fantasic and beautiful. I think this leads on to Unweaving the Rainbow doesn't it?

Think complexity and you will find complexity. Think Simplicity and you will find yourself.

Casua Belli

It is not often I agree with Andrew Motion (especially after charging for his Millennium Poem) but the poem (linked to above) is a neat summing up of what a lot of people feel. "Quote but never learn". Indeed.

I still think Simon Armitage would have been a better Poet Laureate. I used to listen to him when he was on Mark Radcliffe's show in the evening (Between Out on Blue Six and the breakfast show.). That evening show was wonderful. They had film, art and poetry along with drop-dead-for sessions. They often had the poet who is currently doing the digital radio adverts who is a sort of Yorkshire (I hope I am right - where is my Red Rose by the way?) version of Roger McGough but I cannot remember his name which is sad. I am even contemplating ringing up the DAB authority to ask.

I have found him. He is Ian McMillan who amongst other things is Humberside Police's Beat Poet. You wouldn't think that Humberside police actually need a beat poet would you. His website has opened up a plethora - yes plethora is the only word to describe it - of websites for poets so a bit of perusal is called for. I may even go along to radio crosby's poetry evening in the next few weeks. I am currently listening to the poem by Chloe Poems from the Radio Crosby website. I think they encourage people to stand up and read their own poems so I will sit quietly in a corner.

Holly Dolly Clone

Just for all the Londoners who have never seen it, The Guardian presents A user's guide to snow.

I have my headphones on here, and I have just heard a low rumble over the top of the music (Stereolab - Mars Audiac Quintet) which made me slightly anxious. We keep hearing the planes flying low over the building. Having the large window and being high up, we are more aware of the air traffic now. We spent a few minutes yesterday using trig to work out how far away the most distant vapour trail was. If the plane was at 25,000 feet then we estimate about 100 miles but then again we didn't take account of the curvature of the Earth. Martin of course knew that we needn't TAN because we knew the opposite side (25,000 feet) and wanted to know the adjacent side. TAN is opposite over adjacent, just to complete the lesson. This is of course all just ballpark. I think we had better close the blinds today so that we don't waste time staring out of the window and being fascinated by the smoke from the chimmneys. Yes! We are that boring.

I am like Zellaby except that I don't want to think of a brick wall and that is all I can think of. Where are the cuckoos when you need them? I have to crumble that wall myself. It is the only way. Why does John Wyndham always have someone who's name begins with the letter 'z' in his novels. Well, I haven't read all of them but in The Midwich Cuckoos and Trouble with Lichen there are such characters. I can't really be bothered looking up the characters from the other books just to check. There is no such character listed in the cast for either of the two film versions of Day of the Triffids so mayeb it is just a coincidence. The BBC TV Version of Day of the Triffids was far superior to the film. The sound of the clackers which preceeded the use of the Triffids' whip-like sting was chilling and often imitated at school by banging knuckles together. It still hurts if you do it. I started using it as an insult and what do you know a single knuckle clask became a gesture of abuse on 'Friends'. The 1962 film is awful unless you are 10. For the definitive John Wyndham film see Village of the Damned from 1960 (Avoid the John Carpenter remake) It is the best example of a film where nothing happens and still you are rivited. In my mind, films like this work better in British Villagers rather than US outposts, simply because so many films have used American towns that you expect something to happen. I seem to remember some Kids' show set in Avebury. Time to post.

Whiteout Heroes

There was a very well constructed programme on TV last night called Collision Course, which yesterday detailed the events of the Southall Rail crash. It started off concentrating on the lives of some of the people killed and injured in the crash and could so easily have been like one of the 'Airport' films where the personal lives of the various passengers are mixed up with a major air event. This steered a straight course which allowed the details of the few seconds of the crash to be told in an informative and compelling way without ever seeming to be voyeuristic. I try to avoid watching things like this but at the moment it actually seems that a train crash is a more familiar tragedy; there seem to be so many strange and dangerous things going on at the moment, that such an event seems almost normal. The real tragedy is that at the moment rail crashes are almost normal. The stats suggest that we can expect a rail crash of such proportions every two years. Still, rail (and indeed air) travel is far far safer (10-20 times safer) than travelling by car. The problem for most people is as stated by one of the injured passengers, that people fell more afraid, the more divorced they are from the control of their mode of transport. Many of us drive cars and we feel happy doing so because we feel completely at ease with the control of the vehicle. We are happy even if we are not driving, because we can drive. The further we get from being able to drive/pilot a vehicle, the more worried we are about it crashing. The bottom line is that, in general, we don't trust people other than ourselves. Anyway, all credit to the production team but more especially to the people prepared to talk about something which must be a real gash in their memories. I do hope that this man was watching and that he keeps his mits off things which he knows nothing about.

Wonderful suggestions have been made, that we may actually be seeing some snow over the next few days. It is always nice to wake up to but in the city it so quickly turns to slushy mess rather than just melting away over days like it does in more rural areas. I loved the snow when I lived on the common but I told you that yesterday. When it snowed there, you were actually in some danger. I walked all the way from our house to the top of the Herefordshire Beacon (See this map - the route is all the way from the house just above the 'n' in Castlemorton Common on the right to the peak of the Herefordshire Beacon on the left.) and when I got home (in -18C) I found the house empty and I was locked out. I think I was in danger of frostbite then. My nose was certainly on the point of crystallising. The Beacon is an old hill fort which has many concentric ramparts surrounding the two main peaks and these were filled with snow to a depth sufficient to cover me had I fallen in. I think I was probably a little reckless. I am still here though. Or in another quantum universe, I was sucked under the drifts. I have this theory that no-one ever really suffers. We all have our personal result of Sum Over History and all the bad stuff happens to other people, the further away you look from yourself, the more terrible the tragedies become. However, for the actual people who expereience those bad things, life is OK and it is us who seem to have the terrible lives. Probably not true but there is an element of reality, in that people generally like familiar things and so life changes, including those for the better, upset one's feeling of 'comfortableness'. Maybe that is just me and thinking about it it is quite pompous because there are many people in the world whose lives are really bad, no food or clean water or abuse so that their lives are just one long terrible experience. Maybe it only applies in our western culture. And the annoying thing is that more western people take their own lives. It seems that people for whom life is a chore, value it more than those of us who have no real problems. The human brain is a sea of irrationality. The more comfortable you are, the more you worry about things not being comfortable. Mental anguish. Who needs it? Follow the seven-fold way.

Writing as if humans mattered.

Everything is back to normal after what seemed like a very long break. Even my daughter is back at school. As usual I have made all the unvoiced, internal resolutions to start everything with a clearer mind and also as usual my mind staggers to a halt like a trolley rolling over syrup. Only poems ever seem to exit my mind with any velocity of note. Maybe I should write everything as a poem where I can flit from idea to idea without having to worry about the consistency of it all.

It is cold all over the country today and the forecasters are suggesting significant snowfalls for next week. My daughter will be happy as the only time she ever saw snow was on a visit to Malvern two years ago and although that was quite deep and nice to look at, it was powdery and wouldn't stick together at all so no snowmen or snowballs. We only seem to get snow here every eight or so years. The last snow we had here was about 1994 and I took loads of pictures to send to people who were writing to me from Bali as they never see snow. I explained this to the kids in the street and they said that they had never seen snow either. Maybe I should have said nothing the other week when I said that we didn't get really cold winters anymore. When I was at college, there were many days when the temperature stayed below freezing. I have probably mentioned this already but I used to walk to the phone box to call home listening to tapes of Gregorian chant which made the whole thing quite unreal. Further back, when I was still at school and we got days off because the weather was so bad, we would skate across the Icy ponds on our bikes. We felt reasonably safe as the ponds were really just foot deep depressions in the common land where we lived and the ice was nearly frozen through. We did scramble out on one permament pond with a view to testing the depth with a plumb line which was probably quite dangerous but you don't think of that at that age. My brother fell off his bike and got a lump the size of an egg on his head. Where do lumps that big come from? Must be something Lymphatic I suppose. There's a great title for something - The Morphology of Lumps.

I want a machine to speed up time or to enable me to jump to a specific point forwards. No need for any worry about time travel paradoxes as I would still exist in the gap between the start and end. I used to dream of having such a machine to allow me to skip to a time after some bad thing coming up like and exam or a driving test. I was far more bothered about the actual event than the results of that event. Now I just want to speed up the time until I get to go home. I don't feel inspired by anything here other than lunchtime. Still, my life is within my control to a certain extent so I suppose I just have to get on with things. I think my brain runs far ahead of what I can actually type as do most people's when they are blogging like this, without definite ends or structure. I have the ideas arrayed in my brain and they fall out onto the keyboard at a rate which I can't keep up with. The random fridays are only an extension of this idea. They are like word association without the direction given by the trigger words. In fact, my mind has just gone into this terrible loop where I can't think of anything other than the loop to write about. Hopefully, this very act of describing such a loop will allow me to look at it and find a way out which is logical rather than doing what I normally have to and ending the paragraph until I can find something else to carry on with. It hasn't worked. All I can think about is a loop in my head ... but what is that? ... The lane down the hill over the common from the house where we used to live. This was back way to Upton-upon-Severn which I could cycle along (ten miles) without seeing a car or even a person. It went through fields and alongside streams, passed farms (one very smelly poultry farm I remember) and big old manors but I rarely saw a person; I would have regarded them with suspiscion if I had and they would have felt the same about me; I was a scruffy oik then. I used to cycle that road at least once a week for years, whatever the weather. I had no purpose other than to visit what I considered a metropolis. There were no cities in the world as far as I knew. Malvern was the biggest place there could possibly be. Worcester, London and New York were all imaginary places that were made up to fool us into thinking that big was beautiful. Big is still not beautiful. I'm with Schumacher.

Para-Para-Celsus

Illness made it impossible for us to visit my parents in Malvern over the holiday which made me quite disappointed; no matter what happens in your life, going home always seems to put things into true perspective. My wife and daughter were also quite upset not to be going and indeed I think my daughter especially has suffered through not going. A trip to Malvern is always an uplift; even if you don't actually go anywhere, life there is laid back when compared with this speedy metropolis even now that we have moved out right to the edge of the city.

Today is a random Friday. It does not feel that random simply because it is my first day back at work and the time is dragging so much. Did you know that the word 'Drag' when applied to female impersonators comes from the fact that in the early theatre, womone were played by boys and the clothes they wore were often too big for them and dragged on the floor? I need to read A Midsummer Night's Dream again. I think I can still tell you the plot even if I cannot remember any of the text. I can still remember Hal's soliloquy from Henry four part one - 'I know you all and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness ...' And then his other leg fell from the ceiling and Spike said 'Here comes Part two'. Sounds like the punchline to a great joke and so it was. Only two months and this will be a year old and written on more days than not. That is more writing than I have ever done in one place before even on my thesis on Linked Cash machine networks and the Blue Cloud. None of them wanted to send me any information but I worked for one of them and got lots and lots despite the security. They will never admit it. Relativity is a cinch. Pythagoras never relaised that he would ebd up working out that did he. Harmonics and Triangles are the fundemental stuff of mathematics and yet they still crop up in almost everything. See if complex numbers last as long, or genetics or Germanium Diodes, Triodes and Nematodes. Nematodes and not actually worm-like creatures; they are small electronic components with the power to move themselves from one place to another within the circuit. Like writing code which writes code hey? I could stay asleep all day and my computer could write the code for me. This is the end.

The Network is Down

Long break there. Not as good as I had hoped it would be for many various reasons but being away from here is enough and I have had itchy typing fingers for days now. I could not sleep the night before last because of all the ideas I wanted to write down though these ideas were not for Blogging.

Reading log of Christmas presents :-

1. Dead Famous - Albert Einstein and His Inflatable Universe by Dr Mike Goldsmith.

I have a copy of Relativity for the Layman which I have read a couple of times and which I though gave a reasonable explantion of relativity. However, the dead famous book on Einstein manages to do the job better and still have time to detail Einstein's life as well. I knew what the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations actually resulted in but it was breathtaking to see them actually derived in what is essentially a children's book. The author does warn you before the difficult bits but nothing was that difficult. Maybe it was because the derivation of the equation for the contraction of length was actually so obvious that it was easy to understand. I was going to put a link to a page of derivations but they are so obscure compared with the elegant and simple way it is done in the book that I will not bother.

2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking

I have not started this yet but got it because it is half-price in the shops and even less at Amazon - not, I hope a sign of its lack of sales.

3. What the Tudors and Stuarts did for us by Adam Hart-Davis

Raced through this one. Unputdownable despite having seen the TV series only a few weeks ago. The endpapers are pictures of Adam Hart-Davis surrounded by scientific and tecnological accutriments of the time first in the style of a Tudor woodcut and then a Stuart engraving. The woodcut is expecially attractive and I have a copy on the partition here. An extract from this woodcut is in the masthead of this page.

4. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor

Half-way through this one in two days. I was a bit taken aback at first because of the frequent interruption of the standard Lake Wobegon style of story telling with the racy (deliberate understatement) if somewhat stylised extracts from High School Orgies but then I realised that it was simply the overlaying of real-life with the standard mind of a teenage boy, a very clever device. As goof as any other Lake Wobegon book. I left my original Lake Wobegon Days with one of the drivers in Bali as he asked me if I had any books I could let hime have. I am not sure what he would have made of it. I also left him The Third Policeman which must have caused an amount of beffudlement proportional to my own at least. Nice word beffudlement.

5. Trieste: And the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris

Not started this one yet but I have to as Jan Morris is a cousin of mine. This is her last book (she insists) and from reading the cover it seems to be a bit like her great fictional travel book - Last Letters from Hav but then again maybe that was the idea of 'Hav' - all her books have a thread of similarity because they are filtered through the same mind. It has just struck me that writing a fictional travel book is like the feeling you would get if you lost a leg, lose your ability to visit real places and your mind makes them up, a great idea. I am talking rubbish anyway - novelists make up places all the time.

6. A History of Britain Part I by Simon Schama.

7. A History of Scotland

That is all the books. You don't want me to list the socks, gloves, shirts, ties etc do you?

The Plague Dogs

There is no more to say on this. A deep book like no other and with these men at the end. Heroes for everybody.



(From http://www.birdsofbritain.co.uk/features/mao-aug-00.htm)



(From
http://www.pembrokeshirecoast.org.uk/coast_2_coast/wwwroot/english/articles/walking.asp)

I have just found out from reading this article about Animal Research that Berke Breathed's comic strips in Bloom County which satirised the whole animal/testing/rights thing, were instrumental in getting the Mary Kay Company to stop their own testing regime. You can find the relevant strips in The Night of the Mary Kay Commandos laugh and think about it.

Don't laugh at this one. Yet another thing to Boycott. My blood is making those movements that water does in the bottom of the kettle when you first switch it on. How can a company (and forty others by the sound of it) ask for money from a creaking and famine ridden country? They could probably recoup $6 million by not using as many paper clips (I know that is over the top but you know what I mean so don't quote this out of context). No more Milky Bars for me!

More Telescoping

Well, not much more. I got the telescope out again to look at Jupiter and the moons had all shifted around. One was just on the limb of the planet and one was far off but the other two were nowhere in sight. Gone off down the pub for a Christmas drink with their mates from Saturn though I hear they got into a fight with that mob from Neptune and Uranus. Titan always wins and Oberon is useless without Titania to back him up. It all started when Titan tried to pull Callisto and Ganymede got uppity about it. Titan then asked why Ganymede was worried because he didn't think he was interested in girls. You can see that it all just fell apart after that. That snitch Mercury flew to the Police and when he heard, Puck, the barman shouted out "Nymphs and Shepherds, run away". Jupiter had to be called to bail all his brood out but Neptune and Uranus were out for the evening so I think all their moons are still locked up. Proteus and Ariel told me all this in their one phone call.

Please don't complain about this anthropomorphisation of celestial objects; the Greeks and the Romans were doing it long before I did and not so very differently either. It must have been too much Scrumpy Jack last night. Martin says he has drunk most of his Christmas beer already and will have to go out and get more. He has just bought a Palm from the company and his wife, like mine, is shouting at him for ignoring her.

Christmas is just to tacky now. I can't think of one person I have met at work who seems to be treating it as anything more than an excuse for two weeks holiday and lots of drinking. Even the wall-to-wall Carols on Classic FM seem hollow. 'If all the year were playing holidays....'. Radio 3 did just play Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Christmas carols which is better because that is one of only a couple of Carols. Talk of Vaughan Williams has remined me of ....

Great Driving Moments Number 43.

Driving along a long, straight road, under a grey sky on a 'no-weather' winter's day, with bare trees in clumps. The music is Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Greensleeves. I need to say no more for myself and you will have to guess the rest for yourself. I have just done a Google image search with the phrase 'Winter Trees' and despite throwing up many pages of photographs and paintings, not one looks anything like the clump of trees I have in my head. For a start, most of them are on sunny winter days rather than non-descript days.

Christmas for me seems empty without any mention of the reason for it. I know that seems obvious but it is not obvious to many people who I feel would take offence if you took away their traditions of the season. It lasts too long nowadays and while I can seer that, in this country, Christmas has always been an excuse for excessive behaviour, up until now, it has had some spiritual backing to it. Of couyrse, all this may just be nostalgia for Christmasses past, the 'they don't do Christmas like they used to' syndrome but it is now so spiritually empty that now I feel empty before the day in the same way that as a kid, I used to feel sad that it was over. The peripheral stuff around Christmas should be long walks in the cold (Grey) days and songs. For most people it seems to be lots of drinking and an excuse for behaviour that normally would be frowned on. It's OK; I'm not about to get out my Puritan costume.

It is now 07:45 and still pitchy dark but it is the sortest day the day after tomorrow. Apologies to any Antipodean readers; just throw another Turkey leg on the Barbie for me and I will be right over. Keep those tinnies cold for me. And with that rampant stereotyping, I think I should leave this topic for another day.