Always September, Never Halloween.



We all took the train to Liverpool today for the Anglican cathedral’s Narnia day. Entry was via a wardrobe naturally though there was a gap either side for the claustrophobic and those just a bit above that sort of nonsense. Inside, and we found plenty of characters to have your picture taken with and a vast array of Sticky tape-and-glue activities to build homemade things to add the vast pile of pre-manufactured stuff we already have at home. Father and daughter were able to support each other’s shaky courage and ascended to the top of Cair Paravel for the highest view in the city where we found an entire Brownie troop sitting against the wall having the highest picnic. I took a few photos with the camera dangling out of the viewing windows but managed to get over the irrational desire to throw the thing off. This is the hospital where both children were born.



I took this of the bells as we clung to the steps on the way down.



Downstairs mayhem seemed to have broken out as the sombre, gowned attendants had to cope with every organised group of children in the county and some unorganised ones as well. It was just a good job that the birds of prey in the (I want to say vestry but that would have been silly) Knave were sensible enough to keep perch-fast.

Lunch was an all-you-can-eat in Chinatown and was followed with a visit to Virgin Records to celebrate a modest (very modest if you must ask) financial advantage that seems to have been directed my way. (It appears that my recent reading has in some away affected my prose style in a manner destined forever to echo the legal communications between Miss Eyre and the uncle previously unknown to her.) I bought Through the Windowpane by Guillemots and The Best of Ian Dury if you are interested.

And that's the month. See you next year.

The 14th Reincarnation of Shooting Fish



I finished Jane Eyre last night. The end actually caught me unawares as I was expecting a lot of loose-end tying between “Reader I married him” and the end and it was just a short chapter which ended with St John – the strange clergyman with a long-winded turn of phrase – detailing how he was fully expecting to die before he write another letter to Jane. I can’t say I will miss him. I’m not sure if I was expecting anything different in the main bit of the story as I know this from at least two TV versions but I was happy with all the philosophy and managed to keep up even if the depths of the longest paragraphs. I think my wife wants me to read Pride and Prejudice next but I have The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid to read first and the probably something else entirely. You may like to go back to the first few entries in this blog to find out what I was reading then for one day I may finish it and then this blog, me, the entire world will fold in on themselves and leave a void ready for the next big bang. Or possibly not!

I Hate Badgers! They’re So In Your Face!



It has been male bonding day in the deWeyden household. Eldest was accompanied by her mother on a school trip of the “pointing out interesting things around the locality” type while youngest was treated to a train trip to Southport where he argued that every stop was our stop and demanded his own ticket despite being conveyed gratis. We walked (actually he was pushed) to the end of the pier where for one Earth Pound we were given ten old pennies that we could fritter away in various old-time games. When my first attempt at topple-the-pennies resulted in a seven-fold return I thought I had beaten the system until I realised that the only place I was going to be able to spend these was the ten feet around where I was standing. We did get six sweets with five goes from the grapplers but none of them were toddler friendly and had to be reserved for the eldest, though as you can see from the picture above, she seems to have been rather successful at foraging. I hope she sticks to the sweets though we could pretend we are besieged German civilians circa 1940 and make some acorn coffee. Youngest jettisoned his lunch of best Jamie-baiting hot-dog sausage to the benefit of the pigeons but managed to stuff all the bun in his mouth at once and still manage to smile.

The Loneliness of the Dangling Modifier



The big news for today is that I have remembered two things … er … one thing from the list of really important stuff that I thought about yesterday. I thought because I had managed to remember them both several times that I was not going to forget them. And what do you know; just thinking about them has brought the other one back. This one first then!

I was watching that nice Stephen Fry on the Secret Life of the Manic Depressive last night – a very brave thing do to. It struck me that maybe Bipolar Disorder (as we now have to call Manic Depression) is just a reaction of things deep within our nature to the modern world. It struck me as Mr Fry was being tailed around various shops by a cognitive therapist who tried to talk him through (though not out of) buying various things which he would never use. He mentioned the joy of discovering a long sought-after rarity in a shop and how the thrill of the hunt was much more satisfying than simply ordering the thing on the internet. I thought then, that the mania that he was displaying at that point was simply the redirection of the energy required for real, blood-spouting hunts all those millennia ago into some form of modern release. My theory fails twice, once when I try and explain where the depression comes into this and then again when I hold it up against my other similar theory that Autism is some sort of throwback to an older, less emotional time; one of things that sufferers from Bipolar disorder fear about being put on various medications (Lithium in particular) is that their top and bottom will be removed until they live their lives in an emotionless “letter box” (as Richard Dreyfuss put it). Maybe there is a link and maybe I am just talking speculative rubbish as usual.

The second thing I have in my head in reasonable detail though I cannot remember what started me thinking about it. (pause for quick browse through the Radio four listings). Got it! It was a piece on Word of Mouth yesterday regarding the euphemistic language used to refer to death and dying. This piece started with the wonderful sketch from That Mitchell and Web Look from last week where a criminal mastermind and his two henchmen were discussing how to kill someone who was getting in their way – “deal with the situation”, “he has become a nuisance” etc. This annoyed one of the sidekicks who kept trying to get them to say “Kill” and “Murder someone to death”. Very funny but quite incidental to what follows really. Through some minor route through my head, this led me to think about Heaven and how this place must be either a police state where every type of behaviour is checked and matched and compared with the ideal. The question is then who decides what is the correct way to make heaven … er … heavenly? This of course reminds me of the story that our headmaster used to tell us of a well known Korean hero, newly arrived in heaven who asked for a tour of hell. He was surprised to find that hell was exactly the same as heaven. Just before he ascended to his rightful afterlife, he was taken to where the people in hell ate to find them moaning and struggling because the chopsticks they had been provided with were 5 feet long, making it impossible to move the delicious food to the mouth. Glad to return, the hero goes to have his first meal in heaven and discovers that everyone there is provided with the same 5 foot chopsticks. The difference being that here, everyone is feeding each other. Heaven is made by how people interact with each other, not how they fit into the material world. This story of course says much more about how people behave in this life rather than in any possible, subsequent one.

None of this really tells you what I was thinking in detail about this. I would say more later but you probably wouldn’t believe me.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

There is a madman on the telly. I think he can’t actually get to us but it seems like he’s in my head. He cannot hide from anything and stares at the ceiling where the light swings manically, its shadow on the wall like the dark things in his mind.

Like Glencoe


(http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/janeeyre/)

I think I owe my wife an apology over my disagreement about the last film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. We were both disappointed in the BBC version of Jane Eyre last night. As I am in the middle of reading it, I suppose my quibbling must be seen in view of that. However, the break-neck rush over Jane’s early life was quite jarring. Her time with her Aunt and as a pupil and teacher at Lowood school was supposed to define her character and so the speed with which she was shoved off to the (overly gothic) school and whistled through all the trauma and death in that place gave no insight into how Jane became the strange mix of ingénue and savant that is clear in the book. As the young Jane talks to Helen Burns in the two minutes between their first smile and the elder girl’s death (from whatever Neutron Bomb of a disease leaves you looking untouched) they speculate that they think they are expected to become teachers. I wonder why they didn’t go the whole way and show a few spinning newspapers to indicate passing time. Georgie Henley is quite able to handle a half-hour of proper emotional development I am sure. This early stage left me feeling that they days of having to write out children’s parts from TV adaptations of popular drama because of the lack of good child actors had returned. I suppose they wanted to get to the juicy bits with Jane and Mr Rochester and indeed the pace did slow at this point.

I am trying to step back from having a go at the concatenation of various scenes because my complaints are probably just the result of just having read the book. I can probably get over how the house has been made too big and stony for my images and after my rant last week about how we probably expect things like this because no real insight into the décor and furniture is actually to be found in the books, I should be more measured. Having said all this, it is shot beautifully and the adult actors are excellent. Jane herself may be played as a bit too confident – I am not sure I can see this Jane Eyre abandoning her comfortable life to live rough on the moors; she would be much more likely to ask for an excellent reference and a year’s salary in advance. Oooooh. What would I do with thirty pounds?

Big Yellow Spider or Ghosts and Empties



We attempted to go swimming this morning but the pool had had a power cut and so we went to sit in the car at the Coastguard station to wait and see if the power came back on. We arrived in the middle of a dark and dangerous thunderstorm – average distance to lightening of about 2 kilometres. Sitting in the car with dark grey clouds and pouring rain was quite atmospheric and reminded me of the half-term holidays we used to spend by the sea in Wales, because of course it always rained then. I am thinking of this little sanctuary of dunes and scrubby estuary sheep grazing, where the rest of the world seemed far away and we would not think about having to go back to school. It seems that, over the years, the length of time I worry about things has extended well into the future but then a week’s holiday seemed to create a gap long enough to blank out any issues completely. The pool never opened again so we’ve had to skip it. And now the children are bored with the DVD we scrounged from friends so it has been a pretty fragmented day. But as I keep telling my daughter when she whinges, that there are plenty of people around who would be happy to be doing the things she whinges about.

Phew! Is it Still Saturday?

The day has been full and fulfilling. That must be a phrase from somewhere although I suppose the alliteration would make it likely to turn up sooner or later. We found a large, yellowy-orange spider today. It seemed to have small lumps all over it, as if it were made up to look old and wrinkly. A very strange creature indeed, though the camera (useless item that it is) failed to focus and the picture I took of it looks blurred. Anyway, as you can see it is late (unfeasibly late for parents to still be up) so this is all you get. As it is past eleven you get no pictures today.

I am a Camera



According to this article, today I am supposed to tell you how the web has changed by life. The thing is that despite the complete change in outlook that is represented by the internet, I have been using it so long that none of the milestones really stick in my mind. I suppose I can remember the first time I saw some text-based pages all those years ago and how I registered with Amazon for the first time. I can even remember a bit of personal surfing one Christmas Eve when the whole office was standing around doing nothing productive. Only a couple of us had internet access at that time and I suppose the one thing that sticks in my mind is how something which so obviously was going to change lives, was ignored by the great and the good in our department. Maybe it just wasn’t dynamic enough back then – just text-based pages and all mostly in California. There were no fancy logos or colours just one defined background colour with all the pictured to be downloaded separately. I think I downloaded pictures of bridges that day. Now you can read www addresses of the back of rusty old vans in scrap yards – it has been around that long.

It still amazes me that despite the internet being part of almost everything these days, there are so many people in charge of what we do in this industry who still have no real idea what is possible. I always used to quote the (most-likely apocryphal) story of the businessman who sent his ZX Spectrum back because it wouldn’t tell him when his birthday was. This is of course the opposite of my argument. Maybe we should all be like that businessman and expect everything of our technology. The day will come (probably already has) when a computer could be asked this question and will use the retina or finger print that you have used to login to trawl all the databases it can find using its own initiative and will indeed be able to politely tell you when you were born. I love the internet and sometimes I still do get amazed by what it can do. Unfortunately, the children are not amazed and increasingly adults aren’t amazed either. Being amazed by something is the first step to asking what else you can do and without that sense of wonder we stifle development. I suspect that if just one more person in every ten started asking big questions of technology we could be reaching the stars in the next couple of decades. But then again, if the Romans had started doing this, we would be in another galaxy by now. Instead we have to spend so much time thinking about the next meal or how to avoid being the victim of the latest intellectually challenged idea from people who should know better. I always remember the scientists’ reply regarding the original Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative. With the technology available then, the whole project could not possibly work. Only one missile needs to get through for the whole thing to be a failure. I am back to my analogy from the programming world. Sometimes when you find yourself putting in all sorts of junky Boolean variables to be able to jump out of processing, you realise that the whole thing just cannot possibly handle the complexity you want without being stripped down and redesigned. Lots of things in society, lots of processes and procedures put in place by Government and business are either incompetent complexity which could be redesigned or deliberate obfuscation in order to confuse customers.

Things could be so much better but people just don’t know. We have the technology. We actually have the technology to make so much stuff that has not even been thought about. I am sorry, this was supposed to be a piece about how wonderful the net has made the world when actually it just makes me think how stupid we all are.

I Am a Wuss



I float. My head fills up with stuff like this and I cannot see anything else. I did want to write something regarding The Home Secretary's travails of yesterday but it was just naff so I haven't bothered. I am hoping that you will accept photos as daily entries.

Isn't That the Noise a Pigeon Makes?



This was Midsummer day this year. I don't know the names of these two guys but they moved around the fete we were at, playing various folky things on gravestones and actually at the altar of the church. Wonderful!

One Person’s Wheel-less Skateboard is Another’s Tea Tray



Such is the profundity of eight-year olds these days.

I am enjoying Jane Eyre a lot more than I thought I would. I sometimes find the depth of Mr Rochester’s language a bit attention-sapping, sometime almost bordering on disconnected gibberish but I am sure Charlotte Bronte knew what he meant. Jane Eyre herself seems to be the ultimate voice of reason in all this, already acting the cool wife who saves her mad husband from himself. I keep making comparisons with modern books, where there is a quarter of the narrative. The human brain extrapolates so much of its experience from the relatively limited sensory input we have but Jane Eyre seems to fill in all the gaps for you, at least those that involve human emotion. As I said before so much of the described environment could be anything, my opinion having been coloured by all the standard early-Victorian background that goes with the TV and film adaptations. Like this one I suppose.

It might be considered strange to recommend a programme which details The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive but the blurb says it is entertaining and informative and it is presented by Stephen Fry as well.

I Can Do Serious! Can You?

Sucking up the human race.
Get James Burke on the case.

It sounds like this guy just beat Banksy to it.

How serious do you want today to be? I think that today should be spent thinking about whether there is any easily distinguishable pattern to Prime Numbers. I know that there isn’t but like perpetual motion and the ultimate answer, everyone thinks that somewhere there must be. If there is a pattern, does that blow all our encryption processes? Maybe there is a particular shape or spiral which determines primes. I just thought of the first few primes and without ever consciously learning them, their ‘primeness’ is just obvious. If only the pattern was that clear. This is like Rudy Rucker’s description of sometimes being able to imagine the fourth dimension. I’ve tried that many times and though it sometimes seems like I can see things that must be at right-angles to everything else, it always turns out to be just another view of our standard 3-dimensional world. I did manage to see it for a few seconds while watching a rotating hypercube on an episode of Horizon but seeing it one minute and then not being able to see it was so frustrating. Now the web has the ability to show you rotating hypercubes but I have never managed to ‘see’ the reality again. Of course there are people whose real jobs are to work out everything that you can possibly know about Prime Numbers, after all, Governments might fall should public key encryption get destroyed by a short cut to factorising numbers, but it nice to think that all you need to play with them is the grey, gooey stuff behind your eyes. I suppose a pencil and paper might be useful as well.

That ole Book Stompin’!



I’ve always wanted to use an apostrophe followed by an exclamation mark.

I did another page or two of my scrapbook today (examples above) and my daughter made me drag out some of the old books to look at. It wasn’t the pictures that sparked the strongest memories but the smell. Some of the early things I put in were experiments done at work using the new–fangled scanners and printers that we had just got. We actually trialled a number of printers and what has remained in these printouts is a smell which reminds me so much of the time. One of the printers actually put a measurable thickness of waxy pigment on the paper, which could be scraped off with a fingernail, and I suspect that this is the smell I get from them. The later books just have oil pastel in them, which smells different. Interweb’s not yet able to take smells so maybe just some nice pictures later.

All That Plastic Tat!

I’ve got so annoyed at the intellectually challenged beliefs in Tony Robinson’s investigation into the “end times” that I’ve had to give up watching for the sake of my blood pressure. There is no hope for me apparently. These idiots are the problem. Where are you when we need you Starglider?

Anyway, I must mention something much more worthy. I finally got hold of a copy of Blood, Sweat and Tea, the printed version of Tom Reynolds’ wonderful blog about his life as an EMT in the London Ambulance Service. The online version is up there on the sidebar – Random Acts of Reality. Read it. You will find out that the Ambulance Service is not an Emergency Service but is instead an Essential Service. They do not have access to useful information that the police actually get on their computers such as the locations of known violent residents etc. Be amazed and humbled by what this man does in the face of general idiocy.

Plz to Meet the Byzantine Emperor

Nice to see that world figures are up-to-speed with contemporary comment. I always like to quote 14th century figures at every opportunity. It keeps me in touch with what is happening in the real world. If you really want to examine those words that were quoted, you could always turn it round and see what Christians were doing at the time. The fact is that over history, it is not religion that has been responsible for all the nasty things that people have done to people; it is just used as an excuse. So take any religious group and compare it with any non-religious group and you find that the proportion of people in either prepared to do nasty things to others is probably about the same. Sometimes it does appear to me that the religious amongst us are MORE likely to be like this but that is probably because a tale of an atheist psychopath is always less news-worthy than something about a nut who uses religion as an excuse for something bad. I could mention the LRA, or worse still some of the religious establishment in the US who as far as I am concerned are using the power of a legitimate government as their weapon of choice.

It reminds me of a show I must have mentioned here, regarding experiment into the power of prayer. It involved groups of various faiths praying for named patients in hospital. Now I am not concerned with the outcome; there is something else on that later. The issue relevant here is that the only faith group who questioned whether the other groups’ prayers would have any affect were the Christians. Now this could have been editing but that would have been a bad mistake by the programme makers. Shall we say that all the groups doubted the ability of the others to be successful? That’s seems balanced. Which then of course raises the issue of who is right which is a whole other question and one for someone more into this than I am.

The Material World yesterday quoted a few responses to a previous live programme discussing whether the human mind extended beyond its corporeal boundaries. The final comment struck me quite forcibly. It referred to the idea that if some scientific postulation is true, then the increasing improvements in experimental procedures will tend to move towards proof. The fact is that all experiments into paranormal phenomena have produced results that increasingly tend to move away from the postulations being correct. I have a gut feeling on this whole area which is that if any of this was true, then we would have had absolute proof long ago. I don’t believe in drawn-out and carefully constructed parlour tricks like Uri Geller does; I want real proof – something that is as useful as modern technology. As Arthur C. Clarke says, any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic. We live in such a civilization, so when I can talk to someone on the other side of the world using a small box that I can fit in my pocket, why bother trying to see what someone is thinking.

Thank God I am …………. *

* insert nationality here

A wet, early Saturday evening – late October – somewhere in Wales

This is a long room, either just illuminated for the night or maybe still lit by the grey diffusion through a continuous blanket of cloud. The room is not fully carpeted but has several rugs which, though once of bright colours have now faded to pastels in green and orange telling me that they have been here since this house was built. I see them being placed while the house still smells of new wood and varnish. The hall lets into this room through a centrally placed door which links us here with the front entrance from the grass and sand at the front. This door divides the room into two sections though there is nothing protruding into the room to divide it physically. It is like those triangles defined by other shapes which only exist in the mind.

To the South there is a door leading to the sandy path to the beach and near this door are an oval table and four chairs. The flat of the table top is level with the sanded and varnished window sill. This is where we eat and play cards with the radio on. There is no TV here though our father tells us that there is and it is locked away; maybe that is true or perhaps he is just tormenting us with missing episodes of shows we may be into. We sit close to the window, just a flat inch away from the rain on the window, and the sand and dune grass and the drop to the beach and then the sea pouring its own white noise into the mess of weather.

In the Northern part of the room, there are more comfortable chairs, cushioned and covered with throws again with those pastel colours. There is a bookcase at the North end, a low one with probably three shelves and a collection of books that might interest me. There is also a stamp which can be used to emboss the address of this place onto paper and we use it to mark anything short of a book. And the sound is continuous, the sea with its distant mash of breaking, unstopped since the first sea met the first wind, mixed with the high speed percussion of the rain on glass, itself modulated by the gusts of wind which goad the sea in making its sound. And we read, listen to the radio, play cards and fight, thinking behind it all that we are the luckiest people alive but never admitting that to our parents. There is no world outside this house and what we see, no person beyond those who switch the lights on and off in that distant town. I see the many little rooms, all the people moving about hitting those lights and making in one town a mess of codes and numbers, random lights across the sea.

I could play that sound in my head to help me sleep in the mess of worries that I have these days, wish to go back to listening to the sea building its power outside but now I would wonder if it was about to swell and break its boundary, flood the sand and break waves upon the windows of the house. But the house is still there despite the sea with all its power trying to take us. The house is still there despite the attempts of salt to break it down. The house is still there facing up to all our differences and threats to bring each other into hell. If your God is in charge of such desires then there is no God. Humans will fix these houses; mend the damage caused by wars made in the name of God; come prayer or no prayer.

Outside this room now, the world is wet, not as violent as that wet and stormy day but raining again, to level us all. I could sit in the window all day with a book, protected from the rain by glass and from the room by curtains. I would not be worried about anything hidden there.

The Strange Life of ‘erbert GabbleBlotchit

My mind was again full of really interesting stuff last night. I even thought about going to get the notebook to write some of it down and here we are as usual with a big space somewhere behind the eyes. Typical! Some of it was about Jane Eyre and how the style of the text relates to modern narrative. Aha! That was it! I was thinking about how recently I have been able to trawl through things which I would have jettisoned very early on. I am not sure whether this is just maturity which makes one stick with something for longer or an increase in intellect which means that longer stuff sticks. Jane Eyre could of course be written with a lot less extraneous words but it wouldn’t have been right. This was of course the root of the discussion I had with my wife about the latest film version of Pride and Prejudice. I honestly enjoyed this film but as I think I mentioned, my wife bemoaned the lack of authentic dialogue which is the real draw for most Austen fans.

I have to say that from reading Jane Eyre I think that most of the adaptations over do the environment – suggesting some sort of gothic backdrop when what Charlotte Bronte wanted to suggest was something altogether more homely. Another thought that came to me was that there is no way we will ever know what was meant. As we get further and further away from the year of the book, we must inevitably lose our ability to determine the style with any accuracy. Shakespeare looks vaguely accurate to us if the costumes worn are anything from 1500 to 1630 – a drama about Romans could probably get away with anything worn between Romulus and Remus waving goodbye to the she-wolf and the day the Vandals, Goths and Visigoths woke up with a hankering for some energetic sacking. All a Greek drama needs is a pile of sheets (and a bucket of blood along with the ‘humour’). And of course hands up all those who believed that Raquel Welch was authentically dressed in One million years B.C. Mmmmmmm! That’s me in that film that is!

Trinity, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity

I want islands. I want the wind off the sea, over the dunes and lakes up to the mountains that loom unmoving over all this land. I want empty moors and sunshine that gives way to driving rain, and all of us safe out of it under the eaves of summer houses. I want to go back forty years to when we didn't worry about things we didn't know could ever exist, to when my dad looked cool in his pressed trousers and formal shirt even when he went out bird-watching, to when he dragged us out into any type of weather with barely time to choose the right coat.

The other parents at school have been complaining about how much home-work the children are being given. When I was at primary school, the only work I did at home were occasional projects, one about human physiology and another about the Second World War – bodies and more bodies I suppose. Now I hear that a collection of the great and the good – the people who we look up to – have said that modern life poisons childhood. My daughter gets homework every week – this week she had to go and draw the glacial stone that rests in one of our parks. I already had photos of it but we dutifully tramped over there so that proper observations of shape and colour could be made. I expected hordes of small children to be clustered around the rock, pushing each other out of the way and asking each other about the finer points of composition. In fact we were the only people there apart from one mother who turned up, took a photo and disappeared. Doesn’t really seem quite right to me that. We could have saved ourselves the trip I suppose but that is cheating. I will admit that I did OCR the text of the notice but that wasn’t actually asked for.

I thought of something really important and interesting last night and it was vanished into the mess of dreams that I seem to be having. Several times over the last week I have remembered something and spent minutes trying to place where I thought about it and eventually found that it was in one of these dreams I have been having. After so many of them being anxiety dreams, the most recent ones seem to have been benign things, general narratives with no great negatives but nothing really wonderful either. Just writing about these has brought an image of Kenneth More in Doctor in the House - something like the riotous celebration of victory in the rugby match where the mascot was stolen by the rival team. Not sure why though it does seem to fit with some of the more negative “medical” dreams which I have been having.

For some obscure reason, I just ended up at this website http://www.s4c.co.uk/clwbgarddio/ which is for the S4C show. S4C have decided to cancel the show and it has just led me into a reverie much like the one which opened this entry. For a fleeting moment I wanted to give it all up and spend the day in some garden somewhere, out on the soil when it is dry or quietly pottering in … er … the pottering shed. My wife will be falling about as she reads this because gardens and I do not really go together; the huge lawns of my parents’ old house put me off because I used to have the job of raking up the cut grass after the beast of a lawn-mower had done its work. We also had a rotavator which I only got to use once I think because I demolished a shed with it.

Black Pudding Lobbers Unite!

This morning while lying awake waiting for the time at which I absolutely, positively had to get up, I found myself daunted by the drive in here and wishing for the evening to come. When I was finally, properly awake, I longed for the next holiday … then for next year, ultimately thinking about how retirement would feel. I don’t think of myself as much older than when I started work, in fact I can’t see any changes in the picture of my own physical appearance that resides somewhere in my mind. I know that this is not true but now, being probably half-way to retirement there is a sort of physical link with both versions of me - The spotty graduate and the (probably still spotty) late middle-ager who will finally hand in his laptop (or implant or whatever it will be then) and look forward to a full life of sitting in front of the telly still too tired to do anything important in the way of art, poetry or gardening. The upshot of all this is that I should stop wishing things away and start filling in with the meaningful stuff. We can’t all do things that we enjoy 100% of the time and still get paid for them.

The Modern Prometheus

We watched the recent film version of Pride and Prejudice last night and I found it quite wonderful, beautifully shot and fast-paced without losing any of the spirit of the original story (not that I’ve read it and now I have to). My wife however, bemoaned the loss of original dialogue and the ignorance of the social conventions so obvious in longer adaptations. We have to differ though I will admit that it seems that Jane Austen purists have the same feelings as my wife. Maybe I will re-evaluate after I have read this. My current reading (Jane Eyre) is just about to be broadcast in a new version, which looks a little too gothic for my liking – Mary Shelley without the monster. “My – what a Knobstick”! Sorry! Wrong industrial novel there!

John Mills, Sean Connery, Kelsey Grammer …

… and me … sort of.



Phrase of the day – Fake Tilt Shift

I thought I had got beyond the general air of anxiety that had been washing around me for the last few weeks and then, this morning I had a really upsetting dream. I deference to my wife’s superstition on this matter I have promised not to “tell a Friday night dream on Saturday” but this was weird in a David Cronenburg type of way though later on it did turn lucid when I realised that it was a good job that it was a dream or else I would be in deep trouble. I do know what the dream referred to and I suppose my being able to recognise it and realise the consequences of it have actually made me feel better about things and so on to a very enjoyable Saturday.

I want to write about big things, like the things I used to write about but a week of toil and driving seems to have turned my mind to something like the stuff you might find behind the fridge. Oh well, there is always the Dorling-Kindersley history of art book which I got from the library today. It cries out to be turned into a CD ROM like the Microsoft disk of pictures in the National Gallery. It will only be a dipping-into book as after finishing The Citadel, I have started Jane Eyre much to my wife’s delight, as this is her favourite book. The Citadel was strangely modern and old-fashioned at the same time. It seemed a dangerous collection of themes to write about for the late thirties, almost as if it was written by a doctor for doctors, or at least the levels of society permitted to experience racier stuff – like the Victorian upper classes had all their own kinks and pornography while frowning on the licentiousness of the lower orders. I have to say that the Citadel was obviously a pointer towards the creation of the Health Service and had many plus-ca-change moments, which I wanted to ram down the throat of the current incumbent of Richmond House – I want to say Alan Milburn but I really just don’t care any more. – Aha Patrica Hewitt.

Micro-Management

We wander round the custard factory, broken by its own destruction, matching those decayed walls with our own decayed minds. It feels like one of those blank Saturdays, at some time after lunch and before the football results, the time when it does not matter of it rains or doesn’t rain because we feel the same regardless. Not like those late Summer Thursday evenings when any rain changes the mood in seconds. Those are the days when we sit in the doorway, something of our bodies just out in the trickle that makes it to the ground under the porch by way of being diagonal. Or if it stays dry, the humidity and late sun turn the world into something different again, a mix of painting and subtle smells from the gardens here. We could be in Bali or some South Pacific Atoll, clothed in the smell of exotic plants, meeting the glow of sunset with blank minds, untroubled by thoughts of boiling sea or man-made disaster.

But here, we are in the same time, seeing the end of something, a building for a thousand people; just to keep them out of the rain took industry and ingenuity, made human’s exploits seem worth it. And all for this end! Of course for this construction to fade back into the ground will take years. We will never see the final swallowing of brick and concrete by knotty, ugly scrub. We will be taken that way long before the last discarded box has broken down to dust. It is the way of things.

Darn Pan-Spermia

I hate bacteria and viruses; I don’t think we can live without them but I could at the moment. I seem to have gotten the back-to-school cold before the children went back to school, which makes me wonder if there is a true version just around the corner. Maybe it came from space – I blame Fred Hoyle. N for Naso-Pharyngitis!

That Little Tent of Blue

Most surprised to find that the start of the Doctor Who adventure in my daughter’s comic this month, involved the Doctor breaking Oscar Wilde out of Reading Gaol. This led to an awkward discussion of why our Oscar was actually in Gaol and a wide-ranging debate on why people don’t like things that other people do. Eventually we got onto a potted-history of the Irish Question up to the Good Friday agreement and beyond. I finally managed to get off this subject by telling her about Lady Bracknell and even now as she is supposed to be asleep, there are occasional giggles and exclamations of “A Handbag!” from upstairs. Slightly worried that this will be a playground catchphrase.

I cannot say what I did today – it is covered by the Official Secrets Acts. I wonder if revealing that the Dear Leader is an idiot is covered. I suppose it’s not a secret any more so I suppose not.

True Crime Motel

It was very dark and rainy this morning meaning that the journey to work was a might scary. And now, back-to-school summer seems to have arrived whereby all the kids complain that it rained in their holidays and now they have to sit inside and work. Aha – another day of rubbish to fill up time and ensure an entry for every day.

No – not that after all! I have remembered something I have wanted to mention for some time. I used to like US detective shows when I was a teenager but I was never been a fan of British versions. Enough guff - the bottom line here is that while watching The Inspector Lynley Mysteries the other week and finding out that my wife could spot the solution well before the half-way mark, I started musing on why this was possible. The reason is of course that the script distils out the main points though leaving you with enough chaff to make the determination of the correct culprit satisfying. Real-life crime investigations are hampered by having so many irrelevancies that it becomes far more difficult to tease out the meaningful stuff. Maybe that is what determines how easy a crime is to solve. We have reconstructions but they are nothing more than fact-streams – This happened, that happened, he was here with her etc. The ideal mystery would be a sort of balance between giving away too much and not enough. Maybe you could have a two-person writing team, one person to decide on the salient facts and present them like a crime-watch reconstruction and then another to take those facts without knowing the solution and dramatise them, producing the final script. By extension you could then plug in a ‘real’, unsolved crime at the front end (which is obviously what reconstructions are) but the emotional content would filter the facts, possibly leaving some essential essence of the original to determine a solution. Show it to a number of people and let them discuss it. The answer is bound to turn up in those discussions.

I have run out of time. Back to SQL Server.

Shaking the Tree

It would be so easy to keep on the Motorway in the mornings - to not turn off for this place and keep on going until the road ran out. The sunrise was wonderful and I could almost smell the seaweed on the little jetty that I always remember from my holiday to Shetland. There was no one about apart from us that day; we had the whole of that little, abandoned dock to ourselves and while I can see I probably didn't think it was very interesting at the time, it would be so nice to be back there now instead of in the indistinguishable hinterland of the middle of this island.

I'm not very happy at the moment. I cannot really describe what it is that is doing this to me, not because I do not know - the reason is only too clear - but because it is over the border into that which I may not blog about. I am sorry if that makes you feel like I am teasing you with potential, juicy gossip, but I am afraid that the reason is mundane and boring rather than being anything personal. While not a master of obfuscation, I do realise that all this might have been better expressed with a complete absence of post but the anger at the situation has prompted me to record it.

Not Another Lobar Pneumonia

Daughter and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest this afternoon. We saw POTC 1 last week and far from being the dated sludge I was expecting this was surprisingly good which led to today’s Swashbuckle fest. Daughter managed to sit rapt for all 2.5 hours and to not be too upset by the ever-stranger beings that made up Davy Jones’ crew. Nice to see everyone back from the first one including Kevin R. McNally as Joshemee Gibbs. Mr McNally (minus the equity-pleasing middle initial) played Jan Leigh in the BBC version of Diana, though the intervening 20 years have changed the idealistic and dashing young squire to Jenny Seagrove into a rum-swilling, old curmudgeon – and his character is worse.

September 1927

I have dreamt of many terrible things over recent weeks, some which have left me breathless and shaking, unable to move because I was still dreaming but dragging myself out of the dream and into the real, dark world of the early morning. But enough of that; they do not mean anything – they are just tape rewinding. And now for a nice, easy-going film for bedtime – Repo Man. I nearly ran over that nice Alex Cox a couple of years ago. He was walking across the road at the Edge Lane site. At first I thought it couldn’t be him but then I found out that the International Centre for Digital Content (or something like that) has offices there and he is a good Liverpool director. He looked a little less grizzled that I would have expected – maybe they just film him against backgrounds that make him look grizzled. My flatmates and I got Repo Man out of the video shop on the recommendation of someone at work and we loved it. I later discovered that the guy had actually recommended REMO Man so we watched that and thought it was rubbish; I seem to remember it was like Robocob with sad bits but as this was during the deWeyden Scouse Batchelor years I may have been very, very drunk when I watched it – well slightly tipsy anyway. We lived over an off-licence and got staff discount. Or maybe that was a dream as well

Fish Tank

There is a weird back-to-school atmosphere around at the moment. I say weird and it is but it gets to me every year at this time – a sort of regret that the holidays have to end even when I haven’t been away for the six weeks that we used to get. I can imagine that with all the extra pressure to comply with curriculum restrictions these days, the feeling may well be stronger for children now though maybe most kids are like most adults; they just aren’t that worried about things as much as I am. I always like direction in my life and at the moment certain compartments of it just aren’t navigated in any way which means I worry about change. Is this latent Asperger’s?

Next week marks 20 years since I left academic life to start work and although the name of the company I have worked for has changed, I haven’t actually moved at all – I have 20 years of continuous service. I could have looked forward to at least some sort of occasion to mark this time but with all the fragmentation that seems to be the way of business these days, this anniversary has become invisible to my current HR department meaning that any book-token I might have expected will not be handed over in a gentle ceremony followed by a few pints at the local pub. Actually we don’t have a local pub on this site. The Plessey Site at Edge Lane in Liverpool was well served by hostelries, having its own tame, modern bar within stumbling distance of the factory gates. Indeed one pub was actually built into a niche in the perimeter fence, the landlord having refused to sell it to the company along with all the houses which were demolished to make way for the car park. Not sure how that place makes any money any more. The North West Development Agency are doing their best to regenerate the area but it looks like the major part of the project is knocking down houses along the main drag so that they can put up shining new brick walls to hide the wastelands beyond. Or am I being cynical?