Comma Chameleon

My daughter has just upgraded her 18-month-old Mobile Phone to something without any buttons at all. This means that there has been a mass passing down of phones through the family meaning that I have her old, very-pink yet feature-rich Sony Ericsson (I am contractually obliged to plug SE because I have a friend who works for them). It is lucky that they still do alternative fascia for this particular model as people are beginning to look at me strangely - like they did when I had a white briefcase; that ended up going under a car but that is an alternative in the many-worlds isn't it.

It's very quiet in the office at the moment - my pod is down to about 20 % occupancy with the rest of this wonderful new space running about the same. With the windows that runaround three sides there is a slight feel of a Goldfish Bowl around but that may be down to my head being full with the first cold I've had in ages. Anyway - a long weekend to look forward to I suppose.

Bah - Humber!

Before he retired to concentrate on his Bill Oddie impression, my dad was a bridge engineer though I suspect that in later years this meant dealing with the inordinate amount of paperwork it must take just to grease the gears of Local Government if you want to construct anything higher than a raised flower bed. Despite this he did work on bridges a few notches up from the beam bridges that carry cows from one side of a Motorway to the other, including several across the River Severn. I'm not sure he worked on anything as big as this monster but I still get quite a tingle going over them. However, this has not passed on to my children who both gotan> rather scared just walking out to the first tower of the Humber Bridge at the Weekend so bang went my mile-long walk into Lincolnshire. The photo above is from as far as I got while the rest of the family tiptoed gingerly back into Yorkshire.

Some years ago before being toddler-or-spouse-bound, on one Bank Holiday I went to the supermarket to get some rice to go with my bachelor curry and decided to keep on driving - with the next stop (next change down in gear actually) being at the Humber Bridge Toll. After a short jaunt down to see the big skies of the coast south of the river, I came back to the Humber Bridge Park (surely an overestimate of the number of vistors there I think) and walked across the bridge taking loads of Black-and-White photos, bracketing them so I had three exposures of every one. I got through three rolls of film I think and they came out quite nicely. This one is from Saturday and of course was in colour to start with. None of them show exactly how big the structure actually is. Looking up from the base of the first tower is so strange - the slight movement of the clouds above it suggests that the tower is falling. The length of the deck is just outside understanding - it is difficult to place the road that it carries into the normal context of the countryside that leads to it from each side - you just drive off one bit of standard, green, British landscape and end up in another bit a few minutes later. It is like flying. I used to ride out to cross the Severn Bridge (which actually seems quite homely in comparision to it's northern sister) and cycling across the side walkway is the nearest you can get to having a jet pack. I'm afraid that some of my children's fears has rubbed off on me and I'm not sure I'd be able to do that again without some shakiness.

I've just realised that th bridge would have been ideal for some stereoscopic experiments - maybe next time hey?

Yoghurt Wars

As you can see we are fresh from our trip to Stalingrad and raring to start writing again. All is well apart from the obscure Russian illness that has struck me down but we will ignore that just in case it has been imported illegally. Oh - and who'd have thought that Anne Bronte was buried there? OK - so you can guess where I've really been. Answers on a post card - usual boiled sweet to first drawn but I want the location of the Tank as well as the grave.

I took a few books and read none of them - just browsed magazines and maps instead. And now it's like I've never been away.

Don't Tell Him Schmeike!

Again courtesy of Sefton Library Services, I have saved some money. I have started on The Closed Circle which is the follow-up to The Rotters' Club. It begins with a long and passionate missive from Claire to her missing sister Miriam, which does a great job of filling in the years between the end of TRC and the beginning of TCC, though timelines are slightly flaky in any properly constructed modern novel. I am slightly concerned that Paul, one of the minor characters from the first book seems from reviews to have turned into something like Harry Enfield's Tory Boy - surely he can't be that cartoonish. Pandora from The Adrian Mole Diaries was always very believable as an MP for me but maybe I was blinded by the early adoration which Adrian professed for her.

Herbie Tony Hancock

There are not many bits of music that come with a leaflet describing a good walk these days but of course Hergest Ridge is different from most pieces of music. HR is the immediate successor to the phenomenally successful Tubular Bells and is a complete change of direction. It's mellower feel is due to its composer rushing off to escape the pressures of being a hit maker and living in a leaky hut in Herefordshire/Wales - maybe it wasn't a leaky hut but it was long way from Chelsea. Of course I have been manipulated into buying yet another version of something I already had several copies of - tape - vinyl - low-level CD first issue etc but even to my increasingly poor ears, these new copies of Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn have a sparkly quality that overrides anything that went before.

I listened to the new Hergest Ridge Remix last night and was having trouble recognising it as the same recording that I knew - there were instruments that were not just low in the mix in the original that were now bashing away over the top but some that I am sure were not there at all first time around. There was a nicely modern-sounding bit of discordant echo over the top of the ethereal tin-whistles and drones that starts the piece which had me reeling with the unfamiliarity of it all. I was in the chaotic cusp between loving it and dismissing it as an imposter. However, in the end its wonderful clarity was beautiful and I was sold.

So next there I was ripping it to mp3, studying the wealth of extra material and deciding to give the included "Original Mix" a go. Strange - it seemed the same as the new mix - maybe a little less strident but all those strange echoes and things were there at various levels. What's up here. To cut out a lot of Googling, it turns out that the familiar mix I was comparing it to is not the original but instead the version from Boxed which Mike Oldfield had decreed was the definitive mix to use on all releases subsequently. He has only bowed to the bootleg pressure on this release and given us back what was on the original vinyl all those years ago. And now I have a three way - split - the new mix is sparkling (with some glaring over-emphasised elements) - the boxed mix is ambient - everything way down in a strange ocean of sound - and the original mix is new to me - a completely new take that was sitting around on Internet bootlegs for years already.

Oh - and there is Ommadawn as well.

Overload!

It's all gone a bit cultural here. For the first time ever (probably) I have finished all three of a 342 from Waterstones, Having read The Lovely Bones and Life Class in quick succession I finally got around to The Rotters' Club which I whistled through in a week. I watched the BBC adaptation of this a few years ago so I was slightly worried that this reading would be redundant but I was wrong - the show managed to keep enough detail to be a good try but the book contains levels of thought and description that show why books will always better visual drama no matter what doodads and gee-whizzery they put out. The novel has varied elements of narrative - diaries - uncategorisable creative writing, articles from the school magazine all of which reminds me of the various style changes in David Lodge books, but without the self-conscious cleverness. I did at times think this made the whole thing a bit scrappy but at the end you realise that instead of lessening the believability, it instead suggests reality far better than any mess of colloquialism or street-lingo. It is noticeable in a book about Birmingham which mentions that fact a lot - indeed dwells on it - that there is no descent into "Depressed Brummy". It manages to cover the ludicrous acts that teenage boys are forced into through love and lust, the more grown-up behaviour that adults display because of same and deadly-serious games that people play when power is at stake. And despite these wild variations in mood it never seems inappropriate because it reflects what we all go through, the sudden lurch from bereavement to love, from betrayal to loyalty and all the other emotions that humans are capable of displaying.

And on top of this we have the unmissable, breathtaking switchback ride of Sherlock, which brings together many pillars of British dramatic ability and creates a delicate, finely-balanced 90 minutes of brilliance. It manages to maintain not only the structure of the original ACD stories but many of the details as well. Its high point yesterday - a dramatic and strangely-soundtracked fight in a planetarium, underpinned one of the more famous factoids about Sherlock Holmes; that he does not know or care that the Earth Travels around the sun. Not remembering this from the original story, I cannot say whether this confession by Holmes is meant in reality or just as an illustration of how he manages to keep focused. The implication yesterday was that it was the latter. We are all now of course in limbo far more delicate that that between penultimate and final episodes of Doctor Who in that we do not know a) how the cliff-hanger ends or indeed b) that the series will be recommissioned. As some of the reviewers have suggested, it might be a brave step to not produce any more episodes and leave us all with this delicious pleasure at something so right and beautiful. However, I am not sure that commercial pressures will allow that. We can only hope that Moffat and Gatiss have a long game in their heads and that the running start can be maintained.

It Died!

My rewards this week for being at work while the rest of the family gallivants around the country have been many, including the above Dalek Ironside and a 100g of Army and Navy sweets which have now vanished mysteriously - probably eaten by the Dalek I think. There are many geeky reviews of this figure out in Youtubeland so I'd better not add much to them just in case I give you the impression that I am 13 or something. Instead I just need to say that the general appearance of all Daleks is one of "rightness". The Dalek Ironside is a return to the utilitarian style of some of the early Daleks - like something cobbled together from the battered metal junction box casings in the basement of the BBC. Making it Olive Drab just adds to that feel of a combination of dusty Civil-Service corridors and various obscure military establishments. Much as I was enthralled by the return of the single Dalek in the first series of the revival, the finish of that particular machine was a bit too shiny - showing the plastic of which it was made. The green paint of the Ironside covers up all that and returns us to the rough and ready feel of the originals.

And that is maybe where it should have stopped for now we have the sudden regeneration into the Duplo Daleks. While I am not that bothered, the primary coloured replacements do not seem to be quite in the right proportion. They have various lumps and changes in contour that make them a bit brutish. I know that seems silly, but the Daleks as they were in the past, were the evil geeks of the Doctor Who World, an enemy with no need of overpowering bulk because their whole attitude, voice and movements were threatening, the epitome of the scary short dictator - the Napoleons of the Galaxy.

This is just a poster but I would be quite pleased if someone decided to write the whole thing. I'd certainly buy it.

Gimme Six!

At last I've got onto the one John Wyndham book which my wife has read and raves about. This one takes us beyond the usual JW Cosy Catastrophe and projects us hundreds or thousands of years into the future after some sort of apocalypse where mutations are seen as being against the will of God. People are made is His exact image and any deviation is treated ruthlessly with banishment to badlands. In this Amish-like setting, comes the ultimate in mutations - telepathy - which Wyndham was fascinated with.

Now this has me thinking. I don't believe in any of the usual new-age tosh and was rooting for Dawkins all the way in his Enemies of Reason World Tour. However, I suppose because telepathy relates directly to the organ which I use to think about it, I have a slight anti-reason view that there is possibly a perfectly acceptable real-world vector for it. If an eye can evolve to detect light and a firefly can evolve to give it off then why not imagine a creature which emits and receives other electromagnetic radiation? To our ancestors, communication by writing and reading would seem like telepathy - and better still it is telepathy that spans not only space but time as well. All human radio communication is, for all but the few centimetres between the mouth and the microphone and the speaker and the ear, telepathy. We only need to work on a direct link between the black boxes and the brain and the link is complete.

I suppose there must be a reason why organisms have evolved to use only certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate - it probably is to do with wavelength in relation to the size of the cells capable of reacting to it - but I cannot see why we could not evolve (or even re-design ourselves) to broadcast and receive radio waves. The brain after all is an electrical device and we can read some of its output already by direct contact. Maybe two heads close together could already each get an idea of the general field state put out by the other. I am sure that devices to extend the range of this are not far away.

White Sails

It rains! It rains again and the rivers flood and wash away all the hose-pipe inspectors. I love this weather even if it does flood the garden and mean we have to think about lifting the drain covers to let it flow away. Even in the winter a good shower makes me happy which might seem odd but just think about all the negative ions that go with it. They make the air fresh and keep the dust down. Think of the sound a raindrops staging their way down through the different levels of a thick summer wood. You can walk surrounded by spheres of sound from the crashing white noise of the indistinguishable multitude that hit the outer leaves to the chaotic bass of the conglomerated monsters that make it to the forest floor.

From the window here I have a view over green lawns towards trees that hide a few cars, not like the car park that surrounded the previous office. And right now the rains falls, straight down in the windless air. This sealed building steals all the sound, giving us just the muffled murmur of various conversations and a mid-range hum of blowers and air-conditioners. I look forward to the short walk to my car in the rain this evening; it makes the thought of the longer journey home more bearable. I think of all the unpopulated places around - the empty forests with their unheard rainstorms, the undulating grass of moorland taking the deluge unhindered by the protection of trees - the beaches with the sound of wave and tide. These places have been here all the time, long before there was any mind capable of remembering them. Like existence defined by the last memory of the last person you knew, they will fade from our notes and yet they will still go one until we have ceased to be either through destruction or our own evolution into something more worthy of the custodianship of this planet.

I'll make it into Pseuds' Corner one day.

Life After Archie

Apparently there will be Noctilucent Clouds visible over Britain all this week which I suppose is quite exciting though obviously I have to stay awake long enough to see them and hope that the permanent greyness disperses as well. None of which is as wonderful as seeing the Horseshoe Vortex cloud that was in the sky as I drove home the other week.



It was indeed fleeting and because I did not have my camera (and couldn't have used it anyway officer) I am sure that bagging it in my Cloud Collector's Handbook would not be allowed.

We have been enjoying Rev on BBC2, a sitcom that has the basic premise of The Vicar of Dibley only not with a woman vicar and not in a charming country parish. And yet for all that lack of cosy teatime goodness it leaves a much warmer feeling. It seems that the struggle to do the right thing in the face of real urban issues makes for better people than the bucolic glow of Dibley. I'm not sure it's gone down too well with the standard C of E old-guard but we like it.

The Base White Mug of the Universe

(From BestSub Technologies Co., Ltd.)

And the big news is we have moved offices - rather a long way in fact - but to a place with a much nicer view. The entire contents of the previous place have been transported to here - sinks and everything. My entire working life is summed up in a couple of crates and a mobile cabinet. The main reception has New Scientist in the magazine racks and the view is of green - trees and grass which is a huge improvement on the brick wall that I looked out on from my first office at Plessey in 1986. Actually I lie about that because before that I did a placement year in the IT department of The Bristol and West Building Society which looked out over the very centre of Bristol - a spectacular view of theatres, docksides and art galleries - all within staggering distance of at least 100 bars/pubs/clubs/strip joints/kebab shops etc. However, at my age (noticing the first grey hairs) a nice bit of calm greenery is all I want. And so thoughts of the simple view out of a generic office window turn to meditation on getting old.

Until the free vending machines arrive we have liberated some catering-sized cans of coffee and a number of white mugs unusually not bearing the log of various suppliers/clients which, to extend the deep and pretentious theme of today, could almost be Plato's Universal Idea of a cup, though reading that Wiki article I got as far as "category error" before I realised I was out of my depth and gave up. Be thankful that the office is light and airy or I might have mentioned Plato's Cave and then where would we be?