Don’t You Think He Looks Tired?

A very normal Christmas day has been had today. We lost the baby in the canyons of presents he had to negotiate opening before being able to play with the wrapping. We also spent a tense hour or two trying to work out which emergency number to ring when we noticed a large bruise on the roof of his mouth. All over-anxiousness was dissipated the next time we able to coax him to open his mouth do discover that the mark had vanished – something that tends to happen with felt-tip marks inside the mouth.

Daughter refused to watch Doctor Who but we all thought it was good. Number one Son was caught looking over his shoulder at our Christmas tree after the attack by the killer tree but didn’t seem too bothered.

As you can tell this is just to be able to say that I made an entry today and with the remote hope that the headline above means anything to anyone.

You're Leading Me Towards A Mr Whippy

The Daily Misanthropy! I.e. a pet hat – people who do NOT WASH THEIR HANDS. You know who you are you oik.

Why doesn’t oik pass the spell-check? It seems like a perfectly good word to me.

Today is my last day before what I suddenly discover we have to call Winterval. I should get upset about this but it does in some way reflect the idea that the Christmas week has so little to do with what it actually purports to celebrate for most people that it has become like the Japanese version – an excuse for consumerism and other excesses. I know it’s a cliché but it is still true.

I have been re-reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat AND listening to a tape of Alan Bennett’s Diaries in which he mentions Oliver Sacks going to Japan to see how Tourette Syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourettes manifests in a culture without expletives. I think I have always been aware that Tourette’s is not just swearing as some people just don’t. It reminded me of the many parenting shows on TV these days where 2-year-old children can make the winner of the Joint Services Swearing Award look positively restrained. Where do these little darlings hear the words they use? (I was going to put in a “clever” sentence with lots of asterisks but it didn’t seem that clever really – and certainly not big.) I assume that the Japanese do swear now – they just use imported words – unless of course the problem is the actual concept of swearing. Maybe the Japanese would ask you why you need to swear or even wonder why some words are so shocking when said. Actually, I sometimes think that. Why should something which is just another combination of sound waves have the value it has? To me, the use of such connecting phrases as ‘yer know’ and ‘err’ (which I admit I use- it is easy to criticise someone on TV when you are at home – I would be jelly in front of a camera) are just as irritating as punctuation cursing.

Kenneth Williams Ending Goes Here

Thirty-nine Part Invention

Listening to ….

… well actually listening to Tehillim by Steve reich.

I am not allowed to stream Radio 3 at work (as it should be I admit) so I have to rely on the Media player. It has struck me how Christmassy Tehillim actually is – all sort of wintery wassailing despite being based on Hebrew prayers.

So what about all this Bach on Radio 3 then? I worked from home yesterday and it was very nice having the digital radio piped through the speakers of the PC – to be surrounded by all that baroque brilliance. It is true that some of the more Sturm und Drang stuff is a bit much to take – shouty German is always slightly suspect these days I suppose. A particular highlight was the Trio Sonata in C, BWV 529 for Organ which was on as I drove in this morning. The guys who play these pieces must have separate brains for each limb. I am sure that this is a subconscious theme throughout Godel, Escher, Bach, all that stuff about how it was near impossible for JSB to think up Chromatic pieces with so many parts. I was also reminded of GEB by the stuff about termites in yesterday’s Life In The Undergrowth. I seem to remember quoting a paragraph about termites with reference to Wholism and Reductionism – it was apt honestly though I am sure the nice guys at Private Eye might have put the extract on a shortlist for Pseuds’ Corner.
Two interesting articles in The Guardian today :-

This one about the recent court ruling that Intelligent Design may not be taught in science lessons (and due to the requirement for a separation of Church from State – not taught in any lessons – officially). For some probably quite heated argument go here. I have just had a thought about how the complexity that advocates of Intelligent Design use as a form of proof of their solution can always be explained by some form of very complex random development. This random development is like the ‘faith’ element in the more religiously-based theories. The difference is that in most cases a bit of complex thought about something can always explain it. Every time! No Question! No need for faith.

And this one trying to encourage people to attempt the Cryptic crossword. We used to try the telegraph one in the office when it was free online but with us all being scattered and access requiring subscription, that pleasure is infrequent. Maybe the Telegraph will be bough once or twice over the next week or so. We actually finished it once or twice and one Saturday I did the whole thing on my own.

The Unbearable Naffness Of Being

I thought I would say it here but is it possible that Space Cadets may actually turn out to be a joke on us? I have been wondering whether Channel 4 could actually afford to send someone into space - and whether I could nominate someone for a one-way ticket. There has been some disquiet - my initial reaction - that this was a prank too far but what if it really is true.

You heard it here first.

Nobody Expects A Secular Humanist ….

To the carol service at Church with my daughter last night. She was made up to be chosen to carry the baby Jesus figure from the crib around the church, we me following with Mary and Joseph to signify the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. However, the spooky but for me was the prayers, this time a very serious, music-backed affair using what I can only describe as the Taize system. The reader recites the prayers they want, vaguely in time to the organ music backing it. There then comes a chorus where the congregation joins in with a sung bit of affirmation. It all sounded very familiar and at first I kept thinking it was very like an Ivor Cutler song/piece/poem but it suddenly hit me what it really resembled. PJ Harvey performs a cover of Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is? On Dance Hall At Louse Point. This has a spoken verse vaguely in time to the music and then a sung chorus. I can’t believe there is any link between the two but they do sound the same. I haven’t heard the Peggy Lee version and I am sure I don’t know anyone who would have it.

We walked back trying to spot a Christmas tree with a fairy/angel on the top but most people seem to go for a plain tree top these days.

Number One Son is two today and we have pandered to his Thomas The Tank Engine Obsession to the tune of a DVD, more rail track and all the books he could want. He has also developed a genuinely dangerous fascination with the dictionary which he keeps dropping on his toes. Before we were married (and could afford large and pretentious books), my wife bought me this book which got dropped on her mother’s foot (not found out the full details of the incident) requiring a doctor and resulting in very impressive bruising. We are carrying out a Health And Safety Evaluation at present. However, NOS is getting us back with his casually strewn Stickle Bricks which while not quite having the potential for bruising possessed by Lego, can result in a nasty (and impressively regular) injury to the underside of a bare foot. I suspect that some of the weirder end of the whole tattoo/piercing/branding market may offer entry level, ‘temporary’ Stickle Brick Branding.

Roll On 2006.

Penguins Crossing

Listening to Ever So Lonely by Monsoon

My obsession with the Tube Map continues. http://www.oskarlin.com/2005/11/29/time-travel/

This beautiful version is based on the time to travel. Maybe I could get a copy to go with The Great Bear.

While we are on the subject of the Tube, how about some etiquette? The few times I have been on the Tube have been a mess of bodies like some gigantic, all-comers game of Twister.

Emergent Thoughts

Listening to Changes by David Bowie –

- which is so apt it hurts.

ALICE was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

My wife and I had a lively debate last night regarding the teaching of reading using analytical phonics. So lively in fact, that we may have to explain to the neighbours. I think we finished in broad agreement. I was actually trying to defend the use of a study which has resulted in this turn-around in how reading is taught after my wife (an infants’ teacher) declared that you can get statistics to say anything. What is clear is that a single strategy does not suit every child and that some children require an individual plan which in order to get approval from the inspectors, have to be agreed and documented – you cannot tailor your teaching as and when required. Whether all teachers will be bothered to do this is not knowable – one day they may all give up and just teach using whichever method is flavour of the month with the current government. Did you know that the method requires a child reach a certain level of ability in recognizing words before they are allowed books – how to turn off a generation to reading. The scenario my wife described was sad in the extreme; imagine a poor child who has not managed to reach the set level of word recognition, being sent home with a set of cards with simple words on, while other children in the same class get allowed home with books. Stigma! Stigma! Stigma! What happened to the idea that children should be exposed to books from an early age? They’ll be giving the kids Soma next! Or even Ritalin!

Then there is what I just have to call the Billion Monkey’s method of teaching kids to read. It is called Emergent Reading and from what my wife says it involves kids staring at lots of words until divine inspiration strikes and they know what the word means. “Miss! Miss! Is it ‘anti-dis-est-ab-lish-ment-arism’?”

It is amusing to see the comments regarding the issues of reading on the BBC News site. Loads of “I learnt to read before I left the hospital after I was born and I never did phonics” humbug. One of the posters claimed he read Lord Of The Rings on his Seventh birthday in four hours which as a later detractor pointed out, is approximately one page every 12.5 seconds. This reminds me of Woody Allen’s joke about learning speed reading and getting through War and Peace in his 15 minute morning breaks. He said someone asked him what it was about and he said “Russia”. Another comment (apparently removed now) said that “Most kids are raised by single parents, teen mums and other vermin”. Call me reactionary but I would like to ask for an eighth circle of hell just for this person though I might admit the racist thug who scrawled graffiti in the Park where Anthony Walker was murdered. Is this over the top?

A colleague of mine was convinced that all Governments want to stifle creativity and ability in the people because it makes them question what their leaders are doing. I never believed him because I thought that no one in Government was clever enough to pull off such a strategy but when you see the U-turns and tinkering, you begin to wonder.

A Rainbow-Coloured Sky

Bizarre fools and a mumbled sigh, like weaving between the pews on Sunday morning, while the sermon drones, or back in the daylight, the mist high up in the mountains when the day is nearly over. It floods here and lunchtime fails its purpose.

My Name is Rogier (sic) and I am a Gourmand

I drive through a new estate every morning, as I may have mentioned before – something about the spurious attachments made to the barn/warehouse style living units to give them a rural feel. Along with this affectation, the builders have erected vaguely exotic vertical banners proclaiming the wonderful new lifestyle that will be had by moving to this place - New Living, Supports the life you want to lead – all that sort of guff which has been thought up because the reality of life in the little boxes made of ticky-tacky is just the same as every other estate in the country. There seems to be a dangerous trend to cover everything with words dragged out of some focus group just to hammer home with unsubtle enthusiasm what you are trying to say. There are two food show which start in the same way – Rick Stein’s recent shows have various hook-words plastered all over the titles – taste, local, fresh, produce – just to ram in what the general idea of the travels are. Hugh Feebly Whitingstall’s show has started doing the same sort of thing in a way which makes me think the titles are the product of the same graphics company. It is as if the producers are afraid that people cannot pick up the subtle clues to the contents of the shows from the listings magazines or the images in the titles. Everything is about catching the eye of channel-hoppers and maybe we just cannot do pictures any more.

This joins up with the just-announced overhaul of the teaching of reading for very young children. Every ‘new’ initiative on this subject is designed to roll back the supposed problems we have in this country and never seems to work. There are problems, though some of them are created by the used of electronic media. Is it now so easy to create a full document or presentation with graphics, that people just do – and too many of them. We used to think about documents because they had to be produced by document-makers who did not understand the contents but were very good at making the material presentable. Now we just throw the ideas at the word processor and out they come with all our prejudices about what people can understand in what we are trying to say. I say that lots of blogs are written from the point of view of an informed reader who understands a great deal of the mind of the blogger, almost telepathically, and so many corporate documents are like this as well. Bring back copywriters I say; bring back secretaries and limit the documents that come out – so many of them are just not read.

A Mumbled Sigh

So many dead poets wandering across this moor make it strange – all the rhymes they did not complete come unbidden into your ears like the water did when you both swam in the stream lower down.

Shop Window – Pentre Gwynfryn

No priceless junk in the whistling wind here
Takes its colour from the sun that covers it,
Unbought in the window for years.
Every year we passed it, and commented,
The cornflakes box, nearly white with fading,
The cheap toys, guns and hoops and soldiers,
Fallen sometimes, into a mess of flies and webs,
That fills the window, makes the future real.

Numbers pile up here like sand and gravel,
Ourselves defined in civilized society,
Taxed, regulated born and ended in a day,
An afternoon of history, a summer’s fading,
Dusty with the skin of every human airborne.
Scraped at every contact, arm on hand on skin,
In the shafts of light that silence me,
Motes in the sky, beaming down and down.

Snakecharmer General

A serious article or how various forms of fundamentalism are stifling forward movement in science and a not-so-serious one – Simon Hoggart’s yearly review of round robin letters, this year amusingly done as a round robin letter.

As goes the first, I am not sure that many schools actually teach anything about creationism alongside standard evolution. There have been one or two high-profile cases of this in religious schools. If my daughter comes home and says it is the case I would feel like storming in and asking for a religious exemption. Lord May also warns about climate-change deniers; even the US Government seems to be making noises that admit the tiny possibility of the truth in the theories regarding Global Warming being caused by Human activity rather than flatulent cows. Spellchecker said “cowboys” there which brings to mind Blazing Saddles.

Isn’t a blog just like a rolling round robin? I can see a small, fat bird with a red breast tumbling down a hill. She must be drunk.

For The Sake Of Comparison

All weathers have this mist down off the moors, the heights coming to us with their thin ghosts and long-dead poets, but still the summer comes through it. Late June and again we wake up to rain on the window and threads of cold air under the door. Outside, the wind is throwing the trees about, dragging their branches like desperate survivors of grass-bound shipwreck until the edge of the moor is strewn with the black and brittle twigs and braches shed in a seemingly intelligent effort to avoid the battle. There is the wall she posed on in a most impractical manner, balancing her typewriter in an uncharacteristic bout of pretension, a desire to be like the other women writers who lived round here, possibly in living memory, but probably not. Like one of their ghosts she sometimes comes back to tap on the windows, and whisper strange, surreal questions in at us. Suffer profound bonds of love, the drawing of disparate and repelling things together and you will live forever, mad and bad but honest in everyone’s eyes.

And now the rain has gone, pushed away by weather from the sea, cold, clear air from abroad or from another planet, currents of air from Grand Central, where she once wept for two poor creatures, dead at the hands of men but not in revenge for any killing. Who’s bombs did they steal?

No Solstice That.

I was slightly disappointed with the Re-Told Midsummer Night’s Dream. It stuck to the plot reasonably well and the fairies had nothing added and nothing taken away. The problem was that nowhere did it say Midsummer. The whole beauty of the play is that the late, light night of Midsummer comes through the whole thing and this version, set in a pine forest rather than the deciduous green clouds of a British wood seemed like any other time other than midsummer. I know the scene is a Wood near Athens but, as the programme on BBC4 later yesterday evening showed, the influences of AMSND are in the flora and fauna of the English countryside. My time in the sticks showed me this and maybe the urbanites that seem to run the country and the media these days just don’t get that connection with the land. (Maybe you think I should be joining The Countryside Alliance and while I do agree with some of their greenish credentials I don’t think this is going to happen because of the social differences.) Walk back down any country lane in late June, and you will get it, the feeling of so much life and atmosphere crashing down from the trees and out of the bushes, the echoing of various meetings at distance and close by. It is described well in Cider With Rosie and Stig Of The Dump. The BBC show just seemed to show corporate Britain and the whole idea of setting it in one of those forest parks must have been a contrivance to get in both the posh families and the mechanicals, in the form of the park staff. Having said that, the story was OK and Puck was a perfect 21st century counterpart to his cheeky Tudor predecessor.

On to Narnia now! I read this article about CS Lewis’ opposition to any live-action version of the Chronicles because it would fail as poor pantomime compared to the deep and believable imagery of the books. As it says in the article, I wonder whether the technical abilities which produce today’s special effects would have made a difference to his view bearing in mind he seemed more open to a cartoon where the human and animal worlds are rendered in the same style. This of course, indicates how the advances in computer animation have brought the world of the cartoon into line with live action rather than having the whole world brought down to a single blocky style. They will stop listing how many special effects shots a film has because in any blockbuster these days, every shot is pushed and processed to some extent. If you watch the deleted scenes on DVDs, you will sometimes find one which has not been through this process and it seems like a video diary, all raw lighting and bad bathroom sound. Sometimes I wonder if this has removed a good deal of the need for the actors to carry a scene, the ultimate triumph of style over content. Actually, going back to my first topic for today, maybe the Fairy play could have benefited from some more processing.

A Shifty-Eyed Wifeswapping Weasel!

An outpouring of grief has coincided with Nick Cave on the shuffle. “Give ‘em hell in heaven” – do these people know what they are saying and what sort of man they are saying it about. We idolise and idealise the most unsuitable people these days. Enough of this! The man is not worth it.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream tonight which is of course my favourite Shakespeare play because I “did it” at school – for the exam and everything. It was lucky I didn’t do the other choice that year which was Julius Caesar, yuk. With me Shakespeare is all or nothing. Comedies -brilliant! Tragedies – er – tragic. Only yesterday I discovered that The Tempest is considered a Comedy so where does that leave Forbidden Planet? Maybe it was a forerunner of Police Squad. Daughter is now obsessed with Much Ado About Nothing after she asked for it when I was going through boxes in the Attic. She doesn’t really get the plot or even understand much of the language but Michael Keaton and Ben Elton were quite funny and it was filmed beautifully. This came out at about the time I realised that I could just about follow a Shakespeare play without having to have York Notes close by. Twelfth Night was on the other day which we actually performed at school – well the bits with Malvolio and the other posh Mechanicals. My daughter now has a new game of putting us on the spot. She found the free Acrobat reader disk I got at some show years ago and discovered that it has the complete works of Shakespeare on it. She will show us the Dramatis Personae page and ask us which play it is from. My wife and I prefer Charlie And Lola at the moment.

I am at last back into The Ancestor’s Tale, though as I left it in the middle of the worms, it took not a small amount of effort to get back to speed. Actually, worms are quite interesting. I wasn’t aware that the dorsal/ventral mirroring between worms and later animals is probably due to organisms evolving to swim on their backs rather than because they have gone through an evolutional rearrangement of their internal anatomy. Actually it is obvious when it is mentioned but you need to know that it occurred to even start thinking about it. What a boring paragraph. Maybe it isn’t; the relevant description in the book wasn’t boring at the time I read it. There is actually quite an air of tension about the tale as I am dying to know how it all ends – er – begins.

Some amusing signs for you. This has made me think of how complicated life has become and how things like this are reactions against that complexity but somehow add to it as well. We all live beyond our means and I mean that more than just financially. Some weekends just seem to whistle by without stopping when all you could do in the week before was look forward to the long hours sitting in a chair reading a book or doing a crossword. We have to fill every minute with some leisure activity and though we do this do we ever feel refreshed or made better by it. I think an hour reading about worms made me happier than anything else we did this weekend. Well almost! Reduce, Simplify, Reflect!

I am wondering whether the flurries we are having here are enough to justify going home before it gets dark. As most of my journey is on the motorway, I am probably safe but the drivers stuck on Bodmin Moor at the weekend probably thought so as well.

Absolutely No Will Whatsoever – And No Backbone Either

I suppose I should set up some sort of categorisation here. I am sure you don’t want to read those junk posts like the couple from the last few days. They are just filler, brain dumps, junk DNA, whatever.

I am not sure what to read next. I am out tonight though some Public Transport is required which means a book will be needed to pass the time sat on what will be very chilly station platforms. Some suggestions would be nice but I am sure any that I might get would be overridden by my own choice in the end. The M25 book would be good but I don’t have it yet.

John Lee Hooker seems to cropping up a little too frequently on the shuffle at the moment – currently it is Crawlin’ King Snake and yesterday there were 2 in a row, which is a coincidence in 7 days worth of music. It is like my secureID key fobs which seem to have a pattern which I can’t quite define. The shuffle seems to go through phases of picking similar tracks though I can’t find any filter set. On to Miles Davis now.

I Cried All The Way To The Chip Shop

I finally finished Girl With A Pearl Earring last night, one of those I-must-stay-up-to-see-what-happens books. It has a perfect ending, in complete agreement with the characters. I won’t spoil it for you. You will love it.

Talking of spoilers, I am afraid that I knew I would not get to see Flightplan so I have just looked up the ending in case it was like Sixth Sense. No clues for you though I have to say that I might actually have enjoyed it. The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe is the next film to actually go and see. It would have been HP4 but my daughter won’t go because of the dragons.

The Shuffle has just thrown up the first track on Reich Remixed which is a Coldcut Remix of Music for 18 Muscians, though it actually has parts of It’s Gonna Rain, Six Marimbas, Prayer, Electric Counterpoint and probably almost everything else by SR. As the main beauty of Reich’s music is the pure melody, this much hook and tune is almost impossible to resist. I suppose most people who know the composer would think of him as a difficult listen. I actually feel guilty about the geek factor because most of it is actually a simple listen – it’s not Cage or Stockhausen or any of the atonal stuff – it’s the hooks from every catchy pop-tune, melody and rhythm or high order. A friend of mine once said he bluffed his way in an interview by mention Drumming which I had just bought; it gave him a cleverness factor just mentioning it. I am not sure my wife would agree about the tunes though. This reminds me that I have not seen either copy of Drumming for some time. I have been minded to get the latest recording which sounds as if it is better than the two I already have. Be warned that it goes on for ages.

I Will Not Never Ever Eat A Tomato

Random winter here today! The wind brings rain with snow in tow like a rope on a string on cotton, to save the trapped and wrecked. We bring them across the white-watered gap like precious cargo swung out over the dockside into the ships that take it around the world. Here is that delicious, carefree music they always use to back up some nice image of the 50s, deep in the cold war with the largest threat of death and end of the world around. Housewives’' Choice or Mrs Dales diary, maybe. Want to go back then do you? Special time and tide over the edge of the dock cities and the cargo-carrying classes. I was here in 1986, nearly twenty years in this image of industry and deprivation. We used to sit in the back of Taxis or on the bus, talking of what we knew and what we liked and it was good, with the night ahead of us, drinking tea and talking of foxes and physics and electronics and music. And so much music has gone by since then, and we all live in different cities across the world. Only I am still here and tomorrow I will be in the back of a bus with a book and no one to talk to. So much has gone on the road into town. We used to pass the Foot Hospital and the grapes (or maybe they were the same place) and The Throstle's nest and now they are all gone, just almost-empty shops. The roads are all gone as well, broken up and remade for houses, driving the robbers away and into the electronic world, the world of fraud and easy money with no victims. You cannot talk in any bar these days; they are all too loud, like the roar of engineering in our factory. You could walk onto the shop floor and be lost in a world of tippety-tappety jazz rhythms from the machines there, plugging in those million components a day, making prog-rock out of machinery. And then the radio above us, telling us that Roy Orbison was dead and so many years ago that was. And drinking tea and talking in the canteen, that square, flat, windowless, plastic room, lines with machines for tea and food. And on each table, a paper, usually The Mirror or The Sun, but of course that went with Hillsborough. One of us was there and I waited anxiously for him to come home and he said not a word to me; just went up to his room and said nothing about it ever though it was the only time I saw him cry and just thinking about it makes me sad and angry like all this still does. They lie to us still and pretend we are stupid, and my aunt tries to calm me down even from her radical point-of-view, but I live where the machines rock and the world is just music. We just come to dance and dancing is all that matters in the world. Children and starvation and murder were nothing to the news then; nothing made me sad. Now with kids, it is difficult to see any suffering. I couldn’t take high-office and that means killing someone sometime. How would I sleep?

The accordion plays in the distance, an old picture of love in a French street, and who cares that it’s all been done before. I would sit under my hat, pretending to be asleep, with the tiny glass of something for lunch next to the paper and the empty plate. Out of summer comes the gentle breezes over the whole continent, the sad unreality of this world inside the computers and the tables of who knows what. You just cannot believe any of the conspiracy theories any more because no one has the intelligence. The clever people are all liberal academics with no ambition for world domination, and the ones who would have us regulated into non-existence and not clever enough to implement anything to do so. It is all style over content, cliché over real-life. This image of me in the French Street is nothing more than an attempt at style. No Logo maybe! How about a tiny British village? They’re all choked up with cars these days. And the beat box bangs in my ear and I am waiting for some sign to end, my ending phrase but the randomness of this just keeps on going.

Ruddy Terracotta

I love this time of year, getting home in the dark after a drive through gathering gloom. Winter’s days on the common always seemed to be dark and grey with the stark trees on the horizon. Despite all this lack of active life in the landscape, there always seemed to be some sort of presence that only came out of the shrubbery when there were few people about, maybe just us kids. You know well that I don’t believe in all things supernatural but this winter spirit seemed real at the time. The feeling would persist well beyond Christmas and seemed to overcome the post-festive feeling of anti-climax. We were a disparate bunch out there in the cold, with an agenda for the day which had no plan and no defined outcome. We would skate on the ponds, or plumb them to see how deep they were. We were idiots of high order and yet we all survived. On a few years, the shallow ponds on the common froze over, indeed froze solid as they were only a foot deep, and we would play various made-up games on them. They would even take the weight of bicycles which resulted in some dangerous falls. As I said, we were idiots.

I dream of being back there again, with no worries. Or maybe slightly older, nervously trying to adjust my walk to the head girl next to me while we tramped to the bar during the interval at Stratford (See above). Is it dangerous to wish for reliving happier times? I see the black trees and the steely sky, the snow threatening us until we dive home for hot drinks and the crackling fire. I see these places today, the winter spirits filling them, flowing like heavy smoke from the chimneys, into the cracks under the doors, drawn up in the fire into all the secret corners of this house. Where is the maths to explain this? And then the growl of night cracks the wood, and jams us indoors for days, the cold taking the windows as ice as weather smothers everything, breaks us in with trials of cold and snow.

So much to record and so little ability here. How can I get this feeling across? There is a field, empty of people save for us, brave explorers inappropriately clothed, yomping like the best Marines, to save the world from whatever we have deemed to be the biggest threat. We had the world ended and us the only survivors. The hills loomed over us, making it darker after noon, shadowing the valley like a looming giant, following a boat, a sea-monster with threat and venom. For it brought cold beyond most people’s experience, something that would seem to encircle your spine and crush and freeze it at the same time, a double hit of pain in the night. And there I am listening to late-night radio, switching between John peel and radio Luxembourg as the various signals faded in and out, with radio Moscow coming in so clear it could have been transmitted from down the road. And there were never enough blankets to keep out the cold. We might sleep, but waking up would bring the real world back in like a shot, a burst of shivering that no high metabolism could beat. And what tense and what tense. We had friends who lived in a brick-faced Georgian farmhouse, and visits to them would see us all in the one warm room, sat on the high-backed settle with the giant fire fighting the light bulbs as the biggest source of light. There would be toys on the floor and books on the table, and steam from the cooking and shrieks and shouts and so much more. The window showed the grey sky as blue and bluer and darker until the house was a ship in black space, sailing towards mealtimes and bedtimes. There might be fireworks. We were just the last of many children, unhindered by much discipline, making that house laugh and cry.

Where has it all gone now? The world so right and safe has none of this though this may be me. Too much comes in from obligations and constraints to let you live your life with no plan. Anything not foreseen makes me unhappy, or worse. The odd CD here and there is the nearest I get to feeling unburdened by the modern world. Would I want to wake up back there, with the knowledge of all that is to come afterwards, or would it repeat forever, like Groundhog Day? There is me, sat in the window reading, sometimes looking at the sky waiting for snow maybe, or asleep against the cold. And the animist dreams sail over the ploughed fields, the frozen streams, looking for anything moving, for anything to breathe on. All is quiet, and yet all is moving, still alive and kept that way by the spiralling ghosts of all the previous winters.

Don't Break The Time Now - Replay The Game For Each Other

Listening to Shuffle - currently Ryuichi Sakamoto Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia

More fog today. The motorway was closed on Monday so the journey home was on small, fog-bound roads and took 2 hours. I could imagine some undefined horror happening in that terrible, smoky light but after a while it reminds me of the remote house on a common where I used to live which was quite nice when you got used to the weather and the dark and the mud. We never appreciated while we lived there though I would love to get back there. It chimes with my view of how long things to worry about remain as worries. I would not have said I was happy when I was at school; I could take it or leave it which contrasts with the excitement I get going in to work when something tricky and satisfying is in progress. There is of course the filter of history, the fact that we only remember the good things about our lives, sunny summers and all that stuff. The Taming of the Shrew reminded me of the few trips we took to Stratford from school. We saw Twelfth Night there with the guy who played Blake in Blake’s Seven as Orsino. I remember the visit because our head girl taught me how to walk on the correct side. I wonder what she is doing now.

Moan, Moan, Moan

We finally watched one of the Shakespeare Re-Told dramas last night. It was The Taming Of The Shrew which, probably in disagreement with previous pronouncements here, is my second-favourite Shakespeare play. Nothing in this drama did anything to change that view. I saw Josey Lawrence in the play at Stratford though I am sad to admit that I cannot remember who played Petruchio and cannot find any reference to it. Well last night’s version managed to keep the Shakespearean feel without compromising on the use of contemporary language. Not having watched the previous two new versions, I am not sure whether they peppered the text with lifted quotes from the original but Petruchio used them, always appropriately, which suggested that old Bill W. was in the next room giving a nod to the new production. One preview I read said that the whole thing fell apart in the middle and was only kept from complete farce by the performances of the two leads. I suppose I don’t know the text of the original enough but enough of the plot filtered into my brain all those years ago for me to realise that the general line was correct with all the major elements in place. I was also led to believe that there would be some compromise in the ending to cater for modern political correctness but I couldn’t see that. The introduction to my copy of the text says that Kate and Petruchio end up being equal partners in their marriage, and while Kate’s ‘accepting’ of her husbands superiority was tinged with irony, this was also the case in the RSC version I saw. And don’t forget that in the new version, Kate was a successful politician with her eyes on the top job. I was expecting some clever reference to the Sun and Moon at the end but if it was there I missed it.

Is He?

Listening to something by The Cocteau Twins. 4AD is 25 years old this year.

I took the kids for a walk yesterday afternoon. Much time was spent trying to discourage the youngest from climbing on walls which gets very tiring. He will raise his legs up so that he hangs from the reins until he is picked up and carried. When he realises that being able to pick things up is much more interesting than being able to see over fences into people’s gardens, he wants to walk again and the cycle restarts. All this is just background to the horrific revelation I had while walking by the Off-Licence. They were selling Victory Gin, which was the name of that horrible rocket fuel that was the only comestible in plentiful supply in the world portrayed in nineteen-eighty-four. This discovery of course made me, to some extent paranoid and think that I might be dreaming. I almost went in to see the label on the bottle to check whether it had anything remotely suggesting totalitarianism. I cannot find any web-reference to a real brand thought there is an indy band from New Jersey with that name. As you can guess, I am not happy about any of this.

Siren – Siren – Siren

Currently Watching – Charlie and Lola

You don’t even need to borrow a child to enjoy this. Academically inclined, wonderful drawings, likeable children – what more could you want in a kids’ show? Probably a bit too lefty for some I could mention but hey – if you are going to read bias into everything the BBC does just because it does not match with your view of how things should be done then just get on with it. It’s all still better than some TV companies I can think of.

I still haven’t managed to go for my first, long, lunchtime walk yet. The main road in front of the building just has fields and a couple of narrow roads on the other side. It reminds me of the place my dad goes bird-watching every week. He has been going to this place for more than 20 years now and I am hoping that some sort of book will be forthcoming. In his youth, my dad painted very well – we have a montage of a few of his bird pictures in the porch – and I have been trying to encourage him to start painting again. In 1985 he fell down a Welsh mountain and broke his leg and I bought him some watercolours to keep him occupied while he had to sit being fidgety in the back garden. I don’t think he ever opened the box. He does play about with photographs on the computer, though really only pushing colours and stuff like that – no actual manipulation of images.

A new and horrible word for – de-individualise – strangely the spell checker has not flagged that up so maybe it’s not so new – just ghastly – up there with leverage and using too many hyphens in one sentence. Sorry about that.

Class Of 1940

Running in grace along the parapets, the city walls, picked clean by the wind from off the desert go the figures in my idea of what happened to everyone I ever knew. The sun is low and the air is cold, threatening a frost tonight, white water on every cold surface. We will be indoors, up against the fire with drink and meat and song. Our conversation will interrupt the games we play tonight like the diversions before a long-anticipated battle and we will get drunk, roaring and slapping backs with gusto. I see the light from the fire, flickering against the walls, making shadows of the honey tangle, the mess of joy and hope that means that this war is ended.

In the halls and glass rooms, our generals negotiate the humiliation and crushing of a whole people. Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping” The tiger growls and chews his cigar. Curious! I see the white clouds, the smoke that burns. We made peace for these people and they crush us back. How sad that we go to find the deadliest things we can think of in position of this sad man and when we find nothing, we send these things ourselves. Oh Phosphorous is a grey area in the white smoke, a diversion, fully legal under any convention we have signed. I cannot sleep my love. I won’t tell anyone else but you but maybe I made a mistake. I have killed people and now they want to kill me. I say march them all out into the middle of the parade ground and let them kill each other; leave us to get on with our own lives. Nothing is in my name, the libertarian sighs and rolls over, dreaming of his first million, his first mandolin repeating down through history. No statesmen ever lived for you have to be dead to be one.

I take philosophy and all its complications and diversions, wrap it up with grace and reverence and send it back to explain my actions. The trouble is that no one else can understand it. Maybe the emperor gets it, but sometimes even I don’t so what hope is there for those that consume the output of the novel-writing machines, those that chant the acid and hate for things they cannot understand. There are proto-imperialists in every school, taking money from the gentle children, turning into the businessmen and thugs that tell us what we should read and watch and eat and learn and how we should live and die. They won’t die alone and uncared for; the warders might shed a tear for the passing of their perks and tips for soft things to make the hard cell slightly brighter. One down today, when they catch him, the decent man who tells us how to think. I hear that old harmonica on the step, a summer evening ending with a doughboy back from his only war, wishing for the shock to end and all those dreams of shells and mud to go away. And it was right to end it like he did, stepping from the window, ending on the railings, guttering and foaming as the light fades and the black of dispersing atoms coming on him.
I will never know that shock, that crump and ping of metal projected to kill me.

Being Happy

Listening to Replicas by Tubeway Army

I didn’t know any of that.

It has been a struggle to remain anything other than downcast over the last few weeks. Things are beginning to look a bit better but there are threats for the future. All this has made me think of why I get so down. Before I was about 16, nothing worried me for very long; the worst thing I can remember is when the school decided to give us mock O-level exams AFTER Christmas one year which resulted in a few of the more radical pupils (and they were all female) to protest though I can’t actually remember if the teachers even bothered to listen. I have to tell you that this was a school where one of the girls was disciplined for having a perm. I actually got quite upset at that, though probably only to the point of expressing solidarity with the usual suspects in the group of sixth-form girls who petitioned the deputy head about it. This all reminds me of the sock rebellion in Adrian Mole. I’ve digressed alarmingly here. The point is that no worry lasted for any length of time; they were all resolved and finalised. In the Sixth Form I began to worry about career and future though even here nothing kept me awake – my insomnia was for other reasons.

My point is that over the years, worries have multiplied in my head without any real increase in the potential results of the things I am worrying about. I did have some wonderful theory that used pseudo-mathematics to define the length of time you spend worrying about something being in proportion to the point you have reached in your life. I wonder of course whether this applies just to me as nobody else seems to be worried about anything. I think that maybe I appear less worried and more confident than I actually think I do; sometimes I listen to myself on the phone and marvel at the lucidity and confidence which I hear. I am learning to compartmentalise well these days. That is not to say that there will not be more days when I just want to bang my head against a wall and cry. The subject of yesterdays rant may well be very good at being happy – I suspect she is very good indeed.

I am depressed again. I just read some of the news on Gary Numan’s Official Web site which confirms everything I ever thought about him. I am being uncharitable – we all mature. I hope he enjoyed Chessington World of Adventure.

Now Listening to Six Marimbas by Steve Reich

Now Steve would never go to Chessington World of adventure.

Flashing Blades
A take on the world by another Steve here ,and very apt after hearing Evelyn Glennie on In Tune last night. Glennie seems so stateswomanlike these days it is difficult to reconcile this image with that of the gauche yet confident teenager starting at the Royal College of Music, having to put towels over her drums to stop the sound going up into the flat above. I have seen her play twice at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. One of those times she played a whole kitchen which I suppose included the Kitchen Sink. I wouldn’t want to make her cross as she can hit things very hard.

Foot In The Door

Warning – navel gazing!

Listening to 604 by Ladytron

I may seem a bit vague in the following entry due to the fact that I am trying hard to avoid identifying the subject of my observation. I have recently found some stuff on the internet about someone I went to school with. She was in my class though she was a year younger than the rest of us because she was bloody clever. Intelligence was not her single best feature either and she was a figure of desire to more than one of my contemporaries, including one great artist who did many pictures of her, some of which she saw and chose to ignore. At the time I imagined her mind was full of higher things, like an appreciation of poetry and Shakespeare, the power of one person to change the world for the better and how nice it would be if everyone was as clever as she was. None of this may have been true but it was the impression she gave. She was a nice person as well so I cannot report any nasty goings-on or bad behaviour. The only problem I can report is that she failed to question the mathematical possibility of the 110% scores she was sometimes awarded in English. We questioned it and I can only think that the English teacher gave her the extra 10% to make up for the fact that she was younger than us; she achieved the best possible score for our age group and so got more for being so advanced. Not that we were really bothered because she was so nice.

I imagined that she would go to Oxford or Cambridge, study hard, take her professors to task over various things, take some sort of professional job and then go into Politics – of course she is young enough to still do this and I may yet be able to say that I knew some future cabinet minister. I have no problem with this – in fact I quite liked the idea of someone I know being so clever and successful and of course imagine a life of intellectual parties, long weekends with academic colleagues and friends etc. Stereotypes – don’tcha love ‘em?

Now I do not know if she went to Oxford or Cambridge – she certainly tried for them- but I do know what she does now because I have seen a page on the internet which described what she does. Basically she is involved in market research, questionnaires etc. - all the things I hate about the pestering of the populace by companies desperate to wring out the last possible piece of profit from people being forced to buy things they don’t know they need or want. Sometime my job is boring and sometimes it is exciting in the extreme though all that is within a narrow range - for the record, I am a software developer. My image of this person has been destroyed. I have many ideas about why she has chosen this career and I won’t go into them but how disappointing this is. Of course I have made up my mind on this based on the idea that I don’t like media research and you could make even the worst-sounding job in the world more attractive by offering conferences abroad etc. For all I know, the lady in question goes home and writes academic papers or poetry and has a fulfilled life that makes mine look like the most Pooterish existence imaginable. I detect some schadenfreude in this which is not very charitable. Of course, my limited presence on the internet could give a false impression of what I am like and there is always the possibility that my life could be just at odds with what people I went to school with think of me. The real problem here is that all of them, probably without exception could not care about me any more than a slight feeling of “I wonder what he’s doing now?” though I must admit that should any of them have a blog as well-updated as mine, I would be very interested in reading it.

Coverage

I have often talked about the Secret Blog – which does NOT exist – which would cover all those things which I cannot write about on this one, either because they are too personal, give too much away about my identity or that of my employer or are just too darn boring. I know that great acres of the internet are more boring than a speech by one of the two Davids, but I like to think that my selections do at least have something to raise them above the normal white noise of vanity blogging. I did mention the point that so many bloggers seem to write what must just be conscious thought with the assumption that the reader must be able to tease out the meaning from the unreferenced junk that all goes into it. It goes with the idea that so many people have no real idea how big the world actually is. I know that I am thumbnailing here but I am sure the average subconscious estimate for how many people are in the world is add odds with reality by a factor of a thousand. I also imagine that this is also the view amongst a lot of politicians who need to realise that the number of hearts and minds they have to convince is far higher than the number that they successfully could convince using the techniques they currently employ. Of course sometimes they overestimate the number of people involved in an issue to suit their particular issue of the moment. I can think of a recent war in which risk was overestimated with the result that the risk multiplied. I wonder if you can guess what that was boys and girls? Very good. All together now - All Fall Down!

Blue-Sky Thinking

Those whole girls out there, running in the wind for their trains – they can’t think like this can they? What do we see when we get older, and how do we hear differently. The sounds get muffled but so slowly that we never notice until a long-unheard piece of music is nothing like you remember. I have trouble with conversations now; they have lost the top end, all the sibilance that makes speech understandable is gone and I have to lean forward and ask for a repeat of what has been said. Sometimes, especially at times like this when things have been going wrong, I wish I could go back to when I was a kid and start again. The question is, would I have all the knowledge I have now or just some inkling of having already been to the future, a knowledge that it will all be happening again.

I may have said before, that I feel the same now as I did when I was a kid but this is obviously only true for certain elements of my persona. I have obviously noticed an ability to concentrate and to take on complex emotional issues that passed me by when I was younger. Life as a kid for me was like Neighbours; nothing that happened was too serious and was resolved within a few episodes. Now the complexities of real life lead to great long periods of time with various unresolved outcomes hanging over me. I was reading the reviews of the BBC’s Shakespeare Re-told which indicated that the un-resolved plots of the Bard do not go down well with modern audiences and so all the plot lines have to be tied up. I suppose I do not know enough depth in Shakespeare plays to know whether this is true or just some excuse from the modern producers and writers to explain why they have mucked about with the stories. I do remember that Casualty used to leave many loose ends, each episode was self-contained but the long-term lives of the victims was often left only lightly closed. I never found myself upset by this and it chimes nicely with the idea that often medical conditions are not solved instantly by doctors but often take months or even years to clear completely if at all. The current political leanings towards targets actually go against this with their requirement for clear-cut results and ticks in boxes.

And another thing! Why do the government seem to want to override the opinions of experts all the time? They will take on board the findings of unqualified think-tanks and ignore the accumulated knowledge of years from professional bodies. Maybe I am going over the top here but this reminds me of the start of the Khmer Rouge persecution of what they saw as the elitist occupations such as Doctor and Lawyer. Now obviously we are not going to be turfed out of our comfortable homes to work the paddy fields but we are soon going to get to a point where the professions are seriously limited in their work by petty ideas from people who are not as clever as they like to think they are.

Nature Notes

Who do you think you are? Bill Oddie?

The area around this building is mostly countryside, though on one side is a vast area of cleared land which is currently subject to being moved around by various bits of machinery. There are still some leaves on the trees at the front though across the main road outside the business park, the land gives way to muddy fields and stark, black-branched trees. I really think I should try and go for a walk across there one day. Sometimes I think it would be great to just walk around the whole of the country, just trying to go down every road possible though I have been able to nail down the feelings I have about urban places. I was anxious when I first had to go to Chesterfield but I was pleasantly surprised by its low-level appearance. Our cities and just litter-bins these days and in my best misanthropic rage, who is that because of? All of us of course, though I might add that I have not knowingly littered any more than a broken fingernail since I was very small. I was made to carry any crisp-packets or chocolate bar wrappers around in my pocket until a bin was reached. We have not yet been able to persuade our daughter to do this but she will not drop them; instead she hands them back to us over her head. Some education is required there, Come to think of it, Number One Son already does the same thing. If he can do it there is no excuse for the sea of paper and plastic bottles that seems to be everywhere these days. I sometimes wonder why people, who are increasingly image conscious these days, are quite prepared to dump stuff in the environment which they have to go through every day. I was going to write a typical, vitriolic sentence here to describe them but I just can’t be bothered. I suppose some anger should be directed as the companies which use three times as much packaging as they need to. Tax on Plastic Bags now!

Nothing Wrong With The Washing Machine

Listening to Aerial By Kate Bush.

I know that Sainsbury’s is not a very cool place to buy your music but I couldn’t wait any longer. Quentin Cooper actually used the track Pi from the album on The Material World to ask a question about what was creative and what wasn’t – it turns out that memorising Pi is not creative but singing it is. Consequently Aerial was purchased last night and disc 1 played until my wife reminded me of something we wanted to watch. The reviews I have read have been generally good with the Mojo one having hardly any gap between it and perfection. I have to say that the Times review misspelled the title as ‘Ariel’ all the way through which grated with kate herself on Front Row who dismissed the chiming of the title with the great Plath homophone as nothing more than coincidence. I have to add that the picture of the fishermen in the liner notes has more than an echo what with the boat being called ‘Aerial’.

As to my views of the album itself, I have only listened to all of disc 1 which means I have not yet reached Rolf Harris. I loved Hounds Of Love but the technology of the time dates that. Aerial is real and live with a spirit in the instrumentation which matches the high emotion of Kate’s voice. It is difficult now to link the howling banshee wail of the original Wuthering Heights with the measured release of emotion that comes of this album. That is not to say you won’t be tingling and teary by the end of some of it. I was worried about the mawkishness that might have prevailed in the song Bertie (for her son) but despite the simple and unconditional love that the words are designed to convey, the twin powers of that voice and the ability to orchestrate beautifully have made it something special. A well-done cliché is no problem at all. The beautiful renaissance backing (guitars – not harpsichord as one review had it) just tips it over into being brilliant.

I have heard the first couple of tracks on disc 2, and I have to say that the second gave me a “Daddy! My daddy!” moment – wonderful. More later.

Oh My Gawd! I've Hit the Flying Doctor

Evenin' All

Things are up and down like the biggest, horriblest roller-coaster you could imagine - one that gets you all misty in the clouds and then plunges into the deepest, darkest spelunker's dream. Well maybe not quite that bad. One Dead Ant. To each his own hangup.

I am half-way through Girl With A Pearl Earring. I was certain after a few pages that it was going on my give-up pile but it hasn't. I saw the film, though the beauty of that was just in the images; there was so little actual interaction between animated people that it seemed just like a series of Vermeer paintings, a bit like Drowning By Numbers, though that had a false plot of meaningless clues and dialogue. The book of GWAPE is so good, up there with those books you race through but dread not having them to read any more; remember that cut-loose feeling you get when trying to find something to measure up to what has just gone? There is a little bit of such drama being better on the radio than on film because you can make up your own mind as to how the scenes appear, but with this book, you have the added plus of being able to slot the real Vermeer painting into the narrative. We had a reproduction of one of them at the end of our hall and I am annoyed with myself for not remembering which one.

Go Here and Look For Eddie Izzard

All will be explained - I hope.

Listening to Triple Quartet by Steve Reich.

Shakiness and Osciallation have subsided, returned and gone (nearly). I'm not really that bothered about writing at the moment but today is the emotional equivalent of what a flatmate used to call a 'No Weather Day' and I thought I would power through the curtain of indifference, knock over the Dalek of Fate as it mounts the dustbin of mistaken identity and write something. I have just read this review of Stephen Fry's new book about writing poetry. I was going to get it despite my recent view that Mr. Fry is crumbling slightly in the cheerful egghead stakes. Ruth Padel has a real go at him, and the book seems that it might just be another way for Stephen the Classicist, to Smash The Oiks. Well as a fully paid-up oik, I won't be buying this book and I will do everything in my power to help Alan Davies win an episode of QI. The Star's Tennis Balls was pretty dire really as well. There may be a syllepsis too-many in there somewhere or some such pernickety Eng-lang over-construction.

No Spell Check, you pompous twonk!

Just Rattle It Captain Clever!

Listening to Old Kate Bush in lieu of the new.

It has been a bad week in Lake Wobegone – a very bad week! Not one but two crises came along on the same day, both involving health-threatening situations and one actually going as far as requiring an ambulance. All Ok now though thank you for asking. Just look at what you could have got.

I’m still a bit shaky but as neither of the affected people was me, that is just sad and I will just have to get over it.

Still, we have Aerial to look forward to in less than two weeks now. Oh so delicious a wait for this. Pain in the brain and heart and no more thoughts of the concrete. The picture of the mirrored clouds on the cover reminds me of hanging upside down on the railings of the bridge across the common. And is the sound trace, the word ‘Aerial’?

I finished the Peel Biography; the Appendix contains his summary of what would be in the book. He sent this to his agent in 1992 and it is hilarious, though I am curious to how I would have reacted to it if I had I read it before the book. I don’t often get the shiver when reading that usually accompanies a special piece of music but it was here with this one, like it was for the end of Valerie Grove’s The Well-Loved Stranger.

Yes I know it’s not Stephen Fry.

This Title Intentionally Left Blank

Listening to Cocteau twins

My wife surprised me yesterday by saying that she still couldn’t believe it that John Peel was dead. As she had not actually heard of John Peel until she met me, that was saying something. I suppose it must have been Home Truths what done it. I had not actually heard of Daniel O’Donnell until I met my wife but I’m pretty certain that I won’t feel the same way about that gentle Irish crooner when he eventually goes to the great end-of-the-pier-in-the-sky. I am sure my wife won’t either. Having been put off the Midwich Cuckoos by the spoilers on BBC4 last week, she has expressed a desire to read Margrave Of The Marshes when I have finished it. That is not going to be long; I bought it in the local bookshop instead of any discounted place because the great-grey-behemoth that is town-and-country development these days wants to knock down the building it is housed in and put up what Charles three would call a glass stump; it will be finished in the next 24 hours.

I was very worried that Peel’s biography being started by him and finished by someone else would result in a fault-line I wouldn’t be able to get over. There are no worries on this score, his wife writes, if not in the same style as JP, with the same outlook on life and the same level of understanding of what he experienced. There was a gentle pang when I finished the first part, knowing that was the end of Peel, about this time last year but with the insertion of a letter to Tom Robinson declaring love of Sheila, the novelistic trail continues, only slightly slowed by the change of pronoun. The laugh quota per page is the same in both halves, as is the John-bursting-into-tears count and the obvious longing for family life. I left it last night with the description of his kids feeling out of touch with modern music because their dad was not there to call and ask advice of and it was sad – like Jenny Agutter calling out “daddy - My Daddy” something which gives me filmy eyes just writing it.

I’ve said before, that I didn’t listen to Peel’s show often in recent years but thinking back over it, each brief night time listen resulted in the purchase of some exquisite music which he found fit to play between the banging techno, nanosecond long death-metal tracks, and all the other un-listenable stuff which I used to pretend to like. Black-Star Liner spring to mind. None of this is anything to the hours I used to listen to Peel’s show when it came on after Kid Jensen in what must have been the late seventies and early eighties. It was only on medium wave and faded in and out as radio Moscow used to get the better of it and I am sure my uneducated ear must have found a lot of the stuff quite strange, far more than it did the last time I heard the show. There is a wonderful picture of PJ Harvey at rest between tracks for a gig played at Peel Acres, beaming at John as he comes out with an obviously bluffed tale, a real gem, like finding Ian McCulloch smiling or worse still, without his sunglasses. Rock and Roll with the back off. Read it and truly weep.

Freud Egg

I'd just thought I'd better give my analysis of one of Ed's dreams over at The EDitorial.

The spider is obviously a sublimation of fears about our chances of getting more gold medals in the Coxless fours. There are eight eyes and eight legs on both a spider and a coxless four. There is also hope in the resurrection of the spider, that we may find a replacement for Pinsent, Redgrave and the other two who no one can remember the names of.

Of course it would have to have been a lady spider.

Something Beginning With Z!

So long away – so little done! Daughter and I went to see W&G Curse of The Were-Rabbit on Sunday. Much laughter and no slow bits. Go and see it. As the Guardian said, it does seem to push the ceiling of its U certificate but no matter.

I seem to have been working continuously, starting the minute I hit the desk and skipping lunch times. It is one of those times when all days seem to run into each other, leading to fear of the future and where it is all going to fit. Having said that, nothing seems to get done. The panic which seems to be all around at the moment is no help either. We are all going to get Avian Flu and start coughing like chickens. Give the fowl identity cards and that’ll stop ‘em! Interesting comments regarding this at the The Woolamaloo Gazette.

Saturday was a good day for documentary (which allowed my wife to get on with her weekly email report to Scotland as neither of the shows below appealed to her). I rang my dad just before the start of BBC2’s history of drawing show and he said he was about to watch it. It was all about comic book art and animation which made me wonder how long my dad lasted. He managed to make it to the end. Interesting that it started with Daniel Clowes – Ghost World etc. The film was good and I have been meaning to read the book. The last comic book I bought was Tank Girl on the back of buying Deadline magazine in order to seem cooler than I actually was.

The drawing was followed by the writing in a BBC 4 Lost decade show about John Wyndham. My wife was actually half listening to this and got a bit annoyed with its spoilers or all the books; she has been threatening to read The Midwich Cuckoos. I did try to persuade her that the intelligent writing was what mattered rather than the splatter-gun of the plot but I think the delights of this very British Sci-Fi are lost to her. While interesting in its revelations of various unknown things about Wyndham, it did simply seem like a long set of drama docs strung together. Nice to see Chris Langham in it (does he ever not work) but not really something that needed to be made. What does need to be made is a version of Trouble With Lichen , a very laid-back book with much to say about tabloid and trash TV culture.

MIA



Nuff Said!

Six-Three-Three

It was bright and lovely, my first day at school; a great wide expanse of playground took the light from the September sun and bounced it back at me, like some vision of the future, of all that I could do know that the professionals had hold of me. The bit of the school for us infants was simply a number of wooden huts on stilts, the doors of which were up steps at the front, where I am sure we would have sat had we been allowed. I was four and free and of course, homesick. One day, the big school was closed and we had the whole playground to ourselves so we stuck out our arms and turned into planes, skimming over the white line that marked our border, like Mosquito bombers- the Timber terrors, hugging the contours of the French countryside on their way to flatten something. We made the right noise, the throb and gritty crackle of Merlins, something all boys knew then, only 25 years after the end of the war.

Skimming fast over the asphalt, we are up against the brick and glass of big school, dropping our 500 lb bombs as we wheel and pull up round the bike sheds and then back as fast as possible to our bases on the other side of the channel to be refuelled, rearmed and sent back to crush the krauts. Think of the Dambusters speeding over the grey of the channel, lifting gently over the southern coast and then along the canals to do their worst. We knew all that, we had all the history of a war that was like yesterday to our parents and it was good and great and we couldn’t imagine anything being better. Stick those silhouettes up on the wall and I can still tell you what most of them are, Dornier, Typhoon, Heinkel and the Meteor from the future. We could tell you all of those and all the more common dinosaurs. A fried of my mother’s can tell you the time he first saw a meteor, and one of my aunts will complain about being left alone as a Doodlebug hit the cliffs over which she was standing while all the men in the troop hit the floor. And maybe these are separate stories but in my head I see the Meteor chasing and tipping the Doodlebug with its slipstream, sending it to nothing more than a noisy, wet end in the surf and gravel. Its not the same today; the death and injury is more real these days and, quite rightly, small boys want to be David Beckham rather than Douglas Bader. The result of a laser guided bomb going off is a bit more in-your-face than the voiced explosions of our pretend bombs chipping away at the school walls. I’ll paint my face black and sit in the bushes, guiding my mates into the target area by swinging a torch at them. The grey of today makes me think of all those war games, the sky like the skimming sea as it speeds under and over us, like hanging upside down with the river below us.

Four Candles In The Wind

Poor Dr Porter! They replaced yesterday’s Case Notes show with a tribute to Ronnie Barker. That said, I spent the entire drive home with a big smile on my face. Someone said that the beauty of The Two Ronnies show was the sheer professionalism of the writing and the execution without it seeming to be anything more than a couple of guys in the pub doing a turn. People just cannot do that in shows today. Comedy is either weak and badly made or produced to the utmost level of detail, thereby removing the spirit that comedy needs to stand out. We can all laugh the embarrassed or dirty laughs at some of the more extreme sketch shows but nothing comes close to the spiritual uplift of old-style shows. Monkey Dust is very inventive but sometime you just worry that the writers have run out of society pillars to rage against. The targets now are just those that will bring out the most outrage in the Daily Mail Crowd and the most admiration from the couldn’t-care-less brigade.

Interesting sketch of Ted Hughes by Sylvia Plath on the BBC site. There are some of Plath’s drawings in my hardback edition of The Bell Jar but they are of buildings and markets rather than close-up portraits. This sketch seems to have spirit if not accuracy rather than the architectural verité of the book pictures. Anyway, it is a nice complement to the collage with the Plath drawing on the side of the filing cabinet.

There were thousands of Starlings on the buildings of the new estate behind the office this morning. I saw a fat man with a big cigar walk along the main road.

Don’t worry! You can listen to Case Notes from the website.

Niffs

It is common that often the most evocative things that stimulate our senses are smells. An exact aroma can take me back to very specific locations, not just buildings but individual rooms within them. Over the last few years, I have noticed that arriving back at home after being out for the day, it smells very pleasant in an unexciting sort of a way. The smell reminds me of visits to various other kids in the neighbourhood. I am sure I have often mentioned how a change in the polish used to clean the office can bring out memories of all sorts of various things from school days. Those polished woodblock floors with the herringbone pattern seem to soak up smells, like a sort of aromatic recording device. A school my wife once taught at was closed down and we used to drive by it occasionally. I would imagine that even with the broken windows letting in the rain and wind, the polished floor would still be there, still smelling the same as when the kids used to sit on it cross-legged, getting dirty and trying not to sing the “alternate” words for the hymns. I am sure that all the modern schools built under the PFI scheme (Jarvis anyone?) don’t have herringbone-pattern, woodblock floors any more; they’ll all have tasteful light-oak or pine wood floors. The woodblocks are all going into period-furnished houses on the back of the recovery boom. So not everything Dan Cruickshank does is good.

My all time favourite smell is that of my aunt’s house. It gives a deep sense of calm, all baskety and woody, a sort of academic refuge, a smell that I would expect in an old university library, though I have to say that the only time I was in an OLD university library, it smelled of the previous night’s dinner and not a very appetising one either. All this has been prompted by the mix of smells that fill the kitchen here at lunchtime. Many people bring microwaveable meals and the smell of all those different things cooking makes for a very strange and sometimes overpowering atmosphere, not at all reminiscent of anything I can think of, though in years to come, the smell of here will have become a memory trigger for this time. I don’t mind hospital smells though I can’t actually remember the smell of the ward I was in last year. The autumn smells good as well.

Sniff something today.

Death Of The Middle Class

He didn’t know his place!

Listening to Dear Catastrophe Waitress by Belle And Sebastian.

New blog roll entry today – read it – it won’t be easy but it will make you think.

I dreamed of going to the moon last night. We got there by various slingshot devices that would swing round and catch our capsule, each one sending it higher above the Earth until it came in to land in the dust. We stood there in a cubical capsule made rather like the tank in which Damien Hirst’s shark is decomposing. The door was open and yet we had no breathing equipment. I found some stamps on the floor, which we all thought rather valuable though using them to post letters home as we did probably would not have worked given the lack of post-office staff. Not sure how I got home but I did.

Big day for Poets everywhere – hopefully bigger than usual.

Further nature notes from next door to Bolton’s Training Ground.

It is getting like The Birds here in the mornings; every available car park light is occupied by big black crows, cawing and squabbling. Not sure why our car park is the avian night-club of choice for this area.

If You Can Get It

Currently reading Nice Work by David Lodge. (This is not the cover of my edition but it’s a good picture from the TV series). This was prompted by Andrew Marr’s assertion that he has read War and Peace 15 times though I am afraid I can only muster four goes for any novel. I suppose I might have read RJ Unstead’s History of Britain more than that but I was young.

Anyway, Nice Work does a great job of self-reference if only fleetingly when the author bemoans the fact that he is describing the character of one of his creations while she denies the existence of character itself. All the reference to de-construction of novels and post-structuralism leads you into believing that you are reading a book without plot and character when in fact it is so well designed and plotted that nothing is up for grabs. I first read it when I was in the midst of my transfer from college to factory and the relevance of this has only hit me now.

However, I have not forgotten Mr. Dawkins if only because the new Guinness advert reminded me of him. Apologies if you have seen it. It follows a trio of Guinness drinkers de-evolving very believably back through human history, pre-history and all the stages between now and when we crawled out of the water. They end up as mudskippers who don’t like the taste of the water. The standard caption about good things and waiting appears and in an instant, the whole strange show is clear. I wonder if the idea of running it backwards was there from the start or whether the filmmakers suddenly saw it would work better that way? Of course, running it forwards would have left showing the product until the end but either way it was brilliantly made with a great punch line. Back to the standard of the surfers/white horses again.

Nature Notes:-

There was a gang of crows mobbing a kestrel over the car park this morning. I stood and watched them for a while but they got too far away to see the outcome. It made me wonder who would actually win if it came to beak versus claw. My dad would know.

The Wind That Stalks The Rice Fields

The intended topic of this entry has been suspended. How delusional do you have to be? It will take a lot more that this to make the rest of the world collapse at your feet – where are the celebrations today and how far from the aims of a peaceful existence does celebration of this put you? I know that the result is oblivion not paradise. I believed in the gods swooping low over the rice fields, fattening the grains after eating their fill from the offerings given by grateful and peaceful families, slaking their spiritual thirsts from the Coca-Cola left out by the happy, smiling children. And the dead walked with the living, talking with them, just across a tiny boundary, not in paradise but walking with their families on this earth, through the water and volcanic rock that makes this island so fertile. And the sweeping destroyer of worlds is swept from his course across the forests, blown clear by damning madness from the real world, where my prayer is the only right one and no other belief can possibly explain where I come from. I know where all this comes from; the inevitable dark marks and lesions on the brains of everyone, the black swooping fear of future. As people spread the papers over the floor this morning, the same papers I read like some colonial white-suit in the foyer of my hotel, they will see the end result, the cells of skin and bone and brain separated from any chance of enlightenment, and clamour for revenge and more death, up in the sky. They will pray and save for a decent funeral, the beautiful white calf of the rich and the poor storage in the ground before the proper ending sends them over the edge to take the offerings.

And the children will smile and go more hungry, and no war will come, no return to the horror that this island has know in only the last 40 years. They always try the wrong places. A few dead after such terrible things have already gone before will only make it more wrong. And the gods will swoop and return, roaring down to make rice, to make food, to make life and take it in proportion. And who has lost?

We Walk Along We Could Be Famous

The desk here has a high board in sight line, on the top of which is a lockable cupboard with a hinge-and-slide door. It has a number of developer-type books inside it along with a calculator (who still uses a calculator?), a dirty mug and various un-sorted piles of white paper. To the left of the desk, creating a second wall, there is a metal filing cabinet, which allows me, at last, to put up a bit of the magnetic poetry set which has remained unused since the move from building 2 to building 52. I cannot find the tile with the word ‘Nigellike’, which we made up with the transfer set provided. The word is used in the poem in this post that we made up on the old filing cabinet. Today, the first line of the poem on the cabinet is ‘The delicate language shadowing their music.’ because this is all the words, I have lifted from the box so far. There are a number of photos stuck to the metal as well. There is one black-and-white one of a standing stone at Callanish and a photo of a collage I did which combines the drawing of Sylvia Plath from the cover of Collected poems with a page from the Codex Mendosa. There is also this strip cartoon.

The desk itself is just a mess with various bits of technology. I have one computer but use two screens most of the time, which is an advance of having to print things out and match electronic and paper versions of the current operation. To the right of the desk, there is a row of offices, usually empty, which have glass on both sides with blinds. The view from these offices is of the main road outside the site with fields beyond. This is a change from the sixteen years I spent with a brick wall as the view from my office window. One floor up from that and I would have been able to see the welsh mountains.

Try 2.

“Oh! That was too fast!” she says angrily. Immediately she worries that she has been heard but it is too late to fret for long; there are other things worth worrying about in this world. She thinks about the sky for a while, the detail tonight is unusual, something for which she cannot find words, though the internal impression is enough to not need translation into language. The clouds boil and roil on a single plain, caught by the low sun and she feels like some tiny organism held in check under the surface of a shallow puddle, watching the oil on the surface. And of all this, mostly it is not seen; we all go around with our eyes on our feet or the ground in front of us, not seeing the clouds and the sky and all that is above the horizontal. It takes space-bound men and women to see the possibilities, the chance of traveling up to those clouds, so stir them around with a ballet of technology as you whistle through.

The colours range, building in depth from the pink-tinged grey at the start, through the deep reds of sunset and on to the subtle contours of twilight. With few cars, they have the road to themselves, a mile-long stretch of rapidly vanishing tarmac, radiating the heat of the day back to them. To the right, straggly bunches of thorn have given way to sparse woodland with promise of full-blown fairy-tale forests in a few hundred metres. There is some drizzle though she cannot tell when it started; it has been gradual and maybe it has been there all day. Her clothes are not damp and rain feels the right thing for now. I cannot leave all this she thinks. So much to see and do here and I’ll be homesick, planning my escape back to dad and that lovely calm in the house when we read. She thinks of the low music in the background and the fires and the books and records that occupy most of the space in their house. I would learn more there I think. They want to teach me things rather than teach me how to learn. What dates, what maths? It’s all rubbish. I want to sit and learn and write and be happy. Sending me away will do nothing but make me sadder than I am now. So badly is she worried by the future that she begins to feel herself starting to cry, tears on the edge of bursting their surface tension. She thinks of other things, neutral things, Cricket and the Fibonacci sequence. I must look that up she thinks again. This is all she thinks. Maybe I could write this without the instructions. Plays are so much easier to detail; you give some meta-instructions at the beginning and the make-up artist and scene-makers do the rest for you. So much to think about! I will steal some of dad’s records, he has so many, that a few will be Ok. With this she is happier, thinking of the cosy smells of home seeped into the cardboard of the sleeves of these vinyl gems. She is the Vinyl freak, made happy and real by old blues and growly voices from across the water. I ran into her sometimes, her with her coloured hair and laconic replies to my obviously pointless questions. I wrote her poems occasionally, and she curled her lip at them, missing the point possibly. Oh poetry! She thinks. I wish someone would write some to me. Quite the little feminist she often thinks she is but doors opened and little kindnesses secretly thrill her behind the snarl and taciturnity she puts on to mix with the others of her type and accent. Cooly she has turned down so many casual requests for drinks and back she is alone with her dad’s records or walking out taking photographs for her art. She loves nobody outside her small family.

This Is A Guess

Listening to Best of Yes. Yes! Yes! Yes! I was actually looking for some Vangelis after my daughter chose Chariots of Fire as her going to sleep music last night but I must have deleted Soil Festivities. This is good enough for the moment.

I hope Simon Singh is being ironic with this piece about bad science in a Katie Melua song. I’m not sure; I still get his email newsletter and this sort of satire is not normally a part of it. Still, Big Bang was good. I look forward to his popular science book on the proof of the Riemann hypothesis.

We started watching All About George yesterday mostly because Rick Mayall was in it. The whole thing was just too complicated – the basic idea of five generations and second marriages gave it too many things to have to concentrate on or maybe it was just not written in a way that could manage to bring all of the various people together. There have been plenty of drama with large casts which do work but we gave up on this one. Which is good because Love Soup was just so good and we don’t have two comedy dramas to watch in a week. There maybe mention of that next week.

A Bell Huey chopper flew over me yesterday as I was driving home which together with the lone Spitfire which went over last week is making me wonder if I am some sort of conduit for fractures in space-time. I wait for the Swordfish that sunk the Bismarck to go over any time now. I suppose if the Bismarck sailed up the Mersey that would prove it. Rats! This is the Philadelphia Experiment.

Very clumsy writing today. I will try better next time but I did the month Ed.

Visual Acuity

Listening to Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ by Steve Reich

Very sad bit coming up though only sad in one sense of the word.

I have recently had to start using c# instead of vb which has required some ancient area of my brain to start working again. However, there is one bit of c# about which I am happy. It is the increment construct, i.e. integerValue++. It just seems so elegant and right rather than all that mucking about in hyperspace … er …. with integerValue = integerValue + 1. I feel that maybe I should do all my programming in c# from now on, not just the web stuff but windows apps as well. I don’t suppose there is much of an efficiency gain; I just don’t know enough about the deep stuff of compilers to say whether there is any real difference in the processing. Anything you can do in VB you can do in c# so its just a case of what you know and like. C always seems like Zen compared to the western philosophy of VB. Then again, humans always either destroy what they don’t know or give it an undeserved air of mystery. I am sure that after 1000 days, the rarified and spiritual atmosphere of a Tibetan monastery can get a bit mundane. I remember once writing about the idea of staying in a different house every night of your life just to get over the boredom of real-life. This leads me on to something which isn’t quite bathos because bathos is an unintentional lapse into the mundane from the midst of something higher while this is meant. (You can dispute whether the previous stuff is higher discussion later). The family in the Giles cartoons never lived in the same house twice. The punch line of each cartoon was always different but why have a different house each time. I suppose, it would have got boring for both artists and reader the settings were familiar. That is the beauty of Giles, the initial joke (sometimes good – sometimes very poor) was one thing but the real joy was in the depth of the background, the detail in the shops, the impending accidents usually initiated by the hairy friend of the family children. There was always the book that Vera’s husband was reading, the fact that the youngest girl was always acting like mother in training. And of course there was Grandma who must have really been some Central American dictator on the run from justice.