Seeing All Possible Futures

Listening to - The Gathering - Kathryn Tickell

That's TickELL - never Tickle. This shows exactly how to keep traditionally based music relevant and meaningful for the current century. No need to stick sequenced drums over it - just play the music and see how many people get up and dance. Even my feet are beginning to move slightly and it takes bombs to bring out any rudimentary terpsichorean talents that I possess.

I dreamt about a huge computer printer last night. I used to work as IT support for a graphics production team but we only had A3 printers then ; this beast was a room sized thing, hidden away in some huge and empty building somewhere on this site. I was called down because the output was not consistent and the users were trying to blame the software we had written for the problems. I was insistent that the differences in colour were due to problems with the hardware and that they should call the manufacturers. The only meaning I can get out of this is my current work is very boring and text-based. (Thank you Lynne!) I want to be doing pictures or more probably poetry. Text vs. pictures. Right-Brain vs. Left-Brain.

My son had his first injections yesterday. He has been grouchy as the leaflets say but I think it was just residual resentment at us for permitting that to happen to him - two injections - one in each leg. My daughter never cries at injections - in fact at the last one when she was told she had to be brave she just put up with it and then said that she didn't cry so we told her that 'being brave' didn't mean not crying - just being still while it happened. Anyway - women have a higher pain threshold so I expect some belting tear-sessions from Number one Son. Anyway, he is back to normal this morning. Looking around for the next stimulus - milk - playtime - staring at the light. Why to babies do that? My daughter used to stare at lights and one time while we were staying at my parents she would fix on the light in the bedroom even when we dimmed it right down. Sometimes I ask her about these things but she doesn't remember them, though she does claim each day that she cannot remember what she did at school.

New Stereolab album out now - Margarine Eclipse. They seem to name all their albums after the fictitious bands which John Peel always announces one of at the start of his show (The Radio One show not Home Truths). Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Margarine Eclipse, Crispy Ambulance - Sorry! That one is really a band. Don't believe me? Go Here. (Actually I wrote about them years ago).

I listened to John Peel's show last night. Unfortunately, them music was not wonderful and I felt I was listening to hear John Peel. This will sound like the "We lived in a cardboard box in middle of t' road" sketch but I remember listening to John Peel in the early eighties when he played lots of reggae and stuff from groups like the Comsat Angels. Of course Peel was already a long-established DJ by then so to seem him still going with as much energy as ever is great. Home Truths is good as well but that may be because of my Bourgeois upbringing. Sorry but it is a rather middle-class thing. I don't actually get to listen to it anymore. I know there is the streaming but we are not allowed to stream here so lunchtime catch-up is not possible.

Too much writing this morning. My coffee has gone cold and viscous but I have to drink it. The childhood thing of eating everything on the plate is just too ingrained. All that stuff which I ate because my parents told me that there were starving children in the world who would be glad of it. The logic of childhood of course means that you cry out (internally at least in my case) that maybe if they were so hungry you should send it to them. Of course after the recent rant about food and starving people, maybe we should return to a sort of collective version of that logic. My general analogy for these things along with most of the work I do is that it is just like addition and subtraction with the occasional bit of multiplication and division; there is never any differentiation or integration. Then chaos and catastrophe theories jump on board and my analogy come crashing down in a shower of mixed metaphors.

It is four minutes to official start time and yet the office is nearly empty. It is Wednesday today isn't it?

Bye for now. Have a look at what the sky looks like here as you read this. If you have got here because I was on the recently updated blogs list then the sky is as it is NOW.