What goes up...

Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati

2009-04-07T10:46:00.007+01:00

It has been a strange tour of service, these past three years, showing the ghosts of the Camel and Pilot around the world for which they fought and died. Originally, I had planned to let them see, in both the present and the past which would have been their future, what had been the results of all those deaths. I wondered if they would judge the sacrifice acceptable.

Their war was a peculiar one, for, apart from the destruction to farms, villages and towns; citizens, objectors and non-combatants, were generally not the target. In fact, non-combatants did serve and did get wounded or even killed, but they did so of their own free will, not as the victims of a set of rules and regulations which decreed who should be quickly dead and who should be slow-walking dead. Those latter people did not have the choice of neutrality or non-hostility.

An ancestor of mine, I learned when I was young, was wounded by a bayonet thrust to the thigh in a charge. I had assumed he was a soldier, carrying a rifle. But, I learned, he was a conscientious objector, on religious grounds. He would not kill, but served as a stretcher-bearer. This only puzzled me further until I learned that the stretcher-bearers ran forward in company with their armed and non-non-combatant friends. And if one of them should get lost in the smoke and confusion and blunder into a small group of the enemy desperately hiding in a crater while the charge swept past them, the long shape of the furled stretcher might be mistaken for a rifle or two.

There was a small amount of action against the innocents in the Great war; bombings of cities, shellings of coastal towns, sinking of shipping, but, with the exception of the Armenian genocide, the war was fought between the uniforms and machines. As I steered the camel and pilot on towards the place we are today, we crossed the dirty smoking landscape that was Poland, and briefly visited the camps.

We leaped forwards as the throttle was opened fully, banking sharply round from our intended course and diving into today, to topical news, to satisfy their curiousity as to whether the crimes in Poland and the other occupied lands had been resolved. And found that, even now, some suspected war-criminals were never found, others found but cunningly smuggled into the victors' services, and still more, today, are not to be brought to book because they are too old, or it would cost too much.

As we circled over this ugly story, we passed across another land where yet another strange set of rules permitted decimation; Cambodia. And today, so many years after the piles of skulls were made in the centres of little villages, no war-criminals have ever had a sentence passed. They have had paragraphs written on them, that they are too old to be tried, that the stability of the country could be threatened, that the cost might outweight the benefits.

What price a life? What price a million lives? At what point does one move from saying "here is a murder, that is to be expected" to "This is a serial murderer, we should try to stop him or at least write a book about him" to "This is genocide, we should set up whole institutions to debate upon them" ? (That is so clumsy, having to put the question mark there after the closing quote, but I do not see any other way that I would do it. I didn't say could, some of you might notice.)

So what is the point of our circling flight? The title has aroused curiousity in other places. The camel and pilot were very understanding when I told them that I would not tell them. I would try to show them how they could tell themselves what it meant. Years ago, when I first read Gurdjieff, I was puzzled at his dictum that "one must strive to bury the dog as deeply as possible". What was the point of writing a book about one man's view of the truth if it never said what that truth was? I kept his books, and other writings by people like Crowley, because I hoped that one day I would have time to go back and read them all again, and maybe I could find that elusive truth. In fact, I very nearly opened "Yoga for Yahoos" the other day, but saw that someone was destroying my playground and had to rush to intercede.

But I have recently found out for myself why a truth, any truth, is best buried deeply in the soil and not beneath a marker stone either. Take Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati; which someone the other day asked me the meaning of. Suppose I had said, "well, it means dah de dah de dah de dah de dah." What would I have given that person? They would have had in their mind two linked sets of information, one saying Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati, the other saying "dah de dah de dah de dah de dah". It would have been very much the same as any of a dozen of hundred religious tenets, just resting quietly in the mind like languid lilies on a lake. Pretty, but inedible. Useless, except to perhaps amuse someone at the dinner table.

I did take pity on one inquirer because it was obvious that their English was recently acquired, and so I explained that when a Roman conquered Britain, he said "Veni, Vidi, Vici", taken to mean "I came, I saw, I conquered". And since that person did not understand circunambulate, I told them that it meant to go around the edge of, to skirt a thorny thicket, to wander obstinately in a different route to that which others had intended. To circle around. And they then asked me, now they knew what it meant, what did it mean? And I knew then that to tell them what it meant would spoil the joke, not only for me, but for them too, because it was such a silly trifling thing.

And so it is with truths. Most truths, when you finally wrest them from the friendly soil, are really quite trivial and insignificant. In fact, when you look back at them a few days later on, it seems to you that there was no mystery there at all, the truth was obvious. Our minds are full of obvious truths now floating languidly on the surface, or more often lurking in the deep of what Jung called the collective unconscious. And there they wait, sometimes nudging us, sometimes calming us, but usually ignored by us.

For a seeker after truth, the act of seeking is the aim, I now realise, not the discovery. The discovery is usually something you already knew and is therefore rarely new, but the transformation from the journey is the gift of life. I know now what Gurdjieff's secret was, and why the dog must be buried so deeply, no matter what the size of it might be.

And so back to the truth of the Sopwith Camel and his pilot, was their end worthwhile? If they had not died, if they and many others had refused to fight, would the world have gone a different way, would millions still be alive today? Well, just as with any truth, I shall bury it, and I think I should bury it back where it started.

Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati.

Curious clouds and wandering winds have made the flight path circle strangely round, and underneath us is the pock-marked scabrous face between the lines, and, not by bullet but by chance, a structural failure has sent us spinning round and round into a dance that will not stop. This mission ends in mud and blood and wreckage, just like many other missions. War is a list of casualties and decorations, and for this pair, there are no suitable medals for what they did, just a sudden plunge over the edge of the cliff where one world ends and another one begins. The terminal velocity and the soft soil will ensure the camel and pilot go deeply into that dark Jungian hiding place where secrets lie in peace.

This flight is ended. There will be no headstone, no eulogy, no flowers, and no comments.

Porn and Politicians and Paranoia too

2009-04-04T20:31:00.003+01:00

Sometimes I get worried about my obsessions, especially when they lead me astray and I get clobbered with hexually-transmitted diseases. I like to look through the web to see what other people are fascinated by. I think it makes me feel more balanced to know that I am not alone in wanting to see or read about unusual sexual behaviour.

It is, of course, a topical subject here in England at the moment, because of the partner of someone in a high position having watched two porn movies which were subsequently included on an expense account which was then covered by taxpayers funds. The business of who paid for them is, I think, the important issue here, although it is peanuts by comparison to some other "little" fiddles that have been dragged up from the music cupboard recently.

The issue that is really being hammered in the media, though, is that somebody watched porn. I cannot understand why this is newsworthy at all. What, I wonder, is so strange about somebody watching erotic videos? That is why they were made in the first place, isn't it? Are we really still so repressed sexually that the majority of people in this country believe that sex is purely for procreation?

Anyway, I wander about the web from time to time seeing what makes other people tick, and I know from conversations that other people also do, too. Of course, there are risks involved. Some people claim it makes you go blind. Others warn you that porn sites are the ones most likely to give your computer something to make its private parts sore and itchy for a time, and it was one of these sites which I got caught by.

I knew I was taking a risk, not only because I was using Windows XP and not Linux, but because I was using an older version of Mozilla instead of the more modern Firefox. This was because I was fed up with the Firefox updates regularly upsetting plug-ins which had previously worked, and so I had reverted to a Mozilla version which would still do the little tricks I wanted. The browser itself might be irrelevant to what happened anyway, but I cannot say for certain. I had a few tabs open, because I was going through those annoying sites which have collections of thumbnails which you think are going to lead you to a page of pictures, but which instead lead to another site full of thumbnails which lead you to a page, and so on.

What happened is that I had several tabs open, and when a popup popped up saying would I like to download a codec update so I could view the page properly I clicked on the little "x" in the top right corner to kill the popup, not trusting the "NO" button. Another popup appeared claiming that a virus had been detected on my hard drive and inviting me to click to have it removed. I tried the back button to move off the page but was in what is called a browser-trap, I was stuck on the page, which had also switched the browser from windowed into full-screen mode. I clicked on the "x" in the top right corner, and this time heard an ominous beeping. I killed the whole set of open tabs and when the browser window died, I found myself facing a white-coloured desktop with larger than normal icons.

I right-clicked on the desktop, intending to reset the screen size, and found I couldn't. I tried to get the task manage window, and got a message saying that it had been disabled by an administrator. I rebooted, and there was the same white desktop, wrong screen resolution, and lack of task manager.

At times like this it is a great relief to have an alternate, and I fortunately had two; a laptop and a linux partition on the compromised machine. I went online and googled around, and soon got an idea of what I had got, and it wasn't pleasant. Smitfraud, it was called. I found several free tools to play around with and tried to make the problem go away. After a bit of fiddling with Spybot, Hijack this, some malware removal programs and the msconfig utility I managed to get the task manager back, lost the fake white desktop picture, and resized the screen. Now I could start hunting through the windows folders to see what was going on.

I added Zonealarm and began to see what was trying to ask for internet access, and got a name, twice, called Psyche. Google turned up very little about this, just a hint it was a particularly clever tool. On a whim, I called up the dos box and tried netstat, and saw the window fill up and overflow. I found my copy of Tcpview, ran it, and realised that although I had apparently cleaned up Smitfraud with the free tools which said that they would do the trick, what was left behind, or possibly put there in place of the Smitfraud collection, was a spammers delight. My machine was a relay station for 200 or more open connections.

Paranoia is a wonderful gift. Not the mad bad type which leads sufferers to stalk round parks and back streets with carving knives looking for someone that a little voice will tell them is sending them coded messages via a radio receiver implanted in their tooth. I'm talking about the one which says "If your machine is compromised, what else is it being used for besides spam? Supposing someone is using your PC to hack into the Pentagon, or to launch DDOS attacks against a betting shop web-server as part of a blackmail attempt. Suppose the authorities come looking for you based on the IP address? What then?"

My first instinct was to delete the hard disk, refresh it from a backup image I had taken a few weeks earlier, restore the few additional programs I had added since the image, and get back to the serious business of downloading porn. I had now gone for four days without any flickering images, and I was feeling the lack of titillation. But another part of me said that if I did that, and the authorities did come anyway and demand to see my machine because it had possibly been used to breach Pentagon security, the act of having recently wiped and then restored the hard disk could be taken as the sign of a guilty conscience. If the compromised hard disk were still there it would serve as evidence that I was indeed the victim of malicious outsiders.

Then another part of me chipped in to say that the large quantity of porn on the hard disk would then compromise me in a different way. True, it was what you might call "OK" porn, all adults stuffing and being stuffed, but some of it was not what you would call vanilla, and there are laws creeping into place in this country which are not going to look kindly upon people seeing images of other people doing things that are not considered normal by those who make our laws and control the authorities who enforce them.

It is claimed, by several bodies, that there is a direct connection between films depicting violence against women and instance of rape. This is one of the reasons given for bringing in the new laws, that the unrestricted circulation of certain types of films will promote a rise in a certain type of crime. There might be some truth in it, for I have noticed that one of the favourite weapons of the serial psychopath who crops up again and again on the screen is the knife, and there are claims that knife crime has risen somewhat over the past few years.

But here, we get an interesting dichotomy. The government claim that knife crime is not on the increase, rather, that it has decreased in the time that they have been in power. Their figures have tried to show that the UK, when considered as a set of statistics, is a much safer place to live than it used to be. Against this, we have their claim that viewing certain crimes in film and on TV promotes that crime amongst some of the more impressionable viewers. I think that, as an experiment, they should try banning all films which depict wounding and killing using knives, and see if there is a corresponding fall in knife crime.

But they won't bother, because they have it on good advice that they are right. And it still didn't help my paranoia any, in fact, the thought that my collection of porn might have me thrown into room 101 for thought crime against a fantasy figure inside my head made things even worse.

I have been paranoid a few times before, and got given some good, free, advice by someone I shall call Debs. She told me that the best way to deal with paranoid thoughts was to go out and tell them, out loud, to someone. Anyone, but preferably a stranger, because then you could empty your head and run away without worrying that what you had said would come back to haunt you later on.

And so that is what I did. I wiped the hard disk, restored the image, went back to hunting porn but this time using linux, and have told you all about my dark fears and nightmares. and so, if the boots do come though the door and the machines are carted away for forensic examination, the claim that I was the innocent victim of a drive-by download hijack is right here, on the web, visible to thousands of witnesses. Well, hundreds. Well, in the case of this blog, three of four, but you're enough for me. The only problem is, you're not exactly strangers, are you?

The problem still remains that our elders and betters, elected by us to represent us and watch over us, are not expected to do the same things that we do. They will never watch porn, for instance, and so will never understand what it means to many of us. That is possibly why they have decided that taking some of it away might be a good thing.

I really wish that we could be governed by peers, who know what it is like to be human, to have to struggle with masses of junkmail and self-assessment forms and nanny our children ourselves and balance the budget each time we go to the petrol pumps or supermarket or pay our utility bills or try to get onto an NHS dentist's waiting list. But no, we are to be watched over by a collection of puritans who have no inner human needs or desires.

In praise of older stories

2009-03-29T12:06:00.006+01:00

I have not watched anything of any great length now for several weeks. The dark nights had fled in terror of the sun, leading me into temptation outside rather than inside. And, when inside, I have a new temptation too, and so the television has stayed off, and even the DVD's of Green Wing series 1 and 2 which someone lent me are still sitting there unwatched. The last film I sat through without feeling the need to get up and do something different was "Oh brother, where art thou". I knew, within the first five minutes, that this was one of those films. After watching it, and then watching the recording once more, I had confirmed my suspicions by a-googling and a-wikiying, and knew that I had indeed spotted my old favourite framework underneath it. It was "Ulysses", Homer's second epic, first retold by James Joyce in book form, and now reworked by the Coen brothers. (My preceding post about a tour around the town for a haircut owes more than just a nod to Mr Joyce, but also to something deeper.)

I have been disenchanted with the visual offerings lately, and for several reasons. The first, which is being partly addressed by new streaming techniques, is that one cannot stop midway through a film and reflect, pop back and review what you thought you had seen earlier, to discover that you have very cunningly tricked yourself. You cannot allow your critical faculties to sit in the theatre alongside you, their mutterings and comments will spoil the show. With a book, however, they can perch on your shoulder and gibber in your ear and you can riffle through the pages, or grab another book to riffle through those pages too, and there is no detraction from your pleasure. But with visual media which advances linearly, steadily, so many frames a second on the screen or so many heartbeats a minute on the stage, you must go at the pace dictated to you.

I mentioned earlier that my disenchantment of the first reason was being addressed, in part, by the new streaming techniques, and of course, just like with video tapes and DVD's, you can stop, pause, rewind, review, and return to the point at which your curiousity got too much for your self-control and made you wriggle in your seat and rustle your crisp packet. But it spoils the flow of the film, the pace at which you need to sit and watch must not be interrupted. You must suspend your disbelief in order to appreciate the tale the makers wished to tell.

And that is my second disenchantment with the visual media, that the imagination is asked to leave the room. You are not meant to see things in your mind's eye, the producers have insisted that they are going to put the pictures there for you. Well, not a problem, you think, surely that's the whole idea? Yes, I admit, it is, but then we arrive at a more disturbing room, with a creaking door and cobwebs inside sprawling haphazard over all the strange uneasy chairs and tabula rasas. In the state of suspended disbelief, where the police enforce the minimum highway speed limits with rigor and dedication, the roadside advertising can get inside your mind without you knowing it. Not knowing it while the film is playing, anyway.

I like to know who's putting things inside my head. I don't mind when I put them there myself; say, as a result of reading a passage in a book which invites me to imagine a situation, or when the rhythm and the rhyme and the unexpected meanings of the carefully chosen words in a poem makes me cross a border into a whole new territory. What I do not like is when a producer want's me to see everything, but everything, exactly as they themselves did. Sometimes I don't mind doing that, (and the two Coen brothers films I have seen are that type of film). But at other times, I do not want to see the blood and entrails that they have spent so much time creating in the special effects department. I find the unpleasantness disturbs me too much. I cannot watch as psycho after psycho draws blade after blade across trembling flesh and lets the hidden ichor out. I mentioned this in the last post when I roamed like Mr Bloom in search of the shearing shears.

Little Petal and I have radically different tastes in what we like to watch, so much so that we now no longer sit together, and I will no longer choose a film for us to view. The last time I selected something, "Big Fish", I became enthralled at the same rate as she became bored and confused. I tried to explain to her each thing that caught my eyes so vividly, and found I was upsetting both my enjoyment, and her annoyance. And so I now leave her to her endless repeats of crime upon the satellite. Tales of "knight-faced men protecting folks like you from men like me".

I too am fascinated by the predator-prey pattern which fills most modern fiction, whether it be book, film, or television series. But I have become disenchanted with the offerings which crowd out from within the flickering screen and try to convince me that forensics will solve the most baffling and carefully concealed crimes, committed by villains who manage to combine both unbelievable intelligence with unimaginative motive and method, and wreak their wicked whims on the strangest set of victims you could ever think of as meat. It is just another circus, where the clowns wear sombre clothing and juggle things which make you all go "Ooh" and "Eek" and "Argh" and "Ugh".

"See, as I move among you, the ease with which I catch the objects that my lovely young swimsuit-clad assistant will toss to me. Do not flinch as a 12-inch carving knife streaks above your heads, for I have caught it and it is in the air. And here comes the first victim, the silly housewife, who hears a noise withing the house and calls out 'hello, is anybody there?' (Let me tell you I am not only here and frightened but too stupid to go quiet and try to listen to your furtive footsteps before creeping out to safety). Let's toss her up with the other hand, and what have we next? Oh, it's a set of razor-sharp six-inch fingernails, with which to slice you up, provided I can still open doors and manipulate the other awkward objects which are still around me. They're in the dance now, watch them catch the light as they tumble high above me. And here's another victim, I have them, up they go, the screaming teenager who will turn on the torch in the darkened room, saying 'I'm at the pointed end of this cone of light which isn't going to show me where you are because you're hiding, but let you know exactly where I am.' And what is coming next? Don't quiver, madam, I know it looks dangerous, and it is dangerous, but you are in the audience, and we don't pick on our paying customers. Yes, it's that old favourite, the chainsaw, running, I might add, (hear the putt-putt as it idles smoothly), and see me deftly catch it by the handle and spin it up to join the dance, and can we have the next victim please? Oh, I see her, it's the stupid hooker who'll take the most ominous looking customer into a dark secluded alley where nobody can intervene and then express her shock and awe when what he pulls out is rather more than six inches."

But that's enough. The intelligent amongst you have already seen my point and begin to drift away towards the next item of interest, and the stupid are beginning to salivate and slobber as I rang that cracked Pavlovian bell. Anyone with any imagination at all can see the dangers of describing too accurately an actual predator at work with actual methods on an actual victim. And, as we have seen all to sadly in the past, even the absurd offerings of the film industry have apparently inspired some real deaths. But for all that, we still have session after session of the same old bedtime stories.

There is currently a law being introduced in this country which will make it illegal to watch certain films which depict certain acts, despite such films being made by consenting actors. The law does not address those who make, distribute and sell such films, because, one assumes, there are already laws in place to regulate them, (and presumably fiscal laws as well to extract from them a proper portion of the proceeds). It simply means to target those who wish to watch some less-than-usual adventures on a screen, and is intended to stop the sort of tragic murder or four which made the news in this country once or twice. And it is just another bit of nannying from the clever animals in the farmyard who have already given us positive discrimination; let's allow recruiters to intentionally drop other candidates in favour of those who are female, black, muslim, linguistically-challenged, anything which our figures show that we have less of in our little games. Yes, they're fiddling with the rules again, but don't be too harsh on them, they're doing it with the best intentions. Applaud them, I say, wave your ballot papers high and cheer as you step into the booth.

I far prefer the older style of films in which things were often alluded to, or hidden from view by a sudden fade-to-black, letting the mind kick in. I know from my favourite films that, even as I am sitting there, rapt, following the pace dictated by the crafters who have put it all together, my mind, if tickled into life, can go rummaging around furtively beneath the surface in search of the allusion, the meaning of the muttered metaphor, and then it can suddenly pop back alongside me, popcorn in hand, whispering in my ear that it has found something and will tell me later when the show is done.

But if they show me torture and torment slice by slice, my mind cannot go scurrying off in search of buried treasure, it is transfixed, like me, by the graphic images. And when I sit up from the film, there is no following time of thoughts surfacing unexpectedly to tell me what it has realised this scene or that character meant. The film finishes with the credits. And I feel cheated. I want my money back.

The last film I watched which I would class as dark and gory but nevertheless full of hidden meaning to go hunting after, was "The Machinist". It is noir, above everything else, and it had me thinking about the implications of being beside oneself for days afterward.

The last film noir which I watched and was thoroughly entranced by, was recommended to me by my friend the Exetan, probably because he felt I was almost as obsessive as the central character. It was "Pi", and in addition to the connection with computing, mathematical patterns, and the search for hidden meanings, it also featured an amazing soundtrack. And, in true noir fashion, was shot in black and white.

What is it about the lack of colour which so entrances me? Is it just nostalgia for the past, (which I am too young to claim to really know,) when the imagination was called upon to change the shades into hues? It would fit with my thoughts about my needing my imagination to be involved in order to appreciate a film. One of my all-time favourite films, which I had to view with subtitles because I cannot speak Russian, started out in black and white as the three companions journeyed on a maintenance trolley through the dark of the night. And, when morning came and they stood in the dawn staring at their strange new world, the colour came too. It was "Stalker", by Andre Tarkov. And, because I videoed it on a three hour tape and did not realise it would last fractionally longer, I do not know exactly how it ends. As the man, back from the strange country, walks along with his disturbed daughter riding on his shoulders past yellow pools, the tape ends. I find myself often imagining what did happen next, if anything at all. And that makes the film, for me, even more special.

The last "mainstream" film I watched, (and which I watched religiously from start to finish as the makers had intended, cursing at the interruptions of the adverts,) I only decided to watch in the first place because it featured Kiefer Sutherland. I have always been a fan of the Sutherland pair, father first, then son. I don't know if it is alright for a man to state that he finds another man sexy, so I shan't say it, (I would be picked on unmercifully by two people I know, at least, if not more). But if I wanted to change myself and be like somebody else, my first choice would be to be Donald Sutherland, and if I couldn't be him, then I would opt for his son.

The film was called "Phone Booth", and it played at a pace that took me with it all uncomplaining, and it gave my imagination more of a gym workout than it had had for a long time. And, like my favourite film "The Draughtsman's Contract", it hid more than it revealed. I spent days afterward wondering how the sniper acted, what had motivated him, how he stalked and set up his target. And it didn't dwell upon the goriness of death as the bullets struck, slow-motion splatters spurting at the screen, but instead, apart from one shooting and one throat-slitting, simply mentioned them in passing. And, by way of keeping it mysterious, they never showed Kiefer until the very end, and then just a blurry glimpse of him through drugged eyes as he passed by.

There are still some good film-makers who realise that the past is not just a store of old stories to be retold with even better graphic effects or even more desirable stars and starlets to play the parts, but is instead something belonging to us all which needs to be used creatively, to stimulate the mind, not merely titillate the senses.

Pale light, dark shadows

2009-03-19T19:17:00.018Z

On a morning with the promise of another warm day, I have taken myself off to a small town in Dorset, not too many miles away. And there, when I arrived at the industrial estate on the heights above the town, I left my brother's car to be serviced. I stood and chatted with a woman in the dingy reception area while I waited for a mechanic to take the keys from me.

She was possibly just older than me, dressed in slightly faded clothes, and her long brown hair had fine wisps of grey in it. Not grey roots showing beneath dye, but genuine single grey hairs in amongst brown. And her face was seamed in one or two places, a tanned complexion to her skin which made me think of the gypsy ladies who try and sell you sprigs of lucky heather in the streets. For some reason I found this woman quite erotic to be with, and we flirted mildly as the cars moved in and out while mechanics juggled spaces and places. Spring was here at last, we both agreed, and we were flicking our tails and rubbing our horns together in glee, until we both had to go to our separate affairs.

And so, on a morning with a firm promise of another warm day, I took myself, on foot now, into the small Dorset town.

"So we set out with
the beast and his tail,
and his crazy description of home..."

I posted a small parcel to New Zealand, and then my missions were accomplished. I was free to do whatever it would take to fill in the hours that the car would need to be serviced. This is how my life has become now, setting for myself each day a task, a reason to be, a short spell of playing at being a useful part of a working economic system. And then, I am adrift on the sea of fate, rudderless in the head and all three sheets loose to the winds of whimsy. My hair was long, the winter was gone, and I thought to have it shortened. ("Reef all sails, Mr Christian, damn your eyes!")

This small Dorset town, not too many miles from where I live, is well-stocked with hairdressers and barber-shops. There is a reason for this, which I shall not mention to you, for if I did, you would be able to place the town, and I wish to keep it comfortably anonymous. I like it like that. And so I strolled about the streets and thought how best could I choose from all the hairdressers and barber-shops which one I would enter?

I have become fascinated lately with how one comes to make decisions when there is either too much or too little information, with which one would otherwise easily decide. I read recently on the BBC website that researchers believe that we make trivial or unconscious decisions using emotions, not reason and logic. They have based this conclusion upon observation of the behavior of people with no emotional faculties left following accident or psychotic trauma. Such people cannot go to a restaurant and grab a table, because they cannot make up their minds which table they should sit at. We, the un-traumatised, will choose to sit facing a wall in our favourite colour, or with our backs to a person in an un-aesthetic dress, often unaware that we have made such a choice. They, without favorite colours or illogical prejudice, cannot make a decision.

And so I circled around, passing shop after shop, offer after offer, (cut two heads for the price of one, bring your radiation-mutated family here and save on haircut costs), letting my sub-conscious choose for me. Until it did, and my circling ceased, and I stood outside a small salon in a side-alley, whose owner's name was feminine, unlike mine, but had three syllables, like mine, and I remembered I had once loved a girl by that name, and wondered if she was still alive on this bright spring morning with its promise of a warm afternoon.

And when I stepped to the door and found it closed, and read the hand-written sign which said that she or they had gone to the bank, I still felt at peace. The old Camel would have huffed his way off to another alternative, but today, I had let myself be chosen for, and I once more went off on my circling tour of this town.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

(Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati.)

And found myself by the riverside, looking at the signs of spring, thinking that it would soon be April

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

And it seemed appropriate to me to remember that two years ago, at this same time of the seasonal cycle, my sister-in-law died, and we bade our farewells beside the sea not so very far away. The sea, which I now have not seen for so long. The river beside which I stood and thought these thoughts was going there, running away from me as fast as I tried to pick a single spot on the surface to focus on. And underneath the ruffled surface, hidden from the sunlight dancing and dappling up above, lurked dark subconscious fishes dreaming in the deep...

Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Fear death by drowning

"Full fathom five, my father lies,"

My dead father, who went so quickly, that I had barely opened the telegram and sped off towards the other side of the country before he muttered his final words to me. (And, remembering too the moment when I was blue-lighted as I sped through Reigate or Guildford, who could tell? Showing them the telegram in response to their questions, told to "slow down sir, else someone will be receiving a telegram about you." Remembering too that this was when my own spell in the Wasteland began, when I felt as though there was no-one in the world to whom a telegram could have been sent should I have stumbled by the way.)

But, jerking my head to break the river's fatal spell, I thought again of the lurking darkness that is always at the edge of our camp site, waiting, watching. My mother, under sentence of death twice now, once for being old, the other for having an inoperable tumour, is in that state known as remission, where it has gone and hidden out of sight, and is counting up to some unknown number before the game begins again. Is this what springtime means? Is it the cruelest time?

'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

And I think too of the threat to my favourite cat, after I spotted blood in the mess in the litter tray, and wondered "not her as well?" Blood in the toilet, the forerunner of my father's fate. That which was within is now without.

I felt I understood my father better when I realised I had a favourite amongst my three cats, but knew that I didn't love the other two any less, I had to give this one cat more attention than the others because it needed it. So too had my father often spent more time with a brother or a sister than with me, but then, I had felt it was because I was not good enough, or nice enough, or one of the things I had furtively done had been found out. And now I know that there is no way in which one can manage to love all one's pets and friends with an equal love, because they do not have an equal need. I feel I understand God now, if he were to exist. And, as I think of my dead friends and father, and might-be-dead mother, I realise that God could not love all of us with any of the intensity I feel, because his heart would break so often as they passed away, he would soon be incapable of feeling love for anything. He could not love, only do.

Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

But God does not exist, and I should get away from the water.

Fear death by drowning.

And I should get away from God as well, because I have come to think that, for my own agnostic and atheistic beliefs, there is not one shred of scientific proof.

And I went back into the town. and found my way to the shop, and found it open again, and sat inside with the other men waiting their turn to be caressed by the barberess' scissors. She was dark haired and dark-clothed, black trousers and a black with white-polka-dotted top, and her body curved voluptuously in and out and around as she danced her stately way around the chair with her rapturous barberee.

I was the third in the queue, but the youngest, and so I was content to wait, and as I waited, I wrote upon my small pocket computer-cum-phone. I was as rapt in my thoughts as was the figure in her chair wrapped in her attentions, although I stopped and watched from time to time, and listened to her soft Scottish voice. And when another man came in and sat closer to her than I was, I remained calm, unlike the old impetuous Camel who would often stalk out and go in search of more secluded spots, and I listened to the radio. And when "Elbow" came I hummed melodiously, and heard her say to me, "it's your turn now."

Then, jolting, starting from my thoughts, I said, "I'm not in a rush, perhaps that gentleman would like to be next?" And so he went to the chair, and I settled back, to hum and stutter words into the little screen, and watch again as her feet, in their pointed shoes, stepped lightly through the thinning grey hairs which fluttered to the floor. Clip-clip, tippy-tip, snip-snip-snip.

He left, and I, alone with her, got up, sat down, and asked her how much she charged for shearing Black Sheep in the springtime? And we spoke of grey, and I told her that I had read upon the web that they now believed, (those hordes of scientists who by their faith maintain our world from day to day), that people went grey because they, or their bodies, rather, produced peroxide. The body wanted to be blonde, bottle-blonde, no less.

Amidst the pleasant warmth of words which wafted in the breezeless air, she said, with shocking suddenness, "I'm not this colour really, I'm a natural blonde." I could be shocked, for she had finished with the scissors and it was safe to make movements, and asked her what had made her do the opposite of what most women did. And she said it had been an impulse, a wish to see what it was like to be brunette. Her customers were startled and confused, she said, and were just getting used to it. I said I had seen her instinctively as dark when I had first come through the door, and wouldn't have thought otherwise.

Curious, I wondered, did she feel a difference after doing what she had? And she said yes, she felt that, walking down the streets, fewer heads turned as she passed, and, she admitted, looking almost lonely, she was missing it.

She trimmed my eyebrows, bushy ram's-horns that they were, and offered me the razor to remove the fine hairs on my neck, but I declined. I had a horror of the knife, I told her, and I was not making this up; I could not watch a slicing or a stabbing, or even an operation, simulated on the screen, or real. "You wouldn't manage face-lifts then," she grinned, and tilted up her head, showing me the curves of her throat. She indicated that there should be scarring there, but I did not see it, I admit, not because I was too scared to look, but because I was, instead, fascinated by the soaring lines and curves of her swan's neck. I felt she wanted me to see the price that she had had to pay to be the woman that she was, today. But I, myself, now fascinated by her fascination with herself, would rather see what she would wish the world to see. I would like to be lied to, too. I had finally admitted it to myself.

I had been shorn, and I had been shriven also.

And so I left her, Penelope shearing Black Sheep till her Odysseus should return, and went again to stroll around the town, now deep in thought as to how she had come to make her colour-change, my writer's mind now breeding lilacs out of the dead ground, water-lilies from the thawing ponds, and, by the river, seeing swans, I made her walk there, and stare at a solitary white swan as it floated sedately on the rippled water, wondering why it was alone on such a lovely springtime day, and then, surprised, she saw the darker bank behind the whiteness shift and shake, and saw a black swan gliding on beside her mate.

And in that instant, seeing light and dark, she, on an impulse drawn by the hopes of yet another spring, decided she would play at being dark too, to see what it should feel like.

And as I wondered at her daring leap, the deliberate trip to the shop to get the bottle, and clearing out of children from the house so she should not be disturbed, I walked uphill from the river until I found myself standing on the bridge over the old railway line, now derelict. As I saw her dabbing off the last few spots of colour that had splashed upon her skin I walked, on impulse too, along the remnants of the railway, the greatest change that ever hit this land over two hundred years, and which was now no longer. It had seemed so big, so strong, so impervious to wind and rain and enemy bombs, and yet it was no more.

And yet, we are still here.
And, yet we are still, here.
And yet
we are
still here.

And she too, wondering why the daylight men would only glance at sunlight women, has yet to learn the secret of the dark-haired, (which she may never learn, for I fear that she will wash the colour out to get the glances back,) and that is that the dark-haired ladies are the creatures of the moon. They are to be appreciated in the shadows, not the full heat of the sun.

"Fear no more the heat of the sun..."

I still weep in grief for those who have departed and not left me a pointer to their new address.

And so, leaving the remains of the line behind, and walking uphill steadily to where the car might now be ready for me, I made her, in my writer's mind, go shopping, go round the town, go in and out of doors, considering this and declining that, until she found, with much deliberation, a soft cream leather jacket, with a matching soft cream leather skirt which ended just above the knees, and soft cream leather boots which came to just below the knees, and, putting it all on, watched her walk through the streets, turning heads as she passed, hearing them all, in their minds, arguing amongst themselves as to what colour might her underwear be? ("Oh let it be black; no, let it be white, or none, choose scarlet, or green, or lilac even.")

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs...

And she will be walking in the spring, making the flowers lift their heads and watch her as she passes, they wondering to themselves "Am I her favourite colour, will she choose me?" ("No," from another, "it is not you, she will choose me." ) Sweet-pea peacocks cock-fighting over a chance to mate.

And I know that, in my writer's mind, she is laughing, because she, and she alone, knows that her favourite colour is...

this, today, and
that, tomorrow, and
the other, whenever
she chooses.

(The italicised quotes are from The Burial of the Dead, The Wasteland, by T S Eliot.)

Tell it like it is

2009-03-18T08:41:00.005Z

Here is a BBC news article that has made me jump for joy this morning, (this fine spring morning, as the days march on towards summer.)

"Before, I was a wage slave"

I don't know the Latin to translate that into something as pithy as Rosinante, and what's the point anyway? Particularly when doing just that is exactly the sort of thing that the article proposes should be banned.

I'm out of touch now, but a few years back when I worked for a company in an office in Longshot Lane, (what a brilliant name for a park full of venture businesses), I was drowing in a sea of office cliches. I loathed them, they made me cringe everytime I was forced to listen to them.

"Let's just helicopter over this," a manager would say, and instead of concentrating on looking at the problem from a detached and lofty viewpoint, I would think instead of hefting a SAM on my shoulder and getting his helicopter right in the middle of the crosshairs.

"We want to get people synergising together" was another one. I couldn't find an answer to it. Synergy is a fortunate and unexpected by-product of some action or activity. You can't force people to do it, it just happens.

"We're getting into bed with the customer," my immediate line-manager would explain to us in the team meeting, his beady little eyes shining behind his glasses as he licked his lips, and I used to worry about what exactly he was visualising inside his head. Fortunately, I just worked for him, I didn't have to buy any of his wares.

I took my chance to misbehave one day when he uttered another of his favourite cliches, speaking directly to me, "I want you to run with this one." So I grabbed the pile of papers from the table and sprinted round the open-plan office. "How'd I do?" I gasped, flopping back down into my chair. I did well enough to be invited into the department manager's office for a short chat on office behaviour.

I had a friend there, a kindred spirit more like, who also hated the euphemisms as much as I did, and together we began to make up a new office language. "We're all singing from the same hymn sheet" became twisted into "We're all spewing on the same pavement", or "We're all throwing up the same pizza". They got banned. So too did "Rogering the punters". I suppose I can understand their detestation for that last one.

We named our language after my immediate line manager got cross with me one day and refused to allow me to attend a training course because "I had not been 'co-optive', (huh?), 'customer-facing' or 'coercible' this past week. If I had to think of a single word to describe your behaviour when asked to do something, I would pick 'bollocks'". And so our new cliche-pastiche-patois became "ballspeak".

I wasn't allowed to develop this new skill. Firstly, they moved my friend's desk to the opposite end of the office, forcing he and I to communicate by email. Secondly, they produced a list of unacceptable phrases I was asked to sign on to, and which I was to maintain myself by adding to it any new phrase or term I had been told not to use. No problems, I thought, and pinned the list to one of the acoustic dividers which split up our office into cosy little cells. People would drift past to see what I had most recently been told not to say. In a fit of glee one day, I realised I could rebuke myself for making up new phrases, and began adding to my list whenever I got bored waiting for the compiler to come back and tell me how bad it thought my digital poems were.

Finally, I was told to stop pinning anything up on the acoustic dividers around me which had not been officially approved. Shortly after that, I learned that the company was introducing a new "Total-Employee-Care" package. Someone who had visited the first induction course, (held at Milton Keynes), told me that they had all stood in a circle, holding hands, and singing a song about how they each had a customer to give their life a purpose.

I didn't walk, I ran. I gave the minimal notice period, accepted that they would claw back from my last salary payment the cost of the day-release college course they had insisted I complete in order to show I was qualified to write programs, and strode over the edge of the cliff.

And guess what? That was right in the middle of a recession, too. Money isn't everything. There's pride in one's self, as well.

So, anyway, good luck to the new initiative to de-ballspeak the councils. It will save a lot of money when they come to translate all the council directives into dozens of different tongues so that all the ethnic minorities, (now surely a majority group when considered together), can understand what it is the local council would like them to think they're getting for their money.

The Speed of Light

2009-03-16T11:36:00.001Z

The days pass faster as the light lengthens. I still don't know why this is, and I've seen it many times now. Winter seems to take too long to end, spring flashes into life, and suddenly you've blinked and the August Bank Holiday has rushed past. Put on the light, and then put on the light.

April is the cruelest month...

There are signs of lilacs already. The snowdrops at Kingston Lacey are wilting now. My mother didn't see them this year. She did, last year, believing that it would be for the last time, but she was almost wrong. If she hadn't suffered an ulcerated leg she would have been taken there again this year. All being well, she will see the Bluebells at Duncliffe again. She is in that happy state known as remission, when, although death is inevitable, it will come because of old age, not because of an unexpected growth.

I have been amazed to find some unexpected growths around in the gardens. Honesty was still flowering until the snows came. Daffodils have sprouted from two compost heaps, boasting that they can go anywhere they please. Birds are singing in the trees beyond my windows. One of them has learned to imitate the Nokia ring tone, and Little Petal has spent an angry evening learning how to use the menu system and reset her phone to make an old-fashioned jangling bell. That's progress for you, when the only sound the birds can't copy is the Victorian Alexander Graham Bell peal.

And this is why the days pass faster as the light grows longer: more things come to life again, and there is only a small amount of attention to go round. Come the Autumn, come the darkening evenings, small creatures and flowers will nod their heads and curl away somewhere, leaving only us smarter beings to play with the attention. Sitting in our caves above ground, tapping away on pur keyboards, playing ups and downs with each other, dancing in the dark.

Make the most of the light.

The Moon is a Backwards Fish

2009-03-08T13:27:00.013Z

I had passed through Wincanton, seeing the time on the clock-tower as ten past eight, and walked out of the orange streetlights into the darkness. My eyes began to adjust to the dimness of the silver moonlight. I looked up at the skies, seeing the moon, almost full, behind faint scurrying clouds rushing onward to their appointments. It did not look as though they had the time to stop and rain on me. I turned as each car came up behind me, sticking out my thumb, but they too were chasing the clouds and hadn't the time to stop. I kept walking. I had been fifteen miles from home when I had jumped out of the car at Morrisons' car-park, saying "I'll see you back home in my own time".

Someone slowed as they past me, and I ran up, but saw it was a taxi. I told the driver I didn't have enough to pay him, but he said there was no need, he was going to Mere to collect a fare, and I was welcome to the ride. And so I settled into the passenger seat and told him I had left my partner sitting in her car screeching blue murder and shrieking like a fury. I said that I hadn't expected anyone to stop for me; people don't pick up hitchhikers as they used to. There are now too many horror stories.

He told me his one, from a few years back, when he had picked up someone from near Nottingham who wanted to go to Malmesbury, and the taxi driver had said he was welcome to ride with him to Melksham. At Melksham, the passenger refused to get out, and said he wanted to be taken to Malmesbury. (This was not a taxi trip, by the way, the man was working for a firm and collecting one of their cars for them). So, unable to persuade him to leave, and unable to make the detour to Melksham, the taxi driver had said "I'm going to find the police station", and even that had failed. And then, right around the next corner, chancing upon a police car, he flashed his lights and the policemen advised the passenger to get himself out, and they might not arrest him, depending on how he behaved himself.

I told him that I had always stopped for "platers", (men delivering vehicles on trade numberplates who had to make their own way to or from the ends of the journey,) but the last three such lifts had been strange, and I had realised that people were making up their own trade plates. They looked like platers until you started talking to them, and you realised they didn't know the platers' places for snacks or rests, and that they were just a little too scruffy for someone supposed to be working for reputable firms. But I didn't tell him about the stranger who insisted on showing me that he could stub out cigarettes on his bare skin without flinching.

Instead, I told him that my recent argument had been because my partner, struggling to get her new car, (old but new to her,) to start, had screamed in fury at me to shut up when I had started to suggest what the trick to it was. I had spent the last day learning for myself how to get it going after dealing with what had at first looked like a flat battery. So I had decided to leave her, (since the car had actually just started,) and walk home in peace and quiet. Just out of curiosity I began to hold out my thumb to see if anyone would stop to give me a lift. It looked to me as though people now preferred to keep the world safely outside the glass and not invite it into their own private space.

He told me another little story, which I will tell to you, because it fits in with what I had just said about living safely inside the glass. He and several other taxi drivers had been waiting outside the local railway station when a man came up and said he wanted to be driven to London. Suspicious, the drivers said why didn't he take the train? The man said he wanted to go to London, (over a hundred miles away), by car. One driver said the fare would be £250, and he wanted to see the money up front. The man showed him the money, but the driver, his bluff called, pleaded that he had a pre-booked appointment. The other drivers drifted away, and, as it was close to midnight, my taxi driver agreed to take the man to a hotel for the night. The next morning, picking up a fare from the same hotel, he learned that he had just missed a scene with the police. His late-night fare had locked himself in his hotel room and refused to allow anyone in. The police had managed to get him out. He had a fear of being in a place with too many strangers around. I understood then his reluctance to use the train, because the windows cannot be opened, neither can the doors unless the driver releases the locks, and the seats are crammed in side-by-side as if it were an aircraft.

We reached Mere, where he was picking up some customers from the pub, and I set off again into the chill of the night, passing out through the orange streetlights once more into the pale soft glint of moonlight on the damp hedges. I walked along, now only about seven miles from home, realising that this smaller back road was far less traveled than the road I had just come along. I was going to be very lucky to get a lift now. And yet I felt safe, secure, at home in the grey silver light. I like to rest my eyes sometimes, not by shutting them, but by dimming all the surrounding lights. Little Petal is the exact opposite, she wants all four overhead flourescent striplights on so that the room is brighter than it ever gets in daylight. That was one reason for my altering the sitting room so that she could have all her things in it, computer, sewing machine, books, television. I do not like watching the programs that she does, and I do not like to have my eyes getting worn out by too much light. And I do not like being on the end of the angry-mummy voice.

I had not told the taxi driver that, as she had begun to screech, I had already moved to release the seat belt with one hand and open the door with the other, because I had recently sworn that I would not again sit in a car with her in such a mood. It had happened only a week before, when we had set off in her old car, (she driving,) to go and look at, and possibly buy, another car. She would have the newer car, with a nice turbo-diesel engine, while I would take over her older car as a replacement for my now-scrapped Rover. That is, if she didn't decide to give her old car to her daughter's partner so that he could use it.

Armed only with a scrappy piece of paper which didn't give any sequential directions to our destination, we entered Warminster. It was my fault, I was told, that she didn't have a map, because the laser printer at home had faded so much that what she had printed out was illegible. (Why does my printer work for me but not for her?) All she knew was that the place we had to get to was close to station road. So, I directed her to the station, but as we reached the traffic lights, we saw that temporary roadworks had closed off our route, and we would have to detour round the back of Warminster to get to it. I steered us around through the edge of town, sighting the railway line and saying we should take the next left, but, at a T-junction, Little Petal decided I was wrong, and turned right. When we left Warminster and got out into the open countryside she brought up the faded printer episode again.

I got us back into the town, found us the station, pointed out that this was obviously station road, even though there was not a street-name in sight, and suggested we park and walk around to look for the yard. She decided that there was no need, she knew where she was going, and within five minutes had got us lost again. She stopped the car in the middle of the road and screamed at the top of her voice that this was the worst place she had been to for signs and directions. A car behind us hooted, and she screamed again to "fuck off", and when I glanced round I saw that the door had opened and the driver was getting out. So I got out too, fearing a scene. She screamed at me to get back in the car and just sit there quietly while she made up her mind, but I closed my door and went to meet the other driver at the rear of our car.

He was the worst person I could have wanted to meet in such circumstances, short and wiry, with cropped hair and faded leathery skin, and cold pale darting little eyes which flicked up and down and left and right; "has he got a weapon somewhere, is he right or left-handed, does he look like he knows what he's doing, shall I hit or kick first?" I looked at him and saw a ferret in ready stance. I'm not scared of big people, because they're normally just trying to loom large above you and shoulder you backwards out of their way, but these shifty nifty darty little people are the real ones to beware of. If they have a bumper-sticker on their car, it might read, "My dog won't harm you, but I will".

He told me to get back in the car, and I went a little closer and said "I want to ask you a favour."

He said "what", and I said, lowering my voice and moving even closer, "would you kill her for me, please?"

He said "what?" again, and I told him that I had just about reached the end of my tether with her, but I couldn't kill her, I didn't know how, and I whispered "Could you just go up to her door and ask her to move, and when she starts screaming at you, just reach in and throttle her, or snap her neck, or something?"

I told him I would be a witness for him, and say he had acted in self-defense.

He backed away, and I followed. I said "Please?"

He reached his car. While he was scrambling back inside I scrabbled in my pocket and pulled out some money, (all my money), a ten pound and a five pound note. I said, holding them against his window, "I can pay you, please, I'm begging you."

I had to jump back out of the way as he reversed violently into a space between the parked cars and roared off back the way he, and we, had just come from. As I turned and put the money back in my pocket, I realised, guiltily, that it wasn't my money, it was actually her money, the change from a shopping errand I had run for her earlier.

I got back in the car, this time to receive a scolding from Little Petal for being a trouble-maker. How can I convince her that I am not? I do not hit people, unlike her. I try to talk my way out of things. I had told the taxi driver that I could not do the job he did, because I would not be able to handle the drunks sprawling and squabbling in the back of a taxi late at night, that I didn't know how to relate to people who were no longer running under normal operating system conditions, and I hated confrontations as much as I hated feeling angry eyes on the back of my neck.

I am worried that Little Petal cannot control herself. She has, in the past, struck out at me and, since I was not expecting it, managed to land a good crack to my jaw that dazed me. She later said she was sorry, she was drunk, she didn't mean it, she loved me and would never do it again, and I sometimes feel how strange that scene was, that if the players and parts had been reversed, I would have not been let off lightly. And it is strange to me that she always assumes that I will get into an argument with people, when she herself has commented on how peaceful and agreeable I remained after drinking one of our pubs completely out of bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale in a single evening.

The night, and my reverie, was interrupted by pops and crackles. I saw, in the sky a couple or more miles away, floating up over the station where the taxi drivers queued for pick-ups, fireworks burst like gems against the dark velvet of a jewelers back-cloth. Pale quartz followed deep ruby, amethyst and topaz shone together, emeralds danced with sapphires. Then, spikes of flowers sprang upwards, flashing snowdrop-white and primrose-yellow and speedwell-blue glittering in the darkness.

I stopped walking to watch, but found that my feet were painful if I stood, and so I walked along slowly, looking out to my right and tapping with my left foot when I needed to veer away from the verge. The first car I had seen since leaving Mere came up from behind me and ignored my outstretched thumb. As it rushed past me, it scared away the fireworks, and so I set off once again towards my home, and went back once again towards the past.

So we found, and bought, the new car, and drove it home, there to find that we couldn't get the boot to open. It had been troublesome when she had viewed the car, and the owner had admitted that it was a tricky lock, but he made it work. Sadly, although he had shown Little Petal what the problem was, she had forgotten what he had shown her. I said I would try to sort it out, but the next morning, an even more unacceptable problem occurred; the car would not start when she wanted to go to work. She carried on using her old car and I spent a couple of days sorting out a poor battery lead and a suspect central-locking system.

My feet by now were burning, and my cheeks were cold and clammy. I had not anticipated such an evening, and only had on thin socks and a thin fleece. I tried jogging for a while on a long gentle downhill stretch, but after half a mile realised that I had blisters forming on the balls of my feet as well as on the heels, and slowed to a purposeful hobble. The moon above me shone sympathetically down and whispered that it would be alright when I got home. I looked at the pale shape, almost the full letter of an O, and knew that it still had some nights left before all became dark again. I taught myself a long time ago how to remember what the sequence of the moon was, starting from a new crescent that grew into a capital letter D, then to the O, and then shrinking to an old crescent like a capital letter C. The moon, I remember, is a fish, backwards, not a Cod, but reversed.

I settled into a rhythm that gave me the least pain, and swung my arms around, laughing in the clear silvery light. I began to see an idea forming, an idea about the closed lives that we all seemed to be leading. It was a development of the idea that formed in my mind as I listened to the taxi driver. Why did people no longer stop to pick up hitch hikers, or go out to the village pub or the pictures? Why, when they had finished working or shopping, did they rush back into their cars and then into their homes? Being out in the open air, outside the glass windows, had given me this inspiration. It is the result of the world around us expanding. More and more information floods into us through the news, through the web sites; through the television. And the instinctive response to this crowding is either to rage and push it away to give you room to breathe, or to withdraw into somewhere safe, where you cannot be pressed unless you allow it, and you can always turn to the off-switch to shut off the horror stories of senseless killings and starving millions, gloomy visions and missing billions. It is reality-management.

My eyes were wide open now, seeing the dark shapes stuck fast together by their shadows. My ears too had risen and unfurled, despite the chilly wind, hearing the furtive rustles in the twigs as little things realised that there was a bigger thing nearby and tried to keep a respectful distance. Two cars came quickly past to spoil my vision, and didn't stop. I was only a mile and a half from home, passing the staggered crossroads where the Mandrake used to grow, when a car came creeping along towards me, and I recognised the quiet rattle of a diesel engine.

It stopped opposite me, and I walked around behind it and opened the passenger door. I said cheerfully as I settled into the seat, "well, thank you, my feet have said they've made their point, so let's go home in comfort." The dashboard clock showed ten to ten, the correct time, because I had set it when I solved the battery problem. I had walked and been carried for about an hour and three-quarters, and the shimmering moonlight had been my friend for that time.

She had, she told me, driven to and fro between Wincanton and home three times, not knowing which road I would be on. I didn't say to her that the first, not the last choice, ought to have been the most direct route. Instead, I said that I had fully expected her to have gone home and unpacked everything. it usually calms her down, unpacking and putting away the shopping.

But she said that she couldn't, she hadn't brought her house key with her.

I really did not know that when I, cat-like, slipped out of the car and into the friendly night at Morrisons. I really, really, didn't. But that will never be believed.

I am a worried man

2009-03-07T09:52:00.006Z

I am worried that I will never be a great writer. I try and try, I practice incessantly, I make the letters line up properly like words, and make the words line up properly like sentences, and it looks write to me, but then I get these great moments of doubt, and so I go to these online places where the other writers are. And I see that they argue all the time, saying "no, you are wrong, it is not that, it is this", and I realise that I do not have that part inside me which can manfully ignore the various possibilities and seize instead upon only one way in which something can be, can be understood, can not be, can not be right, is, is wrong. And so I am sad because I know I can never be a writer until I learn this thing which I do not have within me. And I am sad because of this.

I am sad because I try to play with my Pookahs, but every time I think I am getting the hang of it they run around me laughing and I have to stand here like the piggy in the middle with my trousers round my ankles. Why can I not learn how to use belts properly? It is the fundamental thing to Pookah games, belting up and not being caught by an unexpected flop.

I am sad because I want to read the things other people are saying about the world and think "yes, I know, this is right, or this is wrong", but I cannot. I read and think, "I have seen this before, it is dressed up in a clever new fashion, but it is an old game". And I curse myself for having analysed so many things so deeply that I cannot watch the conjurers do their tricks any more.

I am sad because I would like to listen to rare and recherche music and tell everybody that I am listening to something that only 1024,768,640,480 other people in the world will have bought, instead of the 2^64 unthinking listeners, but I do not know how to find such things. And when I have bought some of them, they have sounded so strange to me that I did not want to tell people about how I felt while listening to them. I am sad because I like to listen to some music that nobody would want to read about, only to listen to.

I am sad because although I can be disdainful of my partner and her daughters and use them as foils to my acerbic wit, I do not hate them enough to wish that they should put paper bags over their heads while I am with them, or thinking about them, or writing of them, and I realise that *that* is why I can never be a writer, I cannot manage my misogynistic side. I cannot be cruel enough to torture, maim, and kill my creations for my own amusement, let alone my readers'.

I am sad, because I do not have it in me to be offhandedly cruel, and I do not have it in me to be intentionally cruel, I can only be accidentally cruel. And I am worried about that, because I feel that I am only half a man because of it.

I am worried that I am sad, and nobody will ever be able to help me, not ever, and things will always be like this and never change, and I am going to be sad for ever.

But I am mostly worried that I am not sad enough and can never be a proper writer.

Heh, as if I am. Bollocks to you dualistic witterers and duelistic witticists. Kiss my lying arse, on one cheek, or on the other cheek, or right between the cheeks. Yin and yang, I call the cheeks, and the Tao, I call the whole between the extremes. Kiss my Tao.

* how come all
* your poets fall
* into despondencies?
* And write it down
* for us to read
* every indignity?
* Not such worthy specimens,
* these creatures,
* hardly fit for
* what you call
* the good life

* And it seems
* the thinkers you call
* greatest,
* are the ones
* who fall ill young
* and pine away.
* How can they help
* but drag the species down?

Oh Brave New Mobile World (3)

2009-03-01T12:03:00.024Z

Once more into the blue-green-red,

dear friends, once more into the spectrum

This is it, the final part in the trilogy, the end of my speculations. And, I am going to warn you, many of you are going to feel cheated, particularly those of you who think that they already know what the end is.

And those of you who want to read that this is it, doom, gloom, "bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye", you're going to be even sorrier than the preceding class, because I won't be saying that, not at all.

And those of you who want me to spout out complex financial and economic or socio-political doctrine to prove with rigorous accuracy and geometric certainty that this, that or the other are our options are going to be even more disappointed than the "let's all crash back into the dark ages" group, because I am talking not of facts and figures, but of ideas and concepts. I will not dot the I or cross the T in history, mathematics or politics just because you have an anal-compulsion to be able to prove something is right and shut up somebody else whose idea you do not feel comfortable considering.

And, finally, those of you who are hoping to be able to watch groups of people lined up against the wall and shot, or who are applying for the firing-squad posts, are going to be even more disappointed than the "I am right, therefore I am, (and only I)" group, because I am not even going to allow you to stay and watch your visions fade before your very eyes, I am going to tell you now, impolitely, to fuck off, don't bother to close the door behind you because I am not even going to take the time to open it in the first place to throw you out, you are going to be defenestrated, here and now.

And as the last few panes of glass stop tinkling on the cobble stones below, I glance around the room, and see that it is almost empty. Only a few remain. But those of you who do, I gladly choose as my companions. Better to be one small fish in a select shoal than a gigantic water-buffalo in a mad stampede at the waterhole.

We're going back in time today, so I hope you've come prepared. There are no mobile masts where we're going, so don't bother setting your handsets to flight-mode. Oh, and there are no flights, either, so don't bring anything more than you'll be comfortable holding or carrying, there are no overhead lockers, or under-seat stowage. We are going back to a time when your baggage traveled outside the passenger compartment. We are going back to the time of the Navvies.

I feel a kinship with these people, those who built the canals and railways, (which I shall explain in more detail later on). They took part in a great adventure, without the usual bloody slaughter and subsequent ritual enslavement of the survivors (called bringing Christianity and civilisation into dark places). No, these men used nothing more vicious than a pick or a shovel and a wheelbarrow. and if they fought, (which some of them did, frequently), it was with fists and against each other, either on matters of principle, or for money. But, and here is the first part with which I feel an affiliation, they transformed the landscape and transformed the way we moved around in it. The Industrial Evolution changed us all irrevocably. It brought knowledge and enlightenment, opportunity and advancement. For the Navvies, it gave them the opportunity to move around the landscape while they worked. Unlike the weavers who clustered in the new streets of the new towns, the navvies still lived in tents and huts wherever it was convenient for them to do so. (The yurt is back, again, again.)

I shall explain about the weavers shortly. But first, I think we ought to focus on the revolution just briefly, to get it out of the way now. There are already people starting to mutter "Oh come the revolution" (with or without a comma, either before or after the word "come", any or all of the three meanings will serve my purposes here); The revolution's coming, "Up against the wall, all who have offended", who's going to be shot first? They don't realise, the revolution is here, now. It's been here for a little while. It's been quietly happening, very much un-noticed, much as the Industrial Evolution, when it occurred, wasn't an "up against the wall, itinerant workers, bang-bang-bang" type of revolution; it was very much hidden behind the marvel of the new machines, and the wonder of where the world was going as a result of the machines and their creations which was spread around by the advent of cheap papers and journals, themselves a product of this new revolution. (And, a word to the wise, much of what is occurring now is being hidden amongst the outrage and the scandals and the advertisements of glittering dreams.)

But let's step back in time, (again,) and consider what happened when the Industrial Evolution meant that people could no longer earn a living weaving in their little cottage homes. They had to up and move, and go into the towns to where the big factories were, where all the weavers were now congregating together. They had to go in and do something they had never done before, they had to work in a place with lots of other people, instead of sitting in their little home. There was noise, true, there was clocking in and clocking out, they had to be there at set times, such as start at nine and go at five, or whatever the hours were in those days, and they were effectively slaved to a regime, a timetable, a common pace of working. They had, in fact, to cooperate with large groups of other people, both managers and fellow-workers. But, they then had something that they'd never had before either; they had spare time in the evenings with divertissments all around them, and they had spare money to exchange for these entertainments and other services. They could go to pubs and clubs and theatres and congregate with other people, they could buy papers and read things, (other than the bible), if they were literate, or they could go to evening classes to improve themselves. All of these benefits were available to those who had suffered the pain of being uprooted from their remote cottages and villages and moving into the growing towns. As compensation for the loss of the comforting simplicity of their rural life, they now had the bustle and throng of other people's ideas all around them. So, although the Industrial Evolution sounded the death-knell of arcadia (up against the wall, in-bred yokels), it rang in the changes for the modern world that we have been living in.

We are the great-great-great (enumerate) grandchildren of that Industrial Evolution. We, or our ancestors, were not the victims of it, but instead, those who benefited from it. Yes, I know, the capitalist robber-baron factory owner financier class also made fortunes out of it, and if you insist on seeing the world as nothing more than a profit and loss statement then they gained, financially. But, looking at it in another way, those at the bottom ultimately gained more personal freedom than those at the top, because those at the bottom gained much of what those at the top had already had, knowledge and opportunity, while those at the top simply gained more money, and little that was new or liberating.

(And, stepping aside slightly from the big picture, I was intrigued to discover, in my readings of and about the Victorians, that the shareholders; that shadowy class of figures lurking behind every board of directors,( used by them to justify every penny-fiddling employee-cutting measure); were not the money-guzzling black-fur-coated cartoon figures that the Marxists often drew them as, but were instead widows, clerks, spinsters, vicars, all of them small people, everyman and everywoman, who had a small inheritance or a few savings which they wished to invest. I was also intrigued to read of the numbers of well-off people who were also bankrupted by incautious speculation, or by not adapting to the changing circumstances. It wasn't just the poor country people who went to the wall in the Industrial Evolution. In some sense, it was a leveler, bringing a new wealth and freedom to many, taking wealth and power and privilege from others, throwing down old establishments and people and systems which couldn't adapt, and creating new systems to support those who could.)

And it threw up another class of people, the navvies. They built the infrastructure by which the Industrial Evolution could ship that which it was making to those who were buying, to do the fetching and carrying and tripping and traveling which those whose eyes had been opened by contact with new ideas soon became addicted to. And then, when it didn't need them anymore, it threw them down, it let them go. Many of the navvies went off abroad and continued navvying on other projects, canals, dams, sea-reclamations and airstrips. Many more of them had to settle down into more humdrum lives doing whatever they were fortunate to be able to find, and dreaming of the good old days when they worked all day and drank all night. (Actually, many of them were sober religious men who sent as much money as possible back to their families in Ireland and similar places too small to be able to have their own Industrial Evolution. The drinking and fighting was, although not a myth, largely exaggerated by the newspapers who knew that stories of fights and furores sell better than those of peace and love and harmony).

Time to come back to now, to here, to this-when.

I, and many others like me; came, worked, and are now going; just as the navvies did. We laid down fibre cables around the country and under the oceans, around the world even; we set up networks of point-to-point microwave radios, we programmed computer systems to model and monitor and maintain power distribution systems and communications networks. And now that it's done, we're not needed any more. IT work is now being done in places like India, where it costs much less, because the heads at the desks do not have to pay such large bills and therefore do not need such large salaries. We built the infrastructure which helped globalisation to come about, and fell victims to the results of our own labour.

It wasn't that we weren't wanted anymore, it was more that we weren't wanted at the cost we had to charge any more. At or around the Millenium, the then IT minister, Patricia Hewitt, flew out to India to address them on the potential markets for their IT workers, because she was worried that America was taking all of them and Britain was being left behind. Her message to the Indians was that Britain was their friend of old times, and she begged them to "think of us first". And they did, and then some. Fast-track-Visa workers poured into this country, replacing nationals at a third of the cost. Ultimately, a lobby group pointed out to the government that it was wrong to have IT skills on the list of requirements that could not be filled locally and therefore could be filled by the Fast-Track-Visas, because more than a third of their membership were out of work. They won the battle, IT skills came off the list, but by then the damage had been done to the local IT workforce. Just like the disadvantaged cottage-based weavers of the Industrial Evolution, however, very little heed was given to their pleas. Evolve, or die. Become a plumber, or go to India and work there.

And then the UK began to outsource more and more functions to India. After the software, came the call centres. I, still bemoaning my own loss of contract opportunities, nevertheless felt deeply for the families up in Newcastle. Their menfolk had been thrown out of work when the pits and shipyards closed, but the women had then found work in the call-centres. Now that too was being taken away from them. This outsourcing was probably the biggest mistake of all, since the change was so very obvious, and for once, the public did take notice. Complaints rocketed, and after a few years businesses advertising on the television were making a point that their call centres were staffed by people who knew England well and only spoke with a regional accent.

Globalisation is not an "embrace-me or forget-me" concept, it can be derided, but it cannot be ignored. You cannot huddle down in your little village and forbid any visitors to cross the parish boundary for fear of them bringing in the plague, or taking away with them the jobs as they leave. Just as the Industrial Evolution impacted on all classes in society, so too will the globalisation brought by this Brave New Mobile World. Just as the Industrial Evolution introduced the concepts of knowledge and travel to many, so the new changes are going to remove the geopolitical boundaries which up till now have partitioned the world into areas of local government, beliefs and societies. Globalisation is one of the new gifts being handed out to us by the changes.

Consider: with mobile phones you are now no longer forced to stay home with the land-line when you want to talk, you can press the buttons anywhere you get a signal. And with the right package, that could be halfway up in the Himalayan foothills whilst fishing for the giant mountain carp. So what's new, you say? It is now possible to sit at home on the end of a broadband line and work, if the nature of your occupation permits it. With mobile broadband, you could be sitting away from home and still working, whilst not actually being in work. That's new. And so, from there, to another small concept: you could be living in Britain, but working for a company in India, which is actually selling the software it creates to a company in America or Brazil, while you are halfway a mountain in Wales. And that small problem of your Indian salary being insufficient to pay the local taxation bills? Well, supposing that you were registered as an employee of that Indian company, with Indian taxation rights. Your local tax bill would not be for Merionithshire rates, but for Mumbai rates.

You think that won't happen? Can't happen? Shouldn't happen? Local economics and local laws would override the remote ones? Well, think again. Already, last year, in England, serious consideration was given to allowing Muslim communities in England to apply Sharia law to their daily activities, in addition to or sometimes instead of the local law. Could Cornwall or the Shires have the same degree of devolution as have Scotland and Wales? Globalisation is not just the distribution of services and products to the lowest bidder around the globe. It is going to affect far more than that, just as the Industrial Evolution affected far more than just a few weavers and factory-owners. And, here I am laughing gleefully, (just a bit), because I do not think the current government have fully seen the implications of what they have signed up to. If they have, they've kept very quiet about it, but then, they are good at trying to slide stories under the carpet on days when everyone is walking on the ceiling in outrage. Perhaps they have seen where it will go after all, and are now jockeying to get jobs on the global stage, not on the local one, and it is the Tories and the Lib-Dems who are going to be the dinosaurs who congregate in the pit at Butte Ridge and lay down to die.

The writing's been on the wall for a while now, put in between newspaper columns on sex and sleaze and celebrity misbehaviour, so that the reader will not spend too long on it, or it has been dressed up inside a joke so that the true implications are missed in the mirth or scorn which the journalist and editor contrived at. For example, a labour politician said, a few years ago, speaking about the plans for the railways, that what they wanted to see was a first-class service for the business men, and a cheap and cheerful service alongside it for the clerks and secretaries. A labour person said that, and if I hadn't told you that, would you have instinctively felt that this was a typical right-wing politician speaking? I would have. But there it was, their vision for our new mobility was dividing us up into the old classes of which the Marxists had fumed and ranted on about.

There will, of course, always be classes. Most people do not want to be the lone wolf, the wandering jew, the nomads who come and go like the sandstorms in the desert, they want to be in the flock. But, if you are going to play the settled game, you have to fit into one or some of the principal groupings, you cannot dance to your own tune for fear of colliding violently and frequently with the more organised dancers on the floor, or of looking "out-of-place". (Kick a youth to death for dressing as a Goth). One very obvious new class is going to be those who are mobile. Not nomadic, but connected to the rest of the world by telecoms and small portable devices. There will, of course be a reactionary group, (as always), of diehards running 486 machines with DOS prompts and dialup modems. There will still be some people who will refuse to fill out their tax forms online. But the majority will be right in there with their 2Mbit connections; shopping, playing, working, voting, participating in the Brave New Mobile World; possibly even electing government officials or voting innocent or guilty in a virtual court.

Valediction

There are some who have been telling me that I need to wake up, smell the coffee, be serious and appreciate how bad things are really becoming. The world is going to come to an end, they say, and this is no time to be larking around.

To those, I say that my world came to an end, with a creeping catastrophic suddenness, five years ago. I and many others found ourselves without a daily employment because of the globalisation of Information Technology activities. Our screams and protests went unheard, brushed off by a government that insisted it was all going to be for the good of the country in the long term, and ignored by the very people who are now spluttering at me that I should wake up and take things seriously, because then it was only my world that was ending, theirs was still OK, and perhaps even benefiting from my misfortunes, (which was just how the governments spelled it out the the great un-outsourced majority). Now, they've suddenly seen that it is their turn to walk over the cliff.

But I do not want to say it nastily, vengefully, gleefully. I am not going to say "it's your turn now". I am going to say, "look, my world ended, but I'm still here. Don't worry. Don't fall screaming, dive, swoop, fly and dance".

But if they still choose to ignore me, as they ignored my plight earlier, then there's little I can do.

What I can, and will do, is to point out to those who can understand the meanings behind and within words and sentences, that every birth involves some waiting, some pains, and then a lot of mess before everything settles down. I would like to re-iterate, as I have done elsewhere, that creeping bureaucracy and diminishing personal freedom is far more damaging to individuals than are fat bankers waddling off with enormous penguins. Don't focus on the gory tales in the media, look behind them to the lesser bits of news, and think, not about what it might mean to you, for you, should every email and phone call you send be logged and available to anonymous scrutineers, but instead, pick someone you like or love or admire, and think about what it might mean to them to be put into Room 101.

As I have said elsewhere, they are picking us off one by one. And I think that the least we can do is look out for each other.

I am glad that my bitterness has gone. It was not doing me any good.

Saved by my own obsession

2009-02-24T20:16:00.004Z

I have become a compulsive diarist. I use a local instance of Apache on my laptop and desktop machines to run a couple of Wikis into which I can rattle away each day about what I have done, felt, seen, imagined, dreamt of. I used to scribble into little notebooks before we had easily-available personal computers. The trouble with those is that they're not so easy to search, and, in my case, also not so easy to read. But I have several large chunks of my past now typed up in the wikis, either from transcriptions of notes and cassette recording collected over the years, or from reconstructions where I have sat back and thought hard about certain times in my life which were critical.

I wasn't always like this of course. I mean, it's not as if I was born recording

B-1 Dear diary: I can tell you, I'm pissed off, whatever it is, I'm not happy. It's now four days since she last ate pickled onions. What's the point in getting me interested in something and then forgetting to eat it? And why is she moving around so much? I'm sure it got suddenly light in here, that hasn't happened before.

B 0 Fuck! You Bitch! Fuck! Did I want that? Did I hell! What's all this row about? I can't even think above it. Tell that dipstick woman to stop that silly noise! Who's slapping me? I'm not a carpet. Bloody hell, couldn't you have let me know in advance? Give me peace. Oh, something to suck? Must I? If it'll keep you all happy and stop you making that bloody row, then I suppose I must. Sigh.

B+1 Dear Diary: I am NOT pleased. Not one bit. What's all this shit thing about? I mean, just how humiliated do you want me to be? It stinks! And who designed me so that the only way I can say I've had enough or need to take a breath and pause for thought is to puke all down my front? What shithead dreamt up this for a life?

And so on.

But, probably fortunately, I didn't bother about the diary thing until much later. That's not to say I haven't got memories. I do actually have one distinct memory from my infancy. I was sitting staring out from inside a car up to a railway bridge high above, and a steam engine is crossing slowly over from left to right. It is a dirty grey colour, and the steam bursting up from the chimney fascinates me.I also know, although I can't see it, that I am in my father's arms, not my mother's.

From talking to her, I would have been about thirteen months old at this time, because from when I was born until I was one year old, we lived in the countryside, and then for just a few weeks moved into a flat in Three Bridge, where there were lots of railway lines running high above the streets, and a few weeks later on. we moved back out into the countryside again. And, yes, my father used to have me tucked inside his jacket when he drove the car and my mother was not there, she scolded him about both taking me out without her being there, and about the risk to me behind the steering wheel.

What really fascinates me about that memory is that, for a long time as a child, I had no "inner vision" faculty. I couldn't understand when people talked about picturing something inside their heads, or seeing something in their mind. I dreamt, of course, and I wondered if that was what they were talking about, but I never see things when I was awake. So when I did finally start to see things in my mind's eye, I spent a lot of time fascinated by this new phenomenon. But that was when I was nearly ten. Up till then, I read, avidly, and stored up descriptions of things in my mind as sets of words and phrases, not as images.

There was another strange thing about myself that I puzzled over; I couldn't feel things about myself. Someone, such as a doctor, would ask me "where does it hurt?", and I couldn't tell them. I didn't know where something actually was inside me that was hurting, I only knew that an arm or a stomach hurt, but exactly where, I didn't know. Again, sometime around ten, all that changed; when I fell backwards only a few feet from a tree and broke my arm. Suddenly I knew exactly where it was hurting, I could put my other hand on the very place. From that day on, I not only knew where my own pains lay, but I could also feel someone else's pain if I saw something happen to them.

So, of course, I now value my sight, both external and internal, and any threat to it is almost a threat to my very core, I do not see how I could be if I could not see, do you see? (Si senor, we see). And I also value my feelings, because I can remember what it was to be unable to really feel with any precision.

(Just re-reading that lot before getting to the point, I am struck by the fact that Little Petal might be right when she says that I am Borderline Autistic. I always thought she simply said that because it was a mummy-thing to say, a way of classifying awkward behaviour into some term or label that she could then say "Oh, that's it!" and then feel that she knew how to deal with me. But even if she is, by some strange fluke, right, it's too late to do anything about it now, isn't it?)

So, then, today, after I had worked three very hard long hours in the morning, carrying large lumps of masonry round from one part of the site to another, and then smashing them up with a sledgehammer to make the hardcore over which we were going to pour concrete, I realised I was starving. I could feel exactly where inside of me the pangs originated from. I was too hungry to think of carrying on for another couple of hours to finish everything and then go back to eat, and so I set off to the nearest garage where I thought I might fill up the car with petrol and fill up myself with some bread and cheese. I set off in the car and reached the nearest garage. They had petrol, but they only sold crisps. I set off for the next garage, which I knew had a shop, and got there to find that half of their pumps were closed off, the concrete was being jack-hammered up, and there was a queue of cars waiting to use the two remaining pumps.

So I roared off home, put the kettle on, put some red kidney beans in a saucepan, emptied a can of chopped tomatoes with olives in on top of the beans, dashed a bit of Thai curry spice over it all, and went to sit at the computer to check emails and read a few blogs.

Something was wrong. I didn't notice it while I was reading the BBC news website, because they only have a few words per line and so there is no need to scan from left to right much, but when I went onto a friend's blog and started to read his posts, I found that the words began to squirm and vanish as I tried to read them. I could read the one or two words immediately in front of me, but as I tried to read further along the line, there was a sensation of something quickly flitting between myself and the words. I took off my glasses, cleaned them, and tried again. It was still the same.

I don't read a word at a time, or read out loud inside my head, I scan whole sentences rapidly and the words are just there inside me. I couldn't make it work when I had to physically move my head along to see each word in turn; although I could read each word, they meant nothing to me. I shook my head, and had several more tries, but I had lost the ability to read and make sense of what I was seeing.

I began to panic, wondering if I had, as a result of the hard physical shocks as I swung the sledgehammer to smash up the bricks and concrete, detached a retina. I can only read with my left eye as a result of a fall down the stairs when I was a baby, and so there was nothing to be gained from covering my left eye and trying to read with just my right eye, the letters and words were just squiggles. I sat there, wondering if I should go up to the hospital, when I smelt the sweet tang of tomatoes. My lunch was ready. I decided to eat it anyway, no matter what I was then going to have to do.

While I was eating it, I had a memory of something earlier in my life, not exactly the same, but similar in a way. I had been riding hard in Norway, crossing the high mountains towards the sea, to a place called Alta. I was riding through the night, but because of the midnight sun it was effectively daylight, and I had decided to press on against the wind and not stop until I reached Alta, because of the bleakness of the landscape I was passing through. I reached Alta just before eight in the morning, and as I wandered through the empty streets, I found that my vision had been flickering, as though my eyes were switching off for just a fraction of a second. I remembered that I had stopped at a garage which was open and bought two packets of biscuits, one digestives, the other shortbread, and had wolfed them both down in less than five minutes, and had then gone back to the garage and bought a bottle of lemonade and guzzled that down in almost one go. I had ridden for too long against the wind without stopping for food or water or a breather. I had drained all my internal reserves.

And as I sat there, the food now eaten, the hot blackcurrant now drunk, I found I could see the letters a little more clearly, and I was able to bring up the wikki in which I keep the notes for my journey tale. I had indeed been shaky and flaky at Alta, and my notes said that about ten minutes after wolfing down the biscuits and lemonade, the flickering had stopped.

So then, my past had confirmed that this was probably just a similar case; I had worked too long at too furious a pace, and when I had stopped for food it was already too late. I had burnt up large amounts of glucose, which is apparently the only food that the brain can use (according to the anti-Atkins diet people), and I was also probably dehydrated from sweating copiously, and the eyes are nearly all water, so I had probably also had the fluid in the lenses thicken or increase in salinity. There was no need to go to the hospital, or even to the doctors for a checkup. I wasn't going to be visually-impaired for the rest of my life. I just had to learn how to take slightly better care of myself. Again. My obsession with keeping notes on myself from times gone by had, once again, stopped me from dashing around in a blind panic.

I am glad that I will still be able to look at things, because so much of the life that I love is intensely visual, despite my love of converting it into words that look or sound or feel somehow appropriate. I would hate to have to live with a little voice in my ears constantly trying to describe to me what was happening out there, outside of me, in the great blue. I would miss things like this video clip, (which I found quite accidentally when I went searching YouTube for a Talking Heads song to use in the Oh Brave New Mobile World (2) post. I couldn't find the song I wanted, and instead happened upon the Al Stewart song from The Year of the Cat, which was far more appropriate anyway.)

Oh Brave New Mobile World (2)

2009-02-21T13:21:00.018Z

Roaming Rights

This is the middle part, the belly of the beast, and I have just found some fluff in its' navel. Excuse me for one moment while I deal with it.

I roam,
You roam,
He - She - it skips happily about
between the masts

(There is a subtle warning at the very end of this piece, I shall tell you now. It is to do with this being the second part in a trilogy, and there being two previous (yes, two) parts which you should have really read first.)

(And here is another subtle warning: I am teasing; there is a hand upon the far end of those tantalising pieces of string, I am expecting that the cat will make a grab.)

I have become intrigued by the thought that cats are happy because they have no long-term memory. They can play happily, (as two of mine are now doing, one either side of the falls of the table-cloth, dabbing with their paws at the spot where they last thought the other was,) without getting bored. Why do I think that they have no long-term memory? Because (heh), even in adulthood, they still play as (heheh,) a kitten does, with a piece of string, or a dead leaf which has floated down from a plant. The world is still mysterious, the magic is still there for them. If they had an accumulation of memories, as we big people do, then they would remember that "Oh, it is just a leaf", or, "oh, it is only the tabby behind the cloth".

And yet, cats obviously do have some form of long-term memory, since they remember where they live, and who feeds them. One of mine, I have been told by Little Petal, would sit on the mat inside the front door and wail in lament for a day after I had gone out in the dark of a Monday morning and hurried off to Lincolnshire. Also, as I have proved to an initially scornful Little Petal, they can remember their names. I chose a time when all three cats were dozing in front of the fire, and then, one by one, very softly whispered a particular name, and the cat in question twitched an ear as it slept. I did it again for the next, and again for the third, to firmly cement my victory in both of our minds. Cats obviously do have a long-term memory.

In fact, they sometimes seem to show the opposite of what I proposed two paragraphs ago; they have a long-term memory, but no short-term one. Consider, (and those of you with no cats will have to either trust me, or find a friend with cats and hang around long enough to see for yourself); a cat rushes into the room in a playful mood, makes a dart towards a scrap of paper that has been slyly pretending to be a mouse, and then, with no warning or signs of deliberation, stops, turns around, and busily chews at something in the fur on its' back. That done, it will probably look around other parts of itself, snuffling and snorting into its' belly-fur or washing around its' flanks with its' tongue. And then again, it will suddenly, in mid-lick, catch sight of something, perhaps a piece of paper slyly pretending to be a mouse, crouch, wiggle, and leap. So, are they happy because they have no short-term memory to nag at them and remind them that the washing-up still hasn't been done and why is the postman late and where is that other sock? Is it, perhaps, a kindness to leave Alzheimer's suffers as they are?

I have entered by this strange door into Oh Brave New Mobile World (2) not to surprise and alarm you, but because I am becoming more and more concerned about how far people have started to move away from what you might call the natural world, in which the animals and plants still live, as they always have, unconcerned about ominous mutterings in the sub-conscious, or loud alarmed screaming from the media. Animals and plants are not mortgagized, financialized, gadgetized, new-terminologized. You don't see many dogs wandering with a mobile phone pressed to their ear barking at odd intervals.

I still have my very first mobile, a Motorola flip-phone, heavy as a brick, it seems today, and too large to carry in your inside pocket. I did, laughingly, carry it down my trousers once, until someone pointed out to me that the radio waves might be telling my gonads weird tales and giving them the wrong ideas. Oops. One of these days I am going to have to make sure that my seeds will tell their story straight and true, or, at least, with no more devious concealment than I myself would wish to put into my tellings of things I have done and undone. Oh, you say, they're radio waves, they're harmless; if they weren't, the governments would not allow them to be used. What, ban them to protect us from harming or being harmed? Like they ban electricity and cars and drugs and guns and knives? As a thought here, perhaps radio waves haven't been around for long enough for us to observe some subtle changes in the genes. After all, it was only really yesterday that Marconi flashed his message over the big pond. But I believe that nothing truly evil persists for long enough to truly harm the world irrevocably. Nothing lasts for ever.

And then, from one cat-like moment to another, I cease unraveling that skein of woolly thought and return to chasing the idea of people wandering around the streets apparently talking out loud to themselves. There was a time when someone prowling the streets gibbering and gesturing and laughing or swearing with nobody by their side was too poor or too disturbed to take part in the world that the rest of us lived in, but now it is the opposite: only the poor and disturbed are not wearing bluetooth headsets so that not even the mobile phone is visible to let you know that they're not in a bizarre mental fugue but actually participating in a loud and noisy manner in the great game of Life. Life without talk-time has become unthinkable. Life without mail and online-shopping and downloadable entertainment is not a life worth living. There are chips with everything, (and of course, spam), but it is the chips and their own contained silicone thoughts which drive our world these days. And we have to tell each other, endlessly, what it is that we are doing, (as cats, by way of greeting, smell each others' arseholes just to find out what the other had for dinner.)

Cut to - Mrs and Mrs Brave New Mobile World, curled up asleep in their bed, their bluetooth headsets on, their mobiles' keypads on the pillows with the key-locks on to guard against an inadvertent fumble, both busily talking in their sleep, dreaming out loud into the great wide world. We watch them as they lie there, breathing regularly, twitching irregularly, muttering and mumbling and seeing who knows what behind their eyelids? We ought, I think, to reach out and stroke them, to let them know that the world will not harm them, they are still loved. Someone will still care for them and make the thunder go away.

But is this to be the end of us? Stuck at home locked up into little mobile cells where the least we can do is bluetooth each other? No. Nothing lasts for ever. Everything comes and goes, sometimes smoothly sliding away and sometimes jerking abruptly, but one thing always leads to another. Consider: years ago, when I was at Lowestoft, CB radio became all the rage, and the airwaves began to come alive at night with the crackles and hisses as cars full of teenagers shot around the town babbling excitedly to anyone out there; each other, truckers rumbling onwards through the darkness, amused Swedes and Germans when the clouds played skip-games with the frequencies and the babblings hopped for miles across the water-waves instead of rushing harmlessly out into space. And when these teenagers got bored with driving, or realised they couldn't afford the petrol any more, they would congregate in their cars beside the sea on the now-deserted carparks where the sea-siders had clustered in the daytime. Still full of the need to communicate, they would use their CB sets to talk to each other as they sat in their cars. But, because of the reception problems caused by the transmitting and receiving antennae almost touching each other, they couldn't use the airwaves, so they turned a switch and used loudspeakers instead, and, sitting in the darkness in their cosy little metal cells, shouted at each other, like prisoners on a barred row would do.

Life has now become a shopping spree through the malls of gadgetland as we race ahead like lemmings into the sea of expectations. I have had to phrase that phrase with great care, because there are those among us who are literalists, and if I were to have uttered the usual analogy including the cliff, (which I have not uttered), those literalists would all be clamouring to tell me, tell you, tell us all, that lemmings do not do that thing with cliffs for which they are remembered. Just so, my little literalist, the little furry ones do not dive and tumble. But here we come to the poetic point, is the mental image of a thing which isn't true any less valid than that of one which is? You all, I am sure, got the picture I intended, and saw a vision of Brave New Mobile Worlders running herdlike towards the sea where all their promises are held, and toppling over the edge of unsustainable ambition. I love change, in most of its forms, but I have seen that some of the changes being forced upon us have been purely for the benefit of those who make and sell and tax us on glittering things.

Oh but, wait a moment, is it really that simple? Are we but mere puppets jerking at and on the strings being tugged around by the cunning ones above who clothe us and feed us and tell us how to behave and take out money from us? Is the world that frightening? Or do those whom the paranoid believe manipulate us for their own gains really only follow, themselves, the directions that the "marketplace" says it is willing to be lead along? A top might think the bottom is writhing compliant at their feet, but in reality, they can only do to their partner that which the partner wishes to be done to them. Does the one control the other, or the other control the one? Are they both playing a game in which the rules are subtle and the instructions tacit? (I'll pull the string if you want me to, pretend I'm not here.)

I, myself, do not believe in paranoid conspiracy ideas. You cannot sell someone something they have not decided to want to have. First, you must encourage the want. To do that, you need to know what they might want, and you try different coloured wool, twitch the string in different places, leave it static and see if they make a move towards it or away from it. The world is a collaborative affair. We want, because we do. In the case of mobiles, mails, machines, we want it here and we want it now. Having to wait until we get home from work or shopping is no longer good enough, we will have lost the urge to play by the time we get back home to switch on the light and then switch on the light.

How have I got myself here, pondering upon gadgetry? I too have felt the desire to take my cyberlife with me, instead of leaving it at home while I roam. I need to call my "friends electric". I want to stand in the real world and laugh in amazement at something, then flit like a bat into the underworld of electronic dreams and, to a friend or two, go "LOL, you should see this!" Yes, I know, it's here, now. How long, I wonder, from fitting the first mobile phone with a camera, to the first up-skirt snap? How long was it until the first woman saw the winking eye and, on an impulse, flashed her tits at it? And why, oh why, did we move from that happy innocent abuse to the serious business of happy-slapping? Well, my cats, ingeniously, for they don't have phones to video that which they get up to, instead bring home live mice (and even rabbits), to torment in front of the other cats. That's entertainment, when you're feline and furry, and that's entertainment when you're big and clever.

Oh, wait, did I just see that idea move in the corner of my mind, as if it were a mouse? Let me pounce. I have seen the signs that hint the Brave New Mobile World is maybe not so far away after all. I have seen a small pack which, by laser, throws the image of a keyboard on a surface, and detects the points at which the fingers strike, and types the letter, typo or not.

(Is a message written upon a virtual keyboard real or imaginary?)

And, talking to another friend, we both believe a small device exists, perhaps a bit larger than a packet of cigarettes, (Oh absent friends, lest we forget), which, again using something like a laser, projects a screen with flickering images upon another convenient surface.

(Is the vision of an imaginary animal a real vision?)

And so, with those beside me, I could roam through one world and also roam through another. I have a phone-cum-computer, about the same size as a pack of cigarettes, (wail), and with those three packs, (nicotine-free), together with another pack of about the same size which contains power, (our three essential mobile packs are phone, keyboard, screen and ... Our four essential mobile packs...) I could be free. Oh yes, I could be free. I could roam, and still be home.

And so I have wiggled my arse and leaped playfully from one state, (of hate, where the mobile is a despised device to interrupt me,) to another, where it is to be desired, because it can connect me. Keyboards, which up till now are famed for stressful injuries and getting sticky when all sorts of fluids are dribbled into or spurted over them, are also the means by which to soothe and stroke and fuss and tease into states of delight. And television screens, massive magnets for the conscious faculty to rush towards and cling against, are also mirrors for the soul. Life is always like this, moving in and out of the swinging flap of contradictions, seeking food, seeking fun, seeking a warm place by the fire.

(In the land of endless contradictions, where poisons can save lives, and obsessions can be liberating, where the pure can be obscene, and the mouse can chase the cat about the screen.)

I, although I have hated the imposition of a mobile phone which can ring and startle me anytime it so desires, have also come to loathe the settled nature that the keyboard on the desk and the screen upon the wall have lead me into. I want to roam again, to free my mind and free my body too. I want to be out there, not locked in here. (Unless it's raining, and then I will be here.)

"Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall..."

The mobile world is here, will be here, and because it is heading in the small direction, not the massive one, is probably going to survive the coming times of turmoil, when large and heavy things will prove too costly to make and shape and ship and shop and stack and store and stare at. Once more, the essential world might end up fitting in a rucksack or a handbag. We have become such that we cannot do without them any more. I am glad, myself, I do not wish to see us go back into the stone age where all we can do is scrawl our visions on the wall with burnt twigs and hope that someday someone will find them.

And so here, at the tail end of the tale, is the subtle warning

Well, there is the obvious one about reading the preceding parts first, but also, there is the warning to those who think that they know the plot. "Brave New World", if you recall, ended horribly. (Well, I certainly thought so, and I would not go there nor send others into it.) I do not see this for my Brave New Mobile World. I do not see an end to life as we know it, to love, to playfulness and "unstructured activity time". My vision of the future, or for the future, is that this is yet another trip around the circle, the carousel which turns and turns and cannot be halted, such is its' momentum as it ceaselessly tries to catch up with its' tail. You can of course jump off, head for the hills and burrow into a hole in the ground with a collection of weapons and ammunition, and a stock of food, and wait until the crisis is over, when you will come out, tall, strong, virile, armed to the teeth and ready to protect all those semi-naked women flocking helplessly around in the ruins of the old world, following their instincts and flashing their tits at potential protectors. But women don't do that, you see? They are like cats, they will always find the cosy fire, the balls of wool to play with, the loving householders who will stroke them and feed them and let them roll around on the carpet showing their furry bits. Rambo getups? Eating raw meat from dead dogs and horses? Crushed berries for lip-gloss and burnt sticks for eye-shadow? Get real, you teenage twats, women do not like that, women are not like that. Well, the women I like don't and wouldn't, anyway.

It is just possible that any corrective actions required to stop this world wobbling slightly are not going to be coming from the financiers and scientists and manufacturers; their grey-headed woolly wisdom has been suddenly exposed as folly. No, the girlies, the courtesans, the so-called empty-headed bimbos will be the driving force behind the return to stability, but you might not know it unless you have studied the way of the cat, and can see that the hand which pulls the strings is really doing the bidding of the one upon the carpet. They, the girly ones, are simply doing the cosmic will, riding on the kamikaze, the divine wind, which blows where it would and wanders through the forests in search of particular trees. We are not going to die, our world is not going to the bottom of the cliff with an awful crash, wake up, it's just another disaster movie designed to entertain you for a few minutes after they've taken your money and given you your ticket. Go back and demand a different film? Possibly, (called dancing in the ballot-box), or go out of the theatre and into the adjoining one, which is showing something much better; (called I'm not going to play with this piece of string, you go and find a different one, and I'll let you know it it's the right one, aka "law of demand". (Shut up about the supply, you can not and should not supply that for which there is no demand.))

Like cats, when the house they have been currently inhabiting turns into a mental asylum, those without the depressing so-called "light of reality" blinding their minds from the inside out will just get up and go for a walk to find a warmer house where they can curl up without being trodden on by stampeding cattle bellowing and lowing about doom, gloom, and financial sodomy. But, (and here I am pleading to your departing tails,) do please keep in touch, (don't hide in the safe spots and sulk,) reach out and grab the string, be stroked, purr to me.

And now we come to the end of the middle, also known as the rump of the matter, where we can, especially in the case of cats, see a twinkling star that winks at us, and says, Falstaffian-like, "Show you my bottom? My fundamental? Well, here it is, now kiss it."

Do you feel tricked? Were you following the twitching string expecting me to pronounce upon the end of the current world or show you, cat's-arse-like, the beginnings of a new one? (Alice, oh Alice, leave Dinah for a moment; drink this, and then go into this little hole, there's a whole new world inside it.) Have you been slyly treated, mentally, so to speak, teased with a ball of fuzzy wool? Has an idea been put into your head in an unexpected way? Have you had your insight goosed? No, I think not, (well, I meant not). I have been playing with you all. You have been moused.

YHBM, PAW.

The Sopwith Camel puts down his keyboard, and stands by the fire, puzzling. What had he just got up to do? He watches the patterns in the carpet, seeing the firelight dance on the fender, and then, suddenly, sits down and starts to lick his balls.

And, from somewhere, there-there, anywhere at all, music starts. It is from an album called "The Year of the ..."

Epiphany by Moonlight

2009-02-17T17:40:00.004Z

Pleasant dreams are shattered by the wail of an alarm, hooting in the dark like an angry owl, and I sit up. The ship feels not quite right. The door crashes open and the bulky second engineer falls into my cabin, thrown violently inwards by the streaming light behind him.

The fishroom is half-full of water, he says, but he cannot make the pumps draw it out, he says. He has tried both the main and standby pump, he says, and he has tried the secondary valve, he says. He has also checked, and the bilge pumps will not even pump out the engine-room bilge, he says. He sounds frightened. He looks frightened. He is much older than I am, but I know that he is as frightened now as he has ever been in all his life. Once more the ship does that little thing which does not feel quite right. Should I be frightened too?

I sleep in my boiler suit, as a matter of course, for just these occasions. What can I do? Tell him to go and sort it out for himself? He is not a thinker. Hope that someone else will come along and sort it out for us? We are miles from port, miles from land, and at sea there is no breakdown service. True, there are other trawlers out there within radio range, and should the cry go out "for those in peril", those closest to us not in peril would drop everything and charge to our assistance. Well, plod at 12 knots, actually, and in the worst case they would just pick up the pieces. If we were lucky, we would still be there bobbing amongst the flotsam.

So I get up, and as I do, the mate comes down from the wheelhouse. I ask him, was someone washing down the pounds in the fishroom? Yes, they were. Have they made sure they've turned off the hose? Ah, the second engineer says, perhaps it's still running. Go and check, I tell him, and don't just turn off the valve, pull the hose right up out of the hatch and throw it on the deck. Within less than a minute, the mystery is solved, the hose, still gushing, now lies harmlessly in the scuppers. We are, at least, un-holed, and not sinking deeper by the second, merely tricked by a lazy man and a faulty valve.

And so I have to now sort out the pumping system. There are two, a main and a backup, and I know the second engineer has already tried both, so I know the fault cannot lie in both of the pumps. There are two suction points for the fishroom, forward and aft, and a quick look tells me that the second engineer has at least tried each of those. And then the bright light of inspiration comes like a flash, and I know exactly what he has done wrong. He has tried one pump on the suction line, then switched to the second pump, then, in a rush, opened the valve which joins together the two separate pumping lines, thinking that he must try all options. The pump which is running is unable to draw water through the blockage in the fishroom bilges, so instead, it is sucking whatever it can through the crossover valve, and on the other side of that valve is the other pump, leading out to the ship's side; and the running pump, the water lines throttled by skin and scales, is breathing in air from the stationary pump instead. I close the discharge valve for the second pump, and watch as the water beneath the main engine vanishes. We will be saved, once I have worked out a plan for unblocking the fishroom bilge valves, themselves now under a couple of feet of water, their strum-boxes clogged with debris swept loose by the hosing down.

Return to now, or recently now, where the land stays put and there is no need for navigation lights.

I was used to those blinding flashes, epiphanies, when my mind would leap ahead of itself and suddenly see the answer, and I would then have to bring the vision back to my slower brain so that it, (I) could see the problem and try to tell myself how we were going to get out of this mess. I functioned best, I thought, when I was scared and under pressure to find the answer in a limited time.

I don't do that sort of thing anymore. In a way, I am glad. I was proud of my ability, and partly loved, but mostly loathed, the fear which made my talent shine. I have left it behind me. But I still have the calculating part of me that would see a way forwards, break it down into concurrent and consecutive steps, and then convey to all of those around just what it was that each of them must do.

Except, I have been told, I do not convey. I bark orders, I "scream", I "shout", I "dash about"; I terrify poor souls who are not used to there being no time to lose. But, I tell them, and myself, it is a survival trait. I did not want to die in the belly of a steel whale as it slowly glubbed beneath the waves. I practiced moving round the engine-room in the dark so that I could, if needed, restart the diesels when a violent wave had rolled the ship so far across it's beam that the oil pressure alarms or overspeed trips had shut them off, and the torch had chosen just that time to burn out the bulb. I stashed spare spanners at odd locations round the ship so I could get to one quickly, when the one I had been trying to use had slipped from my oily fingers and plummeted into the bilge. I was cunning, I was prepared, I was fore-armed, I was not going to die a stupid death.

I have tried to run my life ashore on similar principles. If there is something I have to rely upon, I make sure I have a backup, in case that thing should not be there when I want it. I have a spare battery, fully charged, and a set of jump-leads, so that I can start the car on a frosty morning without having to call the breakdown service to turn up with their jump-leads and their battery, and get me out of a hole which anyone with half a brain could have foreseen. I do not like being caught out. I keep my spanners in two places, I keep a torch somewhere that I know I can get to in the dark.

So then, to last week, when it all began, Little Petal's youngest daughter tells her mummy that daughter's car has burnt out the clutch, and she cannot possibly live without it. So mummy drives up to daughter's, gives her mummy's car, and the Sopwith Camel then stops what he is doing, and drives the fifty miles to pick up mummy, and the fifty miles back. They then drive over to absent brother's house and collect the large 4-wheel drive which brother has said S-C should use while he is away. My carefully planned itinerary for the thing I must get done by the end of the month is knocked back, more than the mere four hours the whole escapade has taken. But I brutally bark orders at myself and re-plan and once more settle down to do those things which I have to do, while Little Petal, now the only serious earner in our small cabbage-patch, drives my car up to work.

For a few (two) days, all is going to plan. Little Petal finds a garage to mend Little Petal's daughter's car. Not within a five mile radius of where Little Petal's daughter lives, for some strange reason, but the garage just up the hill from us where Little Petal takes her own car to get it fixed. How, I ask curiously, are you planning to get the car with no clutch the fifty miles it has to travel in order to be re-clutched here? Her plan, hatched in conjunction with her chicken-rearing daughter, is that daughter should get the car a few hundred metres down the lane from where she lives and then phone the recovery service, and say "Hayulp, hayulp, this dayummsel's in distress", and use the obliging truck to take the car to the place to which she was heading and has to reach no matter what. It is a cunning plan, and I say as much. I also think, but do not say, that both Little Petal and daughter could do with a good birching, both for their scurrilous ways, and for my private entertainment.

Then, one evening, comes the unexpected call. Little Petal, in my car, says that the clutch has failed, (my clutch), and she is waiting for the recovery truck to bring her, and it, back home. I say "Oh fuck bollocks cunt shit piss and arseholes of the western world, is there no end to this syphilitic stupidity?" But I also formulate a plan to get us out of this, and before she has managed to put down the phone, I tell her to contact the daughter with whom she shares the common bond of clutchlessness, (upon the reality of life), and prepare for a flying visit.

So, cometh the recovery truck with my now-dead car, steppeth up the biplane. Little Petal has actually thought, for once, and says that if we take up with us a 13mm socket, Little Petal's daughter's partner can take out the battery from their other defunct car, (the one they put aside when they got the soon-to-be-clutchless car), and possibly start it the next morning so that they can take the kids to school. For that is the main reason that they need their second car, they live in the country where the buses won't go, and that, in the eyes of the social services, is not an adequate excuse for their children missing lessons in how to speak abominable English but know all about Islam.

"Just that?" I ask, "One single socket?" So Little Petal calls her daughter who confirms that a single 13mm socket will do the trick, but when asked does it need to be 1/2" square drive or 3/8", just says "what?", and then says that her partner is not around to answer the question, he is outside looking for a fox. And so the Camel, wise to the capriciousness of fate, selects a deep 13mm socket and a ratchet which will fit it, and a 13mm combination spanner too, and an adjustable wrench, and sets off to drive the fifty miles to face his foes.

And arriving, parks younger brother's car facing the sulking blue Ford which is flat in the battery department, while Little Petal goes inside to talk with daughter about such things that man himself need not know. And, when Little Petal's daughter's partner looms out of the gloom and raises the bonnet, finds, to his chargrin, that he has failed the world. Gotham City lies helpless underneath the chuckling Joker, while Batman hangs caught upon the barbed wire in which his underpants, (worn outside), have snagged. The bolts which need to be undone are set deep at the base of the battery, and really need an extension bar as well as the deep socket. The Camel tries, and although he can fit the socket on each nut, and just about get the ratchet bar to move half an inch in the narrow space between bulkhead and battery, finds he is denied success. The bolts are not 13mm, but 1/2" AF, fractionally smaller, and they have been rounded by the previous use of the 13mm socket. Oh, fuck-bollocks, fuck-cunt, fuck-arseholes. (And today we have naming of parts). Fuck our souls, and then throw them back with the haddock, the plaice and the cod.

But, in a flash, the Camel has seen the way out. The Ford can be rolled backwards down the lane to stand outside the front door if the clutchless car is first rolled a few feet towards the shed in which the chickens cluck and the cockerels crow. And then, with an extension lead from the nearby window, the battery charger can be plugged into the mains and clipped onto the battery, and lo, come dawn, come brum-brum.

The Camel communicates his wisdom to Little Petal's daughter's partner, which takes the form, spoken pleasantly, of "get the extension lead, make sure it will reach from the house to where we're going to push the car, and then come back and we'll do the deed." The Camel is a wily shaggy beast who won't thrash his strength away on a fool's errand.

Some minutes later, the Camel goes to look for Little Petal's daughter's partner, who is to be found standing by the chicken shed with a bright light, scanning the fields, looking for a fox. What news of leads is there? Ah, it seems, he says, that Little Petal's daughter does not know where the solitary extension lead is, and she says that the best thing to do is to make some space in the chicken shed and push the car into there. The Camel, glancing through the door, can see that it is more than a couple of hours work to redistribute chickens and coops to allow cooperative cohabitation with a car.

He steps back into to starlight and draws in a breath. He is about to utter, with force, with clarity, with conciseness, the suggestion that everybody; mothers, daughters, daughters of daughters, dogs, cats, chickens and possibly even cockroaches, get up and stop watching the TV or tootling their flutes and "find that fucking lead." Because it is cold outside, and the Camel, despite the fur, is starting to shiver and shake, and is worried that slight hypothermia is going to upset his special powers and make his balls shrink to naught but dried peas.

And in that brief intake of breath, glancing up into the beautiful starry sky, comes epiphany. It is a quiet and peaceful place, here in the middle of nothingness, and they are not foundering. The ground is firm, frosty even, but re-assuring. It will not open up and swallow, or buck and heave and wallow. The chickens, cockerels, cats, dogs, ducks, and progeny have no knowledge of the quiver inside that one feels when the world is about to turn turtle and slip away from you. Their world will not stop if the children miss a day at school, although some excuses might need to be made. Unlike the sea, though, the authorities can sometimes be persuaded to be merciful. There is no need to bring shock and awe into this little land.

And so the Camel bows his head, collects Little Petal from the house, makes sure her car starts, and drives slowly home in a convoy of two, a caravan crossing the chilly desert from one small oasis to another. Four more hours have gone, plans are yet again set back, the Camel has to meet deadlines which, although not as cruel as those set by the sea, are pitiless on ones who fail to meet their stipulations. Companies House have this year applied a decade's-worth of inflation to their penalties all at once, and whereas it used to be a fine of £100 for late filing of accounts, now it is more than seven times that much, and no remission, no chance of appeal. The money which has been spent on saving the banks from perishing in the storms of foolish greed has now to be reclaimed from elsewhere, and those on whom the burden of support will fall will be those who are least likely to unite and protest against the injustice.

And that's my second epiphany in the dark: we are not alone in this stormy night, but we are scattered on the waves, and they are picking us off one by one. Save Our Souls.

Put on the light, and then put on the light.

The least we can do is wave to each other.

The current contractions ...

2009-02-13T10:56:00.004Z

are just a sign that the moment of birth is approaching.

I wasn't a diarist during the last changeover in this country, so I am only left with one or two vivid, therefore specific, memories, and an otherwise sort of cloudy fuzz to remember how it was.

"Oh how we laughed and danced the night away"

I know Michael Foot shuffled away after being beaten by Margeret Thatcher in the elections, and I remember Jay remarking to me, as we sat up watching the confirmation of the polls, that he felt that Michael Foot was "leaving Parliament with an honourable record; he had lost because his campaign had been too honest".

After Foot came a blur, Kinnock danced but was out-danced. John Smith died, never a good way to try and overcome the other side, but blue-eyed baby Blair got them all dancing to a brand new song, and they took over the theatre for a while.

Now, the squirming has begun again, as the final thrashings of an experiment in pretending that the left can out-right the right leave squiggly patterns on the laboratory bench top.

Cameron is coming,
the sun will shine again,
let's strum upon our banjo's
"We won't get fooled again."

As if.

Just like Jay thought Michael Foot left parliament in honourable defeat, ( Labour plain-speaking beaten by Tory glitter), so there once was a man who has been described as "the first man to enter parliament with honest intentions." Guido Fawkes. He has a blog, you know.

Over here is a piece worth reading. Labour previously out-toried the tories to get into power, now the tories are prepared, (Guido thinks), to out-labour labour in order to have their turn at the wheel again. And if it means protecting us from being exposed to dissenting views, well, labour have done very well with protecting us from ourselves, so it seems the tories have realised that we can continue to put up with that to which we have become accustomed.

Old tune, new dance routine.

Plus ca change, mais c'est la meme chose

Et in absentia, elle

2009-02-12T09:15:00.001Z

* The song is sung,
* the curtain rung;
* the play is over, for the night.
* And on the stage
* in fits of rage;
* three actors argue who is right.
* While, from a shelf
* a gleeful elf
* looks down, and giggles at the fight.
* Then; opening time,
* once more, they rhyme
* harmoniously, the world's to right.

(All the world's a stage: and as one poor sod found out recently, it has some unexpected exits)

Oh, Brave New Mobile World (1)

2009-02-10T18:58:00.017Z

This is part one of a trilogy, but paradoxically, it is not the beginning. If you are new to this blog, I suggest you go back to read the prelude here first. This isn't a warning to the cocky, it's a word to the wise.

Nomads' Land

Where all paths lead one to roam...

Nomad's Land

When I was traveling on my bicycle, I left each spot unchanged when I moved on. True, the deadwood might have shrunk slightly, the ash in the fireplace might be a different colour, but I tore down , dug up or altered nothing of permanence. The land, however good or imperfect it might have been, was preserved, not destroyed, by my passing presence.

Nomads Land

The saddest thing about the acres of caravans in their parks is not the close proximity to each other, nor even the psychotically-rigid ordering of the rows, but the fact that many of them have had their wheels removed and now sit on concrete blocks. They are, to me, the graveyards of freedom. You ain't goin' nowhere...

Are Nomads mad? No? Are settlers unsettled in the head?

There are three nomads in this tale, two of whom are described below, and the third one is myself.

The difference between those wandering and those housed is that of living on the land, or living in the land. Nomads have very tiny roots, which at any time stretch far away back to places they have stopped at previously which had a special significance. Settlers have massive stumpy roots which dive down deep into the ground beneath their feet. (Hint: this is not a literal truth, it is a metaphor. Do not go around trying to chop peoples' feet off at ground level thinking it will make them free.) Both groups feel suspicion and animosity to the other. The settlers have always assumed that nomads are shifty thieving work-shy troublemakers who should be driven off as soon as possible. The nomads, generally less intolerant of the settlers because they only have to put up with each individual set of quirks and foibles for a short while, can be cavalier when it comes to respecting rights of access or privacy. But, as I say in my motto, nothing lasts for ever. If the place in which you're living gets taken over by deranged control freaks who want to tax you in order to raise enough money to monitor you and protect you from yourself, pack up and go somewhere saner. And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too...

I settled down twice, before settling (thrice). (When I settle three times, it's true). What a frightening thought, I could be living on a Snark. Or, what an exiting though, I could be a Snark.

I settled the first time close to the sea. I had a third share in a small sailing boat in which I could run away and pretend I was still free. I spoke to few who lived around me, and they in their turn said very little to me. I spoke to many people I met on the harbour and abroad, and swapped traveling tales with those who asked about my eccentric bicycle. I was happy for the two years I lived there.

I settled the second time on the flood plains of the Thames, near Reading. The sprawling estate in which I had one small maisonette was built on the site of the airfield where Douglas Bader piled a Bulldog into the ground and lost his legs. Various people walking their dogs in the tame wooded parts thought they might have come across them, but as there was no reward on offer, very few people bothered to press a claim, and anyway, Douglas had his wooden ones.

For the first time in my new way of living, I saw settled people at close-quarters. The man from whom I had bought my house had moved to a slightly bigger house four hundred yards away. I had moved nearly eighty miles and therefore knew nobody. When a gale flattened two of the fence panels at the back of my garden soon after I moved in, I was putting them back up again when the old owner stopped by to see what had gone wrong. As he chatted, another man with a donkey jacket and a flat-cap on his head came by, and said hello to the previous owner. As they chatted briefly, I made an attempt to join in. Flat cap man glanced once at me from the corner of his eye, and said to previous owner, with a jerk of his thumb towards me, "Who's he, then?" Previous owner told him, flat-cap grunted, and continued his conversation. I was not there (I was not their), I did not know how long I would have to live in the place before I was allowed to become their there. Things didn't change much during the three years I stayed there either. Paradoxically, living amongst a crowd, I was more alone than I'd ever been before.

I settled the third time, selling the modern maisonette at the trough of the housing slump, taking the loss and just having enough to buy the rambling and semi-decrepit building I still live in. Unlike the sprawling mass of houses at Woodley, I was now in the middle of nowhere, but, as if to keep me from feeling too adrift, I was still close to some sort of water. Far closer than I ought to have been, it turned out.

I found, as I explored my station, that the space beneath the suspended floor of what used to be the booking hall had flooded to a depth of a foot or more. Although the water level was three feet beneath the floorboards, there was no damp-proof course in the sleeper walls on which the floor timbers rested, and so they had rotted in several places. As if that wasn't enough, dry-rot and wet-rot had flourished, turning the timbers into dark sponges and shooting up the architraving above the floor level. I could not afford to pay for a builder to come in and make good the damage, so I did it myself. For several months I lived in a house where one room had no floor, just a maze of scaffold planks laid across the sleeper walls, with a mass of mud and clay four feet beneath them. I could not stop the water from coming up through the clay, and so I followed my instincts from years at sea and installed a bilge-pump.

The replacement timbers were almost done and the floor-boards about to go back down again when I slipped as I was stepping across one of the gaps, a timber which was only notched into place turned under my feet, and I crashed down into the mud and dislodged wood. I felt something in my chest crack. I drove up to the hospital, to be told it was a cracked rib, and they didn't do anything for those, not even a strapping. I would have to take it easy. I went back home and found ways of carrying in wood and coal one-handed to keep the fires going. The phone rang as I was sitting in a chair nursing my rib, and a few weeks contract work was offered to me in London, which I took, and pretended I was not in agony as I traveled on the trains or climbed the stairs. The doorbell rang one weekend when I was home, still nursing my rib, and someone was standing there, rather scruffy, saying that he was looking for a few day's work.

"What can you do?" I asked.
"Anything, so long as it doesn't involve killing animals."

Enter nomad number two, Andy the New-age Traveler.

Andy was one of the people you see camping on grassy triangles by the roadside, with a caravan or a coach or a double-decker bus. He had started out with a wooden gypsy caravan he had built himself, living beside it in a tent until it was capable of housing him and his girlfriend. He originally had an old Ferguson tractor with which he towed it around from place to place, but after a while the bug to become free of tax and MoT and fuel bit him, and he got a horse. He, like me, experienced disaster, going down a hill one day when the caravan threatened to over-run the horse and he was forced to swerve it off the road, smashing the frame and his girlfriend's arm. He was now parked up near to where I lived, on a patch of common land, trying to earn the money needed to buy some Ash with which to mend the frame.

I had money from the contract work, and he was willing to help me by doing the things I still couldn't do, such as push a plane along a 12-foot board or swing a pickaxe. As we worked, we listened to music, and talked. I played him Thomas Dolby's Astronauts and Heretics, and he appreciated the aptness of "I Live in a Suitcase", commenting that it was ironic that someone like myself who had traveled around by bicycle and lived beside the road should choose to settle down in a Railway Station. It was almost as if I was saying that this settlement was only temporary, and I was simply waiting for a train that would take me off on my travels again.

Andy was committed to organising the travelers so that they could continue living their nomadic lifestyle without being picked off individually by bailiffs and police and other authorities who were infuriated that someone should be able to live without an address or letterbox or door-knocker. Sadly, he wasn't going to see any of his dreams come to fruition. When his girlfriend left him and refused to let him see her, he killed himself in a black mood of depression. He was buried in the churchyard a few hundred yards from the place where he had last been camping. A prominent member of the village tried to prevent Andy having a space there, but the majority of the village insisted he should lie there. I threw the ritual clod of earth onto the coffin, and attended his wake that night. I sat in the darkness beside the roaring fire while other travelers cooked food and drank drink, and one or two fire-eaters performed. I spoke with his sister, who had traveled down from Berwick for the funeral, (his only relative who attended), and later on, she came home with me and we shared my bed. I should have performed better, but I was still feeling the grief of his passing.

The floor was done, the work came up faster than I had anticipated, the bicycle was set aside when I, Mr. Toad-like, fell in love with motor cars (again), and when I roared up to the Costcutter shop one day in my pride and joy, someone said "I heard you'd moved down here".

Nomad number three, Peter the Artist.

I first knew Peter when I was a teenager living in Hawkhurst. At the bottom of Station Road, on which we lived, (how uncanny, that recurrence of road-names), was a tall rambling gothic-style building with spindly balconies and turrets with windows from which I was sure ghostly eyes gazed out over the nearby row of more ordinary terraced houses. In the last one of these terraces, in the shadow of Castle Macabre, lived my best friend, with his brothers and sister, a dog with puppies, a television (which we didn't have), and his mother, who wore jumpers, short skirts and black woolen tights, an ensemble that still makes me rev up from tickover. Peter the artist was her lover. He made papier-mache caricature figures, a sort of fore-runner of the Spitting-Image puppets. Now, he was living near to me, still looking young and healthy despite the years which had gone by. I asked how he was doing, and found that he had given up art as a commercial venture, and instead was teaching art at an expensive school. And he was living in a yurt. (Yes, some of you have just gone "Oh a Yurt, isn't that what the ..", and I know you want me to gabble out the coincidence here but you're just going to have to wait for it.) He had chosen this path because he had become fed up with everyman beating a path to his door to stuff through it envelopes with bills, demands to submit personal details (again) to the electoral register, begging letters from banks asking him to borrow money, and he had up and decamped, and then, encamped. (Put out the trash, and then put out the trash).

And here it was that last week, reading the post about the mongol hordes, I had felt an eerie prickling on the back of my head as all the hairs stood up and I had the thought that there is something in the room with me, that there is something in the bottom left-hand corner of my mind saying "please sir, I know, I know, ask me sir", and that strange sensation of presque-vu that rippled through me, back through the Pookah post to the brief clip from the film when a Mr Wilson goes to the library to look up the definition of the word Pookah, and reads on the page in front of him "A pookah is a large, often invisible spirit, often taking the form of an animal to those who see him, given to mischievous and sometimes practical jokes, and how are you tonight, Mr Wilson?", and although it was the same sort of feeling, I'm not called Wilson, so what else was recently in my mind? (Please sir, please sir, it's yurt, sir).

And I remembered that a Yurt was the wood and felt tent in which the Mongols lived, a structure both robust enough to keep out the bitter desert weather and at the same time light enough to be dismantled and carried around on a horse to wherever else it was that the nomadic raiding tribes were going to make their base for a while. And I remembered Peter the artist and his yurt, and realised that history was repeating itself. The yurt was back again, (The yurt was back again...)

"Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat again the mistakes of History." George Santayana said something like that, the phrase has been twisted about somewhat by its stay in my own warped mind these many years, but the gist is correct.

It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time. The yurt is back in style again. There are raiders on binary horses coming back from the east. (Barak Obama, saviour of the western world, has just ordered a review into the threat of cyber-attack from the east. Digital arrows go whistling by).

I know that I have only given one example of the unsettled behaviour of settlers, and yes, flat-cap man was probably the most extreme example of bad-behaviour that one is likely to come across, but I don't want to catalog the faults of settlers, because there are too many of them around here who might recognise me, and they know where I live. I love my cats, and I have heard the story of a neighbourly dispute in the next village which turned sour and ended with a woman going out to her back garden one morning to find that her six pet rabbits had been strangled, gutted, skinned, and strung up on the fence. I would rather say that I have always found it easier to talk to strangers when they are nomads, and that I have always found the settlers around me to be a little stranger than I would have liked them to be. People who stay in one place for too long seem to undergo a change; they develop a defensive attitude and a suspicion of anyone who "doesn't come from round here", and I am worried that I too might be held fast to the not-so-waterlogged clay beneath me by horrible thick roots. I might have to chop them, because should I ever have to choose between fighting a bitter war against a rabbit-skinning settler and moving to somewhere less prickly, I would get up and go. My ass would be laden, my arse would be moving, if I was heading northwards my r's would be rolling.

And finally, back to the Brave New Mobile World, and another little sign which has also just begun to make sense to me. Say hello to Youtube. Say goodbye to the shelves full of video cases, the video recorder itself, the scribbled writing on the labels and possibly the notebook for the pathologically tidy recording of on which recorded tape the desired title may be found, and at what index number. I want to play you a piece of music, or show you a video, because it adds more to the post than two hundred words could do. Before Youtube, what could I have done? Invited you round a few at a time to sit in front of the television, mailed out the video tape to you one at a time like a chain letter? Done without it? The world is a richer place for getting our collections out of our homes and into shared access, not a poorer one.

I ought to play "I live in a suitcase" for you, in memory of Andy the New-age Traveler, but there are some pieces of music which I cannot listen to without feeling all the old emotions and pain and turmoil welling up again, and that song is one such piece. Instead, from the same album, here is another one, much more cheerful, triumphant, and because it records the smashing down of a wall, and the re-emergence of the east just as appropriate, if not more so.

For Andy Koch, still missed.

(And I'm still waiting for the right train to come along.)

Default Judgements

2009-02-08T18:02:00.002Z

can throw up some wonderful absurdities. Here is a BBC news story of a man who, after receiving four parking fines from his local council, took them to court for causing him "mental distress". The council didn't bother to turn up to the court to put their case, and so the man was awarded a default judgment of £20,000.

He sent in bailiffs to the council offices to get his £20,000. After the bailiffs began unplugging all the computers, the council paid up, to prevent the seizure of their rather important file-server.

The story does not have a happy ending for Mr Noon, the man who bought the case, because the council did appear at a subsequent court hearing and pleaded their case, which I imagine went something along the lines of "it is the accepted business model that we, the council, collect money from those within our sphere of authority, not the other way round". The judge, predictably, agreed, and awarded the council £20,000 plus £7,500 costs.

If Mr Noon is quick enough, he may be able to spend all the money and therefore challenge the council's bailiffs to do their worst.

On a ludicrous note, should a policeman spot the man in question wandering up and down any red-light district trying to get rid of that £20,000 in a hurry, he would be able to go up and say "'Allo, 'allo, 'allo, after cunt, Noon?"

Oh, Brave New Mobile World

2009-02-08T10:56:00.012Z

Prelude: The View into Nomads' land

Overture:

This is going to be a trilogy in four parts ( three parts and a prelude, duh), and is an examination into how the world is flowing from a state of permanency into a state of flux. If this scares you, then just remember my motto, Nothing lasts for ever. One day, in the future, the world will settle down again and stop shifting around under your feet. You just have to wait, and watch for your opportunity to jump onto a bit of solid ground that happens to be passing.

Watcher of the Skies, Watcher of all...

I have been watching out for signs lately. I've not been sure what I should have been looking for, that's caused me a lot of confusion. In the old days, I might have scanned the skies for patterns made by flights of birds, or studied the meandering paths left by the clouds. I might have kept an ear open for farmer's tales of two-headed calves being born, and what particular dialect the extra head spoke in. I might have plotted the instances of fish falling from the skies and muttered to myself "it Steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time". Because I'm not a cruel man I wouldn't have been gutting animals and scrabbling around amongst the bloody entrails, but if someone else less squeamish had muttered to me that they had found suggestive shapes amidst the slime I would have added that information into my cauldron.

But these things no longer apply, scrying now happens in front of a computer screen, not a glass ball. There is also, I believe, an electronic Planchette. The Tarot has been online for years. The I-ching program was one of the first things I wrote, years ago, when I graduated from a ZX-81 to a Tandy 100 which had enough memory to store the lengthy descriptions of the hexagrams.

As to why I am looking for signs, well, I believe that great things are afoot. (Come now, earth-creature, or you will be late...) The world is once again on the move. The old guard is changing.

(Gentlemen, he said, I don't need your organisation...)

What things (afoot, great, fore-mentioned) are these? Well, that's why I'm looking for the signs, because these changes aren't happening with fanfare and panoply. There will be no announcements in the papers or postings on the walls of fashionable establishments. So I keep looking, rummaging around the world and the web, trying not to drown in the mass of messages of banks, bailouts, protests, predictions, sleaze and scandal. Underneath all of that dross are tiny little flecks of news that, on their own, mean little, but they are the signs. If you can persuade these shimmering flecks to cluster in a cloud, it is possible that they will coalesce into a more meaningful picture.

The signs I have found haven't made much sense, so far. A friend of mine has scrapped his domains and hosted web-sites and put his own small webserver on the end of his broadband line using dynamic DNS. It means he could move tomorrow, plug the machine into the new ADSL line, update dynamic DNS and he's back on the web. It's the opposite of serverage, which is what another friend of mine is up to. She has just finished uploading her entire music collection to the web. She no longer has to carry around with her the bulk and weight of CD's and the necessary HiFi system. All she needs is a connection to the web. Just because they're doing the opposite to the other doesn't mean that either or both of them are wrong. I feel that each of them is right. They're taking off in different directions, but heading for the same wide sky.

(Into the Blue again...)

The signs I am seeing are telling me that people are starting to move around again. But this time, they're moving into cyberspace. Online shops are springing up while high-street stores are shutting down. People are starting to do more things in the cyberverse, such as using serverage to store their music collection. It's partly due to cost. In order to house and make use of my collection of music, my Wharfedale speakers and the amplifier and player, I need a room, with the necessary cost of rates, heating, the need to keep answering the electoral roll form. And I can't, when I'm at someone else's house, play them something from my collection unless I've thought in advance and taken it with me. I, in a sense, am the equivalent to one of the city-dwellers in the last days of the Roman empire, when the Huns appeared as if from nowhere and plundered where they would.

This new realisation was sparked off by something I spotted over on Zen's blog, and it has reminded me why I still keep him on my sidebar as a link (under Satori'l Eloquence). He posted recently his thoughts after reading a book on the rise of the Mongol empire under Ghengis Khan, and how the Roman Empire was powerless to oppose him, because the horsemen came and went at will, while the city-dwellers had to sit there and take whatever came their way, usually arrows. Until I read what he had written, I knew that I knew something, but I didn't know what it was. And now that I do know what I had been sensing was going on around me, it's time to write it all down before the event.

The next post, the first in a trilogy, could well be titled Nomads I have Known.

And if you still think I'm clutching at straws, then ask yourself this; why have the cream of the trolls left usenet? And where have they gone? (So long, and thanks for all the fish)

Or, why do I no longer bother listening to the radio? Why is it that I would rather go into SecondLife and sit in the garden there listening to the streaming audio? I do it by choice, I haven't been forced there by economic circumstances, I did it of my own free-will. (I choose, therefore I am)

I suggest that you now pop across to Zen's satori'l state and read his post, which is titled On Information.

For one in transit...

2009-02-06T14:18:00.000Z

Happy landings

What have I done?

2009-02-06T13:37:00.005Z

I didn't realise, when I laughingly suggested Jeremy Clarkson would be a more suitable Prime Minister than Gordon Brown, that he might be reading my blog. According to the BBC news, he has told the Australians that Gordon Brown is "a one-eyed scottish idiot".

Did JC read my blog and suddenly think "now's my chance, with the S-C behind me I can't lose, let's go for it?"

I must make it perfectly clear that I in no way endorse all of JC's comments. I think it was unfair to target Mr Brown because he has only got sight in one eye, and also it is unfair, and possibly even racist, to pick on him because he is Scottish.

A Mental Ramble on the Bachsicord

2009-02-03T13:23:00.010Z

Winter's come, Winter's come, The sun has gone away.

The wonderful thing about the English weather is how it can divert attention from other business. In this case, by burying it under a nice clean white blanket which turns my untidy jumble of scrap wood for the fires into lovely smooth sculptures which hint at faeries and unicorns and other esoterica of the mental landscape.

We would be struggling to afford to heat the place if we had to rely on buying logs and coal, because everything has gone rocketing up in cost this year. Even though the oil prices have come back down again, the bottled gas which we use in our heaters still has the 55% increase in cost which occurred last summer. We are wearing thick clothes indoors and looking like South Park characters.

Now is the winter of our missed content.

But this is not a whining post, my salvation was above me. I am burning my collection of old newspapers. Some people lay down a cellar of wine to have something to look forward to, but I stored up an attic of pulp. Like wine, the pleasure from the use of it is fleeting, but welcome none the less. And they're not all the same. It has been a strange sensation seeing the past flickering past my eyes as each paper is fed into the flames. The cheap local papers, of course. The Times, The Observer, Private Eye, the Sun, even. I used to buy different papers sometimes just to see what life might feel like for the readers of each, and to muse upon the nature of the writers. The Financial Times. A friend with whom I worked on several contracts used to read the FT, because, as he said, "All the other papers are pushing some political message, but the people with money don't care for the politics of the world, they're just interested in the bottom line." So the FT told it like it was.

Sunday Sport 1994 Super Model had Sex with 3 MPs story to shock the commons! How innocent that sounds nowadays, with the forty-minute warning under our belts.

And, of course, the Gaurdians (sic). I kept those because of my love of crosswords. I could regularly complete nearly 80% of most puzzles, and used to refer back to previous works of a particular compiler if I got stuck. I gave up crosswords when I moved into my rambling old station. I had too much else to do to be able to sit around at leisure scratching my head. But I recently started doing them again.

Here come de fugue

I went to Australia last year, for two weeks early in November. Little Petal flew us out to stay with her son in Sydney, in his apartment in the Blue, the old immigration buildings down at Finger Wharf, where I was less impressed by the fact that Russell Crowe lived in the same building than I was with the giant bats who took to the air at dusk and glided majestically over the marina beneath us. The flight out there was torture, literally. I got off the plane with permanent cramp inside my knees. I had watched all the interesting movies, and some of the uninteresting ones, and was saved from having to chew my own limbs off by finding a cryptic crossword in the paper we had bought in the departure lounge.

My knees had just begun to stop hurting when we took to the air again, this time to fly down to Melbourne. The seats were wider, but I had bought another paper just in case. It was the day on which the convicted Bali bombers were executed. In the row of seats behind us, a nervous woman began to cry and sob that she wasn't able to do this, she couldn't go through this, and we hadn't even moved away from the boarding steps. The senior stewardess came down and interrogated her sharply, suggesting that, although we were still delayed due to terminal congestion, she wasn't about to add to the delay any further. The frightened woman's friends said they would keep her under control, and when I glanced round, they had bundled her up into a fetal shape and were cuddling her into quiescence. We flew, I solved, we landed, we got into a hired car and drove through Melbourne to the south, guided by the voice from the sat-nav.

On our return to Sydney, jet-lag gone, I thought we should have a little trip on our own, and so we rented a car and set off for the Blue Mountains, delighting in some of the apparent absurdities of Digital Denise, as I called our speaking sat-nav. As we headed into a crawling queue of cars on the dual-carriageway, she told us "in four hundred metres, turn right and go back." But we're still in Sydney! And the other side of the road, which also prohibited U-turns even if there wasn't a heavy barrier physically preventing it, was just as congested. Forcing her to re-calculate, I took a left and we headed away from the toll-road, through the middle of Sydney, and out to Penrith, and then up into the Blue Mountains.

If I could be anywhere now, other than here, it would be in Leura, where we first got out to walk around and found the wonderful toy museum, or Katoomba and the dizzying Echo Point, where we let the evening slide away into the warmth of the darkness and stretched out on the beds to watch TV in the motel by the railway line, or Lithgow with the wonderful remains of the Zig-Zag at the end of the Bells Line of Sight Road, where I bought a book of cryptic crossword puzzles so I could carry on doing them without having to also look at the depressing news in the paper.

A foog widdin de foog.

After our brief trip on our own we were off again with Little Petal's son and his partner (who confusingly has the same name as I do), this time by car to the Hunter Valley, for wine tasting. As we sat on the patio of the country club that evening, the lightning flickered in the distance, the wind suddenly swirled around, and heavy rain began to fall. Next morning, as we got in the car and briefly headed towards Queensland, the sat-nav said, "in one hundred metres, turn round and RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!" The catastrophic weather was wreaking havoc to the north, and yet again the papers were full of gloom and doom and disaster.

Do foog is done, back to de foog.

And soon, sadly, we left behind the home-from-home to so many other Brits, and once more squeezed ourselves into the torture-chairs for a return trip. I recently saw "Bride and Prejudice", a Bollywood glitter-fest, and laughed at the sight of the hero subverting the protection of the mother by offering her his much-wider upper-class seat so that he could sit beside her daughter. (Was that a new fugue, or just a variation on the current fugue, and if so, doesn't it perhaps get classed as a counter-fugue? Was it really just a cunning subterfugue?)

And, as I sat and shivered on Woking station at six in the morning, waiting for the first train back to Wiltshire, I found that I couldn't solve a single clue in the Guardian.

Five across, 5-3, cease this play on words, away with you! (solution below)

That was the fugue, that was

And so I'm burning my collection of newspapers, even those with part-solved crossword puzzles. Once again I'm too busy to have the time to switch off the world and immerse myself in utter escapism. The good thing about this funeral bonfire of my previous vanities, and apart from the transitory warmth, is that I'm turning away from the compulsive collecting which was firmly marking me out for old age. Nobody is likely to force their way into a silent house sometime in the future and find me dead for weeks surrounded by floor-to-ceiling piles of old papers.There is still hope for me. It was intriguing to go back in time to someone I once had been, but I realise now that I can never return completely. Heraclitus might have said "you cannot do the same crossword puzzle twice." My past is behind me, no longer in flames, but in ashes.

Bring on the Phoenix.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart and freeze.

(Fugue-off)

The Ivory Towers of Power

2009-02-01T11:26:00.002Z

I've never been to New York. I have no idea what Wall Street looks like to a ground-dweller. But I have been to London. I have seen the towering offices of the financial companies, from which those who ran the whole sorry story of this current debacle gazed out over the minions from whom they borrowed money to play their games. I have never been in those towers myself, so I don't know quite how detached such a lofty perspective might give the beholder, but let's assume it does detach one from reality. I'm sure that plain old-fashioned greed wasn't the only explanation for the loss of billions. Perhaps being removed from the normal world affected their sense of perspective.

Likewise, I am beginning to suspect that New Labour have spent too much time in their offices and conferences, and have also lost their sense of perspective. Their minds have drifted into Ivory-Tower mode. Take., for example, Gordon Brown's reaction to the strikes over the use of Italian workers on a Lincolnshire contract, (as reported by the BBC news website).

Speaking from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland (An ivory tower in the land of ivory peaks -SC), Mr Brown said instead of spontaneous strike action, "what we've got to do over time, as I've always said, is that where there are jobs in this country, we need people with the skills, developed in this country".

He then went on to say that his government was using the apprenticeship scheme to ensure that enough people would be available with the right skills to take advantage of the upturn.

The problem is, those wildcat strikers we saw were not teenagers just out of school worried about their future, but middle aged people who are unlikely to qualify for the apprenticeships.

Are the older working generation going to be condemned to pushing long trains of trolleys around the supermarket car-parks?

Footnote:

There is a problem with seeing the world through the web; it changes almost as quickly as I blinked. I read the news article on the BBC site just after 9 am, wrote this post an hour later, came back to the news article to copy out the relevant passage, and found it had been revised. The quote about the apprenticeships had been removed. Someone had obviously decided it didn't belong in such close proximity to Gordon's quote from Davos. I wonder who that could have been?

Jeremy Clarkson was right

2009-01-31T11:53:00.004Z

Two posts in one day must be some sort of record.

I had to go out just after writing Hard Choices, to pick up Little Petal. Her car had been leaking water over the past couple of days and she had taken it up to the garage, confident that they would tell her the head gasket had gone and the car was not worth repairing. I, however, was quietly confident that a hose was leaking. It often happens in the cold weather, when the rubber goes hard overnight in the frosts, and then has to heat up to normal working temperature. It causes thermal and mechanical stresses and after a while, cracks. Simples, innit, peeps?

I was proved right. As Little Petal and the mechanic stood beside the opened bonnet of the car, the hose announced it had had enough and enveloped them in a cloud of steam. She phoned me as I was polishing the post to ask if I could go and collect her.

It's funny how you never see the typos until the post is published, or never realise how awkward or open to misinterpretation your wording was until you see it on the final page. Drafts just don't seem to engage the same part of the critical faculties as the real thing. This is probably what happened to Gordon. "British Jobs for British people" must have sounded brilliant when the speech was written, but look what's happened now. If Gordon had blogged his ideas and allowed comments he would have realised a lot sooner just what he had planted.

So, on the way back down the hill, I was explaining to Little Petal just why I believe Gordon has to go. She protested that Globalisation was Blair's baby, and I replied that Blair was a barrister, not an economist. He might have had the idea, but Gordon was the engineer who made it happen. But nobody could have predicted the problems, she said. I disagreed, saying that plenty of people had been pointing out the un-sustainability of the housing boom or the folly in allowing so much personal debt to accumulate, but their advice was ignored. As I saw it, Gordon had to go because he either ignored the advice, which means he was incompetent, or never saw the pitfalls, which again means he was incompetent.

Little Petal's final argument was that Gordon shouldn't go, because that would mean David Cameron taking over, and she didn't like David Cameron. To me that argument smacks of an officer in the German army refusing to go along with the plot to assassinate Hitler because that would mean Goering taking over, and he didn't like fat people.

But I never got a chance to deliver that witty riposte, because I was approaching a right-turn which I needed to take, and as I checked the mirror before putting on the indicator, I saw that a car had pulled out from the car immediately behind me and was about to try and overtake us both, regardless of the presence of the junction. I put the indicator on, because I needed to start slowing for the turn. He decided to have a go at getting past me anyway, and then changed his mind as he realised how close we were to the turning, and just managed to swerve in behind me. I had to go a little further because if I had braked as I would have normally he would either have smashed into the back of me, or braked hard enough to make the car behind smash into the back of him. He had to brake and slow to a crawl, and I got a look at him as I crossed over into the side road.

It was an Audi, one of the ones which Jeremy Clarkson had declared to be the new un-cool car. And yes, I have begun to notice that, as well as the massive 4-wheel drive cars and white vans, the Audis are featuring more and more and more as the car most likely to cut you up or squeeze you onto the verge.

So, if Jeremy Clarkson is capable of noticing trends and pointing them out, why not make him Prime Minister? He is well-qualified, after all, since so many people find him annoying, irritating, and unbelievably arrogant. But it doesn't really matter what the personality is, providing the person is right. That's all we ultimately need.

Hard Choices

2009-01-31T09:56:00.006Z

Or you could call this divided loyalties. My sympathies lie with the protesters outside the refineries and power stations. It is galling to be out of work and see someone from another country doing work you want to do and are capable of doing. I know it from experience. I am, or was, a software engineer. My work opportunities have dried up over the past few years as, first of all, foreign IT workers entered the country on fast-track visas, and then, after the government admitted that IT skills should not be on the shortlist, companies instead outsourced the work to overseas countries where the cost of living, and therefore the wage bill, was less. Countries to which I couldn't go and get a job. I am a victim of outsourcing. I am not alone, either, as thousands of people would agree if they got their chance to put up their hands and complain.

The chance came yesterday, when the BBC news website opened up a "Have your say" page for the current strikes. Within an hour, the page index numbers had marched to the right at the bottom of the article. When I finished reading all the comments on a page and clicked on the next button, I found myself beginning again at the top of the comments I had only just finished reading, because that number of new comments had been added in such a short time.

One or two of the comments pointed out that it was not illegal, under EU laws, to employ people from an EU state. Nobody, at the time I was reading, pointed out that this was an installation contract, and so the contractor not only had every right but also every reason to employ its own trained staff to carry out the work. I chatted on the phone for a while with a kindred spirit who pointed out that none of these people had clustered around electrical outlets protesting about the import into this country of cheap giant plasma flatscreen TVs.

The fact is, though, that yet again globalisation has twisted and turned and surprised many. They thought it meant a flow into the country of clothing and software and call-centres from India, of cheap toys from China, of magic electronics from the far east. Nobody realised that sometimes the goods would arrive dismantled and would require assembling in this country, and the manufacturer would probably stipulate who put them together.

When I say nobody, there are some people who probably did have some idea. Gordon Brown, for instance, ought to have known. And the reporters now have latched onto this, following the lines that he spoke at the conference in 2007, promising "British Jobs for British Workers". Yes, he probably didn't mean he would flout the EU employment laws, but we now ought to know just what did he mean? After all, if it means we become the dumb animals in the fields while rich foreigners who have become owners or shareholders in great (sic) Britain Plc ride around in their high-tech vehicles, why weren't we told that at the time he announced his vision for our future with that snappy soundbite?

So, even though I know they're not necessarily in the right, my sympathies now lie with the protesters. They have seen a worrying future, where their jobs might be taken away from them by the (often foreign-owned) companies and given to workers who come from outside these shores. And even though they might be in the EU, and therefore have a right to come and work here, they weren't the ones who elected the government sitting over it all and collecting the taxes, making the rules, and trying hard not to shoulder the blame.

If Gordon Brown meant, as his spokesman claimed he did, that Britain would be skilled up to compete in a brave new high-tech world, why has it not begun? Why will the wind turbines which are springing up around the soon-to-be green and pleasant land be made abroad and not in our own country? Why do solar-voltaic cells come from the far-east and not our own silicon valleys? Did Gordon believe in Thatchers vision of our country being a giant service industry selling clever tricks and financial magic to the rest of the world, while the actual goods and produce came in from the countries who didn't know enough to do the tricks?

If so, then why didn't he make sure it was protected? Or is that another part of the Globalisation plan? Everybody gets their turn for a few short months, until a competitor decides they can undercut them? It could be a giant world-wide version of Tesco driving down the price of the farm produce it fills the shelves with. Except that, particularly in the case of oil and gas, the opposite seems to be happening. Everything is getting much more expensive. Including the local and central taxes we all have to pay.

Perhaps the new British jobs for British People that Gordon sees are going to be provided by Tescos and the like. Pushing trolleys around the car-park, stacking shelves, cleaning floors. After all, where I live in the countryside, far away from software houses and what few industries still need knowledge skills, it's one of the few jobs I could get into. And while I'm pushing my long snake of trolleys back from the the collection points to the doors, will I do it happily, or will I look enviously at the rich shareholders, the foreign workers, and want a re-adjustment?

So, my sympathies, I repeat, are with the protesters. It's time for Gordon to either sort things out, or shuffle off. It isn't any good his saying this recession started abroad, not here, because he should have been aware that this was a risk under globalisation. If he wasn't aware, then he shouldn't have been pushing forwards with something he didn't properly understand. And if he was aware, and couldn't prevent it, then he has to go for reasons of incompetence.

It's not about luck, stupid.

2009-01-29T09:29:00.006Z

We were walking towards the exit at Morrisons last week when Little Petal asked me if I wanted to get a lottery ticket. "No," I answered, "I'm tired of hoping."

She said that was sad, and I suppose it is, because in today's world it would seem that we have nothing left but to hope that we get lucky. The old Victorian ethos of hard work and self-improvement leading to a better life was thrown away, first by Thatcher as she persuaded the country to scrap all the dirty manufacturing processes and switch to nice clean services funded by a growth in home ownership, and then by Blair and Brown as they pushed their Globalisation baby along in their shiny new labour pram and tried to be better than Thatcher.

Globalisation, as many saw it in this country, meant the jobs done by call-centres in places like Newcastle going overseas to places like India, or computing jobs being taken away from UK residents and given to people brought in from overseas on fast-track visas to work at a third of the rate.

But globalisation for the Indians has recently taken a nasty turn. Textile workers in Mumbai have been queuing in the streets outside the factories, hoping that one of them will open its doors and hire workers for a day. The problem? The countries which had "Globalised" their textile industries out to cheaper places were now in recession and no longer buying so much. If only Labour had written under their adverts "your fortunes can go down as well as up under our policies". But then who reads the small-print?

Mr Brown recently asked that the world continue to stay with globalisation through "this difficult stage" rather than switch to protectionism. He doesn't want to see his pet project left drowning in the seas as we all swim frantically for the lifeboats. The thing is, Mr Brown, we're all desperate to be lucky, that's the brave new world that has emerged from the results of Thatcher and Blair, and globalisation doesn't promise so much to the people at the bottom, does it? But then the world has always been targeting those in search of profits. Blame the church for that, the Old Testament parable of the talents has been used to justify a lot of religious and political taxation, even though it was only an analogy. If you look at that analogy, it isn't about making a profit, or of being lucky, it's about self-improvement.

Zen, over on his blog Yeah Whatever (Free), asks "should the rich be rich?" Likewise, I suppose I ought to say "should the lucky be lucky?" Except that I know the answer. You could only stop the rich from being rich or the lucky from being lucky by killing them. Aspiration is something that humans universally, um, aspire to. The same greed which drives some people to become rich appears in others as a jealous need to confiscate and "re-distribute". (Did the French, American and Russian revolutions lead to those countries becoming universally-loved models for the world?)

I can only hope that History does not repeat itself yet again by following a great depression with a great war.

Oh, I'm not doing the hope thing, am I?

Shit.

A Pookah is a Solitary Spirit

2009-01-25T16:38:00.004Z

In case you've just googled Pookah because you hadn't a clue what I was on about, you've probably come across Robert Anton WIlson on at least one of the hits on page one.

I read lots of Robert Anton Wilson's writings as I grew up, and he mentioned the Pookah when he told of one of the many synchronicities that amazed him when he set about writing the Illuminatii Trilogy. The Pookah he knew of was the giant six-foot rabbit called Harvey in the film with Jimmy Stewart.

I have a Pookah of my own, a black-and-white cat called Winnie. I jokingly used to call her "Winnie the Puke" because of her propensity for regurgitating dried cat food whenever she was forced to eat it, but one day I realised that her mischievous behaviour qualified her to be a Pookah, and the new name "Winnie the Pookah" didn't offend as many people as the first one had..

Pookahs are still around, even now in the age of technology. A friend of mine likes to use the analogy of a 500 pound gorilla whenever he is making a tricky point. His Pookah is the unarguable facts that we normal people find ourselves up against time and time again. We accept things as they are, or, more correctly, as we think they are. In fact, most of the time we are wrong, it's just the Pookah loves to see us making twats of ourselves.

Talking of twats, there's an example of Pookahs on TV at the moment. QI has the concept of an "Elephant in the Room", which it uses as a means of allowing sharp-witted people to get a few more points, as Jo Brand did the other night. (As an aside, the quest on QI who has most impressed me is Johnny Vegas, and the guest who has least impressed me is Vic Reeves. Make of that what you will). An Elephant in the Room is another type of Pookah, which causes confusion amongst humans, mainly for its own amusement, as it watches them argue over what it is or isn't.

Most people know Harvey, the giant six-foot rabbit, as the best example of a Pookah. Pookahs are amazingly adaptive, migrating from books into plays and then to the screen, appearing on TV, and now even emerging into the digital age. There's at least one in Second Life. I was wandering around there the other night with a friend. I got lost in the sky and when she pulled me back down to where she was, it was to announce that she had found a giant demonic rabbit. And so she had. It wasn't a very active Pookah, though, it just sat there and enjoyed the puzzlement it caused to passers-by.

Pookahs can be like buses, one after the other in a chain of surprises. A few days after meeting the one in Second Life I was over in the stores sorting through the cardboard boxes and bags of cuddly toys, trying to make space for my latest attempt to stay alive and solvent; growing exotic mushrooms. As I picked up a large off-white cuddly rabbit I heard faint music, and put it down in shock. The music ceased. I picked up the rabbit again and began to move down the cluttered aisle, and there came a faint chime. I stopped, it ceased. I moved, it chimed.

Feeling around the rabbit (pervert that I am), I found a strange bulge just above its tail. A key. I turned it, and the chimes began a tune.

"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star..."

I shall have to sell it, though. When I got it home to show Little Petal, Winnie the Pookah took offense to it. It would seem that Pookahs wll not brook competition, and Winnie was there first. So the Large Chiming Rabbit is going to be put on ebid as soon as I can remember how to log in.

And I might Youtube it as well so you can all share and enjoy. Remember to check back here for updates.

Won't get fooled again...

2009-01-19T10:21:00.004Z

Over the other side of the pond they're celebrating the imminent exchange of one president for another. What can we say about G W B? That he was not quite as bad as Idi Amin? Debatable. The USA seems to be looking forward to a breath of fresh air. Here's a short bit of atypical English cycnicism.

But look on the bright side, at least Obama was elected by a majority of voters who knew (roughly) what they were voting for. We aren't quite so fortunate.

Go back a few years (and a few hops across the ocean), to when Margaret Thatcher, after two terms in office, was replaced by an ex-chancellor, un-elected by the voting public, in an attempt to recover from the mounting unpopularity that two terms of her ideas had generated. The good ship Great Britain went rudderless into the storm with her arse-end bared for all to see.

After what seemed like an eternity, a sleaze-ridden government which seemed to have completely forgotten who it was meant to be serving was replaced by a fresh new face, Tony Blair, whom we all (some of us), voted for. Oh, how we sighed with relief! Wonder-kid would save us, Britain would be great again, the damages caused by Thatcher-policies would be redressed. A brave new era was about to dawn.

And what have we got now? Not what we expected. After finally seeing (mostly with relief), a two-plus term Blair bidding farewell, we have an ex-chancellor, un-elected by the general public, taking over, with a brief to do something about the unpopularity which his party seems to have been tarred with. Oh God, Back in Lodi again.

Will history repeat itself?

Good luck, America.

Pray for our souls.

Singing the same old song

2009-01-16T08:52:00.009Z

The car industry is in trouble. The first hint of it came from Honda pulling out of Formula One racing. There are some cynics who say that the recession was a blessing which allowed them to creep away from an embarrassing period during which they spent a fortune producing one of the slowest cars on the grid. If the teams were to be ranked on the basis of annual budget divided by points won, Honda might have topped that list. Still, Max is determined that the cost of racing will go down, and it looks like most of the teams agree with him. And, although I initially disagreed, I have since come to realise that this might be the most important change that will ever have occurred to the sport. More to follow.

Obviously, budgets are being slashed in an effort to preserve the factories. The companies in England are going on to reduced working patterns in an attempt to ride out the troubles while they, like their American counterparts, beg for government assistance. Sadly, I don't feel they're going to get it, because unlike the banks, there are only jobs at stake. And, unlike the banks, the car companies haven't got themselves into such embarrassing debt levels to outsiders such that the governments have no choice but to step in.

Another little giveaway is the decline in advertising for new cars on the television. But, and this is where my title for this post comes to the fore, what adverts there are, are little changed. Buy our car because you'll get laid/ make your neighbours jealous/ Take up more space on the road than the other drivers/ No reason other than we've made a clever advert with lots of strange martial arts scenes like the Matrix.

Do the car companies deserve to survive on taxpayers money? Not one manufacturer has released an advert along the following lines:

"Remember that summer of discontent when crude oil prices climbed higher than the Jumbo Jets? Remember how the goverments said they heard your pleas and would do something? Remember how they failed to cut the price of oil and waited for the recession to do it for them? Well, we heard your pleas too, and we did something about them. The new (insert car name here) does 50% more miles to the gallon than any other car, so when the oil prices soar again, you won't be forced to empty your pockets to enjoy your driving."

No, not a single car company has made any attempt to look ahead and protect their core market. For that reason, I don't think they're worthy of assistance. If the government is going to pump billions into parts of the transport industry, I think they should be funding research into future technology, whether it be on more fuel-efficient cars or on producing biofuels, I'm not able to judge. But my instinct says it should be on smaller. lighter, more efficient cars capable of running on a range of fuels, and. ideally, on electricity when in towns or villages.

(A few weeks ago, when the BBC news site published an article about the possibility of a bail-out, they asked for readers comments, and I sent in one suggesting that any large injection of money into the car industry should be conditional upon it being used to fund better development of better cars. The BBC didn't publish my comment, or any similar ones. Seems I'm in a minority.)

I decided I'd add this final point:

The modern car is generally wasteful of our natural resources and harmful to the environment, and the only people who get any significant benefit from them are the energy companies who sell us the fuel. If anybody should bail out the car industry to protect their assets, it should be the energy companies. Let them preserve the gas-guzzlers. After all, they've got a large amount of our money regularly coming into their coffers. Invest it (and not in a bank, you suckers).

The Myth of History

2009-01-11T15:45:00.008Z

I am a product of the books that I read in my youth that inspired me, the films and TV programs that I watched later on in life which captured my imagination, the people I have known who have told me some of their part in the world, and lastly, of my own experiences.

I have always been inspired to live and act by something, and it is a strange feeling to find the idols of the past exposed and uncovered. At primary school, fascinated by the story told by Apsley Cherry-Garrad in his book "The Worst Journey in the World", I created an abridgment, read by myself and two others one morning during the assembly, of Captain Scott's journey to, and failure to return from, the South Pole. Years later, I began to learn more about Shackleton, who never reached the pole, but never perished in the wilderness or threw his mens' lives either, and learned that seasoned explorers such as Wally Herbert considered Scott to have been reckless, or a poor planner. I was forced to revise my opinion of a hero and accept that he did not perish simply due to the capriciousness of the weather, but due to some of his own mistakes.

We learned, at school, that Great Britain had been a major sea-power, never defeated, due to the character of the men who crewed the ships, and the traditions of the past. Britannia ruled the waves. While working at a company I choose to call Wobble and Careless, a friend there told me about a painting he had seen in a gallery in Amsterdam, which showed the Dutch Navy sailing up the Thames and sacking the Port of London. That hadn't been in any of the history books I had read.

Odd little snippets are beginning to come out now that the 60-year D-notices have been lifted, and we are learning that some of the victories in the last war were not due to courage, determination, heroism and self-sacrifice as much as to intercepted and decoded radio transmissions. And that we (Britain), and America, did a deal with Joe Stalin that condemned many people to death or imprisonment for years to come.

The world behind me is changing even as I write this. History is not the tube down to the incinerator in the basement that Orwell foresaw in 1984, it is almost the opposite. We risk being flooded with new information which could make us rethink a lot of what we have till now taken for granted.

History, I am beginning to realise, is always written at a distance, not as it unfolds, but after it has settled down and stopped throwing up the dust which confuses the participants and mixes up the warring sides. In the past, we are told, it was written for political or religious control, but not now, not in our enlightened democratic age. Oh no, it seems, history now is written to make money.

We are all at the mercy of the editors and publishers of history. We know only what they decide to publish. For example, take Custer's Last Stand.

G. A. Custer is/was an iconic figure who stood for heroism, determination and sacrifice, because of what we had been told happened to him. A few years ago, someone decided to give credence to the stories told by the Indians. They had always told these stories, right from the time that they killed him and his men, but nobody published their accounts. The newspapers, book companies and Hollywood told of an heroic doomed stand, of men facing certain death, staring it defiantly in the face. "They faced their foe and died with their eyes open."

"No," said the Indians, "there was no last stand, no small group back-to-back around their flag. They were running, scrambling away through the grass, every man for himself. Custer didn't organise his men into any formation, defensive or otherwise, because he didn't know we were there. We rose up out of the long grass and killed them as we came upon them."

Archeologists excavating the site came up with evidence that supported the Indian tale of events, not the published ones.

The Indians told the truth, but the papers and books and films made all the money.

You are what you buy.

Escape from Reality

2009-01-02T12:55:00.004Z

I've been quiet for a while.

First, it was because I was busy. I could have posted something along the lines of 'Dude, where's my data?' when a hard disk crash wiped out all of my rail simulation work. Yes, some of it was backed up, but I learned the hard way about using large (250Gb) disks; you need a large disk in order to properly back up everything. I had lots of scattered backups on smaller disks and spent ages searching through them before I got back to where I had been. The strange thing was, this crash followed a similar crash on Little Petal's machine. Sadly, I couldn't do anything for her because her hard disk was a SCSI model, of which I had none similar, and she had studiously refused to do any backups or let me take any Acronis images, even after the machine began to make alarming noises on startup. So a few more days went there as well.

And then; I could have posted about the fun of pedalling around North Somerset on a Bickerton folding bicycle after a long weekend spent in a caravan while I explored the remains for the West Somerset Mineral Railway and rode around on the West Somerset (working) Railway behind a blue Somerset and Dorset 2-8-0 engine, of the same type as that in Rail Simulator. But, when I got home, the pressure of being away from the internet for so long got to me, and I had a mad morning clicking around through all sorts of strange places on the web. One of the porn sites must have had a cleverly-designed popup which, when closed by the little 'x' in the top right corner, installed something called Smitfraud. Trend Housecall recognised it was there but couldn't get rid of it, Spybot tried valiantly to remove it but crashed to the desktop each time I reached a particular stage in the process, so I went online and found the Smitfraud removal tools. They, in combination with using msconfig for a controlled startup, got rid of the fake desktop screaming that I was infected with a virus and got me back the task manager. For a couple of days I felt I had got rid of Smitfraud, but when I used TCPView to see whey the machine still seemed a bit slow, I found that my machine (fortunately not the simulation workstation I had only just finished repairing), was now a zombie relay station for spam and god knows what else. So I had to revert to an Acronis image taken a couple of months earlier.

After that, like Marvin, I fell into a bit of a decline. I used Linux to wander around the dodgy sites. I worked as many hours as I could in gardens to cover the mortgage for the couple of weeks when I went out to Australia, courtesy of Little Petal, and came back to a cold, wet, and thoroughly miserable England. I watched the terminal decline of the economy. I watched my pitiful savings become almost useless after the cut in interest rates. Without a future, I found it too hard to dream. It is hard to escape into flights of fancy when your feet are stuck in the slough of despond. I pondered cutting them off just beneath the knee to escape, Douglas-Bader style, but I doubt the NHS would do the deed and I can't see BUPA offering it as an anti-depressant cure. I couldn't afford BUPA anyway.

Sic Transit MMVIII

And so, for MMIX, I shall begin again. The Sopwith Camel will fly once more.

Australia, by the way, was wonderful.

I hace been bisy, ibbit

2008-08-29T19:31:00.006+01:00

And this week, I shall be mostly being even bisuer :)

First there was this:

It's finally covered, which wasn't easy when the site they had chosen was on top of a hill where the wind never stopped. It's hard work, trust me/

And then there was this:

Which is finally near to completion, but while I was painting and mending holes in the ceiling I had to move most of the stuff that was in the room out into the other rooms, and there wasn't space, of course. And I hate painting.

And then there was this:

It's my brother's pride and joy, but it scares the hell out of me when I'm right at the top. It sways and wavers and sometimes settles with a creak and a jolt. And did I mention that I hate painting?

And then there was this;

Which is ever so sweet and small, I know, but I'm keeping the larger version under wraps for now. I have to do some re-texturing on it. Re-texturing is a digital form of painting. What did I say about painting? At least there's not so much mess when you're doing it digitally.

And I haven't mentioned the lost data, have I? Or the fact that I've rebuilt a Sturmey-Archer front Dynohub, so now Albert Ross has lights again. Did you spot him in the picture with the tower? I bet you didn't even bother. I've been using Albert more and more lately, after mending the broken frame tube and then the broken saddle plate, because it's just so much more fun to ride than the mountain-bike. I've even taken to using him to go to and from the gardening jobs. I'm a bit worried that something else is going to break with all the extra use, but I suppose I should get the weaknesses sorted out now rather than later.

Did you know you can reach 30mph going downhill on a bicycle? I gave in the other day and bought a set of bike lights from Lidl that also had a cycle computer. I didn't read the packet carefully enough in the shop, because the speed sensor that picks up the wheel rotations transmits the signal by a short-range radio transmitter to the torch body where the display is, and it has a maximum distance of 60cm. When I fitted it all to the bike, the torch was 65cm from the sensor, and of course it wouldn't work properly. It would show the speed up till about 9 mph, and then it would stop. So I fiddled around and mounted the torch a bit lower down, and now I can see the speed, until it exceeds 30mph, and then it gets frightened again and refuses to transmit such information over such a dangerously large distance. But I'm not going to move the torch again; I know when I'm going over 30mph on a bike, it's like being on top of the scaffold tower at the house in a strong wind: scary.

Strange echoes

2008-07-19T19:45:00.004+01:00

Little Petal and her youngest daughter have left and gone to Dorchester, to rescue some battery hens. Their latest venture is to buy twenty or so of them at a time from the lorry carrying them to slaughter. They're worn-out and just haven't been laying enough to meet the production demands of the farms that feed the supermarkets. Little Petal's daughter puts them out to grass, where they stagger in amazement in the sunlight, and gorge themselves on things they haven't eaten before, such as grass and nettles and grubs and slugs. After a few days of this, they start to produce excellent eggs. They still look strange, wandering around with wings that are just quills and no feathers, but they seem to be better for being out in the light.

I'm left here to my own devices again. I've been painting the sitting room so that I can move Little Petal into it, desk, computer, phone and all, so that I don't have to listen to her shouted conversations with her deaf mother, or watch the television programs she likes. I hate "New Tricks", and Denis Waterman in wrinkled mode reminds me awfully of one of those battery hens on remission. She can have the big television set and the Sky satellite box that shows almost nothing but repeats of old programs for an exorbitant minimal monthly fee. I'll have the smaller television and the set-top box that shows almost nothing but repeats of old programs for free. It did show me a bit of Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall's program about chickens the other night, which is relevant to the first paragraph of this quote, so that's the continuity nicely taken care of.

I've also moved out of the sitting room my large collection of video tapes, which one day I really ought to work through and catalog, because some of them don't have what is written on the label actually still on the tape inside. One, in particular, I know, has something radically different. I remember, because this evening, having not bothered to watch the Grand Prix qualifying, I sat down for a moment to watch the GP2 race from Hockenheim. Hockenheim is an ominous name in the Formula One list of tracks, because Jim Clark was killed there, not even racing in an F1 race, years ago.

The GP2 race featured Bruno Senna doing typically Senna-esque things in the sudden rain, and I have no doubt that he is going to try and live up the reputation that Ayrton left behind him. Quite a few years ago, I grabbed a tape from the shelf, looked at the title, knew that I had seen the film enough times, banged it into the video recorder, and went out to help my brother change the engine in his Datsun. I came back later that afternoon, rewound the tape, and started to watch the Imola Grand Prix, Soon after the beginning, Ayrton Senna hit the wall near Tamburello, and died of his injuries. The film I had recorded over, the name still written in biro on the label, was "The Man who would be King".

It always scared me, that coincidence, because it seemed too apt.

Verdigris

2008-07-15T20:17:00.000+01:00

I hate it when I don't know how something works. It means I can't fiddle around, changing this parameter or that input, to get precisely what I want out of it. Especially when it's such a simple thing as a copper bracelet.

I found it when I was looking for something else, a few weeks ago, and I had turned out every single drawer in the Haberdasher's unit where I keep my projects: things like half-built solar panel controllers, half-dismantled model railway engines that suddenly stopped working, things to make a cat's fur stand on end, you know the stuff. There, in the bottom of one drawer, was my old copper bracelet.

I bought it when I first moved into the station and started getting pains in my arms and shoulders. I hadn't suffered from them before, and I didn't know what was causing them, and one day in a street-market, I saw this anti-rheumatism device. So I bought it, wore it, probably stopped suffering the pains, couldn't be bothered wearing it any more, took it off, filed it away under D for don;t know.

And then I started getting the pains again, last autumn, and I had forgotten all about the bracelet. I could remember the pains, though. I went to the supermarket and got some of the glucosamine tablets with cod-liver oil. They seemed to work, but also, I had cut down on the brown sugar I had been adding to my oats and muesli, and for a while, convinced myself that it was the excess sugar which had caused the problem. It was, also, cheaper to buy less sugar than it was to buy more glucosamine.

When I was searching through the drawers to try and find the special tool for removing alloy cranks from bicycle axles and came across the bracelet, I remembered buying it all those years ago, and I slipped it back on again, because I had, once again, started to get odd twinges in my upper arms. And then I just forgot about it and went on looking for the bicycle tool.

I remembered the bracelet a little while later, not because my arm stopped hurting; it did, but that took a while longer; I remembered the bracelet because the skin all around it had gone green. Bright green. It washed off, which I was glad to see, but a day later, there it was again, bright green.

After a few days, I noticed that I hadn't felt any pains recently, and I also noticed that my wrist had stopped going green. So I switched the bracelet from my right wrist, for it was the right upper arm which had been hurting, to my left wrist.

Over the next few weeks, I noticed that on some days, my wrist would once more go a vivid green where the copper had touched it, but that the pains had not come back. So, I formulated an hypothesis; sometimes I would have an excess of acid sweat, which manifested itself by leaching salts from the copper onto my skin. What then is curious, is how the copper salts, bright green, act to stop the pains? Does some of the green get absorbed into the skin, thence to the bloodstream, and somehow make up a deficiency? If so, and if taking copper salts can cure arm pains, why doesn't a course of vitamin tablets with the appropriate minerals in them cure the pains?

I'll say right off that I don't believe in any of the quasi-scientific theories that you can find on the web about the beneficial effects of wearing copper bracelets. I know bollocks when I read it, and I should do, I've written enough of it myself.

The real interest to me is not what the copper does, but why, every now and then, I get acid sweat, and how this is linked to pains in the arms. I've already come across one interesting theory that explains how pains in the joints might occur from having excess acidity; the body takes calcium and neutralises the acidity by creating an alkaline compound, and, because the easiest place in the body from which it can get calcium in a hurry is from the joints, and old injuries or imperfections there start to hurt. But the place where I had pains was no near the shoulder joint, it was in the areas below them, about halfway down the upper arm.

And I know that it might seem pointless to wonder about what changes to my diet I could make when I've got this copper bracelet instead, but their are times when you don;t want to be wearing a large chunk of copper on your wrist. Such as when you're reaching around under the bonnet of the car and there's a good supply of amps lurking on lots of exposed terminals and wires. Yes, I know, I can take the bracelet off before I reach around, but then I'll put it down somewhere and fprget about it, and in fifteen years time I'll be rummaging around in the Haberdasher's unit looking for the tiny device that de-magnetises the solenoid valves in the Toshiba household robot, and guess what I'll find in the drawer?

Prelude and Fugue

2008-07-02T22:55:00.003+01:00

The boy stood on the burning deck,
Smoking a Craster Kipper...

I mended my eccentric bicycle. It wasn't a good-as-new repair, because I couldn't afford the cost of the replacement materials or the charge for fitting them. I did what I've always done when I'm in a tight spot, I cheated. In this case, I used my lathe to turn up a piece of tube which I then glued inside the two broken pieces with one of the modern two-pack resins. I'll say no more, but there'll be a detailed description over on Albert Ross's blog, (Just Give me the Wafers), soon. But don't all rush at once, you might overbalance the good ship bloggery and we wouldn't want her turning mock-turtle before the moon is abaft the mizzen.

And so I had to test my repair, and regain my confidence in the bicycle, and I thought that the best way to do that would be to ride through and beyond my jinx village, the place from where, twice now, I have had to walk the bicycle home. I packed a couple of bags with tools; masses of tools, because I was determined that if the bike should break down I was going to fix it then and there, no more pushing for me. I also took some water bottles (full), a handful of nuts (edible), and a plastic box full of meusli and oats and brown sugar.

They took some money, and plenty of honey,
Wrapped up in a B-sharp note...

I shan't bore you with facile descriptions of the joys of the countryside, or fill up this post with pictures of wild roses, I've gone beyond that. Today, I shall be mostly ranting on about the crassness of the richer people who think that because they are on the oldest form of transport they can do as they please. And later on, I'll mention the Angry Badger, and the teenage Midwich Cuckoos; but first, we have to begin at the beginning, and only then can we then go on through the middle until we get to the end, and make sure that we stop there, otherwise we could burst through straight into the middle of something that hasn't happened yet, and that could be awkward.

The time has come, The Walrus said,
To talk of many things;
Of Dead Mens Shoes, and Sealing Wax,
And Cabbages and Kings...

But the beginning is boring, just an odd man on an even odder bicycle riding along a bumpy tarmac road, huffing and puffing his way up the hills and rushing like a lemming down the other side. Let's skip that and go straight to the dirty bit.

I had done all my road-riding, satisfied myself that the glued tube hadn't split apart or bent despite the Wiltshire roads doing the worst, and I wanted to go off the tarmac and onto the muddy paths that lead through the woods. In particular, I wanted to go and see Ballands Castle again. So I turned off the tarmac roads in Penselwood and started riding very cautiously down a track. It went downhill at an alarming gradient, but in addition, the torrent of rain water had gouged out a snaking trough that lurched from one side of the track to the other and back again almost all the way down to the bottom, like the trail of a very drunk snake.

Pick up any map, and you'll see that it is criss-crossed by little dashed lines, some red, some green. These are footpaths and bridleways, usually public. That, to me, suggests that they're there for everyone to use, rich or poor, citizen or visitor. And when I started along the particular section of public footpath I wanted to use, I found that someone else had been along it first. Several someones. On horseback. And they hadn't had a thought for who else would have to try and use the path after them. At every soft and sticky spot the ground was churned into a miniature vision of the Somme, craters filled with water everywhere, (very alarming to a Sopwith Camel who had crashed full tilt into one such muddy shell-hole in the last few days of the war). And not content with churning up the middle of the path, other hoofprints had spread out to either side until the whole width of the track was impassable to anyone who wasn't on a horse or wearing wellingtons.

And, the trouble was, I was trapped. I couldn't have ridden back up the scarred road I had gingerly inched down, it just wouldn't have been possible to have pedalled up the one in three slope while avoiding the snaking troughs. So I had to go on for nearly two miles, pushing and carrying the bike through ankle, calf and possibly horse-deep mud and water. My dead mens shoes filled up, squelched, and got sucked off my feet, the bicycle rims and tyres got so clogged up with mud that the wheels stopped revolving, and I thoroughly lost my temper with the selfishness of rich horse riders.

I think I'm right in saying that they're rich. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty certain that you won't find many horses if you take a tour of the inner city housing estates. I mean, it's obvious that you won't find them in the tower blocks, but even the ground-floor flats and lock up garages aren't known for having a dobbin or three hanging around. There'll be cars and mopeds and motorcycles and mountain bikes a plenty, but I bet you won't find a single horse, not even one on blocks without any horse-shoes on.

It's awfully hard luck on Diana,
Her pony has swallowed a shoe.
She fished down its throat with a spanner,
But all that came out was some poo.

I could not see myself being able to lift the muddy bike over the stiles that separated me from Ballands Castle, it now weighed too much, and my feet were too slippery. I had no choice but to cut and run. Or slither and slide. When I finally got out of the wood and onto dry tarmac, I had to pick up twigs and scrape mud out from between the mudguards and the tyres, from the chain and the pedals and the gears, there were splatters over the frame that just smeared when I tried to knock them off, and I had to give up my attempts to get the bike completely clean and ride it as it was, back towards Gillingham. It felt sluggish and sticky and not at all a joy to ride, and I was still cursing the horse riders, when I had a brilliant idea. I would go to the Lost Ford, and wash my bike clean in the water.

The Lost Ford is an example of how you can have paradise outside your back door and still not be able to enjoy it. It was a beautiful little place that I discovered one year when we were organising a night rally. It had a deep water splash alongside a narrow little bridge that would challenge the drivers to either take the quicker way through it but risk flooding out, or creep round the tight bends and across the bridge and loose a few seconds. I saw it once in the daylight, then once again at night, and then I lost it for a couple of years. I knew it existed, because I had a photograph, but it seemed to be hiding from me, until I passed a road one day and said to myself that I had never driven down that particular one, but when I turned back and went along it, there was the Lost Ford, now found. The reason I had lost it was due mainly to the stress of meeting the Angry Badger.

As I said, I was on the organising team for this rally, not competing for once; and on the night, I was driving the course-closing car. My job was to drive the whole of the route fifteen minutes behind all the other competitors, picking up the marker boards with letters on them that were stuck in the banks and verges at odd points along the way, towing anybody out of ditches who'd not quite got the corner right, and letting each group of marshals at the time-controls know that the rally had, for them, officially ended. Normally, course-closing car had a navigator with a map to call out directions and warnings, because you still had to drive the route almost as fast as the competitors to try and make up the time lost stopping and uprooting every code board. Because we were short on official-type people that night, I said I would drive without a navigator, (cocky bastard), but I predictably went wrong in a couple of places. So, when I came round the bend and went shooting along the straight towards the code board gleaming in the headlights, I was not in a mood to hang about, but I still braked hard and swerved to avoid the badger that ran out into the headlight beams in front of me. It didn't keep going across the road and into the darkness, it turned and lolloped along in front of me, slowing me down, and then stopped just by the code board and turned round. I opened the door, thinking that it would scamper away in fright, and instead, it snarled at me.

It was a frightening and totally unexpected sound, especially from an animal that we all perceive as being soft and cuddly, (when it isn't flat and dead, that is). I stood there, half in and half out of the car, with the engine going bobbety-bobbety in that lovely way that V-6 engines do when they tick over, and the Angry Badger snarled again, and moved one step closer to me. It didn't care about my lovely car and the beautiful engine noise or how late I was. I got back in the car and shut the door, and thought that if it wanted that code-board so much, I wasn't going to argue. It had teeth and didn't look like it would enter willingly into a negotiated win-win situation. So I roared off again and got to the finish pub nearly an hour late, to find that they had eaten all the food, and worse than that, they refused to believe me when I told them about the Angry Badger. They all thought I had got lost and completely missed that section. Badgers just don't do things like that, they said. If I'd had a navigator, I might have had a witness, but then again, I wouldn't have been late and the Angry Badger might have gone and picked a fight with someone else. And, in all the confusion, I forgot to get a copy of the map of the route, so that, a few weeks later, when I thought it would be nice to go and see the ford again by daylight, it wasn't where I thought it had been. And then, as I said, I found it again by accident.

Those of you who understand organ music will probably have recognised that the episode of the Angry Badger was the fugue. And so, let's resolve the shifted melody and return to that which was left in abeyance; me, on a muddy bicycle, approaching the Lost Ford, determined to enter that cleansing water and rid us both of the sins of commission.

I baptize thee Albert Ross

I came down the slope towards the water with my feet held up in the air almost at the level of the handlebars, went "Whee!" at the top of my voice, and sailed into the stream. As I reached the middle of the stream, I had doubts and uncertainties, and began to lower my feet towards the pedals, thinking that the water was deeper than I had thought, and maybe I should be going a little bit faster; and then it was too late, because the water was over the pedals anyway, and I had to put my feet down to where I hoped the ground would be, at the bottom of the ford, because I had slowed so much that I was about to fall off. I had to hop and splash my way out from the middle of the stream and up the slippery slope the other side, with my dead mens shoes now sodden and squelching.

I took them off, and my socks, and rolled my wet trousers up to above my knees, boomed "Whom have we here" to the empty trees, and walked the bike back down into the water. Despite the force with which I had entered the ford, it was still caked with sticky brown mud. I used a pair of old boxer shorts that I kept the spanners in to wipe and swab the bike clean, then pushed it back put to where my socks and dead mens shoes stood, and left it to dry in the sun. I left the muddy boxers drying on the tarmac too.

Midwich Cuckoos (Two) - Teenage Gangst

I was not downhearted by my undignified exit from the ford, the sun was warm and the water refreshingly chilly, and I stood on the narrow bridge crunching almonds and brazil nuts, enjoying the solitude, and puzzling over the odd whiff of seaweed that would drift along with the tiny breezes. Where could the smell of the sea be coming from when we were forty miles from it? Then, I saw four figures walking along the road towards me. I could see that they were not going to turn back, but intended to cross the bridge. As they neared me I saw that they were two couples, late teenage or more likely early twenties, very neat and tidy. I felt slightly peeved that my solitude was to be un-completed, but I smiled at them as they came onto the bridge, and said hello. One of them, after a definite pause, said hello, maybe not back to me, but in my direction.

I thought for a moment about what to say next, and said "I've been puzzling over where the smell of seaweed keeps coming from."

There was another definite pause during which I felt that they had looked at each other, even though none of their heads had turned, and then the same person spoke again. "We can't smell any seaweed."

They were staring at the scene on the tarmac apron below the bridge, where my socks and shoes were drying at the water's edge.

"The water was deeper than I thought," I explained, "It gave me a bit of a surprise."

They didn't answer, even after the time for a definite pause had come and gone twice over, and then I realised that they were staring, with mild revulsion, at the muddy boxer shorts beside the socks and dead mens shoes.

I thought through several different explanations, and found a problem with all of them. If I said 'No, those weren't the boxers I was wearing', how could I prove it? Drop my trousers and say 'Look, I'm still wearing pants?' Pick them up from the tarmac and say 'See, it's mud, smell it if you don't believe me?'

My goodness Toto, we don't seem to be in pants-land any more.

So I said nothing. They seemed to come to a decision, and left the bridge. I was torn between relief at having my solitude again, and anger at being the loser in a battle of what was cool and what was not. But then, they did seem to have an unfair telepathic advantage

My only recourse is to become an author and use them like puppets in my fiendish plots. Godzilla meets the Midwich Cuckoos. See the monster have his evil way with the screaming teenagers.

Death by Bongo, Death by Bongo!

As a postlude to this tale, I rode the bicycle to and from the railway at Cranmore the next day, although I had to wear different shoes, the dead mens shoes were still wet as seaweed. The repair to the broken frame tube held, nothing else went wrong, it didn't rain on me, I met no Baby Badgers being chased by dogs, and I found it, although satisfying as an accomplishment, surprisingly boring as an adventure.

Footnote: This tale precedes the recent episode of the silly walk virus. I am a very slow typist.

The thin end of the safety wedge

2008-06-27T18:42:00.005+01:00

It's not that I begrudge this gentleman his settlement, because he does seem to have had a particularly nasty fall, and certainly deserves some compensation, but to be able to claim, successfully, that his employer was at fault for not showing him how to use a step-ladder is going to open the floodgates. Not, I must add, to the the hordes of "if you've had a trip or fall anywhere at work in the last three years, let us sue their arses off for you" brigade, but to the armies of nannies who spring up in any organisation which fears the lawyers.

Example: at my last-but-one job, the company were so fearful of being sued by employees and contractors for RSI and other keyboard/monitor related conditions that they employed a person whose sole job was to visit each new inductee, and get them to fill out and sign a form stating that they knew how to use the chair, desk, keyboard, mouse and monitor in such a manner that they would not be able to suffer from glare, neck strain, back-ache, numb legs, and anything else not covered by the fore-mentioned list but otherwise arising from any use, abuse, and misuse of the company furniture and desktop equipment. And it wasn't enough for me to quickly tick all the right boxes and sign my name; I was forced to go through the points one by one, listening to and repeating the person's instructions, and then demonstrating that I knew where each adjustment was. It was one of the most stupid, and almost humiliating experiences I can recall, ever.

And now, if I were to sink so low as to need to apply for a janitor's position in a council run building, school, enclosure or other contained place for which the aforesaid body had responsibility, what could I expect but an examination in how to use a stepladder, bucket and mop safely, and who knows where it would end?

Mark my words, after the first successful suing of a restaurant by a customer for choking on a bone or falling off a chair, you aren't going to be allowed to sit down at a table and read a menu before you have satisfied some tawdry little bureaucrat that you know, and can prove, that you can sit on a chair and position it correctly at the table, hold, use, and put down your knife and fork, and handle a glass without causing any possible form of litigious injury to yourself.

Twice-bitten

2008-06-24T21:15:00.002+01:00

I don't believe in coincidences. I don't mean by that that I deny them completely; but I don't believe it is pure chance and there is no other connection between apparently un-connected events. Equally, I don't go to the absurd extremes that some will do in order to try and prove that J F Kennedy was assassinated by the entire Jackson Five plus close family in order to try and cover up an early peccadillo of Michael's in the pre-natal ward before he was even born.

But anyway, this all began with a pain in the legs. I had been up for a while, cooked breakfast, eaten it, (of course), and was mooching around when I suddenly realised that my legs, just above the knees, were in excruciating pain. Funny, I thought to myself, I had leg pains like this sometime last year, didn't I? And I cured them by going out for a gentle bicycle ride and pissing off Little Petal completely because she had predicted dire consequences for me if I did go out that door, and didn't I come back in with a smug grin on my face?

So I looked up leg cramps in the diary, which, because it's on a wiki on my web-server, is as easy as googling the web, And that's when the first frightening coincidence cropped up. The date on which I had first written about my leg-pains last year was the very same day of the very same month of this year. How improbable is that?

But it got worse. I re-read that page from the diary a year ago, and the first thing that was on it was a description of a dream I had had, where I was driving a narrow-gauge railway train. That is quite an unusual dream for me, because although I frequently dream of railways, the dreams are always of either full-size or model railways, To distinctly see a narrow-gauge train is a very rare occurrence. And that was coincidence number two, because that very morning, before I had suddenly said "JFC, my legs are effing killing me", I had written in my diary that I had dreamt of a miniature railway, the kind that you can sit in but not side-by-side. So, not a normal dream for me.

And then I thought to look around the days immediately before each occurrence of leg-pains, and if I thought it was already bad, just how incredible do you think it then got? Let's just say discombobulatingly amazing.

Three days before each occurrence of the leg pains and the dreams of unusual railways, I had bought from the market in town a bag of sea-samphire. If you think that that isn't much of a coincidence, let me just say that last year, I had only bought and eaten sea-samphire once during the whole year, and I've already told you when that was. And, I'm sure the quicker ones of you are already thinking, yes, I had only bought sea-samphire once this year as well, and even the dimmest reader should know by now when that day was...

And was there more? Well, yes, because each time just before the day of the leg-pains, I had drunk a whole bottle of wine to celebrate Little Petal's birthday. I know, her having a birthday each year on the very same day isn't a coincidence, but I hadn't drunk anything of significance for weeks either side, except for shortly after buying and eating a two-pound bag of sea-samphire, then dreaming about unusual railways shortly before suffering excruciating pains in my mid-to-upper thighs, and as far as I could see, that made the whole affair bloody damn fishy, too fishy for words.

But anyway, the important thing, to me anyway, was not this pluponderance of improbable occurrences, but the fact that I had, in writing, an apparent cure for the pains, which was all I really wanted to get rid of, the coincidences I can live with. And so I hobbled outside and dragged the bike out onto the road, and managed to lift a leg over the crossbar and off I went, riding gently along the self-same well-documented road to recovery I had pioneered a year ago, expecting the miracle to occur.

But it bloody well didn't, did it? (Dinnit?) I only got as far as the end of the first road when I knew that my legs were absolutely not going to get better doing this. In fact, I realised, as I tried to turn round in a tight circle and ride back home, my legs had suddenly got an awful lot worse, and I had to stop pedaling. And that meant that I was going to have to walk home, because Little Petal was miles away at work. And that's when I discovered the full horror of whatever it was that I had got wrong with my legs, I couldn't even walk. I could stand up, immobile, holding the bicycle, for as long as I wanted to, but if I tried to lift either leg a fraction of an inch to move it forwards, burning fires suddenly erupted just above whichever knee it was that I was trying to move, and if I did force myself to endure the pain and move the leg forwards, burning pains would then erupt in the mid-thigh muscles of the same leg. I was stuck, four hundred yards from home, doomed to stand there holding my bicycle like a piece of modern sculpture; painful, ugly and futile.

I solved the problem of "how do I get out of this one, then?" when I found that I could stretch a leg out behind me without a twinge, and I was soon walking backwards along the road, wheeling the bike, (pointing forwards, I know the traffic rules), beside me. And then I heard a car approach, and slow down, and stop, and I saw that it was someone I knew, so that I couldn't ignore them or pretend I was from Lithuania looking for work, and I had to listen to them say "And just what the blue bollocking hell do you think you're doing?"

And I tried saying "Look, I don't want to talk about it, OK?", but they selected reverse and drove backwards in company with me and leaned out of the window and said, "Fine, I'll just wait around until you do decide you want to get it off your chest," and so I had to tell them. And. knowing that they've now gone down the pub to monopolise the bar with yet another "Guess what the mad bastard from the station's done now" story, I suppose I can't bury it any deeper at all, and, based on the maxim that the best place to hide something is in plain view, I'm sticking it here for you all to see and ignore.

And, just let me warn you, anybody popping up with some asinine comment from a book on dreams on the significance of dreaming about narrow-gauge or miniature railways is going to get very short thrift. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a moron with a dream-interpretation book is a danger to society and needs to be put down at once.

Abnormal service will be resumed shortly

2008-05-29T23:13:00.004+01:00

Which is my way of saying "I'll be back", but without the Arnie accent. Or muscles. Or mad grin. Not that I've got anything actually against him. I laughed at "Twins", and not just at him being paired with Danny De Vito. There were some genuinely memorable lines in that film. "I did not hurt him, the pavement was his enemy". But I couldn't say the same about "Total Recall", or the Terminator series.

So where have I been? Same place. What have I been doing? Trying to be normal. That was where it all began to go wrong. I did try to blog a couple of times, but I really don't want to be yet another whiner in the wind. There are already enough voices pointing out that this country is shite, I don't want to waste my time joining in with them.

Mostly, I've been trying to resurrect my eccentric bicycle. Even though I hadn't ridden it for years, it was always in the back of my mind that I could, if I wanted to, go out, pump up the tyres, tuck my trouser cuffs into my socks, and ride off to anywhere I felt like. The realisation that the bicycle was in serious need of work before it could even go to the end of the road and back made me wake up, and I slipped back into normality for a while as I sought, vainly, to come up with the money to pay someone else to mend it for me.

Now that I know I'm not going to get funds falling out of the sky, I've knuckled down and started acting crazy again. I'll mend it, and I'll mend it my way.

And speaking of banks...

2008-03-19T21:15:00.003Z

Little Petal has just come back from a trip to Newcastle. Now that she's back at work again she's been able to give her mother back some of the money she borrowed a while ago.

Little Petal's big sister took the money into the bank to pay it in. Her mother banks with Northern Rock. Just in case some of you don't know or don't care about British news, Northern Rock is the bank which folded last year as the first ripples of the sub-prime crisis spread across the big pond and lapped at our shores. Northern Rock was effectively nationalised as the only way to keep it both open and out of Richard Branson's hands. (Someone that successful is obviously an alarming prospect as an incoming banker, just as he was too honest a choice for the lottery management).

So, a customer walks into Northern Rock, and instead of wanting to withdraw all their savings and take them to a steadier bank, says that they want to pay some money in. And what happens? The Northern Rock bank says "I'm sorry, but that account has been frozen because it hasn't been accessed for a while. We'll have to re-activate it. This may take some time."

Let's just clarify what happened: a bank was saying that they couldn't accept money. Not they weren't going to lend it, but they couldn't see their way into receiving money. A bank was saying it was too difficult for them to take someone's money and put it in their safe. A bank said that? Even a piggy bank knows when to just shut up and take the money.

From what planet did they recruit the nationalisation managers? Bare weeks have elapsed since the emergency legislation was enacted to prevent the formation of Virgin Banking, and already the Northern Rock is showing all the hallmarks of the dear old nationalised British industry that caused them to become a byword for waste and inefficiency (I before E except after C).

LP's sister was not impressed. As soon as the account was re-activated she drew out all the money and opened a new account for Mother in the Alliance and Leicester, just over the road. I thought the whole idea of nationalising Northern Rock was to prevent just that sort of thing.

Is there anybody out there watching what's going on in this brave new world of ultra-modern reversionist socialism? And if so, are they just laughing?

I know, two posts in one day, but if you've noticed, I've been silent a whole fortnight. This is just catch-up time.

As safe as houses

2008-03-19T18:58:00.002Z

This government of ours probably can't believe their luck. Not only have they been given the perfect excuse, but they've also been given the perfect scapegoat. Nobody loves the banks.

They've been (the government) presiding over a slowly cooking pot for these past few years. Houses just kept going up in value. In one sense, that wasn't a bad thing. It seemed to keep everybody happy; people improved their property, sold it, bought into something better, estate agents and property maintenance firms lived off the steady demand for sales and care, and the government lived off the taxes it took from everything involved with the housing market. Everybody was a winner.

Everybody who had a house, that is. Of course, it was a nightmare for those who didn't own one yet and whose incomes didn't allow them to raise the deposit and costs, let alone qualify them for a mortgage. The banks and building societies found ways around this with a range of clever deals that "leveraged" a relatively puny income into something powerful enough to get someone onto the property ladder. Of course, voices were still heard muttering about the paucity of affordable housing in rural areas, and the difficulty of getting new development sites that weren't on flood plains and yet didn't cut into any of the precious green belt.

It was obvious, to anybody who looked and thought about it, that it couldn't continue, but what government in their right minds would want to be the ones to put the brake on the rising prices so that young families could afford to own a home? It was a classic dilemma. If you didn't act to create affordable housing, a large chunk of the voting population would become disenchanted, possibly actually aggrieved. But if you did act, and caused the perceived value of existing houses to be reduced, an equally large chunk of the population would become disenchanted, perhaps even aggrieved. Both groups paid taxes, both groups could be expected to express their displeasure with the ballot-box. And so, the government chose to do nothing that would be perceived as drastic, while at the same time doing anything possible that might appear to be capable of filling the gap at the bottom of the ladder.

And suddenly, house prices are under threat. Not the slow percentage creep that has been reported over the past few months as the Bank of England played ever so gently on the financial keyboard a soothing lullaby called "Let's not borrow more than we ought". This is a big (predicted) "house prices must fall, and bigly so, because buyers can't afford them since the lenders won't provide the funds."

And it came in a rush, to those who hadn't been muttering for some time that this country was turning into Monopoly for real. Suddenly, the banks and building societies just aren't lending the sort of money they used to. No more 125% mortgages. No more cheap fixed-rate deals for a couple of years. They're actually scared of lending money to each other, let alone the public. They're even having to be bailed out and nationalised themselves.

And it's all their fault. There's no way you can blame the government for the banks own folly in lending money to people with a poor history of repaying loans. Nobody forced them to do it, or to then try packaging up some of the dodgy mortgages and selling the debt on to other banks. They alone brought about their downfall, all the while making almost the largest profits any industries in the country were capable of reporting.

And so, house prices are probably going to have to fall, rapidly, and by significant percentages. Not because of any government pressure to keep a certain amount of housing affordable enough for first-time buyers and key workers, but because the banks have sliced their balls into the long grass and are way off the fairway. The green is no longer in sight for them, or for any of us who are used to borrowing it.

And we're all going to blame them for it. Especially the government. That's what you get for letting free-marketeers play games with reality.

I saw a quote on a news site recently. "The only people who are going to be hurt by this crisis are those who've bought houses beyond their means".

That, to me, is everyone with a mortgage and no means of paying it off in the short-term. We are all going to have to suffer because of someone else's greed and stupidity.

To Choose, or not to choose

2008-03-03T17:15:00.000Z

There was an advert recently discussing the unfairness of "Or" as opposed to "And". One means you have to choose, the other means you get both. I think Honda ran the advert. You have to admire their brass face, I don't think a major automotive manufacturer has ever built a slower F1 car with such an enormous budget. "We can go fast, or we can go slow". I forgot, they're selling the "And" clause over the "Or", aren't they? "We can go slow, and we can go slow".

Is having a choice always the best thing since sliced bread? Did we need Betamax and VHS? Since you couldn't use both at the same time, it was really a choice of one or the other.

But business seems to love the "And". Why? Let's take screws, for instance. Old-fashioned slot-head screws can be a real pain to use, because you have to keep centralising the screwdriver in the screw or it will slip out and gash something, usually a hand. So someone had the bright idea of making a screw with a pair of slots in the head, and a special bit to fit those slots, a cross-head bit, so that it centred in the screw and just stayed put.

And then someone else had the next bright idea. Let's make two competing types of cross-head screws, one called Phillips and the other called Posidrive. And let's make them subtly different, so that instead of having to have three of four different sizes of screwdriver to fit the different screw sizes, you need to have double that amount to cater for both Phillips and Posidrive screws.

"And," (there's that sodding word again), where they got really clever was, "let's make then almost visually indistinguishable from each other." So you can't say to yourself, "I'll have nothing more to do with that Phillips, (or Posidrive)", weed out half of the screwdrivers from your toolbox, and just concentrate on the job of getting the shelves up. "Or" is not an option. You can't get one type of screwdriver that will reliably work on both types of screw.

At least Betamax and VHS had the common sense to be different enough so that you couldn't get confused between them.

In an extreme moment, I admit I have just put in a couple of cross-head screws with a hammer. After finding that the wrong type of screwdriver had chewed up the cross to the point where the screw could be neither tightened nor removed by either type of screwdriver, what choice was there left?

It was fun doing it. I don't have a sign up when I'm working saying "Caution, men working", I have one which reads "This is a designated foul-language area."

Dues

2008-02-20T18:09:00.005Z

(Superstition factor: 11)

You see, most people only go up to 10, but me, I can go up to 11.

I bought a new fork, an all-steel one, because I have so far cracked three wooden handles whilst levering out brambles at the roots. I've developed a knack of plunging the fork in two or three times, testing to see which way the root branches off beneath the surface, (because they never go straight down, you know), and then giving a mighty plunge on the fork handle. This loosens the root enough for me to then get both hands around the stems and pull it out of the ground. Bramble nil, Me 1.

I sometimes feel guilty about murdering life-forms in this way: what I'm doing is against nature, after all. Left to themselves all plant life manages to achieve some sort of equilibrium. Some plants might achieve dominance in one patch of ground, but not everywhere. I come along and quite callously rip up this and that in order to allow the other to thrive where it previously had to share. And what's ripped out of the ground isn't even allowed a replant, it goes up in smoke or into the compost heap. I am final for lots of green life-forms. Am I too soft? Possibly. But I do it for money. A bit like the SonderKommando; it was their job. If they didn't, someone else would.

At the end of a busy afternoon I christened the new fork. We went to the bottom of the garden to plant a plum tree for the lady. I cut a nice hexagonal patch of turf out with a spade, then dug down with the fork to excavate a hole deep enough for the mass of compost around the roots. I reached for the plum tree to pick it up and shake off the pot, and one of the small branches raked my cheek viciously. As I shook off the pot I felt something trickling down my chin. Blood. It had slashed an inch-long scar on my face.

Little Petal, when I got home, asked what on earth I had been up to. "Dueling with a Plum-tree," I said with some bitterness.
"And it won?"
"So it would seem. I wasn't free to slash back at it."

Maybe the Plum-tree knew it could strike me with impunity, because I was just the hired help doing my job. Perhaps the uprooted brambles had clubbed together and slipped it a bribe to get me back for their untimely deaths. Or perhaps my customer is an ancient Wiccan who knows that trees need a blood-sacrifice if they are to grow into proper trees. Or perhaps a steel fork demands a christening in blood, since it is a weapon all the way through.

The next day, I was preparing to cremate several weeks worth of bramble-slaughter at another customers. I popped round to the yard to get an old oil drum with which to make an incinerator. I was told which drum to choose: not the one that had held anti-freeze, or the one which had held clean engine-oil, but the one which had held dirty oil. I recognised it easily enough, it was the dirty oily one, and carried it back to the workshop where the man was going to wizz round the top with a plasma-cutter so that I would end up with the basis for a very effective incinerator. I stood watching him prepare to start, chatting with another onlooker whom I hadn't seen for a while.

The explosion was memorable not for the noise, which was just a short violent bang, but for the absolute silence which followed it. It had been so unexpected that I had only the briefest memory of seeing the drum leap up three feet, the lid fly off out of sight, and the man with the plasma cutter jumping backwards for twice his length, and then that memory seemed to be blotted out by the silence. As I got used to the hush I realised my ears were ringing.

"Are you alright?" I called to him.
"I haven't got a clue," he answered, staggering out into the daylight and blinking.
He rubbed his hands through his hair and they came away black from the droplets of old engine oil which had been blasted out across the floor and up the walls.

Apart from a tiny drop of blood on the bridge of his nose and some singed hair, he was fine. I trod carefully through the patches of old oil and switched off the machine, then found the tools which had been flung from his jacket and the portable phone, scattered around the workshop floor. The drum lid, which other onlookers had said cleared the top of a nearby tree, was nowhere to be found.

I hadn't got the nerve to ask him to cut half-a-dozen air holes around the bottom of the drum a few inches up from the base. I paid him the money, and then put all my remaining change in the lifeboat box they keep on the shelf, as a way of saying thanks for being spared, yet again.

I used a club-hammer and chisel to punch holes in the drum and got the incinerator going, spending a couple of happy hours cremating the brambles and ivy I'd murdered the previous weeks. My trousers and fleece stank of burnt engine oil all the way home, and went straight into the washing machine.

That night, I dreamed, as I usually do, but this time it was, for me anyway, a very unusual type of dream. It began ordinarily enough: I was walking along a road that was covered in mud and debris, and the banks were littered with abandoned cars which seemed to have been washed along in a torrent of water. I had no clear idea what I was doing there, or how I had got there in the first place. A white camper-van pulled up and a man got out. He said he was the county sheriff, and told me to get inside.

There were two other men inside the back of the camper, his deputies. The sheriff asked me if I had a motor bike. I said that I didn't. He looked sad at that, but then said it didn't make any difference, I would still be just another victim of the bike-killer. I asked him what he meant, and he said "Ignorance is no excuse in this matter."

He went to the other end of the van and un-holstered his pistol. One of his deputies was sitting at a fold-down desk, filling out paperwork. The other deputy came down to where I was and offered me his gun. I shook my head.

"Take it," he said, thrusting it towards me, "We're making it fair."
I refused it again. I didn't want it.

I said I hadn't done anything. The sheriff laughed at that and said "You know? That's what all of them say."

The deputy offered the gun one more time and I said "No" in an insistent tone.

"Have it your way, then," the sheriff snapped in annoyance, and shot me. I saw the bullet moving towards me in slow motion, leaving behind it a trail of little bullet-outlines, just as in Matrix, and I tried to twist away and duck my head forwards, but I felt it rip into the back of my neck.

And then I died.

And then I woke up.

I have very rarely experienced death in my dreams, it is totally unlike what I normally see. So now I'm wondering if, because I cheated death in the daytime, I had to experience it in the nighttime, just to pay my dues.

My life is anything but mundane, I'll have you know.

Ahem

2008-02-16T14:33:00.007Z

ahem, ahem. Ahroogharghchoogargh cack-cack-cack.

The Nightingales are coughing near
the convent of the Sacred Heart

Sorry.

My first blog post, two years ago now, was about early-morning coughing. I wrote it in a whimsical mood, sparing the messy details of hawking and retching because I had some sympathy for my reader (all one of her), and instead imagined the rattle and bark of the engine of a First World War fighter aircraft springing into life as the dawn sun peeped through the trees and hedges somewhere in Flanders.

My early morning coughing fits do prey on my imagination sometimes, for all the wrong reasons. I gave up smoking a few months before I moved into the station, sixteen years ago. I stopped because I had done some sums and realised that to get out of the horribly featureless box of a modern maisonette and into somewhere I had dreamt of for nearly all my life was going to take more funds than I could count on getting my hands on. It was the middle of a housing slump; my five-room ground floor maisonette was now worth £5000 less than it had been when I had bought it three years earlier. And in addition, I was giving up my secure job I had held for three years and going back into the uncertainties of freelancing.

At the time of which I write, cigarettes still hadn't reached the incredible prices that they command today, but I worked out that if I stopped my forty-a-day Red More habit immediately, the savings would pay most of my living costs over the next three months until the start of a possible contract in Southampton where they were making some new underwater fibre-optic cables to cross the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans as part of the FLAG project. That contract, assuming I got it, would allow me to sell up, at a loss, and move Westward, away from the clamour and crush of the booming Thames Valley, to start a new life in the peace of the countryside.

So, having double-checked the figures, I threw away the last six cigarettes in the packet, and stopped drinking coffee for three months until the need to smoke felt less intense. It was as easy as that; no patches, no chewing gum, no mints, no support groups where you have to listen to the ravings of a wretch who imagines that he's worse than anyone else in the room and wants them to reassure him that, yes, he really is a special case and deserves everyone's attention. No need for group hugs and chest-baring confessions; I preferred to suffer in silence.

A few years later, when someone was trying to sell me life insurance, I asked the question about having previously smoked, and was told in reply that the insurance companies considered that after ten years of abstinence, you were equal to someone who had never smoked at all. Equal, or equivalent, I can't remember the precise weasel-words, but the gist of them remains.

I still find that hard to believe. Can a lifetime habit that had at one point reached sixty-a-day be undone after ten years? Especially when for some of that time I had smoked cigars instead of cigarettes, believing that they were less harmful, but I knew that I was inhaling the smoke, which cigar smokers were not supposed to do, and was up to twenty-a-day; partly because there were cards inside the packets to collect, and I wanted the last couple of famous aircraft, a few of the hedgerow wildlife, and one or two railway trains to make up complete sets. You'll gather from that confession that I am of the compulsive type. It worked for me; where I had previously been a compulsive smoker, so I switched to becoming a compulsive stopper.

If it were true that ten years or more of abstinence could make you born-again, lung-wise; how come, I was wondering a few years ago, did I have such a hacking early-morning cough at certain points in the year? Did life sometimes withdraw the recuperation bonus for those whom it considered had tried to cheat their way out of paying for the pleasure they had enjoyed for so long? And yes, let me remind you all, smoking is a pleasure. I know that smokers smell terribly to non-smokers, and I know that they sometimes seem to be part of a closed society that has the right to hold secret meetings in private rooms, or recognise each other in railway carriages and airport lounges and pick each other up in clubs and bars by asking for and accepting lights from strangers, but the real reason for smoking is that it is enjoyable. It is, believe me.

Non-smokers will never know this pleasure, of course, and probably will never understand it either. One of the things I missed most when I stopped smoking was the company of smokers. I always found them easy to talk with, more tolerant of personal differences than the fervent non-smokers I also knew, and, in some way, more tolerant of other people's habits, such as drinking, or of quietly farting and not apologising for the offence. Of course, smokers have one of the best defences against the wind-breakers, except in crowded tube trains where they are banned from taking pre-emptive measures.

It was the tubes that first made me worried about whether I had possibly left it a little late to give up. Not the tubes inside of me, but those underneath the ground. A couple of years after I moved into the station, I took work in London that meant I had to stay in lodgings through the week and only see my Wiltshire home for a few brief hours each weekend, rather like my recent sojourn in Lincolnshire. I noticed quite quickly that, whereas a few years before I had been able to run up the escalators to reach the top and light up, I now struggled up at the same rate as those around me. I put this down to the extra weight I had put on when I stopped smoking, and started going out to Finsbury Park in the evenings to try and jog it off, but the increased bulk of my mid-section meant that I could no longer sustain the fluid motion I had been previously proud of, and after a few yards the wobble would get out of control and I was forced to slow to a shuffling walk to try and stop the tank-slapper that my bulging belly was threatening to throw on me.

I didn't keep a diary during that period of my life, so I can't look back and try to see where I first began to cough as soon as I got out of bed some mornings. I do now have a few years of notes that I can look back through and realise that it is the crisp cold mornings that affect me most, not the damp foggy ones. And since I am still getting these hack-attacks even after losing some weight and regaining fitness, I am worried that it might be caused by something other than my previous smoking excesses. Could it, for instance, be a result of my country life-style? Must I consider giving up something else I enjoy?

The station has no mains gas, nobody in the area does, nor are we likely to, and I don't have oil-fired central heating. I burn coal in an old Rayburn room-heater with a back-boiler to supply hot water to the bath and warm water to the cast-iron radiators I scrounged from the factory in Southampton where the cables were being made. I burn coal in the sitting-room fireplace and wood on an open fire in the large room I call the office, which was really the booking hall in the days when the station was active. Visitors, when the fire is cheerfully crackling away, always remark how wonderful it must be to have real wood fires. Yes, there is a definite cheerfulness and a radiant heat they you won't get from the smug smoothness of pressed-steel panel radiators, but I wonder how long the visitor's envy would last if they saw the work that goes into running solid fuel fires for warmth? The labour of carrying in the wood and coal, the need to keep kindling dry, and, of course, the need to sweep the hearths clean and carry out the ashes each day.

That's where I am worried that my coughing might be coming from, the contaminating dust that wanders invisibly throughout each room as the fires burn and produce their heat and ash. I am worried that on cold dry mornings, the sudden change of air temperature in my lungs as I breathe in disturbs the fine particles that have built up inside me, and the cough is an instinctive reaction to get rid of these invaders. If so, what is happening to me on the mornings when I don't cough? Is there no dust to be expelled, or is there no helpful burst of cold air to trick me into getting rid of the particles?

These thoughts were stirred by a program I watched recently, which described how some of the rescue workers who rushed into the choking dust clouds as the Twin Towers collapsed were starting to experience respiratory problems a few years afterwards, and, typically, the administration that at the time was so proud to be videoed standing alongside them was now distancing themselves from the sad wheezing workers who were finding it hard to climb stairs or carry equipment around. The dust, which a government body had insisted at the time presented no threat to humans, was reportedly building up in the lungs and causing scar tissue to grow over the particles, and consequently giving the sufferer a significant loss of lung capacity.

The 911 workers will, I hope, be able to claim compensation from the US Government; if they cannot, it will be one of the most disgraceful disregarding of human sacrifice that one could think of in the past few years. Smokers, almost paradoxically, it seems, are also able to sue the tobacco companies for profiting from their ailments. But I, living in my railway station, with my wood and coal fires, cannot sue anybody if I find I am going to cough my way to an early grave. I have enjoyed their warmth and comfort for the past sixteen years, but there may have been a hidden price that I am only just coming to realise.

Or, of course, it's me indulging in a little hypochondria. I rode the bike up the steep hills to Shaftesbury for two consecutive days last week, as part of the cure for a depressing cold I had been experiencing that was leaving me breathless after working for a couple of hours. I can't be all that ill if I can pedal up a 400-foot climb at my age.

Go on, feel sorry for me, you know you want to.

Yet another wake-up call

2008-02-05T09:57:00.000Z

{it's your turn soon)

I have a new customer for my gardening: an elderly couple who live in a converted barn on a hillside overlooking the river Nadder and the railway line. They are both too old to manage the heavier garden work, and the man who mows the lawn and cuts the hedges likes to do a quick and easy hour's work with motorised tools and not get involved with any really physical work. So I have been pulling out the Russian Vine that has grown unchecked to the very top of the conifer cluster and high stone wall. It was killing the trees, and had begun to send tendrils up under the eaves into the roof space.

I began by clearing away the long grass and weeds which had grown up in the flower beds and borders, because the bulbs are already growing up, and she would like to be able to see them. Her sight is deteriorating due to macular disorder, and she cannot see clearly much further than her feet, let alone through a mass of weeds. I uncovered some early crocuses, and a beautiful deep purple flower that I still can't put a name to. Neither could she, because it was too far from the pathway for her to walk to.

Every few minutes, the man wanders out to where I'm working. He says one of two things: "I was going to ask you something, but I've forgotten it", or "Do you know a local mechanic who'll come out and see to my car?"

He has Alzheimer's disease. It came on him sometime in the last 12 months. He still has his long-term memory; he can remember where things are kept around the garden, and where his friend lives on the coast. And he can obviously remember something in the short term, because when he comes out to ask me the question, he knows that he decided to come and visit me for some purpose. But he doesn't realise that he is repeating the same behavior regularly. How can he, when he doesn't have the recall necessary to make comparisons? He doesn't even know that he has Alzheimer's, because what the doctor told him was probably lost five minutes later.

Some time ago, I wrote a story in response to a challenge; to write a short story in which all the action took place in a span of 5 minutes. There could be no reference to events outside of that window. I settled on imagining a pair of people living together in a home who had lost their short-term memories. At the time, I didn't go and look up anything about Alzheimer's or Dementia or other known conditions, I just wondered what it would be like if all you could do was live for the moment.

The story is here (Stalemate) if you want to read it. Just out of interest, when it was reviewed, the reviewer imagined two old men together. I knew better, but didn't contradict him; sometimes it's instructive to see how other people think.

What has focussed my attention now is that I seem to have imagined quite accurately what it is like to not remember, and I am worried. Is it going to happen to me? Or to someone close to me? Because at the moment, there is very little that can be done about it. The attitude in the health service is very much one of not wasting resources to deal with a problem where the sufferer is going to die within a short timescale anyway. There might also be a hint of not rushing to cure someone of a condition that they do not know they suffer from, and which doesn't actually cause pain or physical discomfort anyway. But does the sufferer feel mental anguish?

I am now becoming fascinated with what I might try to do if I myself began to lose my short-term memory. The first and probably most important question is, how would I know?

You know things are getting tricky when

2008-01-24T20:37:00.000Z

the MP's of your country decide they have to award themselves a below-inflation pay rise.

But don't worry just yet, the Bankers and stockbrokers are still getting their bonuses.

Shouldn't that be bonii?

Pique Oil

2008-01-22T20:59:00.000Z

We passed a psychological barrier here in England a few weeks ago, when diesel and petrol passed £1.00 per litre. Once committed, (and once their pumps and forecourt signs had been adjusted to allow for the extra digit), it was obvious that we weren't going back. Premium price fuel is here to stay, and by way of celebrating it's new found freedom to rise, the prices are almost at £1.10 per litre for diesel, and we haven't even finished the first month of the new year.

Looking through the on-line news at their "Why are oil prices so high?" sub-sections, I found a bewildering list of reasons. Anything and everything around the globe was cited, storms, hurricanes, hostages.... One day, as a teaser, the oil prices were supposed to have fallen, because "America might have more reserves than it had thought", but next day, the same old song was being sung again. Up, up and away.

A minor war here, a nuclear building program there, anything could trigger a rise in oil prices. Except for a butterfly beating its wings in Africa. I haven't seen that one yet. So the butterflies are innocent, OK? And that means that this isn't chaos theory. The oil market isn't being perturbed by random happenings. This is a move.

Before certain people start banging on about the Bilderbergers or Iluminatii or Masons or the Priory of Sion, let me say that I don't believe that people are clever enough to form secret societies capable of running the world. The closest thing we have to them are the governments, and they're neither capable of keeping secrets or of running things without a cockup a day. They think they can do both, but look at today's news. America has cut the interest rate, not in a controlled manner, but in a desperate bid to try and keep stockbrokers and shareholders around the world from dumping their investments and running off back to their vaults with the cash. So, America does not control it's own economy anymore. A disparate group of investors and traders can call the shots, and the picture I get is of America having to dance to a tune it didn't put on the jukebox. Somebody else is benefiting from the market's susceptibility to ingenious rumours.

You can't blame them, either. What they're doing is quite legitimate, even though it might fall into the category of gaming. They're in the business of making a living out of other people's money, and when that becomes uncertain, they fall back to the secondary business of not losing their own money.

And it's not about oil, OK? It never was. It's all about futures. Someone (plural), somewhere, have (ugh) been trying hard to make as much money as they can from the oil market, long before it actually reaches the run-out point. Who could it be? Shrewd investors? Maybe. The suppliers? Quite likely. And here, I have a lot of sympathy for countries like Saudi Arabia, because all they have is oil. When they've sold all the oil they can get out from under their feet, what can they turn to? Selling sand? Camel-hair coats and rugs? Who can blame them for trying to build up a chunk of venture-capital for what comes after the well runs dry.

Or, and this was the startling thought that came to me while I was gardening, with jets screaming overhead beneath the low clouds and helicopters thudding monotonously backwards and forwards in the Blackmore Vale, perhaps this is a new kind of warfare. Let's call it Economic Guerilla Warfare. Perhaps Osama Bin Laden, and a few like-minded individuals, have decided that terrorism is too hit-and-miss, too risky, and above all, not able to really hurt the people they despise the most; the financiers and governments of the West. Perhaps, in the way that the Japanese tried to put a stranglehold on the computer printing market back in the early days of the Centronics interface, these individuals have decided that they will go into the futures business and beat their enemies at their own game. And perhaps they're winning.

Get me out of this

2008-01-15T19:11:00.000Z

I went home with the waitress,
the way I always do.
How was I to know?
She was with the russians too.
...
Send money, guns and lawyers,
Dad, get me out of this.

Sub-titled

How to get your Infrared Stowaway keyboard working with Windows Mobile 5 on your XDA Exec

Sub-sub-titled

Without access to money, guns and lawyers

Warning: This post has a geek-factor of 1 times 10^3. That means it will contain some technical terms, but no formulae or other forms of mathematics. If you want explicit descriptions of wide-open cases or hot throbbing motherboards, go elsewhere, and blame Google for sending you here in the first place.

Warning: This post has a porn-factor of 1 times 10^-2. This means there is no porn or gratuitous sexual references anywhere in this post. If you came here hoping to find descriptions of soft yielding flesh penetrated by hot throbbing uncircumcised members, you're out of luck. Go and blame Google.

Actually, if you've got the patience to read through it, there is a picture of a gratuitous horn somewhere. Consider yourself warned.

Spoiler: If you're wondering what the hell this is all about but find that words and you just don't get on, it is all about how to get from this

to this

If you still can't see the point, you might as well carry on reading as you've got this far already so you're obviously |open to suggestion|of a curious nature|bored|can't work out how to close the browser window| (or something else I haven't thought of).

I have been in junk-clearing mode, this might explain my blogging-silence, particularly if I tell you that I am a compulsive collector who hardly ever throws anything away. In addition, I have a fascination with tiny gadgets, particularly if they are battery-powered computers that could conceivably travel around with me on a bicycle and be powered by sunlight. I'm not going to explain that last bit in this post.

I was determined to find the little Stowaway keyboard that I had used with my old XDA, because I had finally realised that the newer XDA Exec I received last summer as a replacement for the burnt-out XDA Mini did have infrared on it after all, and so it would work with the fold-up keyboard.

Why had I decided that the Exec didn't have Infrared, even though the specifications said it did? Because I couldn't see an infrared port on it anywhere. I was looking for the red transparent cover that the two previous XDA's had, beneath which you could just see the LED that handled the beams. But all I could see was a black patch between the camera button and the backlight button where I was expecting to find the diode, so I decided that the spec was wrong; it wouldn't work with my portable keyboard. I was getting used to hardware becoming obsolete after less than two years due to Microsoft changing the playing field yet again.

As it happened, I didn't care too much, because the XDA Exec was a large clamshell PDA that had a nice built-in keyboard, and so I managed, typing carefully with my fingernails, until recently, when I came to think about putting the folding keyboard on ebay. I decided to have a quick Google to see if anyone else had noticed the lack of an Infrared port on the Exec. Nobody had, it seemed; in fact I found three people talking about how simple it was to beam files to one another. I had another look at the front of my machine, and saw that, moulded in black on the little black piece of what I had assumed was part of the case, was a tiny symbol showing an expanding wave.

I had been mislead partly because the Windows Mobile 5 operating system didn't call it Infrared, unlike all the earlier versions (Pocket PC and Windows ME); they called it "Beams". Clicking on an icon I had previously ignored because I didn't understand what it was for got me into the page that managed Infrared "beams". Now, I could see if the keyboard would actually still work before putting it on ebay.

So I went looking for the keyboard, and after two days finally found it snugly zipped up in the little black carrying case, still with the two AAA batteries inside that I had got when I originally bought it. A further rummage turned up the installation CD, and before you could say "Is this wise?" I had hooked up the USB cable and was busy installing it. All the prompts and messages popped up just as I remembered them, and before I knew it the XDA was suggesting I allow it to restart. I let it.

The XDA Exec is more security-conscious than the earlier models: it insists on a password at startup. I haven't found any way to not have a password, and to be honest, I hadn't worried about it until now. The machine booted through the Windows Mobile splash screen and came to the password prompt. And that's when I found that the clamshell keyboard wasn't working.

"No problem", I thought, I'll just get up the on-screen keyboard and tap in my password. "Yes problem". The on-screen keyboard wouldn't appear. And, without logging in, I couldn't get to the screen where I could remove the recalcitrant piece of software that was currently locking my XDA Exec. I was stuck. Again. As usual. Why does it always happen to me? Send Money, Guns and Lawyers...

After a lot of fiddling, I tried a second reset, and this time found the clamshell keyboard worked. I logged in and investigated the Stowaway Keyboard in the settings menu, only to be told that it wasn't working properly and would I please re-install the driver?

It seemed obvious to me then that this was a compatibility issue, and I remembered that when I had switched from the XDA 2 to the XDA Mini during my sojourn in Lincolnshire I had been forced to go online to download the driver because the CD was back home in Wiltshire, and I was damned if I was going to have to wait the rest of the week before getting all of my toys back into action. So I went online to look for the company called Think Outside Inc.

They seemed to have sold out to someone else, and that new company only seemed to be supporting the Bluetooth keyboards. So I rummaged around for the CDs I had burned with all my downloads on, located the driver I had downloaded, and installed the keyboard driver again.

And again. And again, trying a slightly earlier version, but with no better results. The Infrared keyboard still wouldn't work, and I still had to struggle to enter my password to get into the XDA Exec and remove the locked driver file.

Once more into the search, (dear friends), and after trawling through several support forums I found someone asking virtually my question, but of a different PDA. The answer he was given was to follow a link and download a newer driver file. Sadly, there was no follow-up to the thread to say whether or not it had worked. I followed the link, and found myself back at the site that seemed to have bought out Think Outside Inc, offering a downloadable driver for a Bluetooth Sierra keyboard. Since I didn't have a Sierra Bluetooth keyboard, I didn't bother, but instead returned to Google the forums some more.

Finally, I found the piece of essential information that explained it all. Firstly, in a standard geeky gripe, someone had suggested that the Stowaway Infrared Keyboard program be added to the list of things that had stopped working when Microsoft dropped PPC (Pocket PC) and switched instead to WM (Windows Mobile). Someone else replying to the thread suggested that Think Outside had bundled WM support for all their products into a single installation file that would update either Bluetooth or Infrared devices. The file in question was the one I had declined to download.

And so, after returning to the site and downloading the file, I got my Infrared keyboard working again.

So what do we make of all this? Who are the guilty parties? The company who took over Think Outside, who couldn't be bothered to add a note to their website to say that the driver file for the Sierra Bluetooth keyboard would also update the Infrared keyboards? The people on the forums who couldn't be bothered to post back and say "Thanks, that did the trick, oh and by the way, don't be fooled by the Sierra Bluetooth title?" Or Microsoft, for ignoring compatibility with existing devices every time they raise the stakes in the game of world PC domination?

It's very tempting to bash Redmond (Virginia) for all the sins in the world, but you have to admit that without them, we might still be back in the days of as many different operating systems as there were makes of computers.

It's very tempting to bash the companies who produce the items that no longer work with the new versions of Windows, but from their perspective, why should they be forced, at their own expense, to re-write their drivers each time Microsoft change the tune?

And it's very tempting to bash the people on the forums, but suppose that all of them had thought as I initially did, that the file was not the correct one and they didn't want to risk going through the frightful experience of seeing all the information on their PDA apparently lost for good because they couldn't type in the password to get in and remove the incorrect software. Who could blame them if they took the safe way out and just put the Stowaway keyboard on ebay and bought a Bluetooth one instead?

And so I went outside and smashed some more kitchen units up with a sledgehammer to put on the fire. Life's like that nowadays, everything's screwed up, but no-one's to blame. Supposedly. And smashing the hell out of some modern pointless crap that's been superseded by other more modern equally pointless crap is satisfying for about five minutes. Which is about how long it takes for a modern varnished pine kitchen unit to be totally consumed by fire.

Postscript:

If you're an XDA Exec user with a Stowaway Infrared keyboard trying to get the two working together, go to this link and download the file, use it wisely, and when you restart your XDA Exec and go to set up the keyboard, you'll be offered the option of configuring one of several devices, including your wonderful Infrared keyboard. And I can confirm that it does the trick. You can get a Stowaway Infrared keyboard working with Windows Mobile 5 on your XDA Exec.

Post-postscript

If you're hunting for porn and feel cheated that you got sent here by Google, here's that picture of a gratuitous horn I mentioned earlier.

Yes, I know it's a mythical beast, but so, it seems, are stable operating systems and reliable upgrades.

Just do as you're told

2007-12-30T09:59:00.000Z

Waitrose, where I love to shop, has had a self-scan system for quite a while. You collect a handheld device when you go in, which makes beeping noises when you pick things from the shelves, and then somehow it works out how much you have to pay at the special till. I've never used it, I enjoy chatting with the checkout ladies and I'd hate to think I was doing them put of a job. We got our Christmas food from there, pork and sausage-meat for Little Petal, Craster Kipper and Sushi for me.

Tescos, where I hate to shop, has recently introduced a pair of checkout counters where you can scan the shopping through yourself. Little Petal loves it. I didn't want to use it when she first introduced me to it, because the queues at the normal checkouts weren't long enough to mean we'd be waiting for too long. But Little Petal had to use the new device. I watched as she tried waving the shopping in front of the scanner, and tried making helpful beeping noises, but it didn't work until I took the packet from her and held it upside down. I was pushed away and told to watch and not touch anything while she carried on.

I picked up a bag and began to put the shopping into it. The machine made a low-toned warning sound. Little Petal turned to me and hissed in her angry mummy voice "Don't touch anything until you're told to, is that too difficult for you to understand?"

A Tescos girl hurried over and Little Petal said "He touched the shopping." They exchanged a knowing look, she reset something, and Little Petal started all over again. She pointed to the instructions on the screen, which said that each item of shopping was to be scanned and placed on the out tray and then not touched until payment had been completed. It took us twice as long as the normal checkout counter would have taken. And it was all my fault.

And so it came to pass that, after Christmas, we returned even unto Tescos to get such things as we had run out of as bread, flour and cheese, and because we were now both penniless, Little Petal would use her Tescos voucher to pay for the bulk of the shopping. And, she was going to pay for it at this same self-service station.

"Do not muck about," I was told. "Just do exactly what you're told to do on the screen." In the mummy-will-be-angry voice, of course.

So I stood and watched as she put the flour through, then the cheese, and the salt, and then she went onto the payment page, and waved the voucher at it. There was a deep beep, and the page changed.

"Payment Voucher not accepted at this time" it read in large letters. "Please call for help."

"There isn't a help button," Little Petal said, puzzled. "What do we do now?"

And so I did exactly what it told me to on the screen. I opened my mouth and called at the top of my lungs "HELP!"

Everyone stopped and turned to look at us. I looked back, raised my arms, and said "Will nobody help the Widow's son?"

And somebody did. Joy of joys, Little Petal was politely shown where the screens told her to present the voucher. She had ignored what the machine was telling her to do.

There is a God. Or was it a late Christmas present?

I burnt my Boots

2007-12-28T09:07:00.000Z

so there's no going back now.

Luckily I wasn't inside them at the time. It was a stupid accident. I'd stood them on top of the solid-fuel boiler to dry them after getting soaked to the soles digging out tree stumps. The old chipboard I was burning made the flue pipe get hotter than normal, and by the time I had noticed the smell, the right boot was a charred mess.

I was going to say the right hand boot, until I realised how clumsy it would have sounded, but then I tried changing it to the right foot boot, and that sounded even worse. So, regardless of which part of the body should or shouldn't be used when talking about footwear, I was now unable to working in muddy fields. Even worse, I wasn't going to be able to go fishing on Christmas Eve with my brother.

In the end, I went to the country stores and found a boot sale in progress. I got a pair of lace up working boots and a pair of rubber boots for less than I had paid for my old cremated leather walking boots. I christened the rubber boots with a trip to the river and caught some more pike on the fly. My brother, who ties the absurd creations that we dangle in the Stour to tempt the fish to play, has named them. I caught my fish on a Dame Edna Everedge, while he caught his on a Dame Barbara Cartland. We have yet to try the Dame Shirley Bassey, the pink and mauve lures seemed to work well enough in the chilly winter waters.

If you're still wondering why I said there was no going back at the head of this post, it's because I live with a Geordie, and often find myself saying things with a Geordie accent. "He burnt his boats" would, said by a Geordie, come out as "He burnt his boots".

Geordies, pronounced Ji-aw-dees, are the people born within a certain distance of a part of Newcastle, a large city in Northumberland. It, the county, sprawls on the Northeast coast of England close to Scotland, and is a home to several other dialects as well. Most Geordies have disparaging names for these, such as "Makhams", but I have not been able to understand the reasons why, let along the dialects themselves. The rules of pronunciation are haphazard, and have to be learnt by rote.

When I first visited Northumberland, I was driving around the area of Hadrians Wall, and told Little Petal (trying and as usual failing to use the maps properly,) that we were on the road to Hawick. I pronounced it "Horwick", as in Hawthorne the tree, or Lord Haw-haw the traitor, or even Horlicks the perversion.

No, I was told, it's pronounced "Hoick". Aha, I thought, drop the middle portion.

"So should Newcastle really be pronounced 'Nestle'?" I wondered. I began naming things according to my new-found whim. The atmosphere inside the car became dour, like the scenery outside.

I drove around the border counties, desperately scanning signposts and village name signs, hoping that one of these places we arrived at would be called "Bottom of the Locks". I would then be able to drive into the place and announce, triumphantly, "This is Bollocks". But there was no such place anywhere, so bollocks anyway.

Christmas 1954 style

2007-12-20T10:40:00.000Z

The war years were a fading memory, and building steam-powered meccano things to celebrate the festive season was de rigeur. What is he going to use that engine for? Will it power a carousel with reindeer going merrily up and down? Or a flying Santa and his sleigh ride? She seems to know, that look on her face suggests she's looking forward to something once he stops fiddling with his tools. I can't get over the smartly-knotted tie and buttoned-up jacket. So this is what the internet has lead us to: we don't make things, just buy them off ebay, and sit around at home wearing pastel-coloured tee-shirts and ripped jeans.

We are such stuff

2007-12-11T10:56:00.000Z

as ice-creams are made on

Little Petal and I couldn't be more different when it comes to dreaming. She can rarely remember a dream from the night before, but when she does, it is invariably a nightmare. I can nearly always remember at least on of the dreams I had when I wake, and I almost never have bad dreams.

I feel cheated if I can't recall anything from the night before, but trying to bring back the memories of some of them is still a puzzle to me. Sometimes, something in the day will just bring back a fragment, but mostly I have the strange feeling of knowing that I have an image or sensation in my mind that I can sense is there, but just can't quite touch. There is a similar sensation when you jolt awake after dozing and realise that you were dreaming, but can't picture or describe it to yourself. It's as if a shutter comes down, and it seems to be instantaneous. Tommy wrote a poem that describes it in another way. Her poem reminded me that I sometimes remember a forgotten dream when I am in another dream, and yet again, when I wake, I know I remembered a dream within a dream, but still can't picture it.

I dreamed the other night that I took a car (not mine or Little Petals's) to a garage because the brakes needed mending. I wandered away from the garage and found myself wading along a shallow stream, passing underneath a road bridge. I turned a bend and saw that trees arched up above me, and then once I had gone beyond the leafy section, found the water plunged down over a weir into a series of little pools. The water was suddenly very much warmer, but I climbed out of it and stood on the rocks. The pools were full of shellfish. I saw clams with the water swirling in and out of their open shells, and purple brown lobsters, and large crabs moving slowly through the clean bubbling water. I knew the name of the village where this was happening, but I also knew it had never had these pools, or even a shellfish shop.

After I woke up I tried to remember the name of the village, where it was, and if I had ever owned a light brown car like a Golf or a Polo. I did once own an old Passat, and it had a partial brake failure once which I fixed myself,but it was a much deeper red than the car I saw in this dream. And, once awake, I had no idea at all of what the village really looked like.

All I know, and I'm not even certain that it is true, is why the shellfish might have appeared in the dream. The night before, when I had been grabbing songs from the net, I had been humming to myself

Limpets,
There's no Limpets,
There's no Limpets,
No No, there's no Limpets

Mindless Cruelty

2007-12-09T20:00:00.000Z

My dilemma is this: I know it is morally wrong to kill something needlessly but nature does not make such a distinction. If I follow nature's way and kill something, does that make it alright?

I hate slugs, they are repulsive, and destructive to our plants. The only good that I think they do is to provide a food source for birds and other small creatures. For that reason, and probably that reason alone, I don't like putting down slug pellets to poison them.

I put a log on the fire, and as I fiddled it round into position I felt something slimy in a spot where the bark had peeled away. I turned the log around and found that a slug was stuck to the bare wood.

So, what would you have done? Left it on the log and put it back on the fire, or taken it off and thrown it outside?

I did what I felt was right, much to Little Petal's scornful amusement. But then, I have to live with myself. The distinction I make is that a Thrush eating a slug is nature's way, but my knowingly putting on the fire to burn is mindless cruelty.

Side-tracks

2007-12-07T23:56:00.000Z

I'm still new to blogging, I'm still learning what you can do with blogs. I spend a lot of my on-line time wandering around a small list of blogs, most of which you can find in my sidebar. On these blogs I visit, once I've read the latest posts, I often start wandering through their sidebar links. Using the principle that, if I like their posts I'm also going to like the people they've selected to link to, I can find myself miles away, blog-wise, from where I started. There aren't the hours in the day to travel enough of the net.

I put up a link to an MP3 blog in my side bar some time ago. It was a site I had discovered even before I started my own blog. It's quite easy to spot if you want to take a look. The good Doctor visited here once and decided it was the most noteworthy thing about the site. He was at least honest enough to say so on his own blog.

Today, though, I'm honouring Taiga, firstly for her Superloner Advent Calender, and secondly for one of her sidebar links that I've only just discovered. First of all, have a look at Taiga-Tails, as I call her, and then have a look down her sidebar for The Hype Machine. I'm holding off from putting it straight into my sidebar because I didn't discover it for myself; I'd feel guilty stealing from Taiga.

Of course, you don't have to go look: not everyone likes the surreal, which Taiga excels at, or new sounds, which the Hype Machine pumps out effortlessly. If you want something a bit more mundane, Albert's playing with trains. It makes a change from bicycles.

The Gene Kelly Strain

2007-12-04T09:48:00.000Z

It makes you realise just how tough some actors were. Remember Gene Kelly, trotting around in the downpour? I wonder if they heated the water up before filming so that he didn't catch a cold. I know it sounds silly, but they could have set up a tanker run from some hot springs somewhere or other and turned one of the Buzby Berkelely sets into a temporary storage reservoir before using Nellie the Elephant and friends to spray it into the air on a parabolic trajectory. Knowing Hollywood there would even have been lighting to ensure there was a rainbow.

No such luck here in Wiltshire, where the rain has been intermittently persistent. I say intermittent, because I kept realising that it had stopped, and persistent because as soon I went outside with a saw and began to cut up the drier pieces of wood, it rained again. After three days of this, I woke up with a burning nose and percussive sneezing.

At least I have the sneezing. It is one of my top pleasures. I can understand the appeal that snuff had during the Seventeen Hundreds, although I believe that sneezing while taking it was as frowned on as it is today while snorting other stuff. Lack of self control, you see, showing lack of social graces. When LP found an old snuffbox in a box of auction goodies I had to try a pinch, much to her disgust. Sadly, I didn't get the sneeze I was hoping for either, just an ear-bashing from a Geordie who's never smoked and has no understanding of those who do or did.

Of course, the sneezing is just a by-product, the real reason for taking snuff is to get a nicotine hit. I did try using snuff once when I thought I ought to try and control my cigarette habit. I was wandering through Lapland at the time, and noticed these little round tins with "Snus" written on them, so I started sticking the odd pinch of it up my nose.

I didn't get any sneezes out of it at all. All I got was a burning sensation in my nose, and eyes that streamed so much I had to get on the bike and pedal like crazy to blow the moisture away so I could actually see the world around me. After a few more failed attempts to get a sneeze or two from the stuff I gave up and let the tin stay in the bag. Only an idiot would stick that stuff up their nose, I grumpily told myself.

Later, an American cyclist I met up with put me wise. I had spread out some of the contents of a bag to sort, and he spotted the tin of Snus.

"Can I try a pinch of that?" he asked. I told him he could have the whole tin, and watched to see how tough he would turn out to be.

He took some and rubbed it on his gums.

"Why did you do that?" I asked.

"It's like chewing tobacco, but you don't need to chew it," he said. "Don't be fooled by the name on the tin, only an idiot would stick this stuff up their nose."

I didn't tell him I had tried chewing tobacco once and had ended up almost vomiting the filthy brown stuff onto the ground. I couldn't be an actor, not even one with a bit-part sitting on a porch in a rocking chair and making the spittoon chime. And you can forget about dancing through pouring rain with an umbrella, too.

To bet, perchance to win

2007-11-27T10:51:00.000Z

You can't always get what you want.

I can confirm that this is true. I can never get what I want. Maybe this is down in part to my fanciful nature; in an age of jet aircraft I wanted to fly a biplane. While other engineers studied the turbocharger and its application to transport I wondered if it would be possible to modify steam engines to have a small nuclear reactor in place of the firebox. I wanted to design a human-powered spaceship using the principle of ion ejection at relatively low voltages in vacuum.

But if you try sometimes, you can get what you need.

Indeed? (Raises a quizzical eyebrow). I have my doubts. If I have everything I need, why do I still want for more? Perhaps if I knew what I needed, I might be happy with what I've got. But it seems to me that you never quite get what you need. There's always that feeling at the time when you come to pay the bills and settle the accounts that some of the debt will have to be put off till next month. You rank them in order: this one will repossess the house if I don't pay, this one will take me to court, these will cut off the power. I live my life under threat of retribution.

The last few days have seen the autumn weather arrive and play havoc with my plans for getting gardening work completed on the days I had scheduled each for. I have missed out one of my regular customers for two Mondays in succession now because of heavy rain, and as I sit here tapping at the keyboard the fog outside has only just cleared away. If only those who send me bills could also be put back until the weather clears.

But back to the getting what I need thought. It is now cold and wet. I need to be able to get warm and dry at the end of each day in the damp and drizzle. I need fuel. The costs of fuel are soaring. Even coal, which at first thought you would think would not be affected by the current surge in oil and gas prices, is going up. The reason is that it is hewn from the seam, brought to the surface, and delivered to depots and doors by vehicles which will only run on oil. The bottled gas which I use in a catalytic heater for quick warmth has also gone up, and although much of it comes from the Brownsea Island field and is therefore supposedly unaffected by hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico or tense standoffs with Iran, it again is raised and delivered by energy derived from oil.

Of course, as a side effect of my garden clearance, I do get a lot of wood and bark shreddings. This would appear to fill my needs for fuel, and in a small way, it does. But what I actually get is green wood, recently cut, that cannot be burnt immediately; it has to be stacked and allowed to dry. Once again the carrot which is dangled is not quite close enough to be eaten completely, and I keep trotting on after the remaining stub, hoping it will droop just that fraction more so that I can reach it. Paranoia begins to creep in as the doubts about the carrot supply grow and rumours of who's pulling the strings abound.

"Doctor, Doctor, I think I'm a puppet."
"Why is that?"
"I have this terrible pain in my arse."

I wonder if I am an experimental subject in a psychology research program? The behavioural aspects of hope and optimism considered in the context of both negative and positive reinforcement stimuli. At what point will my cheerful optimism turn into dour pessimism? Years of being a freelance worker have lead me to believe that a maxim of "Hope for the best but plan for the worst" is the only way to live. Sitting down and reviewing the past few years has shown me, however, that when you are on the downside of life, you never quite manage to break even in the short term. The same review, though, also shows me that if you look at events with a window greater than a few days, something does always seem to turn up. The doldrums are not infinite, and the wind doesn't lie low for ever.

So I live in hope. Not, I trust, like Hitler in his bunker, waiting for the Wonder Weapons to spring their surprise, or for one of his generals to achieve the impossible victory. My mental picture of that man's last few weeks is of an evil Billy Bunter waiting for the postal order to arrive, or for his numbers to come up. It takes me back to my last spell in the slough of despond, when out of a desire to generate some hope at least, I wrote some programs to try and predict which numbers might be drawn twice a week. I didn't win, but I did get back into software contracting for one last time. I cannot hope to win the lottery. If I were to win, I am sure it would be in a time when I was not desperate for money. To those that have, shall be given, and from those that have not, shall be taken away.

If there is one thing that I have noticed emerging during the last few years that I hate, it is the rise of luck as a lifestyle. We are being persuaded to abandon the Victorian ethos of hard work and study as the path to a bright future in favour of picking a celebrity to follow and a set of numbers to hope for. We have television channels full of repeats of old shows and stories of other peoples' luck with auctions and house makeovers. The last days of the Roman Empire is the latest show in town, and of course, it's a repeat.

And so my hopeful optimism is no different from the dreams of those who buy the lottery ticket each week. The dangling carrot changes slightly; I have noticed that when the weather deteriorates, I start to sell more classic car spares. Not enough for me to hang up the foul-weather clothes and stay inside in the nearly-warm. More promises of gardening work arrive by emails, from neighbours of customers who have watch me labour to cut down a hedge and dig up the roots, and are impressed enough to ask if I would do some work for them. I thank them for their emails and put them on the list, and look outside the window to the lowering skies that suggest it will be weeks rather than days before the promises I make can be kept.

So what difference is there between my living in hope, and my hoping for luck in games of chance? And why do I never quite get what I need? Is it because hope is engendered by the gap between what I need and what I have? Who is pulling the string on the other end of the carrot?

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they do up and undo us for their sport.

One-Track Mind

2007-11-19T17:41:00.000Z

The first train simulator program I bought was called Microsoft Train Simulator, known as MSTS. I have always wondered where the extra S came from. It was a serious simulator, and one of the things it didn't like you doing was laying a circle of track. If you insisted on trying to build a model railway you had to get very devious with the turnouts to try and hide the fact that at some point the line was going to form a loop. And something else that didn't work in MSTS were turntables. Not only did the program object to track joining up to make a circle, it objected to track that could be broken. Was there logic behind that? I never knew.

At about the same time, I bought another train simulator program, Trainz. Don't you just stagger in admiration at the genius of someone who can replace an S with a Z? Trainz, produced by a company called Auran, is known as TRS2004, although recently they have brought out TRS2006, and going backwards in time to before I bought my version, there was something called UTC, and at this point I'm going to stop enumerating.

Trainz allowed you to lay a circle of track, in fact it seemed to expect you to want to do that. It also had working turntables, swing-bridges, lifting bridges, all the quirky things that made railways the fascinating things that they are. And you could flit from train to train like a passenger trying to use the fragmented British train operating companies to get somewhere; I discovered this almost by accident, driving one of the steam engines that pulled a train full of logs to a sawmill where the logs were magically unloaded into a heap on the ground beside the track and the other wagons filled up with woodchips as you crawled slowly through the factory complex. I passed a set of sidings where there was a second engine hissing quietly, with some carriages coupled up behind it. I thought it looked inviting, so I clicked on it with the mouse, and instantly I was in the cab of the new engine, looking out at the train full of woodchips steaming off away from me.

The initial panic of being left behind passed when I found I could operate the controls of the engine I had hopped onto. I sounded the whistle and set off along the line, wondering where I might end up. After a while I passed a mill in the woods with a train hauling trucks full of logs to be unloaded and more trucks to be filled up with woodchips. After a while longer, with the landscape starting to look familiar, I passed the same mill again, this time without the train. I could go round and round in circles, playing trains, without having to worry about the line suddenly coming to an end and my needing to bang on the emergency brakes.

The next discovery was that Trainz had 'drivers', artificial intelligence agencies to whom you could give instructions to save you doing the mundane tasks of running round the train yourself or finding the way from Upper LumberjackWoods to Lower Pansycreek. I could sit back and watch as driver one drove the train I was riding, while up in the woods driver two was circling around between logging camp and wood mill. It was all I ever wanted from the game; I didn't want to be an engine driver, I was happy being the Fat Controller, a perpetual passenger. 'Drive', I would instruct as I boarded the train. 'Copy that', would come the response from the speakers, and the train would set off, driving at the varying speed limits, while I tagged along watching the landscape flow past me.

I began to notice that the AI drivers were not infallible. Sometimes they would take a rather circuitous route between two points that I thought could have been reached by a shorter path. One of them would often come to a complete halt and sit there immobile, and I would have to intervene, taking the controls and getting the train back into motion. Sadly, there was no way to interrogate him to work out why he had come to a halt. So I searched around the net and found that someone had written an Inspector program. I downloaded it, and waited until this particular driver halted, then sent in the Inspector and awaited his report.

I should have known it right from the start; why would a slim young driver like that wander on board with such an enormous lunch satchel? It wasn't food he carried around with him to while away the boredom in the cab. His bag was stuffed full of porn. "He was reading 'Rubber Nurses Enema Revenge' while he waited for the signal to go to green", the Inspector reported, "and he seemed to have become engrossed in the plot and hadn't noticed the signal wasn't for his line at all."

I'm sure there ought to be an apostrophe in that title somewhere.

The Late Fish

2007-11-13T20:48:00.000Z

I have noticed that I never get anything right first time; I never breeze through things; I'm always fighting till the last moment to get something completed, or waiting until it almost seems to late before I finally achieve what I want to.

I haven't always been like this. I was one of those hateful people at school who finished the exam paper with half an hour to spare, got up and left while others were still furiously re-working their answers or resting their head in their hands on the desk, and still got good marks. But exams were a simple set of rules to learn and follow, and life is quite the opposite. All sorts of strange fish swim in the rivers of life, and I still have to learn all of their names and what tempts them out.

I went fishing again, on a wild and blustery day that owls begin their stories with. The last time, earlier this year, I caught nothing. In fact, I found that I couldn't remember when I had had a successful fishing trip. I know it was about fifteen years ago, when I moved into the station, and my one vivid memory of the time was of casting out the carp bait and having the rod snap halfway along. My old wooden fishing gear just wasn't up to the task of handling modern baits, it seemed.

My youngest brother took pity on me after I showed him a couple of old fishing rods I had acquired, a split-cane salmon rod and another glass-fibre rod. He bought me an ultra-modern carbon-fibre fly-rod that packs up into six sections in a storage tube less than 2 feet long. It will be perfect for strapping to the crossbar of the bicycle.

We went out today to fly-fish for pike on the Stour; not at the stretch of water where I had unsuccessfully tried for trout earlier in the year, but higher up, at a stretch near Hindon St Mary. I was reading the local free paper the evening before, and came across an article stating that they had only just re-stocked that stretch of the river following a pollution incident earlier in the year, when effluent from an unidentified source killed large quantities of the fish. I mentioned this to my brother in the morning as we loaded his gear into the car. He rushed off to telephone the shop from where he had purchased the day tickets, and came back looking a bit concerned.

I thought it shouldn't be a problem; there would be loads of new fish wandering around like new kids on the first day at school, too uncertain to know what was right and what was wrong, all hungry for food, all raring to chase those brightly-coloured feather toys we were going to dangle over their noses. "But I think they should have told me before selling me the tickets," said brother.

We parked beside an old roofless mill, derelict long before the unknown vandals had torched it one night and left nothing but charred timbers scattered amongst the blackened stones. There was a catwalk that lead out over the weir to a halfway point, from where you could cast either upstream into the slow-moving mill pond, or downstream into the more turbulent but less weeded stretch of water beneath the foaming weir. I opted for the cleared water in order to learn how to cast with the new rod. Brother put on a bright pink feather on his line, while I went for a more subdued tawny-coloured affair with a hint of sparkling silver in the tail. I felt it looked more natural.

Pike are like fussy cats, (but with scales instead of fur). They have vicious teeth, and will chase something if it is dangled in their vicinity. Or not. Sometimes they will lie sulking on the bottom and you could actually brush the lure past their scales and they wouldn't even blink. Note to self: do fish blink? I think not, but it would need researching. What sort of person would devote a large portion of their life to determining whether or not fish ever blink? How many hours of painstaking observation would it take to be able to state definitively that fish do not blink? Supposing they only do it once in their lifetime, as a sort of rite-of-passage? How could you be sure you had carried out sufficient observations to be certain that fish never blink? Shut up.

I soon got control of the line and the feather, and only got it comprehensively snarled in a tree once. Brother had used his chest-waders to explore the sill of the weir thoroughly, as well as the banks of the upper stretch, and I had thrashed the lower water into a foaming mess, but neither of us had seen a flash or felt a twitch. We decided to go downstream through the field and see what lay in the weedy stretches.

Nothing lay in the weedy stretches, we decided after another two hours and a chicken sandwich each. In my earlier lifetime, I would have used some of the chicken as bait to see if the river really was as dead as it appeared to be, but like Father William, I have grown older, and no wiser; I have, however, become greedier. All the chicken went in me, in case I needed the energy to balance an eel on the end of my nose. Above us wheeled a pair of Buzzards, waiting hopefully for one or both of us to collapse from boredom or frustration and give them the meal of a lifetime.

"We could go to Hamoon, to the free stretch," brother suggested. And so we set off again, half-collapsing the rods and stowing them in the back of the car. Hamoon is another weir, but without the mill, and is one of the last places I have a vivid recollection of fishing. I used to work at Southampton, before I set out on my long bike ride, and was living in Marnhull. I used to stop off at Hamoon on the way back from work. In the back of my car would be the enormous and archaic 3-piece Spanish Reed rod, the one which I subsequently broke while casting. I would park and walk out onto the bridge, staring out over the downstream railing at the foaming and weed-riddled water. Upstream, in the calm section, there were always a few fisherman sitting on chairs and stools by the bank side, firing handfuls of groundbait and maggots out with catapults to pepper the water around their floats, their rods laid carefully in rests beside them. I would put a large piece of crusty bread onto a hook, and float it carefully through the tumbling waters to a spot beyond the weeds about fifty feet below the bridge. I usually caught two large chub, sometimes even a smaller yearling, carefully steering them back up through the rippling channels between the weeds to a spot beside the bridge per where I could just reach down with the landing net and lift the fish up out of the water. I did this no more than once a week, so that the fish didn't start to remember me, and the upstream fishermen didn't notice what was going on not quite under their noses.

We walked down a few hundred yards from the bridge this time, because brother admitted that he had never managed to catch a pike in the bridge pool, and started working the flies around a bend in the river. He had almost instant success; I heard an exited grunt, and scrambled up the crumbling bank to see him bringing a small jack pike into the side. I reached for the landing net, but he decided it was light enough to just swing in, small boy style. He unhooked it easily, one of the benefits of using barbless hooks, and I went back to my casting with a lighter heart, knowing that it was possible to catch pike in this stretch of the river, on flies, in the autumn. The wind began to skitter across the surface of the water, making Vee-shaped ripples that hinted at darting fish. A magpie swooped down across the weeds as though it were a kingfisher. An autumn bonfire's smoky scent wafted through the field and lingered in the scrubby bushes where the wind couldn't quite get a grip on it. I forgot about time while the daylight lasted.

Two hours, two dozen pools, and two miles later, I was still optimistic, but in a deflated way. I had become reasonably comfortable with the rod and line, and could loft the fly across the water almost to the other side of the river. For those of you who aren't fisherman, fly-fishing is rather like flexing an old-fashioned coaching whip, but in slow motion, waving the line through the air in a swirling curve that settles gently on the water and lets the bushy lure on the very end plop down like an exhausted insect. We were using wet-fly method, where the lure then sinks beneath the water and you tug it back to you with a series of random jerks to simulate the movement of a small fish swimming erratically; something that is supposed to cause pike and trout and other predatory fish to lunge for it in a cat-like frenzy. Only, I wasn't being lunged at. Nor was I being nudged, or tugged, or even twitched. For all I knew, there had been one solitary pike in the river, which my brother had caught and which was now sulking on the riverbed with a sore lip. Doubt and uncertainty grew as the afternoon ran out.

At the farthest point downstream, we stopped and debated what to do. The light was beginning to fade. I had caught nothing, but brother had caught another couple, and had lost several. One of them had been in a large pool which I had definitely tried. I looked at the rather dull lure on my line, and decided I should try the gaudy ones. When subdued sophistication doesn't work, disco is a viable option. This is a typical fishing syndrome, using the wrong bait, fishing too deep, fishing too shallow, whatever you are doing seems to be the wrong thing, particularly when someone else is catching fish in the same water. It is, of course, partly psychological, as I well knew, and the real secret to fishing was to be quietly persistent, in a bloody-minded sort of way. But it didn't hurt to try something different once in a while. A herd of frisky bullocks watched and jeered as I strung on a fluorescent pink lure and went back to whip the water once again.

We were almost out of daylight, and almost back to the car, when I felt a sharp series of tugs, and knew it wasn't just another underwater reed. I struggled to get both hands doing their independent jobs, one clutching both the rod and the taut end of the line, the other reeling in the slack coils I had been retrieving so that I could finally get the fish onto the reel with the controllable brake. I felt the momentary fear that it would get off the hook before I had full control, and had to fight my own panic almost as much as the fish was fighting me. Brother appeared with the landing net as I steered the fish away from the tangled mass of weed it had been trying for, and it shot away towards the opposite bank. I still hadn't caught a glimpse of it, but knew from the feeling that it wasn't a minnow. After another two anxious minutes I drew it over the landing net and brother hoisted it up onto the grass.

I could have killed it and taken it home to eat; it was a four or five pound fish, a predator that lives mainly on the fish that other anglers love to catch, and they would have thanked me for removing it from the river. But I found I didn't have any desire to kill it. I would put it back, because it was lucky; it had been the first fish I had caught in something like fifteen years, and that had spared it from the cosh.

Instead, I did something I have never done before. I have caught fish since I was four, since before I went to school. I have caught river fish, pond fish, lake fish, sea fish, even fish in grass-marshes only ankle-deep in water, but I have never had my photograph taken holding one of my catches.

So here, after half a lifetime, is my first fish shot.

OK, drop the sax and eat the soap

2007-11-06T11:07:00.000Z

I've been spending a lot of my spare time immersed in a virtual world set fifty years ago, and just a few miles from where I live. The new rail simulation program from EA Games arrived by post a couple of weeks ago. After getting to know the quirks and foibles I've found myself wandering around the landscape looking at the trees and bushes, the people on the platforms, the flowers in bloom in the meadows and along the trackside, even plants gently swaying from side to side in the virtual breeze. The level of detail that the creators have put into the game is amazing. But then, unlike driving sims and shoot-the-monsters, some of the players of this game are going to be out for a stroll. Once I get the content-creation toolpack I shall be adding some of my own details, such as people walking through the streets, and swans swimming serenely in the river.

It isn't the only train simulation software around, there are earlier simulators, some of which are cab-driving viewpoint only, but others also allow you to roam the landscape almost as you please, but these earlier simulations are showing their age in quite a few areas. Not everyone has been as taken by the simulation, blandly entitled 'Rail Simulator', as I, and if you want to read through the war of words between the extremes of users, go to this site and head for the forums. I've taken to the new release because it offers the promise of trying to model some of the past in much more realistic detail than the two earlier simulations I have used for a couple of years.

I haven't been an avid games-player before these railway simulations came along, or at least, I haven't been attracted to the graphics games as much as I was to the adventure games a quarter of a century ago. That long?

I walked into a video rental shop back in the eighties, saw that they were selling of stocks of a small personal computer quite cheaply, and bought one for myself. After a short while, I went back and bought a couple more, for two other members of the family who trusted my judgment on computing matters. The machine was the Dragon32, a rather quirky piece of hardware in a creamy plastic box with a rattly keyboard. It had a reasonable selection of games available for it on cassette tapes, although not as many as the Commodore 64. I didn't bother with the graphics games, I didn't find them realistic enough to make me overlook the cartoon-like representation of reality; I played the text-based adventure games.

One of the first titles I picked up for the Dragon32 was called El Diablero, and I realised, within a few minutes, that it was based on the Carlos Castenada books. I roamed happily around a magical landscape, dreaming, flying, changing realities, and finally solving the puzzle after several weeks. And that, of course, was the whole problem with adventure games. They were a linear sequence of experiences, flashes of enlightenment as you found your way past obstacles, and once known, the flashes of enlightenment couldn't be repeated. The game couldn't be replayed in quite the same way, but because of the linear structure, it couldn't be replayed in any other way.

Rail Simulation is a game. Not everyone agrees with me on that, in fact, a large number of the forum members that you will meet should you follow the earlier link would disagree quite strongly with me, and if the game was a shooter, I would probably end up being turned into one of the legions of gun-fodder that seem to come out of doorways and round the corner as though there was never going to be an end to it. Games players, though, need to believe strongly in the reality of what they are playing. The difference between the modern simulations and the old text-based games is that you are no longer being challenged to use your imagination to bring the game to life, you are instead presented with a set of visual and aural events and invited to either accept or reject them. It reminds me of some of the older films, where the special effects just didn't live up to the rest of the standards; Marlon Brando cradling a blowup sex doll meant to be a drowned Stephanie Beacham in 'The Nightcomers' being a prime example.

Some of the earliest computer games, things like Space Invaders and Asteroids, worked because they made no attempt to try and depict reality with any degree of realism, they simply flung the situation in your face and let you either dive straight in or walk away, in much the same way, I suppose, as cartoons did. A step beyond the acceptance of cartoons lead you into the area of the Gerry Andersen puppet series like Stingray and Captain Scarlett, where reality was treated as a cartoon subject, but an attempt was made to add realism to a few chosen objects. In a similar way, the earlier generation of train simulation programs also tried to animate certain features of their virtual world.

Rail Simulator hasn't moved from the cartoon theatre to the Hollywood set. It does offer a promise of modeling the world with a greater degree of realism, both present and past. And it does offer a new direction for gaming to head off in, or several, possibly. There is the open-ended scenario where you can roam as you please without finding that the game stops as soon as you stray from the storyline, and there is the possibility to recreate the past. This opens up a whole new range of activities investigating some of history's mysteries.

There are already games where you can hunt Jack the Ripper, or try to solve the Black Dahlia riddle, with the limitation that the creation team have already written the script and scattered the clues. Like the earlier adventure games, they tend to be linear. Rail Simulator allows the addition of user-created content, in fact, the whole ethos of railway simulation seems to be one of adding to the game. Sadly, and this is probably the biggest incendiary source that has been found in the forums, the Rail Simulator program was released several weeks in advance of the tools which allowed user-created content to be added to the game. Perhaps the marketing part of the game creation process didn't look closely enough at the players whom they expected to embrace the new product within a few days of release. The game is certainly marred by a scattering of bugs, but this is to be expected in any new release. But the inability to change the world to how you wanted to see it appears to me to be the biggest block towards universal acceptance. It is like stepping back several years into one of the old linear adventure games. Adding user-created content to a game removes the limitations imposed by a single author or directed team, and allows the game to evolve according to a multitude of whims.

It has, though, reminded me of how quirky and at the same time, appealing, some of those old games where. As well as the sorcerer game, I have fond memories of an adventure set in a castle. I can no longer remember the exact title, 'The Castle of Adventure' is actually an Enid Blyton book, so it can't be that, and I think the author was called Conrad Jacobsen, but again, it's all a blur to me now. He played some cunning tricks in the game, for example, setting a maze challenge in underground tunnels and caves, where everybody kept the torch alight. Well, you must, mustn't you? Even my old tricks of dropping selected objects and moving in each direction in turn, recording those ones which lead back to the dropped objects, didn't seem to help. But, if you turned off the torch, you saw, glowing faintly in the darkness, luminous arrows which you then followed and eventually emerged into the garden to find a hot air balloon. If you had remembered to bring the bow and arrow with you that had resolutely failed to kill any of the earlier hazards you had encountered, you could enter the basket, wait until the balloon had risen some distance, and then puncture it by shooting the arrow to allow a descent into the final area of the game.

I was playing it once, with my youngest brother giving suggestions. There was a saxophone that you could, and should, pick up. You could also play it, and in a certain situation it would spell instant doom to a fat greasy white blob that otherwise spelt instant doom to you. There was a bar of soap that you had to pick up, because otherwise you would immediately slip on it and fall to your death. Anytime you put it down and then moved meant instant end of game. As with most games, you had a limit to how many items you could carry at any one time, and we found ourselves overloaded at the point where we needed to have the saxophone, plus everything else we had speculatively picked up, and there was that damned bar of soap in the way.

"Drop Saxophone", instructed brother.

There is a saxophone here. There is a bar of soap here.

"Get soap", instructed brother.

You pick up the soap.

"Eat soap", suggested brother. I baulked at that, but he was insistent.

You choke to death trying to swallow a bar of soap.

Of course you do, doesn't everyone know that?

The Strangest Autumn Ever...

2007-10-31T19:01:00.000Z

Supposing I tried to write this post in the vein of an established genre?

Try for example, Hammer House of Horror. Lightning flashes, a red overlay floods across the outline of trees, and we hear the voice of Vincent Price speaking in his silken dry tones...

"It was, it seemed, just another autumn..."

No, too bloody. Autumn is golden orange and russet shades. Let's try a musical style, perhaps Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. Da-da-dah-dah da-dah, and in comes Richard Burton's spitfire-flying narrative style "No-one would have believed, as the summer faded quietly into Autumn, that we were being watched..."

No, too paranoid. Nobody's watching us, we're not some intergalactic soap-opera. Try something lighter. Derek and Clive.

"The strangest autumn ever, was when that stripper was staying at the club and used to do that trick opening a bottle of wine with her fanny. Every now and then, it would go slightly wrong, and she'd lose the cork. Me being an emergency plumber, like, I had to go down there and sort of get it out for her."

"Like you do."

No, that won't do either. There might be children reading these blogs. Actually, that's very unlikely, most children have far better things to do. There might be adults with the mental age of children reading this blog. Yes, that's a possibility, and I wouldn't want them to get ideas and throw away their corkscrews. They might hit someone as they spiraled out of the window. The corkscrews, I mean. Although I wouldn't put it past a stupid person to get anything wrong these days. Put out the rubbish, and then put out the rubbish.

I'll just have to tell it like it is, then. I'm seeing things from the perspective of a worm, or a mole, or at least, from a kneeling perspective, weeding out a couple of the top flowerbeds for a customer. I should have been digging out the lower beds with a fork and turning over the earth, but at lunchtime, wandering around a garden centre trying to get a sensible price for black weed-control cloth, I had a sudden searing pain in my right shoulder. I knew what it was, I'd had it before. Frozen shoulder, one of the great mysteries of modern life. I hadn't had it for several years, but once you've been touched by it you never forget it. I just couldn't understand why on that particular autumn lunchtime I should have been struck again.

Frozen shoulder feels much worse than it actually is, and the doctors can do very little to cure it, apart from massive cortisone injections into the shoulder, which I know for certain would bring on my infamous vagus nerve reaction. The best advice I had received in the past was to try and do something rather than immobilise the affected arm. So I opted for the easy money that afternoon. I was pulling out low ground-cover weeds amongst the Cyclamen just coming into bloom, and cutting down the Raspberry canes now that they had finished their crop. Or had they? I spotted half a dozen fresh berries on one cane, and lower down, fresh leaves sprouting from the base of several other plants. In amongst the Evening Primrose and Phlocks, I found Forget-me-nots still flowering, and underneath a small tree, two small blue flowers on a fresh stem of Honesty. Some of the plants just didn't know when to give up.

I knew when to stop, though. My shoulder, despite my taking things easy and working left-handed, was burning as though hot barbecue skewers had been driven into it. I drove home using my left hand and waited for it to ease. I went to bed and hoped that sleep would come and take me away from it all, but two competing sets of pain set in; if I eased the shoulder, a fierce pain developed in my elbow. If I moved the elbow to alleviate the ache, the shoulder flared up again. I tried a couple of Ibuprofen, and within twenty minutes had chilly feet and chattering teeth. Was it so cold that I was getting hypothermia? The symptoms seemed to match. A bowl of porridge, a hot bath, and half an hour huddled by the gas heater got me back into a more normal state, and I was able to go back to bed for a second attempt.

Thinking back, I had often had previous attacks of frozen shoulder in the autumn, when the cold and damp arrives. I have an old injury to that shoulder where, as a teenager on a motorbike with less brains than the Greaves Silverstone I was riding, I crashed on a bend and fractured the top of my arm where the two bones meet and form the socket for the shoulder. Although it healed quickly enough, I had several times since over-reached and momentarily dislocated the joint, and the autumn knew how to find a weak spot. Perhaps the unexpected double-blossoms I had seen that afternoon meant that this was a particularly potent autumn, one that we shall remember for many years to come.

The tabby cat came to lay on the duvet close to me. Cats seem to know when you're poorly, and think that climbing on top of you and kneading your chest or stomach with their paws while purring loudly will help. In a way, she does help. Overweight, as many spayed female tabbies are renowned for being, she has got me out of a tricky situation several times, when after having said "Stop pushing me out of bed, you fat bitch", I've been able to answer the "What did you call me?" with "I was talking to the cat."

Limiting Factors

2007-10-26T20:54:00.000+01:00

Old habits die hard. I still keep looking at my life as an engineer might. I have been driving to and fro between home and Blandford Forum these past few days, visiting a couple of houses where I have been felling Leylandii, uprooting ivy, and putting in new fencing posts and panels. It ought to be a pleasant enough journey, fifteen miles each way through the beautiful rolling hills of North Dorset, with a choice of two roads to take, a high road and a low road.

The low road, as it nears Blandford, runs close to the trackbed of an old railway, lifted years ago now. It was called the Somerset and Dorset, and it was one of those cross-country routes destined to be closed because it did not fit into the vision of swift inter-city transport that British Rail, as they were called then, were entranced by. It didn't go to anywhere big or bustling, or come from anywhere important. It started down at Wimborne, in Dorset, some distance away from Poole, and ran to Bath, in Somerset, some distance away from Bristol. Now, the derelict hedges and earthworks run alongside the crowded country roads that I am trying to use to get around between home and jobs.

My limiting factor appears to be mobility. It has taken me forty minutes to travel the fifteen miles between home and Blandford, because of the holdups. The roads, both high and low, are too narrow for the heavy lorries that are traveling each way, and when two of them coming in opposite directions approach each other, they have to slow to a crawl in order to pass without either scraping each other, or scraping the houses and hedgerows either side of the road. Two spots on the two roads I can choose each have 20 mph limits on them to try and reduce the number of incidents where lorries and coaches have met each other in the past. And, of course, there are the ever-present tractors to dodge around or follow haplessly when the bends make overtaking impossible.

The railways, when they arrived after the Napoleonic wars, revolutionised this country. The narrow country roads had become clogged with stage coach and carrier traffic which, meeting in the lanes, were often forced to a crawl in order to try and squeeze past each other without causing damage either to the vehicles or to the houses and hedges either side. The rutted and potholed surfaces enforced a maximum speed limit without the need for cameras and policemen. In an effort to speed up the transportation of goods and passengers, some enterprising individuals opened toll roads, purpose built highways without the width restriction and poor surfaces, allowing higher average speeds to be achieved, but only by paying to use them. The system had only limited success, because the toll roads were scattered, and could only be reached by traveling through the free but impeded public roads.

And now the railways have shrunk to nothing but dim memories and small preserved examples, which can only be visited by traveling to them an these narrow, potholed, and overcrowded public roads. Paradoxically, these preserved railways have become very popular, and at least one of them has been extended so that visitors to it will soon be able to travel by train instead of by car to ride the Purbeck line.

The Somerset and Dorset, whose tree-lined relics I have been gazing longingly at from inside the car, features in the latest computer simulation, or game, let's not try and hide the fact that we are only playing. EA Games released Rail Simulator a few weeks ago, and it included half of the SDJR, or S&D, as the line was known, with a couple of steam engines to run along it from Bath to Templecombe. One of the scenarios in the game is called Swift and Delightful, although to most people sixty years ago, the Somerset and Dorset was known as the Slow and Dirty. The quirky initials did not help it to survive when the nationalised railway split itself up internally into regions. The S&D cut across two of them, causing a bit of a headache to the planners and namers, who nowadays we tend to call facilitators and enablers, and the simplest solution seemed to be to close it. Another small line with equally quirky initials, the Shropshire and Montgomeryshire, also closed, but again, mainly on 'economic' grounds, nothing to do with it being known as the S&M.

The railways just didn't make the sort of profit that private companies were able to make on the roads. Profit, for a government, means taxation, which is the life-blood of any party in power, and the railways had been sucked dry by the war and subsequent prevarication over whether to go for all electric, all diesel, or dirty old steam. I make this point about profit and taxation because it is obvious to me that the move towards charging motorists per mile in order to try and force, sorry, persuade them to forsake the roads for public transport is not going to revolutionise personal mobility in this country, certainly not in quite the same way as the coming of the railways did. And taking the case of someone like myself, public transport would not get me to and from my customers. Unless, of course, like the modern railway network believes, we all live in major conurbations conveniently close to the stations.

In a desperate move to try and modify the limiting factor on the motorways, the government this week formally declared the experiments with using the emergency hard shoulders of motorways as extra lanes a success. Modern cars, possibly more reliable than their counterparts of the fifties and sixties when the motorways were built, are far less likely to break down, so there is less need for an emergency lane to deal with problems of stationary vehicles. Let the lanes be used for moving vehicles instead, albeit at a reduced speed, as a concession to safety. More of this innovative (sic) thinking will follow. I can see that, in towns where the single or two-lane roads cannot be widened, one way of reducing the limiting factor on transportation will be to allow cars to use the pavements in busy periods. After all, we are a nation heading rapidly towards obesity, mainly because too many of us walk too little, so why not use that wasted space and create a few more happy smiling faces behind the steering wheels?

I'm not joking.

Putting the clock back

2007-10-20T17:33:00.000+01:00

It's not long now; British Summer Time comes to an end, again. "Spring forwards, Fall back", goes the old saying which is supposed to help you remember which way the clock hands are going to go. Not that there are too many clocks with hands any more, just digits, and none of that metronomic ticking from the mantlepiece at Granny's house to remind you just how much longer it was going to be until you could leave and get back home to your toys and secret places in the garden. Time creeps at different paces in different places.

If I could turn back time...

If I could have anything, any scientific advancement, or any super power, I would want the ability to move through time, to visit the future, to explore the past. Sadly, it doesn't look as thought H G Wells managed to get all of his predictions right; we still are stuck in the present, the here-and-now where Johnson's foot keeps kicking the stone and eternally refuting Berkeley. "The second law of thermodynamics!" screams another school of thought, "says that all order must decay into chaos. We are condemned to death by entropy."

Is it true? Does the past flit silently off into a whirling mass of released energy which slowly and inexorably seeps away until the whole universe is just a level playing field with no more clusters of matter? Is life a desperate but ultimately futile gesture of defiance?

I can accept that time-travel as we popularly understand it has too many flaws and fallacies to be discoverable, even leaving aside the fallacy of killing one's grandfather, there is still the nightmare vision of the past being as uncertain as the future when too many interested parties are monkeying around with it for their own nefarious purposes. I'm not saying that all genius is evil,or that all of world history is controlled by conspiracies, but most of our great inventions have been driven forward by groups of men eager to make a profit, and if someone should manage to find a way of seeing forwards even a few hours into the future, the lottery is going to be their main target.

I would be happy if I could simply look backwards, and see what really happened in the Sunderland flying boat when the Duke of Kent died, or what happened to Irvine on the slopes of Everest. I accept that I would not be able to stand on the grassy knoll and shout "Duck!", just as I could not whisper into Scott's ear "Five men are too many." The past has happened, I would just like to see exactly what it was that happened.

When I started living away from home in Lincolnshire last year, I had the TV on in the hotel room for company, and noticed there was a spate of programs about undoing the ravages of time. Most of these programs involved plastic surgery to remove the fat and smooth out the wrinkles, causing me to writhe and cringe and change the channel. One of them, featuring the rather scary Doctor Una, focussed on turning back the body clock by slightly more natural means. Although I didn't watch more than a couple of her programs, it set me thinking: could I turn back time for myself?

Those of you who've followed my blog for these past eighteen months, or been interested enough to read back far enough, will know that I have fought a long struggle against my own greedy nature, and managed to shed a few pounds and lose a few inches. But has it really done me any good? Have I managed to turn back my body clock? How could I find out, without having to go through all the humilation that Doctor Una and Gillian McKeith put their subjects through?

I had to go and see the doctor a couple of days ago. I had trodden on a nail whilst clearing a corner of a garden, and couldn't remember when I had my last tetanus booster. I had been meaning to go and see the doctor anyway, because I had been developing strange pains in the little finger of my right hand, which I had assumed was caused by the stress of gripping and pulling brambles and nettles, but it was one of those things I accepted wasn't really serious enough to warrant a visit all on its own, although it has put me off doing too much typing lately. The nail through the sole of my shoe was another matter entirely.

The pains in the little finger he could say nothing about, other than if they got worse he ought to see me again. I had collected enough tetanus jabs in the past to not really need another booster. Was this his way of saying he didn't want to witness one of my vagus nerve attacks? I thanked him, and stood up to go, when he said "I'd just like to check your blood pressure while you're here, you were borderline when I last saw you a year ago."

I waited while he pumped up the cuff on my arm and listened with the stethoscope, before saying, and looking suitably impressed as he did so, "125 over 70. You won't get any better than that."

Yes, yes, yes, a result. I have, in some small way, managed to turn my clock back a little. It's official, I've got a doctor's note to prove it.

Alter Egos

2007-10-08T21:09:00.000+01:00

I don't know what woke me, but I realised I was standing by my bed, feeling cold and shaking in the dark. There was a singing in my ears like wind in telephone wires. Pale light flitted through the room as clouds raced past, turning the moon on and off, and in a brief bright moment I saw that I was still in bed.

"There are two of me!" I exclaimed, staring at the darkened pillow where I still lay sleeping in shadow as the clouds obscured the moon again.

"I don't want to cause alarm," said a voice to my right, and it did just that, "but there are somewhat more than two of us."

I turned, staring at the dimness of the bedroom door, and as another ray of moonlight flared up like a lighthouse beam, saw that it was I, standing there, looking at me. And, as I glanced back to the pillow in the final flicker before the clouds snapped shut across the silver face outside, I saw that I was also still asleep, oblivious to the shock that I was now encountering.

"I can't put this any other way," I said from the doorway, "but we are in a lot of trouble."

"We?" I asked. "Because there's more than one of us? How so, will the government triple our tax bill?"

"Don't be quite so frivolous" I said dryly, motioning me to follow. "Money is the least of our worries at the moment. But government?" I laughed ironically, "Well, that, in a way, is all of our worries."

I was going to move to the doorway, but stopped, feeling my lip. It felt wet and sticky, and when I took my hand away and the moonlight re-appeared, I saw a dark stain on it. I tasted it.

"My nose is bleeding," I said, and looked at myself.

"We've just been punched in the face," I said. "Come on, before it gets worse."

"Who punched me?" I asked, moving now, following myself out into the darkened corridor.

"One of us," I answered, not looking back. At a determined pace, we passed through the open doorway into the large room. I moved out from behind myself just as the moonlight arrived, and stared at myself, huddled on the floor clutching my nose. Standing over me, snorting noisily like a horse beyond the finishing post, was myself, wild-eyed, manic-faced, waving my arms wildly.

I looked at myself, beside me, then at myself moaning on the floor, and said to myself "Why did you hit me?"

"I am in command here," I said, "I'll decide what questions are asked and what answers are given."

"I'm not like this!" I turned to myself beside me. "How did this happen?"

"I didn't say anything wrong," I moaned from the floor, "I didn't deserve that. I was trying to help."

"I will not be disobeyed," I screamed, waving my arms again, "and I will not be questioned. What is decided is decided, it doesn't need reviewing or approval by a committee. One word, one will, one war!"

"For my benefit," I said, trying to prevent the situation from rising to the boil again, "what exactly is the problem?"

"I think the problem is quite evident," I said beside me, "it is the solution that requires debate."

"Am I surrounded by talkative idiots?" I screamed, stamping the ground in a fury. "Must I repeat myself for every inattentive poltroon? There is only one solution, and I have the formula! Act, and act now! Prepare the Thousand-year Rite! "

I looked at myself as a fresh wave of moonlight rushed into the room, and saw that I had a small black moustache.

"But I shave," I said in bewilderment, feeling my upper lip. It was smooth and hairless. "And I do not comb my hair like that!"

I stared in horror as I recognised myself. I was Adolph Hitler.

I turned to myself and exclaimed "but Hitler has been dead for sixty years, has he not?"

"Did anyone see my body?" I shouted in excitement. "Did they? No, they did not! They saw a charred corpse. It could have been anybody, the city was full of charred corpses. The world wanted me dead, and when they were given a body and a plausible tale they swallowed it, pickled cabbage and all!"

I turned to myself where I lay on the floor, but I had recovered from the earlier beating and scampered quickly up and came to join me where I stood in the doorway beside myself.

"I think this is what is known as a cataclysmic schism," I said beside me. "It is rare, but not unknown. What I am not certain about, is what can be done about it. I need to look at some parts of a book I read some time ago."

"The book is not a book, it is a pamphlet called 'Spontaneous Cathartic Regression Technique," I said from the other side of me. "I was just describing how relevant it was to the current situation when I was brutally attacked."

"I do not need any quack-doctor hypotheses," I screamed, wagging a finger at the shivering self beside me. "I have Hans Horbiger's advice, and Himmler will have the Holy Quail. Marmite Tax Three!"

I turned to myself and said "How would this pamphlet help, if I were able to find it?"

"It would possibly describe what to do if the subject reacts inappropriately," I began to say but was interrupted as I screamed "I am not a subject! I am the new ruler of the age! All will bow to my command! I will rise again, and this time I will not go to Moscow, or let Goering loose with the medicine!"

I turned and went back into the corridor, lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves. The moon did not penetrate here, and I was forced to feel along the shelves one by one, searching with my fingertips for a slim pamphlet in a plain card cover, that I remembered seeing a few months ago when I chased a butterfly though the house. It came to me assertively, it seemed, the narrow spine projecting just a fraction further than the other books.

I hurried back into the room, into the moonlight, and said to myself "I have it, see!"

I took it from myself and examined it, reading out loud the title, and then the author, "Doctor Abraham Isaacs of the University of Zion, Fellow of the Institute of Uncommon Science, Philosopher at Arms to the Emperor Joshua Norton Foundation."

"A Jew!" I screamed, lunging forwards in a fit of rage and wresting the pamphlet from myself. "I will not be insulted by this loathsome arse-wipe of semitic lies! Where there's a Will there's a Whale! I will..."

And before my eyes, I suddenly writhed and contorted, twisting and thrusting the hand which gripped the pamphlet away from myself as I fell to the floor, splayed out in the moonlight like a drunken sailor. I started forwards, but I reached out and stopped me, saying hurriedly, "No, no, it is enough, just watch, and do not touch, on any account."

I turned to myself and saw that I was calm, almost triumphant, as I watched myself squirming on the floor like a slug that has blundered into salt. My outstretched hand was trying to distance the pamphlet from me, but as I curled up into a fetal position the paper and card came closer still, and as I folded into a smaller ball, so it seemed to grow around me.

There was a sudden cloud above, and when it moved away and let the moonlight in once more the floor was empty. I looked around the room, and then to myself, seeking an explanation, but as I looked, I faded with the moonlight's departure, and as I turned quickly back to myself, I too had gone.

The clouds raced past outside, the moonlight flickered beacon-like, and I waited for a long time, watching, breathing, listening, but I was quite alone.

This tale owes much to Stanislaw Lem. I could have kept quiet and dared you all to recognise it, but I must pay him the respect he is due; he was one of those writers who helped me see what a fascinating thing the mind can be. I would like to dedicate this story to the Society for Happy Endings, whom I understand are campaigning to have all children's books that do not have a happy ending burnt. Happy Kristalnacht to them.

I have a Twisted Side

2007-10-04T20:52:00.000+01:00

It seems that you never stop finding things out about yourself. Here I am, in the prime of my life, stable, mature, no hidden talents left to discover, no secrets left in the closet, and suddenly I'm having to face up to that fact that I am deformed and may have been so for years. I just never knew, and nobody thought to tell me.

It's all about socks, you see, not the usenet type, but those silly little cotton or wool rags you wear on your feet to prevent leaving skid marks in your shoes. At least, that's what I think they're for, I've never really worked out exactly why I wear them, I was just taught so at an early age.

I have an odd-socks box. It is an old archive box, and in it I put the odd socks that are left over each time I empty the tumble drier and put the clothes away. Every now and then, when the sock drawer empties, I go through the odd-socks box and manage to put together a few more pairs. It's a simple enough system, and I was quite happy with it, until recently.

As part of the tidy-up in preparation for mending a leaking roof, I moved a stack of archive boxes, and was a little concerned to discover that two of them were full up with odd socks. I had, it seemed, archived my archive box a couple of times in the past. On a whim, I spread the contents of all three boxes out on the bed, and managed to put together a few pairs of socks, but I was still left with two and a half boxes full of unmatched socks. That is a lot of singletons.

And so I became intrigued with the puzzle of where the other two and a half boxes of socks could be. I did the normal things, tidying up the bedroom, again; lifting the bed and finding yet more socks underneath, most of which, I was amazed to find, did not match any of the socks in the three archive boxes, but added themselves to the collection. I now had three and a bit boxes labeled 'O-S', and was no closer to unraveling the mystery of where the missing socks were.

It is time for a small diversion into the strange world of transmitted knowledge, because everyone who finds themselves in my position and wonders who to ask must tread at least some of these paths. You need to find someone who you think might give you an answer. There are many such people, but a limited range of categories they fall into.

Firstly, and I choose this type of person for obvious reasons; the closest to an omniscient being that any of us are likely to encounter, is the mother.

"Mummy, why is the sky blue?"
"Because it's always been like it, now stop toying with your egg and eat it."

By way of a thought-experiment, let's put the question to the mummy.
"Where have all the missing socks gone when there are only odd ones left?"
"Don't ask me, you're the one who loses them. Go and tidy your room."

When is an answer not an answer? When it is the 'It just is' reply.

To be fair to mothers, the father-figure answer isn't very different in the overall result.

"Why do I have so many odd socks?"
"Ask your mother, she's in charge of the washing."

And in the same area of those who can never answer questions fully, let's add the religious group. They will always fall back on claiming that god (pick one, any one) made it so, and that to question him is unwise, shows lack of faith, is blasphemous, or in some of the more active religions, is grounds for a Jihad. I won't even consider putting the question to them, I'd just be advised to consider the lilies, or give thanks that both socks hadn't gone at the same time.

Close by, and equally unsatisfactory, are the politicians. Ask them any question with the merest hint of possible culpability, and they'll waste no time in claiming that one of the opposition parties is to blame. That's if they even answer the question in the first place.

"Why do I have so many odd socks?"
"Since coming to power, our party has been committed to doubling the expenditure on affordable footwear in real terms, and our target show that during the last three years, a real increase in bed-pan warmers has been achieved in every major hospital."

There is another major group of answerers that have to be mentioned, because they have always held themselves to be the fount of all knowledge; the very purpose of their existence is to further man's knowledge of all thing physical, and possible also immaterial, since there doesn't seem to be a word unphysical, which is what I would really have liked to use there. This group is, of course, the learned body, the academicians, the scientists.

(As an aside, I'm getting more and more confused about this rule I before E, except after C, because it seems to me that there are more exceptions to it than there are adherents. Height. Weight. I could go on.)

To the scientist, the sort of simple question we would really like to ask is anathema.

"Why do I have so many odd socks?"
"In any universe, where the number of socks tends towards infinity, the probability that a single sock should be matched precisely by another single sock tends in the inverse ratio. It is a wonder that a pair of socks can exist at all."

The law of entropy applies to matched items of footwear; nature, it seems, abhors a cosy relationship. This is why there are so few binary stars.

There is one final group who persist in claiming that they have all the answers, and these are probably the most dangerous of all, because to a certain type of mind, they are the most believable.

"The reason that you have so many odd socks is that there is a global conspiracy amongst clothing manufacturers to boost sales by means of built-in obsolescence. There have been several patents for everlasting socks that have been bought up and are now locked away in safes belonging to a few rich men. They want you to buy more socks, it's as simple as that."

I will give you a warning now, about the most extreme of these types of answerers, the ones who say "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."

When you ask them why, they'll say something like "Because if they find out I've given one of their secrets away, they'll kill me for it, so I have to kill you as a simple act of self-defence."

So, after our little diversion, and after I've established by rigorous analysis and geometric logic that there is nobody reliable enough to answer the question, let's cut to the chase. I considered briefly the possibility that Little Petal was stealing them and selling them on a dubious website as willy-warmers, but a determined search of the internet showed that no such site existed. I even dismantled the filters on both the washing machine and tumble drier in case a few of the missing items were hiding in the machines, knowing that it was a futile exercise, but I had to eliminate the possibilities systematically, using tried and trusted empirical methods. (And yes, I looked behind the fridge).

I finally located my missing socks, in a couple of black plastic bin-bags over the road in my stores, where I had put them for use as rags when I worked on the cars or did other oily jobs. When I found the sacks, I immediately remembered putting them there, and why I had thrown them away in the first place. They all had the heel worn out of them.

So, my first question had been answered. I had such a large collection of odd socks because I had to throw half of them away. And, of course, that begged the next question. Why was I wearing out the heel of one sock, and not the other? Was this really a global conspiracy of textile companies after all? And why make one heel wear out before the other? That seemed very inefficient if the desired result was to increase sock sales, because for someone like me, with an obsession for keeping the odd socks in case the missing partner should turn up, spurious matches could sometimes occur.

Consider: you go to the shop and buy a pack of five pairs of socks, and after a few weeks have two pairs and three odd ones left. You go to the same shop and buy another pack of five socks, and a few weeks later have another three odd ones, some of which might have the same pattern as the first three odd socks, and so the need to go out and buy still more socks is diminished until those accidental pairs themselves become separated. The case for a conspiracy of devilishly clever business minds is weakened considerably by this simple observation. (And I might add, the case for almost every conspiracy similarly fails to hold together, no matter how sensational the claims might be.)

I had to embark on yet another investigation to answer the new question. What I did, over a period of a few weeks, was record in my diary every instance of taking off my socks and finding a hole in the heel of one of them. Yes, I know, this might seem a little obsessive, but sometimes there's no other way to get to the bottom of a mystery. And as far as obsessive goes, I've still got a long way to go before reaching 11:25, hit return.

What has worried me, at the end of all this, is the discovery that I always wear the heel out on the sock that is on my left foot. I never, in all the records, wrote down "pulled off a worn-out sock today from my right foot." It was always the left.

I've inspected both my feet thoroughly, not only with a mirror, but by using my digital camera with the self-timer setting to take snapshots of the soles and heels of my feet from all angles, and I can't see any difference. But it's there, I know it's there. I have the evidence, you see. Just not the reason why.

My Swearing Lady

2007-09-21T20:20:00.000+01:00

An adaptation of the work by George Bernard Shaw, disgracefully condensed, expunged of all sissy characters with no significant role, de-bowdlerised, and presented for the wearers of the emblem, by The Sopwith-Camel.

(Opening scene, the camera tracks up a flight of stairs following Eliza Doolittle, who follows Mrs Pearce up towards the first floor landing. Both women climb the stairs in synchronization, showing alternately flashes of left stockinged and then right stockinged calves over patent leather ankle boots. Camera halts just behind Eliza at shoulder-level as Mrs Pearce knocks on the door, then turns to look at Eliza with disdain.)

Cut to Professor Higgins' study, where the Professor and Colonel Pickering look up.

Professor Higgins "Do please come in, Mrs Pearce."

The door opens and Mrs Pearce's bosom enters. She struggles to keep Eliza from ducking past her rump into the room.

Mrs. Pearce " Professor, there is a young, um," (pauses for a distinct moment), "woman, who claims she has been invited to visit you."

Professor Higgins. "Ah, the swearing flower girl, I believe. Yes, Mrs Pearce, she may enter."

Close up on Mrs Pearce's disapproving face as she steps further into the room propelled by an eager Eliza.

Pan to follow Eliza as she looks around the room.

Eliza "Gor blimey, right fuckin' posh number you've got here, innit, ya cunt."

Cut to a shocked Mrs Pearce, clapping her hands to her ears.

Pan back to Professor Higgins "Quite, quite." (Turns) "Colonel Pickering, please allow me to present to you Miss Eliza Doolittle."

Colonel Pickering (bowing slightly) "Charmed, m'dear."

Eliza (curtsey's) "Too fuckin' right, mate."

Professor Higgins, to Colonel Pickering "Well then, Pickering, here's a challenge, one hundred guineas says I can have this foul-mouthed little creature of the gutters talking like a true-blue lady at Ascot in just a fortnight."

Eliza "Oi you fucker, I ain't foul, I washes me mouth out every fuckin' morning and every fuckin' evening, cunt!"

Colonel Pickering (shaking Professor Higgins' hand) "You have a wager, my friend, and I have to say, you've got your work cut out. Oh Good Lord, your woman's taken a turn."

Pan to Mrs Pearce as her eyes roll up and she swoons to the floor.

Professor Higgins "Don't worry, old man, she often has these little spells, probably over-done the lacing again. Just wave something from a bottle under her nose, it usually perks her up."

Camera follows Colonel Pickering bending over Mrs Pearce, loosening any laces he can find, then pans back to Professor Higgins taking Eliza by the arm and ushering her towards the laboratory door. She turns to look back.

Eliza "Hey mister, yer pervert friend's only groping yer missus's tits, innit!"

Cut to Colonel Pickering glancing up with a guilty look.

Colonel Pickering "Er, can't find the smelling salts, I thought this might be the quickest way to arouse her, I mean, bring her to her senses."

Professor Higgins "You're a brave man, Pickering. Do join us in the laboratory when you're ready, I should like you to observe the process."

Colonel Pickering "I'll be with you in a moment, just as soon as I've checked on Mrs Pearce."

Camera shot of Professor Higgins and Eliza as they leave and the door swings closed. Pan to Colonel Pickering and Mrs Pearce, who has just opened her eyes. We watch as she glances down to see her bosom loose, and then looks quickly back up at Colonel Pickering, suspicion growing on her face.

Colonel Pickering "Um, you see, as you fell, the doorknob caught your dress and pulled it off. I was just trying to fit everything back into place."

Fade quickly to

The inside of Professor Higgins' laboratory. Eliza sits in a chair with her wrists secured to each arm with leather straps. Professor Higgins is bending over her, doing something with a pair of wires, while Colonel Pickering sniffs a decanter suspiciously, and then takes a sip.

Eliza "Oi,cunt, what the fuck do you think you're fuckin' doing to me fuckin nips?"

Cut to Colonel Pickering shuddering slightly, then taking a deeper drink.

Professor Higgins, straightening up. "Eliza, let's try calling them areoles, from now on."

Eliza "Now you're fuckin avin' a laugh, innit. Me ear'oles is either side of me fuckin' 'ead, and you can stay away from any of me other 'oles as well, cunt. I'm a good girl, I am."

Professor Higgins "Of course you are, Eliza, and in this instance, good is as good is taught. Now then, just a little bit of calibration. Would you please listen to what I say and then recite it back to me, precisely as you hear it. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain."

Eliza "The fuckin' rain in fuckin' Spain falls mainly on the fuckin' plain, innit, cunt."

Colonel Pickering covers his eyes and with the other hand, pats his wallet reassuringly.

Professor Higgins, turning a polished wooden knob slightly "Fine, fine. Four-tenths." (He flips a lever over briskly beside the dial) "Now then, let us begin. Say it again, my dear, if you would be so good."

Cut to Eliza "The fuckin' " (jumps slightly) "Oooh! rain in fuckin Spain!" (Her voice rises rapidly to a questioning wail as the syllable ends). "'Ey, something just bit me in the tit, innit."

Camera pulls back to Professor Higgins as he says "Not quite, Eliza, just a mild application of the new wonder force called electricity. Now, again, if you would be so good"

Close-up on the dial as we hear Eliza continuing to recite the line, The needle jumps at each expletive, which is followed by a fresh expletive, giving yet another twitch of the needle. Fade down sound.

Cut to outside the laboratory door where Mrs Pearce is kneeling, listening. As Eliza's squeals can be heard through the woodwork Mrs Pearce begins to stroke her left breast through the silk blouse. The camera moves purposefully forward as the fingernail circles closer in, and just as it reaches the position of the silk-covered nipple we fade to black, outside to centre.

Camera opens on Eliza and Professor Higgins standing at the entrance to the Ascot enclosure. Eliza looks around her, very poised and self composed, and we move in for a close-up as she turns to Professor Higgins.

Eliza (She speaks delicately but with a precision and manner suggesting she has never spoken otherwise,) "I feel apprehensive, Professor. It is far too soon, you have rushed me here. I fear that I will let you down."

Professor Higgins "Nonsense, Eliza, you have come here at your own good pace. Have faith in the marvels of modern science, and today you shall vindicate the method of selective aversion therapy."

Eliza "And, I believe, contribute somewhat towards your acquisition of one hundred guineas, dear Professor."

Cut to Professor Higgins' face. He looks mildly concerned.

Professor Higgins "The amount is quite trivial, I assure you. My interest is more in the challenge of scientific application. The money is a mere trifle."

Eliza "So you won't mind sharing some with me, I presume?"

Professor Higgins stiffens slightly. Almost beneath our hearing, Eliza's voice whispers "innit, cunt"

Professor Higgins, pausing for just a moment "Well, shall we say twenty percent?"

Cut to Eliza, raising an eyebrow. Close up of her mouth, just starting to form the letter F.

Professor Higgins "Forty?"

Close up of Eliza looking mischievous, still waiting, still ready with an F.

Professor Higgins "I suppose we could make it fifty-fifty. Less, of course, essential expenditure. Room hire, electricity, leasing of scientific apparatus."

They exchange a knowing glance.

Camera pull-back from them and swing around, keeping them in shot, to show Colonel Pickering approaching, escorting the Lady Eleanor Erstwhile-Jones. Close in slowly on the Colonel and Lady, with Eliza and the Professor left of scene, as the two groups meet.

Colonel Pickering "Good afternoon, Professor, and to your companion." (raising hat). "May I have the honour of introducing the Lady Eleanor Erstwhile-Jones."

Professor Higgins, bowing slightly "I am indeed well acquainted with the lady. May I in turn present to you both Miss Eliza Doolittle."

We watch Eliza and the Lady Eleanor Erstwhile-Jones greet each other and see but do not hear their pleasantries.

Colonel Pickering shakes Professor Higgins by the hand, then looks questioningly towards the enclosures. Professor Higgins nods his head and motions the Colonel. The Colonel turns and offers an arm to Eliza, who accepts it, nods farewell to Lady Eleanor Erstwhile-Jones. The camera follows them as they stroll together into the busy enclosure, then pulls back to Lady Eleanor Erstwhile-Jones, who taps on Professor Higgins' sleeve.

Lady Eleanor Erstwhile-Jones "A quick word in confidence, if I may."

Professor Higgins, nodding, moves closer.

The camera closes on on them. We hear Lady Eleanor Erstwhile-Jones murmer "I was getting out of the carriage today and caught my hem, and I said the F-word."

Professor Higgins raises an eyebrow in surprise. "Did it slip gently out?"

Lady Eleanor Erstwhile-Jones "Volleyed forth, more like. Quite stunned the coachman. How permanent is your method, Professor Higgins?"

Professor Higgins, grudgingly "It sometimes requires a minor reinforcement."

We watch as Professor Higgins opens a pocket book and scans rapidly through it. He snaps it shut. "I could fit you in for an emergency session Tuesday next, perhaps?"

Lady Eleanor Erstwhile-Jones "I am to attend the royal ball tonight, Tuesday simply will not do."

Professor Higgins, offering his arm. "Well, then, we shall have to sort something out this afternoon, shan't we?"

Camera pulls back, then fades to black.

The End

(Innit, cunts).