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.