Hello! Siadwell Here!

I had a big literary idea for this morning’s post but I think I had a dream about Kevin Turvey last night and the image of the “accent and a mood from South-West Midlands” is up in front of my eyes like Esther Greenwood’s baby. Anyone for a pint of Crème-de-menthe?

I should start looking forward. My daughter pinched the free ‘One foot in the Grave” DVD last week and now goes around quoting Victor’s homily about the non-existence of the past, present and future, and though she just likes the logic of it, it makes me realise that I am worrying too much about what has happened and what might happen. None of this is under my control and the chance of my village being bombed forcing me to trek across the arid wastes of Africa with all my possessions is quite low. Reality always fails to meet expectation either negatively or positively. As you might be aware, I have a lingering wish to simplify things around me but like all the other commuters and office workers, there is a tension within me between the desire to keep things the same and the wish for an end to the routine. I am afraid the example that I have come up with is the end of the last episode of the last series of Drop the Dead Donkey, when George ends up earth-bound while the love of his life jets off to some exotic place. The fact that the shuffle on Media Player has just thrown up ‘because of’ by Leonard Cohen seems a coincidence too far.

None of this means that I am looking for a Reggie-Perrin-Style change to my life; coming home is a joy of stability in what seems like the fit-inducing buzz of the speed of life at the moment, but at risk of sounding like one of the business-speak memos which I hate, within those parameters some sort of sorting out and re-evaluation might be useful. I keep throwing up some weird examples today but I am now thinking of the 3D model of the shadow of a rotating hypercube. I once saw an animation of this on a Horizon programme about the fourth dimension and for a second I understood. Try it yourself at dogfeathers. Click the stereo button until you get two separate images and then go cross eyed. Robert Heinlein wrote a short story called “ - And He Built a Crooked House” about a building with 4D properties, a tesseract in fact though from what I saw of the bit about the universe in The Beach, Alex Garland might well have failed to understand the maths involved in his book “The Tesseract”. The Heinlein story reminds me of another tale, probably also from Omni magazine, called “The Infinite Plain” about a ball turret gunner in a Super Fortress, who is cut from his craft at some dizzying altitude and falls to what he thinks is the Earth but is in fact a mathematical construct. I won’t spoil the ending but I cannot find it or reference to it online. Anyway, you might think that today’s theme is along the line of being about the constancy of maths and the physical basis of the cosmos. This all stems from reading “The Last Three Minutes” by Paul Davies. Again, this should be a positive because we have a few years left yet though sometimes I wonder at the sunlight through the window on early mornings and wonder if the sun has gone Nova in the night. Yet another short story has come to mind, one where the sun does exactly that and the people on the night-side of the Earth have to come to terms with being fried at sunrise. Even the worst of mankind’s excesses against itself are petty playground squabbles compared to all this but obviously pointing this out to anyone seems stupid and idealistic.

Some constancy in my punctuation would be welcome as well I suppose.