Strong Strung String Strang Streng

Listening to Spiritchaser by dead Can Dance

The minutia of my actual work is quite interesting at the moment. I have long since put all that faffing around with frames into the trash and am now deep into dataviews and the .net equivalent of Excel pivot tables. Learning on the fly I suppose but with Music for 18 Musicians seeming to fit the actual mechanics of the stuff, all is right and the sun is shining – or “the sun am shining” as Word wants me to use - I seem to have the patois version or maybe a non-pc pc.

I tried to take a 360 panorama form the top of the British Camp at the weekend but the clouds were blowing across the sky so fast that by the time I’d come around to the start again, the image was so different that the panorama software kept complaining and wouldn’t accept that my idea of the join was correct when everything it knew said something different. So you might get an idea of how dramatic it was up there. The boy managed to walk most of the way himself despite complaints and requests for “carry” and “no walk”. My daughter ran up and was there long before us. It was windy but a walk up there is always worth it. In the bad winter of ’81 (dontcha know) I struggled up all the way to the top in drifts and -10 degrees of frost. I got home so stiff that I couldn’t lift the latch on the door. Being up there is strange; you are only 10 minutes from the car park, good coffee and a pub, there are many people on the hill on all but the worst days and yet it seems remote, like a walk across a remote moor. If instead of following the main paths up and around the hill, you go down the metalled road from the car park you will go by the reservoir (complete with its own set of dogs who will check you out) and end up on a rocky path through a very dense wood. If you manage to get through it without spraining anything or getting lost, you will emerge onto the common land where I used to live. This was the path I took that winter so in an alternative universe my bones are lying there, picked clean by foxes in the gloom. There is a roaring silence all around, all distant noise flattened to a low hum that swallows any other sound like gravity. I never appreciated it when I lived there though.

Doctor Who at the weekend – all really is right with the world though I am sure the Cybermen will want to put a stop to that.