Perfumed Garden

I was thinking I might try an uncensored entry but this has turned out to be like the cure for hiccoughs which says that you should run three times widdershins round the house without thinking of a badger. Inevitably you think of a badger and inevitably I am thinking of things that cannot be put on a blog like this. You are free to decide on the nature of these thoughts but they are probably not what you 1970’s throwbacks are thinking. So what to write about instead? I’m going to be random.

The black dog gets me every time, backwards, against the flow around the house, the church, anything in this idyll, this ideal, this religious architecture with its spires stretching to God and other anagrams. The sexton shows us the scratches on the door where the Grimm came last, stalking the marked members of the congregation slowly throughout the sermon. Some armed men broke in and took out the traitors without fuss from anyone; not even the vicar, trembling in the pulpit raised his voice to check their sacrilege. He continued after the door had been shut and locked again, inciting the remaining flock to strive for paradise. And maybe they made it. The Black Dog settled calmly by him and slept, drooling across the stone floor.

Bored with this. This is no longer random. Along with Stephen Fry’s Novel – The Star’s Tennis Balls, I have also got the book Meme Machine by Suan Blackmore who turns out to be the partner of Adam Hart-Davis and the mother of Emily Troscianko who together wrote a history of Henry Winstanley And The Eddystone Lighthouse. There is a good forward by Richard Dawkins (Saint Dawkin perhaps) and a lot of text. Not sure if I’ll get through it yet. It does seem to resonate with my deep ideas over what science and knowledge should be about rather than the wishy-washy ideas of the current national curriculum. I think it was in Richard Feynman’s first book of popular reminiscences that he took issue with some of the over-simplification of science teaching in the US. As usual what happens there, happens here and we have a vast reduction in what science is actually taught to the extent that statements which have to be examined in the SATS (and possibly GCSEs) can be unclear or untrue. There is no allowance for children thinking for themselves. The have to have the right answer, though of course they can spell it anyway they like. Maybe we don’t need to be able to spell; this very text underlines in red when I get something wrong but is it not like the idea of zero tolerance. I use this as an example as I don’t like the idea of zero tolerance when it comes to ASB as much as I like it in the basic building blocks of knowledge. We obviously have to have a balance between defining the language down to the last comma (and you all know my feelings on that) and allowing the language to evolve (Sorry Mr. Dawkins) as it has to this day. However, teaching some level of defined spelling and grammar is the foundation for what I am going to call pompously, intellectual rigour. I am conscious of Mr. Fry laughing at my ineptitude with the language if of course he can be bothered with us silent pseuds lost in the blogsphere. I am sure he can’t be. Is the ‘be’ at the end of that last sentence redundant? Tell me please Stephen.

So memes then! Great things! They have this fuzzy place in my head which links to all those projects I never get around to, programming stuff – music and fractals on the computer, the wind-powered light house etc. The trouble is, the time to do these things outlasts my enthusiasm for them. Bored with this like I was bored with the random paragraph above. My bedtime conversation with my daughter which I mentioned the other day, got onto constructing new words by putting the word ‘out’ in front of something else. I tried at first to think of ‘out-something’ words which I had heard of but my daughter was already onto every possibility she could think of. For some reason I suggested that if several people were building a model of the Cathedral with matchsticks, the winning team could be out-building the others but she suggested with great enthusiasm, out-modelling them which I thought was great. I know I cringe at things like prioritise and intellectuallise but I know what they mean. Remember the experiments where children were given made up verbs and asked them to conjugate them. It was easy even for very young kids (not sure exactly how old but I think we are talking year 1). It’s the same with the creation of new words. Us codgers may hate them because we get fixed in our learning but we all know what they mean. I have an exception to raise here. Leverage! Leverage is as far as I remember a noun – leverage is something you either have or don’t have. It is not something you do. But now, in almost every statement from business, it is used as a verb – to leverage. Technically we have a perfectly good verb in the word lever. I know that to leverage comes from some obscure financial use of the word leverage – the use of credit to enhance one’s speculative capacity – but even in the defined transient verb use there is no mention of its general use as a term form making something better. It’s a buzz word which people think makes them sound important and should be binned, canned, trashed along with the use of the word paradigm by people other than philosophers (and not the French ones at that). After a particularly annoying corporate email used the word paradigm in a meaningless way, I asked around in the office what it meant and I don’t think one person knew. It’s the jargon word for example and any need to qualify it should be done with a sentence of more than one word rather than thinking this catch-all will suffice. Short-cuts, Newspeak, reduction of the language to simple single words is the goal of all good corpy-pseuds. One day, you’ll find that people will wake up and be able to speak only single words. Like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. The long stream of Japanese will be translatable into a single syllable word which by no means conveys all the colour of the original. Think I’d better post.

What’s That Barrel The Sherpas Are Carrying?



So much white space; so little intellect to fill it!

Someone is listening to the radio in the distance. I can hear a squawky voice reading what I think is news. The pips went off at some point so it is probably Radio 4. Being a new office I haven’t felt able to bring in the headphones to listen to music though many people here already do. This means that what I hear is the office itself, the hum of blowers, the flap of paper being moved about and the click of the security doors (No Tailgating please!). So today is just random stuff you guess? Probably! Nothing to write about that’s worth writing about. I have thought about a secret blog for sometime now, a document of the things I really feel, all thoughts that are just not suitable for wider reading. I’m not sure what the point would be other than to have a record of how I thought for sometime in the future. The first proper diary I mentioned in yesterday’s entry was closer to that as it was just handwritten rather than published to a medium accessible by billions of people. It would be naff to mention that I have no illusions that billions of people actually read it – most accesses are I'm sure, simply robots trawling for email addresses – but I will mention it anyway. The potential for billions of people to read it is there and that acts as a form of censorship.

Thinking about this has made me aware of the continuous micro-censorship which I have found myself doing on this blog and in other forms of communication. The teams we were in at the old company have been scattered across the North-West and we all keep in touch for professional and social reasons via instant messaging. I find myself having to read everything before I send it, often deleting whole lines. Instant messaging is like speech in a way though with speech you are not able to drag things back after you say them. IM is therefore removing any of the emotional content of the communication at least for me. All the inherent colour of language is removed. I resort to the Ceefax subtitle method of indicating irony by using exclamation marks but that gets annoying and it becomes difficult to tell if you are using irony/sarcasm or just emphasising something in the normal way of exclamation marks. If you are my one regular reader then you will detect the imminent arrival of my request for an Irony punctuation mark. I have a sneaky suspicion that this already exists - possibly that upside down question mark – but I am too lazy to do the clicks required to find out any more. I have just noticed that Word indicated that the single word – Probably – in a sentence on its own was grammatically incorrect. Putting the exclamation mark after it seemed like the right thing to do and it has indeed kept Word happy. I love instinct; the day I tried doubling quotations marks on a whim in a batch file and it worked was a good day. Small things hey?

So what is happening in the world? How can we give the right emphasis to the impact of these events on the world? War and Peace! Poverty and Richness! Hunger and Obesity! We have given a pound to each of the people at risk of starvation in Niger. Well we have given 33.3p and the other 66.6p has come from the rest of the world. In the spirit of thumbnail calculations, that’s probably the insurance for about 100 miles of the journey of one oil tanker.

I make no judgments! Oh those pesky exclamation marks! And here comes another one now.

Not rainy today but grey in the extreme. Thunder is due early tomorrow morning. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.

Rain In The Style Of Perry Cox

It’s raining again, great splashes of cold water on the windows of this silent car. It’s only silent inside if you ignore the rain I suppose but the sound is from the interface between the rain and the glass. Otherwise, the rest of the world is locked out and how safe it is in here. You know we all love the rain in this family. You will sometimes find us sat or standing in the porch with the door open just looking at the rain in the street. There isn’t that much to look at here but the rain makes it many more times interesting. The drops on the trees are like the bees on sunny days, movements in the limits of vision, drawing attention to their locations but gone when you move your eyes to them. Our old house was in the middle of common land under the forests of some well know spa hills and in these forests in a rain storm, you could stand dry and listen to the white noise of rain on the canopy. In winter, some rain might make it to ground but in the summer, the wind would fan the rain, making currents of damp air flow through the trees with a scent better than any tranquilizer.

When I first used to keep a diary (an adolescent embarrassment of clichéd observations and fantasies on many levels – no change there then) I would call the days of real downpours Grit-Splashers. I would cycle to college and stand elated in the rain, early enough to know I would be dry before I needed to talk to anyone. From this time, I would imagine myself in small places sheltered from but close to the rain that fell. Under The Ivy or in the broken down and blasted shed under the edge of the trees. Or in the door of the house. And thinking back, the closeness of the shelter was no comfort, just a component of the experience, a necessary component but one I did not need to survive.

Sometimes I think of all the places in the world where it rains at a particular moment, a clump of trees beside the M6, some deep bush in a forest in the Highlands, an overhanging alleyway in the city. They all exist like that tree in the quad maintained in their existence by their very solidity and atoms rather than by the omniscience of their creator. He may have set it all going but the rain that falls on these places is a creation of machinery, of clockwork and quantum. And then I am in that state again, thinking of everything and nothing, trying to imagine both states at the same time. They are both impossible things. Everything encompasses the limits of the universe and then some, all the possible creation sciences that explain the big-bang and all the possible other Universes beyond it. Everything has all that is possible to imagine as existing or happening, all possible space and all possible time, the brain state of EVERYTHING. And nothing has nothing and cannot take up space even in its description here. This sentence is infinitely too big for nothing as nothing needs no space and no time. Switch between the two and you will switch between two unknowables going via so many more and so much that is mundane and real, the ice in a comet or the light from a flickering TV. When I was a kid, this would fry me, sit me in the corner with no thought other than this flip-flop of reality that blinded me to the rubbish of what really kept me going, to food and water and books and being out of the cold.

With the rain, it is grey and windy, stereotypical British summer, with the trees lashing about and the umbrellas making way, white noise outside but so quiet in here. On one rainy day, my class watched as our teacher went to raid the school bee-hive, I am sure expecting that the cold and wet would keep the insects quiet and happy at this theft. We sniggered at the stings he got but he came back with wax and golden, gooey honey, enough for us all to take a swig for it ran like wine down our throats as the rain made the wooden hut rattle. We could feel it shaking but it was the end of summer term and we had no work other than to draw the honeycomb before it all got eaten. That hut was full of natural things, wasps’ nests, flaky and papery on the cupboards at the back, skulls of various road-killed animals boiled clean by the teacher in spare lessons, and ranged in size from the badger to the shrew, a tiny, delicate thing that fell apart just being breathed on. Outside this room, one day, another teacher tried the oil-can collapsed by the weight of the atmosphere, not with a 2 litre castrol can but a pre-steel band drum, maybe one of the barrels, the price of which we are so concerned about. He placed it over a fire of some kind, boiling the dirty water inside it until the jet of hot air escaping from it made the big school behind it shimmer like a mirage. Then he sealed it. Eventually we heard a great crack as the contracting air inside was overcome by the miles of weighty gas over our heads. Air crushing us like paper rolled up and made art. But this was science. And the drum cracked again when we threw cold water at it so we could pick it up and return it to the caretaker.

I return from my diversion there. It still rains here but not as heavily as before. But it still rains and that makes me happier than anything. A void for most people, this is my paradise, a place where the spaces that fill with pain and anxiety are instead taken up with water. Like self-harm, it is something to take your mind off things, something that has a defined end and you know will go away. But who wants it to go away?

White Sands

On a summer day that in England was wet and miserable, leading to floods and incorrect use of commas, we found ourselves in what seemed like the tropics. This beach was wide and sheltered, fed by peaty streams, treadmills for the trout that came down from the mile-long lake higher up. Given an hour or two I am sure I could have tickled one up for tea. The fishing here was licence-free. In this part of the country, the children had already returned to school, so many tiny, single-room places all over this island, and the beach was ours. Maybe in the distance, we would see some flash of white as a caravan scraped its way along the single-track roads, trying to find hard-standing in the face of expected wet weather; maybe we saw the odd birder picked out only as a movement of green on green in the distance, but we never got close enough to speak to anyone.

One Sunday, shamed we were waved at by someone reading in a garden. We waved back, not sure if waving was allowed on the Sabbath but they looked liked mainlanders at the very least though the cow with its head over the wall being fed and tickled indicated that they lived here all the time. We walked miles in the sunshine that day not expecting to burn but we did. Sun from the sky and sun from the white sand got us from two directions. In the distance, the form of a sleeping woman was pointed out, an incubus maybe, for the faithful to these stones. And I saw her smile at our discomfort and dislike of the rest of the world in this perfumed moorland.

And the stones! This island was covered in aged reminders of us so long ago, families like us, existing in the face of harder things than we ever have to experience. A toothache un-checked, tiny bacteria raging across the population and now we get them in a second with cheap chemicals available everywhere. I imagined men, driven down by wet and cold and illness, hewing rock for months and then lugging it with brute force, up hills and for what? Something we can never know. In the early morning monotone, the stones took water like water, feeding the lichens and other rugged plants which clung to their sides. Close-up and they were like verdigris or some abstract painting of rough oil, not meant to be anything, but in this filmy coat were things more complex and meaningful than any art that humans may produce. The stones are laid out like an early cross, a symbol dragged up long before its current meaning made it one of three across the world that make us love and hate equally. Its long axis points at the sleeping woman in the mountains, indicating where the moon will rise out of the gaps. Where the two axes cross, there was found a cairn. I did read what they found in it but maybe it was not important enough to remember. Bones or pots but nothing really matters, only what it becomes as a symbol of the ultimate nostalgia. Go back then? Maybe not with all that sickness and dying young but start the journey to then, indeed.

You know when you wish you could go back to a time before some trauma, thinking maybe you could undo it or warn people? Think what would really happen. You would carry on the same way and simply have that terrible event to go through again. Maybe start as a child with all the knowledge you have now and be gifted. Perhaps that is what happens, these precocious children and so clever, than when older they find some way of starting again with all their accumulated knowledge. Not sure about that. But is there a time you want to go back to? What would you want to undo? Not a good idea really is it? I imagine myself, reading adult books under the shade of a tree in the rose garden (no running or shouting) at our old school. No work to go to, no football to play, just sucking up the future, making what I already knew better. Should I learn how to use commas properly but then again the rest of the world will have to define that before I can possibly know. Take this further and regress over and over, go back to carefree days and layer your understanding of the world, repeat, reiterate, learn new things and understand the world, the universe, the branes beyond it.

There was a description of a new type of brain scan on the radio the other day. It is called Magnetoencephalography and complements existing technologies in that it tells us when things happen and has a millisecond frequency. Take this together with older types of scans which are slow but locate actions in space within the brain, and you have mind-reading. Well maybe not but it makes me think of the acres of space left in our heads that we do not use. I was talking to my daughter yesterday before she went to sleep and we ranged over many things. At her leavers’ service for her infants’ school last week, one of her classmates said that when he grew up he wanted to be a scientist and discover a potion to make people live longer. My daughter was intrigued by this and it got us onto telomeres and why people get old. She asserted that learning new things pushes old stuff out of your brain and she was amazed when I told her that nothing ever gets pushed out because no human has ever come close to filling up the brain. I told her about memory in computers (she gave up trying to understand binary) but loved the idea of neurons and all the connections between them making memory. And all this comes out of that lump of jelly wobbling around on the top of your backbone, a complex thing making new connections all the time and forgetting nothing. We will have all that in machine before long, copies of mind. The existence of human physiology is proof that mechanical copies can be as good when the technology reached that point. What about memory and brain and consciousness? We are onto soul and that infinite point when mind and body come together in some confluence of two medical disciplines – probably more than two. I’ve got soul.

I Like To Think That Mr. Gardner Would Appreciate It.

The building I now work in appears to be modern - last 10-15 years probably - though the Edge Lane site in Liverpool appeared nearly as recent despite being built around 1900. It was refaced and re-modelled inside to create a reasonably comfortable environment. However, the buildings around the one I now reside in, are pre/post war, mostly single storey with those typical iron window frames and big wooden doors. Take a picture of this site and convert it to black and white and you will have something from the fifties and sixties, a sort of Ealing comedy atmosphere. In fact it looks like you may imagine the actual Ealing Studios did (though they didn't).

Funny old world. We need a thunderstorm and we may get one.

As you may have guessed, I jettisoned The Ancestor's Tale temporarily in order to read Harry Potter. I am not allowed to detail any of the plot in case my wife reads something crucial but I will say that it was slow to start and got better. I though it a return to the old style with a lot more concentration on the school year rather than extraneous events. I know I promise full reviews and never provide them and you will have to wait until my wife has finished HP but the intent is here. Having said I was going back to The Ancestor's Tale, we went to the library yesterday and I came away with The Stars' Tennis Balls if only because it is by Stephen Fry. Portents are good, though they always are with Stephen Fry who can do no wrong - except Absolute Power. I am drooling at the thought of the follow up to Moab Is My Washpot though it may not arrive - ever. I imagine him picking over my style and grammar in the same way he pulls up Alan Davies in Quite Interesting and you can show your support for the great curly-headed underdog at www.GiveAlanDaviesMorePoints.com.

I wonder how Molly is getting on in Tibet?

But Mr. Axebanger - Those Are My Initials.

I am sure that this article will vanish and not be archived so read it now. I especially like the grit of the customers as witnessed by paragraph 3. So it continues. I am so glad I left.

Matrix Management

You can be Religious and Moral.
You can be Areligious and Amoral.
You can be Areligious and Moral

Can you be Religious and Amoral?

Excuse the simplicity here. Obviously the billions of colours in this ranging of human behaviour mean that you cannot argue any of the above points. They may be useful as the starting point for a discussion and indeed that is what they were intended to be when I wrote them first. The last question is I suppose quite valid though of course the answer would depend on whether the question was asked by the answerer or someone else. The bottom line with this discussion, is that I again taking the DeBono route of "I am right and you are wrong" and wanting to see why Religion is used as an excuse for so much which is obviously wrong by almost anyone's standards.

There is the element of being blind to the full picture when lost in the deep complexities of any philosophy - and religion is just a particular type of philosophy - but some acts have to have a very strong promise of religious reward to get people to carry them out. I think maybe you have guessed what I am referring to. Why are so many people willing to die in a most horrible manner, to take many other people with them and to do it in the face of seeing the bloody aftermath created by their predecessors?

My image of religion is a very fuzzy, benign thing, of golden sunlight through clouds, of quiet contemplation and application to betterment. None of this inspired me to anything more than intellectual contemplation though that has sometimes been intense albeit without much conviction of any possible truths to be discovered. What distortion of those quiet views drummed into me by Pipe-Smoking, Tweed-wearing headmasters could ever justify just one murder? Nothing can - ever. Any philosophy which even allows the contemplation of such things is flawed but then again as far as I am concerned the majority of philosophy which involves any element of un-explained (you could say supernatural) belief, is flawed. I have mentioned the idea of not increasing the complexity of creation by asking what created the creator but recent scientific theories have opened up keyholes into the fuzzy super-cosmos that surrounds the big bang. This is where this set of ideas descends into fuzziness and I have to give up. I hold simplified ideas in my head about things beyond the big bang but things which my limited math skills leave me unable to comprehend in any more than basic form.

All these floating particles and colliding Branes have no moral element whatsoever. However, if out of these things, somehow was built a logic analyser which could comprehend everything down to an emotional level as well as an intellectual one, would it not see that Humans have an emotional component, concepts of pain and bereavement and see that acts which most humans would condemn are just not right for this world? Just because humans are irrational and get upset and cry and all the other things which machines and computers don't do, doesn't mean that a machine without these components would see what good and bad actually was. The idea of psychopathy came to me there. Are there humans without emotional sides to their brains - through accident or genetics or even trauma - who can see the difference between right and wrong? (Right and wrong in my logical construct which I hope you have been able to accept.) I expect there are. There are also plenty of humans with as much emotional content as you could wish for who are capable of such terrible things. In comes to me now that of course the people who carried out the recent attacks are fired by a very emotional sense of what is right and wrong. It may be that they are just at the end of a line of escalations, but the question is, how to we intercept that building trail of escalations? I have no answer and I am sure you were expecting me to say that. The problem is I don't know if I am right but I do know that some people are certainly wrong.

A Severe Attack Of The Mollywobbles!



Go on! Admit you'd never guess that this was the north end of Liverpool rather than the sea-front in Miami.

It's been a funny weekend. Not sure about what happened most of the time. It all seems a blur. I was up in the attic sometime and then at the Marina and once I was at hospital. I was aiming to put up all the photos but for whatever reason you only get the one of the Marine Pub above.

Will someone confirm to me that Andrew Marr said that Ted Heath would have preferred to be around to give a warm and glowing tribute to the late Margaret Thatcher? My wife says she heard him say it but thinks she must have been mistaken.

Gottleib Daimler
Piero della Francesca
Martin Heidegger

Slow Day



Another photo to trigger some words. This is the docks in Bristol sometime in 1985 I suspect. I got my first 35mm camera for my 21st birthday while I was doing my placement year with the wonderful Bristol And West Building Society which gave me loads of time for just ambling around taking pictures. I have a box of thousands of prints most of which are useless because i just took pictures of anything I could. As it takes so long to scan them in, you may only get a couple of pictures at a time if I can be bothered at all.

Now - Jon Hale - Mean Fiddler - does this mean anything to you? Taunton to Bristol to Liverpool to London. If so then please email me at rdeweyden@hotmail.com. Go on! Yer Will, yer will, yer will, yer WILL!

A busy weekend ahead including masquerading as a Taxi driver tonight so no summer-night beer which is not nice. There is the tape of the Michael Palin thing about Hammershoi who I have to admit i had not heard of until reading about him in the Radio Times. His pictures are like a cross between Vermeer and Hopper. Restrained and beautiful - I suddenly seem to be out of adjectives today.

Eat Your Heart Out Penny Smith

Yes! All right, it's maybe not that good.



I cannot quite remember where this is. It might have been at The Flying Picket or possibly the 051 Club. Wherever it was, the band is Fergus who's bass player went on the play with Electrafixion (Half of the Bunnymen). One of my photos was used on their flyers. Didn’t actually get paid for it but hey - the magic rubs off!

Ai No Derrida!

It's no good! I am just so proud of this title. Read it and fall at my feet like King Rollo.

There was a right-angled cloud above our house last night. In fact all the wispy, high-altitude clouds in the last glimmer of day seemed to be more planned than normal. Of course random movements of air can produce anything you can think of in the sky but it doesn't stop them being interesting when they do appear as Kate Bush well knows.

The talk of clouds has made me see this writing strangely; the light here has made it seem like it is suspended in the air, sort of forming in a plane that just exists logically in the air rather than being flat against a real plane of the glass in the screen. It's a bit like the Necker Cube where perceived reality jumps and resumes depending on how you tell your mind to see something. I feel like I should be adding 'Life's a bit like that isn't it?' in the style of the best Radio 4 Thought-for-the-dayer. With events as terrible as recent ones close to home (though I bet you haven't thought too much about things just as bad and worse elsewhere), my thoughts turn to this idea of reality and perception. What is the divine reward going to be like? Violent ends such as those we have seen recently provoke deep internal investigations which spill over into the nature of reality and scientific ideas on the beginning of the universe. I can see that this is going to become as unstructured as a French Philosophy lesson so I'd better rein it in.

The news that Karl Marx has been voted as the greatest ever philosopher in a Radio 4 poll has me thinking that the Radio 4 polls are always rigged. Margaret Thatcher was regularly voted as Top Woman (like Top Nation in 1066 and All That I suppose) and from what I remember, Top man as well. Like in all those NME polls where some band got awarded Best Band AND Worst Band of the year. I once went to a recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and could not quite get over the feeling that I was an outsider. I knew the drill but there was this weird air of chumminess; the feeling that all the rest of the audience were in on something I couldn't quite get. And then you must never give away the secrets such as the fact that .. (CENSORED BY THE RADIO 4 SECRET POLICE - No John! Don't hit me with that rolled up copy of the Guardian).

Phew! We're back. I've just had to sign something. They threatened to cut my tongue out - I would have been The Listener. And I have Ariel in the title of this Blog; that's very nice indeed. You do your best. Sorry! Got away from me a bit there. Still it's better than French Philosophy.

Trotsky one day and Marx the next. They're going to be watching me aren't they?

Bet His Ears Are Burning

It turned up at last! I'm not sure if it can be genuine but it at least shows that it was a climber's ice-pick rather than the weedy thing for cracking cocktail ice.

Piolet

A friend of mine once claimed,
he owned the ice-pick
that killed Trotsky,
the one that made his ears burn.

We are not clear today
how this man died.
Was it by an axe,
a shining metal instrument
that rang on contact
with the skull
and sank into museums
with the blood still on it?

Or maybe, less heroically,
it was a weedy chisel,
for breaking cocktail ice,
plunged easily between the eyes
to tap the Marxist theory,
the humanist computer
sucking all humanity
to Mercader and SMERSH.

A small and deadly incident,
in Mexico,
became an end of history,
a little termination
where all events must merge
and separate again.

The ice-pick floated north,
and in the hands of Dr. Freeman
cut the nerves of Communists,
with twenty-second,
“transorbitals”,
an afternoon of terror
at the hands of madmen
made to cure the sane
and different.

The Heat - The Dust - It's Not November You Know

Listening to - The Hum Of The Air Conditioning.

Well actually there is no aircon here so I'm not actually sure what the hum is. Whatever it is, it's less annoying than The Aphex Twin 'playing' sandpaper on his decks. I suppose he could have played a Sandpiper but it sounded like sandpaper. I also wrote to a colleague on another site about the rabbits 'gambling' on the grass which provoked mirth at the thought of Hazel, Fiver et al, green shades on heads, raising and calling like some rabbity western bar scene. To be honest they don't actually gambol; just race off as soon as someone comes in sight.

Some children had to be rescued from the mud after going out to visit the furthest Gormley statue they could see. Always been at the back of my mind that one, but the beach already has permanent red-flags because of the mud.

Some serious-minded reading for you if you are that way inclined. Don't bother if you are trying to forget.

One Of The Few



Scene above our house yesterday. We were told it was a Battle Of Britain flypast but I suspect that the full set of planes was busy elsewhere so all we got was a single Spitfire. He did do a wing-waggle as he left. I suspect they are not allowed to do victory rolls in those expensive machines. Come to think of it, they weren't allowed to do victory rolls in 1940 either.

Hypnagogia

My dozing thoughts the other night must have been sparked by The Ancestor's Tale. I was thinking about how the organization of cells in the body reflects the early coming together of single-celled creatures to form bodies. I always found Volvox fascinating and from the pictures this is the start of colonial life. they look so much like the early stages of embryonic development in more complex animals.

Dawkins' description of how the Genes in cell nuclei use a collection of repeating subroutines to create the diversity of life started me on this way of thinking. He talks about a library of functions which all life uses to some extent. The fact that Human and Chimpanzee DNA is nearly identical shows that the library must be the greater part of life. Large numbers of the sub-routines must simply not be used which makes me guiltily think of many of my software efforts. The bits of DNA which differ between animals are the Sub Main so-to-speak which calls the library routines in the order required to build the organism in question. Obviously you could extend this analogy far too far but it seems useful for illustration. And remember that Banana plants share a large portion of the same subroutines. Great swathes of the library functions must be related to chemical processes; indeed genes don't actually cause the creation of anything other than chemicals which are used to determine how something works inside an organism.

It seems obvious to me that there is great potential for the existence of many times the number of species that have existed. There must be many library routines and the ways in which these could be used to create valid (well-formed you could say) organisms must be up in the factorial-using mathematics of the stratosphere. As the Human genome project already has the sequences available, it may not be too long before we are able to understand how to put those functions together to create un-heard-of living things. I hear that Craig Venter is resurrecting his idea to create a synthetic Bacterium, not it appears from any desire to increase human knowledge but because he hopes to engineer the bacteria to create useful things. I don't want to stifle his creativity but I can imagine that the idea will seem very dangerous to most people. Me as well I suppose. Just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we should. It'll be out of the lab and playing the stock markets before you know it - deducing the existence of income tax and rice pudding even.

I have noticed in my spell-checks of these entries (using Word), that I am rarely getting the long green underlines which indicate some problem with the grammar. I used to be bothered about these but soon realised that Microsoft Word does not have much artistry about what it considers good grammar. Many times it rejected perfectly good constructs which I left in as I considered them OK. The question is, have I subconsciously taken in what it was telling me? I must have. On another note, you will of course realise that it does not pick up the useless errors I put in where the word is spelled perfectly but is just the wrong word. My wife tries to catch them but usually I don't bother correcting them.

Probably Grauniad standard today. See you.

Brain Chemistry

Your god is a chemical imbalance. Your paradise is the split second between the time those clock hands touch and the time your Phenotype becomes irrelevant. Those voices in your head are nowhere else but there, a slight rise in some hormone created by the anger you have at yourself. And how do you tell us all this? No speech convinces anyone but your fellow sufferers of any need for things like this. And the dead will become part of the world, mingling with you, and your chemicals, re-made to feed us all, to grow the food, to make the drugs, to build the safety that we all crave. There are fingers on buttons all over the world now. I suppose you did that, tick a box on a piece of paper in some office raising our notice of buzzing insects. But how do you value yourself in this? From the first joining of intelligent chemical soup all those billions of years ago, through the construction of vehicles to take us to the stars, everything is upwards. Except you! This planet has done its best to kill us all, all our generations from bacteria to us, with fire, with asteroids, with earthquakes, with wars, and we are still here, still able to feel and be and know what is right and what is good. And in all this I embrace everyone; I feel dragged to one side, a belief I feel is as equally unjustified as yours but you bring it home, to my home. I stand with everyone, and I mean everyone - the numbers who agree with you are as irrelevant as the dust in the wind and you will be but as dust in the wind, when that chemical turns your brain to sludge in the face of all that anger or pulls itself apart in that fire and chemical thing you hold to yourself. In my head, I have the whole day in slow-motion, the horror of the worst possible things, but I know that they mean nothing to you because you have not determined what you want this to do. It does you harm, it obviously does you harm. You think you are some famous star, burning a track through society to become a legend for mothers to tell their children. Instead they will tell of the men and women in green who came out of the smoke and floodlights, who stood black and tired in the quiet city, of the crumpled commuters waiting in shock but still aiming to carry on. While you will be nothing more than shreds of people, forced into the stones of famous buildings and sand-blasted into the sky towards something I cannot define. The little deaths, the safe endings to life in the hands of those we love are still the normal way of things. The long-life will save us all in the end. Not only will we win, we have won already.

Not Good

This room echoes. Plenty of dichotomies regarding sad tunes powering away in the wreckage. What one set everything off? Can't bring myself to consider that it is worth carrying on for, though this is just a tiny thing in a world of tiny things. They'll get us out and save us all from everything but this. This must be revenge and on who? It is like a storm in here, all chaotic particles with no destination, just trying to find a synapse to connect to, to trigger the next in a series of meaningless decisions. Think of three years down the line and the soot and steel will be gone; the tunnels will be open again. And the suits are right, and right with us. All our disagreements are as but the scratches on our arms as kids, no difference to the real things which matter. We have been sucked in. Trains crash and planes crash and bridges collapse in storms but nobody starves. It all goes on and on and on.

Under the dripping trees, the crackles of the radio cannot be heard. Like for a limb out of the covers on a hot night, the wind blows in, to cool this humid place of green and leaves. The networks stop at the edge of our garden, an air-gap between us and the real world. There were bombs then too but none that we ever heard. We were poorer then in some ways and now we are richer but sadder. I find a dry part of this lean-to in the trees and settle down to read. The world flows in both directions, at least for itself, ignoring us poor wretches tied by arrows going ever forward to the end of us, the end of all of us, the end of time. Time is like a globe with no start point, no poles and no equator. We are limited in our direction on it but, live forever, and you get back to the start. Albert will shrink you and your life but make you fat. Maybe time will slow enough to let you live forever but probably not. What if I travelled on a beam of light? See the colours change; things get shorter for my friends who wave as I go by.

I call the last number.

Taking A Number Of Small Vertebrates Of The Order Anura To The Taxidermist

Remember when you were at school and you would gather around interesting things like Slow Worms or an 'Art' magazine or a fight simply because they were interesting? (Apologies if you are still at school and still gathering around such things; 'Art' magazines are especially interesting, I mostly liked stuff about Van Eyck.) Nothing changes. The number of people older than me (there are some) who stand around with smiles like the kid off Mad Magazine while one of their number scrolls through the tunes on a bloody mobile. That's all I want to say about that apart from the fact that this in no way refers to an incident which has just occurred.

Blocked up solid now. I am going to look on the map to see if the scenic way home from here is any use. The quickest route hone is via Motorway and is pure slog as motorways always are though this book about the M25 seems interesting. As the book is available in Formby Library, maybe I should stop there on the way home tomorrow.

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy - There Are Chickens!

I'm not sure what to write about. The long drive, while only a few minutes longer, is nearly all on Motorway and is getting to be a slog.

The fire alarm went off yesterday, and once I'd got over the realisation that it was a real one and that no one had actually told me where to go, it got a bit boring and wet standing round in the car park. I vaguely recognised a few of the people hanging around under the limited number of company umbrellas (never had to spell that word before - looks funny) and realised that some must be people who worked at the old place a few years ago and escaped up here. There is my colleague Martin of course who drops over for coffee and a colleague from further back who actually resigned from the old company to come and work here. To clarify the situation, I moved over as part of an outsourcing deal so I do the same job from a different site. Technically I can do what I do from home - all the development tools I use fit nicely on this laptop - but Number One Son's presence may make concentration difficult. With any luck I should get a permanent desk soon which will mean I can lug the giant monitor in.

Bit of real-time interaction here - Martin has just signed in and I'm sure will be over for coffee in a second. Isn't technology great?

We watched My Life As A Child yesterday, a new BBC series where children are given Video cameras just to capture family life. Excellent viewing! In my almost subconscious realisation that I sometimes still feel like a ten-year-old, it is nice to see that some ten-year-olds have deep and interesting minds and the eloquence to express them. So much of the news today wants to show kids as uncommunicative and surly, violent even. The three kids in yesterday's programme, despite being in second families, seemed balanced and loving and aware of having to do the right thing. As well, bearing in mind that they were responsible for all the filming and setting up of shots, they all seemed aware of story-telling. I suppose that should not be a surprise; my daughter can make up some rambling but fascinating stuff. To me, these nuggets of insight into her internal view of the world are spaced out at intervals but I get the feeling that this made-up place is with her all the time, tempered by the practicalities of real-life, of having to sit down to tea or to got to lessons at a particular time. What if we all had lives like the main character in About A Boy where your time was all your own? Obviously it would depend on character but I could see myself retreating into some strange world of imagination rather than the structured play in the book. No more Countdown though - well not in the same way.

Letter From The North

It only took 40 minutes to get here despite it being 30 miles instead of the 10 to the old site which takes -- er took -- me 25 minutes. Can't get used to not going to the old site ever again. Bit of a shock really. I left without fanfare either which is actually quite sad. Not helped by not knowing anyone at all here. A colleague of mine has been working here for some time but he is not in this morning. All last night I thought of things and noted that I should mention them to my colleagues today until a split second later, I remembered that I won't see them again; sending these water-cooler snippets via email doesn't seem the same.

I suppose I must write about normal stuff for the time being. Like the poetry workshop which one day I may have a go at though that one being about conflict has made me much more aware of the pain in this article from the same place. And then something better with the newly-discovered Da Vinci drawing. And of course, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe.