Tuesday, December 26, 2006

No! It’s Traditional Dad.



No Christmas can ever go totally smoothly, though this year’s issues were small in comparison to some things that have gone wrong in years gone by. There was only one problem, which involved a dropped dish and me. However this was severe enough to have left some human remains on the drive outside, enough in fact to warrant calling in Harvey Keitel’s Mr Clean. Well, maybe not quite that bad - but it was painful enough to mean that I was awake as much as the children on Christmas Eve.

There was the usual carpet-concealing pile of presents this year; a haul, which, I regularly complain, is about equal to ten-years-worth of presents from the dark ages when I was a lad. However, one of the presents this time was a dolls’ house made from Handy Andy’s favourite three-letter abbreviation. I will confess it was a kit but I did have to fit it together and paint it and cover it with bits of slate-patterned paper (thank goodness for spray mount). Unfortunately it was too large to conceal the construction from my daughter, which meant that surprises had to come in other forms this year.

This being only the second year that there has been a seasonal Doctor Who, it may be too soon to call this a tradition but it seems like just that. The family sat down at 19:00 precisely, waving absent-mindedly at departing non-whovians for an hour of cracking Tardis-Taxi chasing and Spider-Woman over-acting followed by 90 minutes of Who Music over on that interactive channel thingy at number three-o-something.

This morning, the house is strange mess of casually discarded board games, books, foil wrapping from chocolate coins and an upside down plastic jet aircraft. Being ever-efficient, my wife was able to supply all required batteries from the secret store that she has been caching since August, though some have already run out.

Best joke of the day came from the BBC continuity announcer who said that Christmas day would not be right without the Trotters … before the start of Babe.

Merry one and Happy other.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Red Caps

Outside any collection of houses, we find a small group of farm buildings, hidden and sheltering under the steep slopes of towering northern hills. It is colder up here than it is in town; the frost from the night still remains, nurtured by the heavy shadow of this valley. Where the wall of the farm garden ends, there is a gate leading to a dark path which follows the contours of one of the hills up into the featureless winter green. We take this path, puffing up and up to find some view across the lake, some sun to tell us that the day has started. High up we eventually see water, smooth as ice, stretching round the curve of the valley into the misty distance. And now we are warmed by the sun as it raises with us over the hill. The sound here is almost nothing, a sort of absence of sound to make us aware of the tiny noises still left reaching us from the villages and big town below us.

My guidance is internal, a poetic collection of equations, balancing me, moving me forward, telling me which way is up and which way is home. They tell me when to eat and when to sleep, when to fall in love and when to act on it. This sounds like voices in my head, a madness of broken computer code, mixed up in the mush of my brain like the dreams of robots. The hawk up there has the same code but loads in different data, the actions and assembler for raptor and prey. I might think I have free will but within the framework of me as a human being, I cannot break out and behave unerringly like a hawk. The black shapes swoop down on us and I feel some link there, "hawkiness" streaming across the gap between us like chemicals across a synapse. Sometime, when asleep of awake for what a robot might term "self-cleaning", The maths comes out of the shadows of the glutinous mass and forms dancing visions of algebra and calculus in my head. All of this can be determined somehow; we just cannot put it together to form any meaningful device. And in the sounds and music, we find the same. Hear those earworms, the irritating tunes that get stuck on loop, the eight-track of the mind turning forever. Count backwards from 100 and it will stop.

We are at the top of the hill now. There is the house we are staying in, alone like most of them around here, but close enough to neighbours to feel safe and comfortable. There is the station in the town a dozen miles away, marked by steam rising from the yards and platforms and by the thin black of the cuttings that reveal the path of the invisible tracks. In a few days we will be back there, off to work and school with our flashy possessions in this austere time. I love this place. There is no outside here. And that is funny for I know that there must be an outside - I know I have to leave here but I have no memory of where I have to go. I know who I am and almost know ehere we are now but there is nothing inside my head outside what I can see from this summit. Now I realise that this is literally true. I can see say twenty miles down the railway line and that is where my memory goes back to. But down by the farm buildings I could only know the few hundred yards of road that I could see. But this is different, what I can see, I know one hundred percent, the location of every tree and road, of every house and every room within those houses. I can tell you the names of every person out there from my friends beside me to the stationmaster blowing his whistle in that distant town to the tramp looking in the bins outside the pub, to the unborn baby. And there - that tells me more. No only do I know the present of what I can see but all of history from conception to death and beyond in both directions. This is a sort of compression of memory into that of experience, time extended to fill in the gaps so that time gone and time to come leap in to meet the time now.

Now I worry about sleeping, what happens when I close my eyes and see nothing and know nothing? Do I turn into an inanimate thing? What will wake me up? But somehow the privilege of this change in memory is compensation for any lack of possible futures.

I wake up in this sunny room. I know it has snowed for my sleep has told me more of the future and this is some indication that I know more outside of what I can see. My sleep was empty of experience but has somehow told me things I need to know.

Again, we are on the hill and I can see what must be the entire county. I know how to fly and could at any time raise myself to orbit and know half a world and every location and person within it. I can see every grave, every lost person in this brown-green sward in front of me. Winter has come hard but covers nothing with its snows and ice.

Boatman to Trunyan


Boatman to Trunyan
Originally uploaded by Steinbeck.

He took me to see dead people.

Quick, Quick Quiz,

Listening to Dry by PJ Harvey. Not very Christmassy is it? Fairport Convention anyone? Struth!

Nice to see the King William's College Quiz online early this year. I got eight (I think) and my daughter got one of them.

I am inspired to produce a very short quiz of my own. Answers on an email postcard - prize is the never-ending respect of your peers and a small credit in the Bank of Kudos (Just East of Turkmenistan - spot the apt reference there).

Identify these vocal sound-effects :-

1. Pch-Tick-a-boompa
2. Pch-T'-cooff (my aunt knows the person who did this one.)

I tried to find a third one but all I could think of is ack-ack-ack but the above two are made by humans for non-human devices and ack-ack-ack is of course Popeye.

I have just re-read the Dead Famous book about Einstein for want of something un-emotional and although it explains the details of Special relativity very well, it is obvious that Einstein had to make some brave assumptions to reach his mathematical conclusions regarding time and space etc. It is all very well understanding it after having had it explained but to make all the leaps of faith between the various assumptions shows why Einstein was brilliant. But even then the implications were not definite. It took proof through experimentation though I suppose even to me the theory just seems right through being simple. Software development is a bit like that isn't it? I'm The Bishop of Southwark. This has been Thought For The Day.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Beware of the Pelagic Tern

My wife tells me that I only like Christmas because it is time off work and looking back at how my feelings towards the festive season have changed over the years she may be right. I do however, like the light and sound of the physical season around Christmas, the same sort of ambience that would have accompanied this time of year since before it was linked with Christianity. I also like the religious ambience of carols and some of the simpler secular aspects. What I really do not like is this year’s trend for spiritless adverts which seem to have dispensed with the last vestige of Christmas spirit once and for all. The big chains' spectacular commercials for television seem to be nothing more than CGI-heavy, Hollywood blockbusters; there seems to be a real lack of colour as if the deep reds and blistering whites of Christmases remembered are embarrassing to the oh-so-trendy, pastel-obsessed executives responsible. Compare Jamie Oliver in his current Dickens-fest with the (admittedly twee) Yellow-Pages advert from way back – you know the one – tall girl, short boy, mistletoe. Just not the same now is it?

I used to love Christmas when I lived out in the wilds of Worcestershire – the view from our window was like the live-action, introducing shot before the start of the Snowman, with a sort of long-distance silence – not traffic – just the sound of all possible noises bouncing around the valley until they made up a sort of sonic version of the echo left over from the big bang. I’d get a book as a present and could sit in the window as the day darkened in a sort of exquisite balance between the comfort and gentle sounds of the house and the excitement and silence that surrounded it. My dad will complain that I never made any indication that I did like living there but being away makes me miss it so much more. My parents do not live in the country any more so Christmas visits do not have that rural delight though the place is just a-few-minutes drive away.