timbobig

Wimps

2012-01-27T21:02:00.000Z

In 1911, a weak Liberal Government forced through the Parliament Act, which effectively disempowered the House of Lords from any lasting control over legislation. They did this by packing the Lords with new peers who understood that they were for the sole purpose of ensuring their own disempowerment. It worked.

In 2012, a weak (in perhaps a different sense) Coalition Government has proved itself incapable of preventing the Royal Bank of Scotland’s remuneration committee from awarding their CEO a million pound bonus for failing to meet any of his objectives. Osborne and his poodles whinge that ‘we don’t wish to intervene in the day-to-day operations of the Bank’ – oh, for ***k’s sake, why not? We’re not asking you to man the tills. As majority shareholder, you (via your tame UKFI subsidiary), can surely pack the remuneration committee with your own appointees – just like Lloyd George and Asquith did to the Lords – on the understanding that they may NOT approve ANY bonuses whatsoever. What’s stopping you, Government?

I know two possible answers. Either it’s because you’re still in thrall to those powers-that-were, you still believe that discredited claim that we have to ‘reward talent’ or it’ll go elsewhere (though we don’t hear so much of that nowadays, perhaps because Hester has just sacked most of those people); or, more likely, it’s because you’re a bunch of gutless wimps.

Tomorrow, I promise some trivia.

Everybody agrees

2012-01-25T22:48:00.000Z

The last refuge of the modern-day scoundrel is to establish the ground on indisputable quicksand. I want to build a conservatory, or concrete over my front garden? The last thing I want is people wondering why. If they’re allowed to stray in that direction, I’ll never win. So what I do is divert the argument into process rather than substance. If I can achieve that – get them fighting over what might be the best way to solve my problem, rather than wondering what exactly that problem was in the first place – then I’ve won. So establishing at (or ideally before) the outset, as a sine qua non, that ‘everybody agrees that I need more living/parking space’ is critical.

We can see this strategy unfolding by the day in several areas: HS2 and Boris Island, for instance. As far as I can tell, nobody, but nobody, has questioned that there are problems, because ‘everybody agrees’ that we have to shorten journey times between London and Birmingham by however many minutes, or pump more and more air passengers through Britain on their way to somewhere else – because otherwise, well, that’d be a bad thing.

‘Our future success as a competitive nation depends on it’ is about the most cogent argument I’ve yet heard for these or many other similar proposals. Nobody seems to be asking ‘hang on, before we even start talking, let’s see some numbers’. By which I don’t mean fatuous made-up so-called benefit figures, I mean the simple ‘opportunity cost’ question: what will be lost if we don’t do this? What will be lost, and by whom, and when and where, precisely? It shouldn’t be that hard to work out. After all, airport expansion projects have been proposed and rejected for decades. The projected benefits must have been quantified at the time, and the actuals are obviously available. But this has never, ever been checked after the money’s not been spent – nor, for that matter, does the converse get checked: what, for example, was the original business case for Concorde?

I think the promoters of projects of this kind should be made to put their money on the table. If HS2 is going to produce net benefits of £1.80 for every £1.00 spent, then let’s see you commit (in the form of promissory notes, escrow accounts, whatever) £0.80, to be cashed in, one way or the other, when judgement day comes. Any takers? Thought not.

I may have strayed off the point a bit. I apologise, I just needed a rant, any old rant. And I was distracted by Victoria Coren on HIGNFY.

Linear verbiage

2012-01-24T19:11:00.001Z

~~Roaring with pain~~ sorry, pouring with rain; abject crossword débâcle; ironing (almost) done; batch of fridge soup made; not sleepy, ain’t no place I’m going to … So I decided to measure my books.

The methodology was quite simple. Most of them are arranged like this on shelves, so ‘Σ shelf length times number of shelves’ gives total yardage of books, by spine.

Approximations had to be made for this kind of situation:

And after some deliberation I decided to include the antiquarian department, out of respect:

The final outcome is that I possess approximately 28 yards of books. I have no idea what this means. I probably need to calculate the corresponding weight and word count for the data to become in any way meaningful. Plus, I suppose, some form of quality weighting: maybe I can estimate how many times each book has been read, or the probability of it being read again. But that will have to wait for another wet day, or month.

I left out certain reference volumes, including cookery books. I have also omitted the new Kindle, for two obvious reasons. One being the difficulty of assigning a spine thickness to an e-book; the other that there aren’t actually any books in there yet. This is because I don’t really know what to do with the thing. I doubt if I’ll let it supplant ‘real’ books entirely, or even in large part, so I have to find a selective rôle for it. I don’t often go on extended holidays any more, at least not the kind that contain wide open reading spaces. (I get too much of that at home.) I daresay it will come in useful once my arms become too weak to hold up a weighty tome, or my eyes demand magnification of 8-point text; but neither of these has happened yet (as at 3.50 p.m. today), and I’ll probably have lost the ability to work technology by the time they do.

RIP

2012-01-21T22:35:00.000Z

Etta James – Try A Little Tenderness

Short stories

2012-01-19T23:00:00.000Z

I've started a new blog.

http://tim-timsshortstories.blogspot.com/

Diaries

2012-01-18T16:38:00.001Z

I spend a lot of time finding things other than those I’m looking for. So it was that, yesterday afternoon, I discovered that from 1959 to 1962, I had kept a diary. I’d pretty much forgotten this. It came about, I now remembered, because late in 1958, my father, who could be quite inscrutable, casually handed me one, with the words “Thought you might want one of these”. It was a palm-sized week-to-view, published, I found, by The General Electric Co. Ltd. Of England, obviously a free handout at his work. Each day’s space was about three inches by one.

I must have been fairly suggestible and literal-minded, because I immediately concluded that I should use this gift to record my day-to-day life, rather than to note forthcoming events and appointments, which was probably my father’s intent. It obviously didn’t occur to me that perhaps a larger format might have been more appropriate for this purpose. I just started writing things down, within each day’s little box, as they happened. There was no room for reflection or introspection, except in the sparsest form.

Well, you can guess how I spent my afternoon yesterday. Don’t worry, I’m not going to quote extensively – that will have to wait for when my archives are donated to the nation after my passing. Nor am I going to draw any profound life lessons from the contents, except, perhaps, to note that I seemingly found it difficult to distinguish one girl from another on a weekly basis (apart from two or three, who seem to recur at varying intervals over the whole four years).

Oh, all right. At random [there is a ‘notes’ box at the end of each week]:

‘Sunday 13 March 1960: Read morn. Rolled lawn, 5/-. Group practice after at Tony’s. Not much good. Vic didn’t turn up. La Fiesta [local coffee bar] eve. Saw Bobbie. Walk with her. Cliffs. Wow! Back to La F then home.

NOTES: I think I’ll go out with her.’

And, by contrast:

‘Wednesday 4 October 1961: Did nothing all day and eve.’

But here’s the important bit. After I went to University in Leeds in 1960, I began to go to the pictures quite frequently. There was a fleapit across the road from the digs in Harehills, and students could get in cheap to the city centre cinemas in the afternoon (ninepence, I think). And I tended to note the films I saw in the diary. This isn’t by any means the full list, but I think it’s quite interesting.

Psycho

The Greengage Summer

L’Avventura

Taste of Fear

The Guns of Navarone

East of Eden

La Dolce Vita

Spartacus

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

The Innocents

A Kind of Loving

Last Year at Marienbad

West Side Story

Fall of the House of Usher

The Alamo

By the way, can you spot the odd one out?

How to tame your human

2012-01-15T19:47:00.000Z

Be a bird. Robin is best. If you can’t manage that, try blackbird, or any kind of finch or tit. Avoid magpie, jay and pigeon (disguising yourself as a dove doesn’t work). If you find yourself lumbered with being any kind of raptor, gull or duck, forget it, you’re on the wrong career path.

Find a suitable human. Your parents will probably have done this already. The human will have a garden, a good nature, and a bird table. Learn to exploit these assets.

Learn your human’s behaviour patterns. They are often very predictable, and with practice you can influence them to your advantage. Observe the times at which the human tends to go into the garden, and try to be seen eating the last few seeds on the table at around those times. Organise yourselves into tidy queues, by species, making sure that this is noticed. The human will stand there for several minutes, watching you and possibly going ‘aaaw’. At this point, fly away. Usually, the human will go into the house, emerging with a bag of seeds.

If that doesn’t work, perch on a nearby branch and fix the human with that cold, unblinking stare that says ‘I am the descendant of dinosaurs. I will be here when you are a faint trace in the planet’s memory. Obey me.’ That should do the trick.

If you are lucky enough to be a robin, you can exploit the human by being cute, like human babies. Humans are very susceptible to emotional manipulation.

If all that fails, go down the chimney and peck the bastard’s eyes out.

The Rock’n’Roll Years

2012-01-13T23:00:00.000Z

Part two in an occasional series

The idea that boys like us could actually do it ourselves never occurred to me, until we heard Lonnie Donegan, Johnnie Duncan and the Blue Grass Boys, the Vipers, Nancy Whiskey. I was given the washboard, and begged my mother for thimbles (the washboard itself acquired from a long gone ironmongers in Southbourne Grove). Skiffle groups erupted all over the place. But soon after I’d been issued with my washboard, and the other guys had bullied guitars out of their parents, frustration started to set in. ‘I can do that’, I thought. My parents got me a guitar. The first thing I found out was that, once having managed to tune the thing, if you played the bottom three strings in succession, they spelled out the first three notes of ‘When I Fall In Love’. So I hunted around till I found the fourth note, then the whole tune. I got a chord book and learned, in about three weeks, how to play four string majors and join them together into as near as I could get to what I was hearing on those relatively accessible skiffle records.

And then, suddenly, it was 1956. The 7 inch 45 was invented and we had to have, and got, our green and beige Ferguson record player with the lovely cream and maroon 4-speed Collaro ten-disc auto-changer (the Dansette scathingly rejected). You could stack up ten 45s – your current top ten – then as the last one drops onto the pile, you take off the arm which had held the stack in place, and the top record plays over and over until you choose to stop it. Brilliant! The records themselves were designed for this purpose, with serrations around the outer edge of the label which stopped them skidding or damaging each other as they landed from the stack, like so many flying saucers. Naturally, I had to own more than ten 45s. Every penny of pocket money’s worth of 45s. The exact chronology, obviously, is available elsewhere. By now, you’d expect it to have turned into one amorphous blur, and to some extent it has, but I like to recall two overlapping phases. First there was Bill Haley, with a few imitators like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys. Little Richard and Fats Domino crept in alongside. And then Elvis came and hit us straight in the ears, guts and seething hormones. The rest followed. My enduring, confused memory of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is hearing it late at night on some kind of radio in our holiday home in Pembrokeshire, presented by my sister as a secret thing that parents had to be protected from, weren’t permitted to share. It was dark, mysterious, unattainable, addictive.

I loved the sheer energy and meaninglessness of pure rock’n’roll. By definition, you can’t analyse ‘Tutti Frutti’. John Lennon said, years later, something like “There is nothing conceptually purer than ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’”. He was right. But I loved the slushy stuff too. My heart still quivers when I listen to Elvis explaining why he’s ‘Playing For Keeps’, or the Everly Brothers’ complaining about ‘Crying In The Rain’. Even ‘Susie Darling’ by the long-forgotten Robin Luke can catch me unawares. Why is this? I sometimes wonder. The hormones that drove those emotions, all those years ago, have thankfully done their job and fallen back to where they belong; but they left the emotions behind them.

Next: Jazz

Thanks to Rog. I feel an anthology coming on.

Detox? Bah, humbugs

2012-01-12T23:31:00.000Z

Monday is officially the most depressing day of the year. That's good news, of course, it can only get better. (I'm pretty sure I blogged this identical point this time last year, and probably the year before, but hey, if I'm not allowed to repeat myself, well, I wouldn't be allowed to repeat myself, would I?) But so-called 'detox' is not the solution.

A friend at work used to give up alcohol for the whole of January. He was hell to be with, and tipped the first pint of February down with audible relish. I remember him once saying "Welcome me back to the human race" as he did so. And science states that so-called detox is a myth: abrupt changes to your body's expectations, as cultivated over eleven months, do more harm than good. At least the science I read does.

And there are more pressing reasons to abstain from self-imposed abstention. They come under the collective heading 'Christmas presents'. Here are a couple:

And of course:

OK, not strictly humbugs; but there must be a hundred of them in there (it doesn't say on the packet), to be consumed by 3 April, when the best-before date starts to poison me.

And I haven't even started on the socks and the handkerchiefs.

Inspired? Moi?

2012-01-10T17:47:00.000Z

As Z graciously remarked in a recent comment, we bloggers do indeed often inspire each other. At least, that’s been my experience on the ‘income’ stream; I wouldn’t presume to claim any credit in the other direction. But at the moment the inspiration-response bit of my brain has stopped, probably due to the onset of Seasonal Cantbearsed Disorder. So here are just a few questions I most probably won’t be addressing over the coming days:

Is Twitter now the de facto medium of preference for public policy, social commentary, personal gratification and, erm, everything? Am I right to be scared?

Is writing a Christmas present wish list of any use to anyone over ten? I asked for a dressing gown and got a Kindle. So other people are obviously better at writing my list than I am.

How many shirts do I need? How many shirts have I got? Why do I only like four of them?

As an Englishman living in England, should I be given a vote in the Scottish independence referendum, if any? (West Lothian readers need not reply.)

Is there any obligation or expectation to blog even when you have nothing to say?

Why can’t I think of anything else I don’t want to write about? Oh, hang on, I know this one …

Compare and Contrast

2012-01-06T22:01:00.000Z

Churchill: "I apologise for the length of this memo. I did not have time to make it shorter."

Diane Abbott: "Bit much to get into 140 characters."

Early Music

2012-01-04T22:51:00.001Z

I had heard, loved, and even listened to music since my ears opened. My father singing me to sleep with ‘A Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’; ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘My Darling Clementine’, even Leadbelly’s ‘Good Night Irene’ – these melodies and lyrical stories plunged into my psyche at a very early age. I think those songs will be my last memory traces to erase themselves.

There was a room at the back of the house, beyond the kitchen and the pantry, presumably originally the maid’s quarters. It immediately became the Den, and the exclusive territory of we three kids and our musical resources – the monolithic oaken radiogram with its fretworked loudspeaker grill, huge piles of 78s of all diameters, inherited and later acquired, and constantly replenished supplies of gramophone needles. We spent hours sifting through those mysterious, fragile black circles, with their spiral groove etched into their surface in their brown paper sleeves, randomly prospecting for aural gold. A record would be put on, briefly assessed, then rejected. Or, occasionally, set aside into the pile that needed revisiting. Perhaps one in twenty would make it all the way through to the ‘Favourites’, then to be played to destruction forever, or at least for a week. I’d love to know what those favourites were.

Of course, there was also the heavy Sunday lunchtime stodge pudding of ‘Two Way Family Favourites’ on the Light Programme. ‘Children’s Favourites’, with Uncle Mac, was another. I may kill myself next time ‘I’m a Pink Toothbrush’ or ‘The Happy Wanderer’ slides uninvited into my ears. But, there were some goodies even in those arid swamps, or soggy deserts. Even now, I wouldn’t mind listening attentively to ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’. And I adored ‘The Drinking Song’.

When I was about thirteen, there was one huge breakthrough: we were allowed to save up and buy our own records! The significance of this can’t be overstated. Suddenly, music wasn’t just something that was done to you: you could, within the restrictive boundaries of parental approval and cash, exercise some control, get what you felt, in that instant, you wanted, needed. How did we know, in the instant, what we wanted? What told us so undeniably what we needed? There must have some very special force at play. Because, back in those 78rpm days, we couldn’t be selective – we had nothing to select from. But somehow we did. ‘Chain Gang’ by Jimmy Young, ‘Sixteen Tons’ by Tennessee Ernie Ford, ‘Kisses Sweeter than Wine’ by Jimmie Rodgers. I have no idea how, but I knew I had to get ‘Zambezi’ by Lou Busch on the purple-centred Capitol label, rush it home and play this fragile 78 rpm single spiral over and over again on the radiogram.

Thus began my love affair with records. They combined so much art within the single artefact: the simple physical beauty of that perfect disc, with its cryptic centre label which seemed to hold depths of arcane information (what did ‘ffrr’ mean? what was the Capitol Tower? what did all those strange numbers mean?), the music it magically contained; and, dimly, the notion that perhaps here was a new art form in which sounds with no counterpart anywhere else could be contrived, constructed and preserved, like pieces of sculpture, within that black shiny squiggly ineluctable groove.

And then it was time for rock’n’roll. But that’s another story.

Christmas Card Audit 2011

2012-01-02T22:05:00.001Z

Snow/Snowmen/Snowflakes: 12

Santas/Reindeer: 9

Animals/Birds: 7

(of which Robins: 4)

Landscapes: 7

Boats: 3

Nativities/Wise Men/Angels: 3

Christmas trees/Baubles: 3

Comical: 1

Puddings: 1

Twelve Days: 0

Special categories:

Homemade: 4

Cards with glued-on glitter: 5

Ecards: 1

Wonderfully weird: 3

No Awards this year, apart from Best Card, which I have already announced.

Although this important data-gathering exercise has been conducted for several years now, this is only the second time the results have been scientifically recorded. Meaningful statistical trends cannot therefore yet be discerned. A more formal methodology will, if feasible, be employed in the future, enabling the presentation of the data in the form of graphs, pie charts and year-on-year percentile variances. However, some early indicators are worth noting:

· It was necessary to include three new categories: Puddings, Boats, and most significantly, Landscapes. This may be ascribable to inconsistencies in the categorisation procedures, whereby items now recorded as ‘Landscapes’ or ‘Boats’ were previously placed under other headings; in fact this is almost certainly the case. The same cannot however be said of ‘Puddings.

· There is a marked decline in the incidence of Glued-on Glitter. This may reflect economic circumstances, but is more likely to be a consequence of an increased perception that the damned stuff comes off on your fingers whenever you touch the things.

· Robins have doubled in quantity, possibly due to the mild weather.

366 Resolutions Per Annum

2011-12-31T17:44:00.001Z

And all of them the same: "TODAY, DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT".

I won't keep them all, of course; probably not even a quarter. But waking up with the thought in my mind won't do any harm.

Actually, even if the last word gets left off, that'll still be something.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Had to pass this on ...

2011-12-30T18:58:00.000Z

http://deadlysins.com/features/sintest/lusttest.htm

Courtesy of http://www.lastwordonnothing.com

Review Of The Year 2011

2011-12-29T20:46:00.000Z

Lesson Learnt: Tread carefully, but step out with conviction when you do.

Lesson Not Learnt: Don’t wear white shirts to dinner parties.

Best Thing Said To Me: Not telling. Runner-up: “You are lovely.”

Worst Thing Said To Me: “I really enjoyed our friendship.”

Answered Question: “Does the Higgs boson exist?” (Answer: maybe.)

Unanswered Question: “What did I come up here for?”

Achievement: Playing the guitar for two hours on Boxing Day after a six month lay-off.

Non-achievement: Painting the kitchen ceiling (winner for three years running).

Un-understood Word: Meme.

Culinary Discovery: Wilkin’s Tomato Ketchup.

The Glassman Cameth, and other stories

2011-12-28T21:15:00.001Z

I don’t know about you, but when I’m hanging around waiting for a crucial phone call or doorbell, I find it difficult to concentrate on anything else. Today, I could be excused this character defect, because I wasn’t allowed to get on with many of the things I should have done. I couldn’t do much in the way of tidying and cleaning until Forensics came, and there was no point in Glassman attending before Forensics. And I found it impossible to settle down to a book or a movie. I couldn’t even summon the willpower to throw away the Christmas presents. (Only kidding: see below.)

Anyway, Forensics came and dusted for prints of finger and foot and whatever else they do. He didn’t hold out a lot of hope: Idiot was apparently smart enough to wear gloves, and the shoes were, well, just shoes. This was confirmed within an hour or so by phone. The case is still open, obviously, and they’re looking for tie-ins with other similar ones. They’ll catch Idiot eventually, but I’m losing interest in that. (Although I’d like to meet him face to face and explain to him, at length, exactly what he’s done, until he breaks down in tears. I could do it, and society would benefit in a small, not big, way.)

The glass people had promised to come ‘as soon as possible’ today and do their best. That is exactly what happened. An exhausted but charming young Glassman arrived at seven thirty this evening, all ready to do boarding up or whatever it took to make me safe. He’d been doing this for ten hours. We quickly agreed that nothing more could practically be done to make me safe. I’d been worried about the glass in the small leaded window in the living room, which has been there since 1929 (the glass, I mean, as well as the room). “Amber Flemish,” he said. “We can find that.” As he left, he shook his head and said something about Idiot which made me laugh. “Looks like he was more interested in the box than the present.”

Which leads me neat(ish)ly on to other news:

The Boxing Day fourteen-part harmony sing-song went pretty well. In fact it went pretty well for about two hours, until I claimed blisters on my fingers. (And by the way, does anyone know why, according to the authorities, it was Ringo rather than George or Paul who shouted that? Drummers don’t get blisters on their fingers, do they?)
I joked about throwing away presents, but some of them, eventually, will be. There’s a limit to how many jars of home-made chutney a guy can get through in a year.
The major present was a Kindle. I will research further. The instruction manual says ‘plug it in’.

Bleedin’ Amateurs

2011-12-27T19:47:00.001Z

As I was leaving here on Christmas day in the morning, I remember mentally checking that I’d secured the perimeter according to Standard Operating Procedures, and then for some reason thinking ‘I’ll probably have been burgled when I get back’. And when I did get back this afternoon, as I unlocked and opened the gates to the drive, before I could see the house itself, I thought ‘I’ve been burgled’. I don’t know whether this makes me psychic or paranoid.

Because, as soon as I got out of the car, I saw that I had indeed been burgled. The clue was that the kitchen window was wide open. (I should explain that this is a window which has not until now been opened since 1992, by the last burglar, after which I fitted locks, painted it shut and bought the alarm system.) I walked round to the front door and entered. The alarm made all the right noises as I disarmed it. I saw that, in fact, two windows in the kitchen had been smashed. One pane of the six in the back door, and one of the eight in the now-open window. I went straight to the living room, naturally, because that’s where most of the obviously tradeable valuables are. I could immediately see that nothing had been taken (not even this elderly laptop) or disturbed. (When you live alone, you develop an intimate knowledge of your own disorder.) I went through to the dining room. The side window had been smashed, but the secondary double glazing had defeated them. I checked the rest of the house and found that a little pane in the leaded window on the other side had been smashed too. Nothing missing anywhere. That made the score four windows, no swag.

The bright young PC arrived pretty quickly. “You’re my first today,” he told me. “Only just came on shift. But they’ve been pretty busy already, and I’ve got a couple more after you. Looks like there’s this one idiot on a spree last night.”

I agreed. Idiot. The first try, in the dining room, should have given him a clue. You can’t break secondary glazing. But that didn’t deter him, and he persevered – hadn’t he noticed that there was an alarm? – until finally he managed to get into the kitchen, opened the door to the hall (which is where the alarm gets triggered, for the benefit of any future burglars who may be reading this) and scarpered empty-handed.

Idiot is the only word. Bleedin’ amateurs. A professional would only have broken one window, and got away maybe with a few bits of insured stuff. I wouldn’t have liked that, but in a sense I’d have preferred it. I’d have been less uncomfortable with rationality than with mindlessness. Although a professional, of course, wouldn’t even have tried it.

Oh, apart from that I had a brilliant Christmas.

Have yourselves a merry little Christmas

2011-12-23T22:09:00.001Z

Well, to paraphrase Groucho, have whatever kind of Christmas you choose. Personally, I'm going for a few Merry and Bright days.

Advance announcement of the Best Card award, which as usual goes to my darling friend Molly:

Whatever can he have meant?

2011-12-21T19:08:00.001Z

R was telling her brother, M, about her wood-burning stove, and the deal she'd done with a tree surgeon friend which provided her with a more or less unlimited supply of logs. Just then the summons came to go through for supper. As we climbed to our feet, M caught my eye. "I wish I could get wood whenever I wanted," he muttered.

Tribute

2011-12-20T13:25:00.000Z

You have all been endowed, for twenty four hours, with the honorary title of "Glorious Comrade Defenders Of The Heavenly Rainbow Of Blogdom". Rejoice!

Oh, and this might cheer you up.

What?

2011-12-17T23:12:00.000Z

Two places to my left, P was conducting an animated conversation about immigration with M, two places to my right. P is M's father, so they compete - in this case, in volume. Meanwhile, C was explaining, to A seated opposite her, how a random Scotsman, forty years ago, had transformed somebody or other's life with some unasked-for advice. C is married to P, so has learnt about volume over the years. Meanwhile, behind me on the iPod docker, Prince was tearing through 'Let's Go Crazy' from Purple Rain. Music always drives everything else out of my ears at the best of times. Meanwhile, I was having a quiet conversation with R and D, to my immediate right and left (P and C's daughter and granddaughter), about my trip to Jersey last weekend. D said something I didn't catch (it turned out to be 'Guernsey'), so I said "What?" C looked across at me. "Are you sure you're not going a bit deaf?" she said.

A bit later, someone said "Stuff an old pillow up the chimney." I definitely heard that.

Cutlery

2011-12-15T21:34:00.000Z

So, why do we have different knives and forks for fish? And why do we feel compelled to use them?

And how come I'm finding it impossible to do a typo, even deliberately?

Only asjing.

Communities

2011-12-14T22:24:00.000Z

This started from my reviewing my Christmas card list.

It’s that time of the year, isn’t it? I like to think that I belong to quite a few communities. But if I’m honest, I’m not sure whether I do. So I need to analyse this. Bear with me. (Or don’t, click off now – but see my last paragraph.)

Years ago, I formed a concept that a community might consist of a number of people who might be thinking of each other at any one time. The closeness of the community could be measured by the probability of that happening, and actual face-to-face meetings were an outcome of that probability. Originally, and for many centuries, people had to be within walking or riding distance, so you’d be constantly aware of all that, and of the subtle shifts within it. If you wanted to move in or out, you had to physically duck and weave. I’m not just talking Jane Austen: even in my teens, in the fifties, you had to keep a bright eye open for who might walk up the high street or through the youth club door, and who they were with in relation to who you were with. So communities shifted and mutated.

The theory held, with extension, after the telephone became cheap enough for parents to permit its use. Although the interaction was long-distance, it still depended on the precept that you would be thinking of the person you phoned. The nature of the community didn’t really change, it just stretched. The relationships within it remained the same. And of course you could always pretend not to be there, or ring off.

And then along came the internet, 2.0. I started blogging, and that was fine. Although I didn’t actually know any of the people, I could feel that there was a community out there, to which I could belong, within a rather reconstructed set of rules. It was a bit like being at a conference in Dusseldorf or somewhere, where you don’t know anyone but can easily relate, because you have at least a bit of common ground – and of course you can always walk away.

This is where we came in. I’ve joined a few social sites, and I get invites to befriend hundreds of people whom I don’t know, will never know, and who only know of me as a friend of a friend of a friend. That’s exactly like my Christmas card list. I’ve got it down from eighty-something to thirty-six, just by eliminating all those with whom I feel absolutely no sense of community.

Am I being churlish? Probably. So I promise to do nothing but frivolous posts from now until 2012, starting tomorrow.

Surprise, surprise

2011-12-12T21:18:00.000Z

It wasn’t anything like a military operation, because intelligence was involved, and it worked. (That is to say, it achieved its objective; and it had one.) A few marginal things went wrong – the helium balloons didn’t turn up and had to be hastily reorganised; the seating plan for the five-course dinner had to be last-minute adjusted for arcane reasons, with potential mis-delivery of pre-ordered courses; Boy (whose thirtieth this was, in Jersey) threatened, on receipt of programmed red herring texts, to go to the airport and collect people who’d actually arrived the previous day – but in general the General did an amazing job. I think she tired, during the evening, of being reminded that when she was eighteen she wanted to join the Army.

I know him pretty well, so I was certain, when Boy walked into that bar, that his surprise was genuine. He’s not the kind of guy who habitually fakes stuff; and he lives, mostly, on the surface: not being devious himself, he doesn’t suspect others of it. So the massed choir singing ‘Happy Birthday To You’ (in several different keys) may have momentarily thrown him emotionally, but he bounced back. After handshakes and kisses all round (I got both), he looked at his father and said “Any chance of a drink, then?”

At any party, there have to be a few, er, moments. Bloke provided them. Bloke is an enforced non-drinker, due to recent fatherhood, but obviously grabs the opportunity when it jumps up and licks his face. I’d guess that he’d stoked up the prospect of getting tanked for weeks, and shovelled in more and more fuel the nearer the event drew. Of course, what happens is that you peak far too soon. What happens after that depends on what the booze uncovers. (In my case, I’ve been told, I get mellowly amorous, so I’ve learnt – mostly – to contain that, although being seated between the two most attractive girls in the room didn’t help; I didn’t know which way to turn, but thank you, General…) In Bloke’s case, evidently, it’s Clarksonian banter. You know what I mean. There’s a fine line in there; blokeish ‘banter’ can easily tip over into obnoxious bullying, and the bully, even though he (it’s very rarely, though not never, ‘she’) might still have hazy sight of his behaviour, he has nowhere to go except more of the same.

I won’t go into details, even though he certainly won’t read this. Eventually he was quietly made to shut up. It didn’t spoil anything, and most people probably didn’t even notice it. I intervened a couple of times, and ended up having my shoulder figuratively cried on, at two a.m., when he’d got a glimmering of what he’d done and subsided into faux-remorse. And I’d only met him for the first time that afternoon. But I’ve learnt to deal with that kind of business.

You don’t need me to tell you that Sunday was a bad weather day. Luckily nobody felt much like walking the five mile length of St Ouen’s Bay. Driving back from Southampton airport, through monsoon rain, I heard Boy’s Nana say “Shame it had to be spoiled by the rain.” I’ve learnt to deal with Nana too, so I just grunted and carried on driving.

Falling

2011-12-06T19:23:00.001Z

No, not that! Not even this from 1958. This is about the real thing. I was sidetracked the other day, by an itchy thumb, to write at more length than I’d intended about the only tumble, thus far, that has left a detectable trace (at least on the outside of me – I have no way of knowing about the mental consequences of being dropped on my head all those times before I was three). But there have been others, so here are just a few.

For years, we went to south Pembrokeshire for our summer holidays. Our rented house was just up the hill from Wiseman’s Bridge beach, and it was always my secret ambition to be first down there and up to the top of the Big Rock. This particular year, I was probably eight, I ran too fast down the road and swerved to avoid an approaching car. Unthinkable today, of course, but cars were few and far between then. I went over forwards and removed much of the skin from my right knee. Why is this memorable? Because I still remember, as if I were hearing it, my instant thought: “I’m not going to cry!” And I didn’t.

Fast forward to 1967, Milan. We have somehow fallen in with a patroness who collects artistic butterflies on Friday evenings in her huge apartment. She has an invisible husband and an all too visible daughter. I am forced to play a duet with someone who claims to be Django Reinhardt’s son, and might well be. We leave as the sun is rising, and decide it’d be fun to see if we can jump between a number of raised traffic islands, spaced about two metres apart. I can, twice: but not three times. This time, it’s my left cheek. I tell a lie to my girlfriend about slipping on a dropped ice cream. She asks me what flavour it was.

You know those ‘director chairs’, the sort of rectangular ones which have ‘Michael Winner’ or something written on the back? Well, there’s a subspecies in which the backrest is on pivots, so that you can lean comfortably back into it whilst watching the rushes or whatever it is directors do. Do not, under any circumstances, reach out to one of these to steady yourself when stumbling on an uneven garden path after consuming three blue cocktails. In fact, do not under any circumstances ever consume a blue cocktail. Cracked rib that time.

I could go on. The time my foot missed the skid mat in the shower in a hotel room as I attempted to turn it down from scalding; the time I unwisely accepted, and smoked, an unaccustomed cigarette and then tried to walk up a steep grassy slope in the dark; the time when I lost my dancing balance and narrowly avoided landing on top of a sleeping small child on a sofa … but I think I have delighted you enough. We all fall once in a while.

Made of this?

2011-12-04T22:10:00.000Z

I'm sorry I couldn't find my original 45 of 'Catch a Falling Star'. I think my brother has it in his garage. But here are a few that rang bells for me:

Confidence

2011-12-03T19:23:00.000Z

On Any Questions, Jeremy *unt, the *ulture Secretary, said that various measures (I really can’t remember what they were, and it doesn’t matter because they’ll have changed by this time tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure you and I won’t like them, and don’t know anybody who will) are necessary in order to regain “the confidence of the Markets”. I’ll write that again: the confidence of the Markets.

I have a very limited circle of acquaintanceship, which doesn’t include any Markets. But apparently there are now only 2.7 degrees of separation, rather than the pre-digital six, between me and everybody else on the planet. So send, please, the following question to 2.7 people, and ask them to pass it on to another 2.7:

“How much confidence do you have in the Markets?”

You can rate it on a scale of 0 to 1. Answers on a comment please, enclosing a food stamp.

Scar Itch

2011-12-02T20:53:00.000Z

I was going to write a comical piece about the several times in my life that I have fallen over, and the consequences; but then I got this itch in the pulp of my right thumb. Proust did taste and smell, of course, and we all do sight and sound, all the time. But there aren’t many times, I think, when the sense of touch triggers a madeleine moment. This is one.

It was the early summer of 1964, a Saturday evening. We used to go to the Bure Club at Highcliffe as often as we could afford it. It was one of the only two places to be in the Bournemouth area (the other being the Disque a Gogo in Holdenhurst Road). The big visiting American blues names played the Bure: Hooker, Muddy, I forget who else. On this occasion it was the Animals, and it was important to be there early, so as to get a couple of beers sunk and be near the front when they came on. We were anti-Animals, for all sorts of reasons. They were slick, commercial, about to sell out and, to be honest, just too bloody good. Whereas we were thrashing around trying to put together a group, any sort of group. A drummer, any sort of drummer, was number three on my wish list, after a couple of girls whose names I remember (but had better not mention here).

I was late. I’m not sure why, probably due to negotiation with my parents about use of the car, a ritual which had to be performed even though the outcome was always the same (ending with and don’t forget to put some petrol in!). So I parked up and ran. You had to park outside the grounds and then proceed on foot through the entrance and up a gravel drive. In the middle of the gateway there was one of those sticking-up metal stops that prevent the gate going the wrong way when it’s closed. That’s what I tripped over.

And that’s the fall-over – the film. My legs stop dead whilst the rest of me carries on. My right arm goes out to break the fall, palm first. Gravel digs in. I get up, rather too quickly, and carry on; blood is dribbling from my hand, but I find a handkerchief and mop it up. It doesn’t seem too bad. I get inside the club …

Three days later, Dr Hall-Reid (rather viciously I thought) scrubbed away the incipient gangrene or whatever it was, put a dressing on, prescribed some penicillin and told me I was lucky. Some sympathetic musical colleague said ‘Yes, lucky it wasn’t your left, or you wouldn’t be able to play.’

The scar’s survived, for five decades. It’s tiny, quarter of an inch long and just detectable by touch if you know it’s there. It throws up an itch every so often.

I'm sure that's what they said ...

2011-11-30T22:01:00.000Z

Well, not totally certain of this one, and can't be arsed to search any longer for a replay, but I'm pretty sure I heard Ed Milliband, in the Commons, refer to poor people who "... earn in a week what the Chancellor pays for his annual skiing holiday!" Erm... maybe he meant year?

I'm absolutely sure of this one: Michael Gove on working parents who, because of the school strikes, "... have to scrabble around for expensive childcare." I daren't even start to try deconstructing that!

Old-fashionedChristmas

2011-11-29T23:07:00.000Z

I like this!

Emmy The Great – This Is Christmas

Lit crit

2011-11-25T22:53:00.000Z

I sometimes read that people are considering giving up blogging. I’d be the last to question this kind of personal decision, it’s none of my business. Indeed, I’ve given up myself, several times, sometimes for whole days, for my own reasons.

But I hope that the main reason people carry on is that they believe they have something to offer, as entertainment, provocation, or often just plain simple human sharing (not to mention other animals). I certainly get all of these from the blogs I read and the interactions through the comments. And, most importantly, I get to read loads of brilliant writing, without having to stir from my sofa or donate a penny to Amazon or Waterstone’s. So thanks, all of you.

Which brings me neatly to my self-serving point. I really enjoyed the opportunity to review the start of Clare’s novel: it was a brave and intriguing extension of the bloglit concept, and I hope she got something from it too. So, does anyone fancy helping me with my children’s novel, ‘Clock and Jeremy’? It’s a fantasy aimed at the 10 – 12 readership. Although stylistic criticism is obviously welcome, what I’m really after is ‘where the hell do I take this story from here??’

You can email me via my profile if you want to play.

Words and Music

2011-11-22T23:34:00.000Z

I had this conversation during a very noisy party last Saturday night. As discos are, the music was too loud for anyone to hear what the other person was saying, so most of it consisted of lip reading, sign and body language. I’ve been to too many of these over the years, and there is always a consensus, next day, that conversations – long, intense, heartfelt conversations, lasting for tens of minutes – have taken place, during which intimacies have been exchanged, anxieties exposed, hopes and fears poured out … but luckily, it’s all wiped out because, actually, you only managed to hear about one word in ten. This isn’t to say that communication didn’t take place: indeed, the heard one in ten might have said more than the unheard nine. But there’s something to be said for those words that aren’t heard.

So, Zoe was asking me about music, and during a lull I was able to hear and consider her question, which was to do with whether you should respond more to the lyrics or the music of a song. She felt, I think, that most of the time, at least in the music she liked, lyrics were a distraction, if not an irrelevance, and I have a lot of sympathy with this view. When I listen to a song, very often it tends to be one or the other; the perfect marriage of the two is rare. Dylan said ‘If I can sing it, it’s a song; if I can’t, it’s a poem’, but that’s a bit simplistic. Leonard Cohen wrote an eighty-two verse poem which he distilled down to a song called ‘Hallelujah’, and yet at the moment I’m hearing the tune more than the words.

I was about to counter with ‘Come on over baby, whole lotta shakin’ going on’ as a perfect storm, but then the disco kicked back in and words became irrelevant.

Something with a smile

2011-11-21T16:12:00.000Z

I don't usually need plastic bags at the supermarket, but occasionally one gets caught short.

ME: Could I have a bag for that please?
ASSISTANT: I'm sorry, we're out of bags. [Smiles apologetically, then glances to his left.] But Customer Services might have some.

I follow his glance. Customer Services is four feet along the same counter.

It was the smile that did it for me, I think.

I know, I’ve said it before …

2011-11-16T21:31:00.000Z

… but that’s no reason not to say it again, and again, and again.

‘Growth’ is ‘predicted’ to ‘flatline’ at 1% for this and next year. That’s plus 1%, which is bad news. I have no idea what this means, and nor, it seems, do any of the politicians, economists or journalists who spray this kind of talk around. Percentages mean nothing unless it’s clear what the percentage is of – ask any statistician. Is it per annum, which means the base would be the twelve months preceding the date of the prediction? Or month by month, for example comparing October this year to October last year? Or some other formula? I know there’s an answer, but I have never seen it clearly written down. The Wikipedia article starts ‘This article has multiple issues’, and goes on from there, which just about nails it; but nowhere, as far as I can see, does it define a consensual mechanism by which it’s measured. And yet, they carry on spraying, for all the world as if they were saying something meaningful. They’re not.

I’m not going down the ethical, social or biodynamic byways, that’ll have to be for another day, but let’s just pretend that this ‘growth’ stuff constitutes, in some way, an increase in productive economic activity. So, if this activity, however measured (but with the proviso that it as to be productive), was, say, 100 units in year one, in year two it would be 101. In year three, just over 102, and so on. That’s an increase (however slow against perceived expectations). So, given that economic activity is increasing exponentially, year on year, how come what I’ll call well-being (for example, employment, earnings for those employed, support for those who aren’t or can’t be, education for entrants, etc.) is, by any objective measure, declining?

That’s enough. Well, nearly. On a lighter note, I heard Mervyn King tell us that he can’t predict what’s going to happen to the euro next week, never mind next year; and then go on solemnly to deliver his confident forecasts for growth, inflation, interest rates, solar flares, asteroid activities, alien invasion (okay, I exaggerate slightly). Ha ha. Not funny, actually.

Alternating current account

2011-11-12T16:13:00.000Z

Like many people, I pay for my electricity by monthly direct debit, spreading the cost evenly across the year. As you know, the idea is that a surplus at the end of the summer covers the extra consumption during the winter.

So when I got my six-monthly bill the other day I was pleased to see that they owed me about £150. Good, I thought, that’ll see me through the next few months when it’s colder, darker and more boring. The system’s working. Then I read on. “…which we will refund to your bank account on or soon after 6 November 2011.” Hang on, though: that means that, come the spring, I’ll owe them money; and I bet they’ll put my monthly payments up in response, which means next autumn they’ll owe me more money, which they’ll refund, which means … you get the picture. A positive feedback loop.

I remember a variant of this a few years back, when instead of issuing a refund, they proposed to reduce my payments over the winter, which would mean … oh, I can’t go on. On that occasion I phoned them up and explained. “Oh yes, the computer does that,” the call centre told me. “We have to go in and override it. We get this all the time.”

I don’t think I can be bothered to phone this time, but if I do I want a word with that computer.

Wodehouse or Chandler?

2011-11-10T22:42:00.000Z

There are no other contenders for the title (which I'm not even going to bother to identify). To help you along, here are a couple of quotes, picked more or less at random:

There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those moustaches that get stuck under your fingernail.
Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo's back like a terrier.
'One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?'
Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. 'Did he say "whom"?'
'Yeah, but don't hit him,' I said. 'There is such a word.'
Degarmo licked his lips. 'I knew there was,' he said. 'I often wondered where they kept it.'

And -

Women never know when to stop on these occasions.
I remember Mrs Bingo Little once telling me, shortly after their marriage, that Bingo said poetic things to her about sunsets - his best friends being perfectly aware, of course, that the odd egg never noticed a sunset in his life and that, if he did by a fluke ever happen to do so, the only thing he would say about it would be that it reminded him of a slice of roast beef, cooked just right.
However, you can't call a girl a liar; so, as I say, I said: 'Well, well!'

Difficult call, isn't it?

But I must say, I did enjoy typing that!

Nothing really changes

2011-11-09T21:41:00.002Z

For some reason, Soaring posted the following in a blog comment. It concerns the resignation, on the 18^th of March 1911, of the Italian prime minister Luigi Luzatti:

Although a man of first-class financial ability, great honesty and wide culture, he had not the strength of character necessary to lead a government: he showed lack of energy in dealing with opposition and tried to avoid all measures likely to make him unpopular.

I promised to come up with an equivalent to reflect today’s equivalent:

Although a man of fourth-class financial integrity, great manoeuvrability and bunga bunga culture, he had not the brown-nosed flexibility necessary to lead a government: he showed excess of early-day corruption in dealing with opposition and tried to encourage all measures likely to make him richer.

Will that do?

Sometime for your diary

2011-11-08T14:02:00.000Z

I'm sure everybody already knows this, but around coffee time next Friday, here in Britain, it will be
11:11:11:11:11:11. GMT.

Bearing Debts...

2011-11-05T12:35:00.000Z

They've been on a bit of a bender,
The Eurozone's champion spender;
But the Oracle speaks:
"We shall bail out those Greeks;
Just one caveat: no referenda!"

Alternative lines 3 - 4:
But we'll bail out those Greeks
(and curate their antiques) -

Endangered Species

2011-11-01T13:26:00.000Z

I see that zebra crossings are disappearing due to the march of technology. Those are the ones marked by Belisha beacons (named in 1934 after half of the Transport Minister Leslie Hore-Belisha, the other half having presumably already been taken).

Well, not around here. Oxford Road currently contains about nine pelicans or puffins or whatever they’re called (the ones controlled by lights), and there is a proposal (not yet implemented, but it’s only been four months) to replace several of these with zebras, so as to speed up the buses. I suggested at a local meeting that doing away with the bus stops would achieve this even better, but for some reason that didn’t go down very well.

I do hope the zebra crossing doesn’t become entirely extinct, as this would involve the loss of one of my favourite road signs, in Honey End Lane: ‘HUMPED ZEBRA CROSSING’.

In other completely unrelated news, I’ve just heard some minister, on ‘The World At One’, explain that the 0.5% growth figures must be welcomed as ‘better than predicted’. Doesn't he mean ‘the predictions were wrong’?

Why do I feel so tired?

2011-10-30T22:12:00.000Z

Oh, I know, it's because my body clock is an hour ahead of my clock clock. I wonder if anyone has computed the cost of this meaningless biannual ritual. I have banged on about this year after year, inducing global stupefaction - but still they don't listen! And now, I read, our government is going (no consultation, referendum, nothing like that) to convert us to Central European Time, so that ... oh, I'm too tired to go on deconstructing this idiocy. Why can't they just accept that it gets dark in the winter and lighter in the summer, and we are where we are, in terms of the planet's rotation? Get over it.

Blogiquette

2011-10-29T21:35:00.000+01:00

It’s easy for me to say, because not many people read my blog, and I don’t regularly read that many others. But I can’t help but become aware that, even within my narrow range, some odd things seem to happen. People apparently masquerade. So-called ‘blogmeets’ are arranged and, sometimes, end in tears. And there are creepy people who visit frequently (sometimes for hours) but never ever identify themselves or comment. (I'm not counting casual passers-by or one-off search results; I'll even let googlebot off the hook, even though I'd rather it didn't exist.)

So here are some of the rules I play by:

· I won’t instigate a ‘blogmeet’. If anyone wants one, they can easily contact me, and I’ll take it at face value and consider my response. But I’ve concluded (from just my one experience) that it’s a risky endeavour. It’s very easy for false expectations to set in when the written word is the only medium of contact.

· I will never pretend to be someone I’m not. I really don’t understand why anyone would do that – leaving aside that they’re obviously sick, they’re going to get found out, aren’t they? So if I see someone who I suspect might be false, I’ll find them out, believe me.

· If I find a blog that interests me and I feel inclined to read more of it, I’ll consider ‘officially’ following it, so that the author knows who I am. (It’s not nice to feel stalked.) And I’ll post a quick comment, introducing myself, even just a ‘hello, like your blog’. It does no harm – they can always tell me to blog off.

· And if I post a comment, either on my own or someone else’s blog, which I later think is inappropriate, or offensive, or plain point-missing, I’ll delete it asap (possibly replacing it with a better one).

But within that framework, I will continue to fire off my rants, raves and trivia, like it says on the tin. I think nearly everyone conforms to these simple norms of decency.

Google plus

2011-10-29T20:54:00.000+01:00

I've just joined Google+. I have absolutely no idea what this means. Something like this?

The ladybirds have made it into the kitchen. I repatriated twelve, then got out the Raid spray. I'm not particularly proud of this.
I have bought 'winter tyres' for the BMW, on the hope that I won't have to abandon the car quite so many times this winter.
Still haven't put any of the new strings on the guitars. Must be done.
I have about four other things I want to blog about, but one will do for this evening (see later).

Have I got the idea?

We are the 99%

2011-10-28T20:26:00.000+01:00

Have I got that right? Yes, but it's a bit more complicated. The 99% are the 2.6%, and the 1% are the 49%. And % of what? Those figures need to be swapped over. Give 99% 49% and 1% 2.6%, and I guarantee we'll get more work done.

Abstruse Goose

2011-10-27T20:35:00.002+01:00

I assume everybody already follows AG, but just in case:

http://abstrusegoose.com/406

(Hit 'random' for more joy. And don't miss the hover-overs.)

Risky Parlour Game

2011-10-26T21:33:00.001+01:00

Inspired by Z’s recent post as others see us, I’ve dreamt this up. Probably best played after lunch on Boxing Day, but before the singing and the dancing start.

Here are the rules, as I envisage them:

Everyone gets issued with a piece of paper containing a list of adjectives (see below for a starter kit, drawn partly but not entirely from the original, but the quizmaster can tune it if s/he wants to), from which each player selects the four that they think best describe themselves. Tick those four words.

The entries are put into a hat (or something) and then drawn at random. (If you get your own, you throw it back in.)

Each player then has to identify the person they think has described themselves, on the entry they have drawn, write the name of that person on the back of the slip, and their own name (this is crucial), and put it back in the hat.

The game could go in several directions from here. The simplest is for the quizmaster just to read out the results, using a formula such as “George says that Elegant, Naïve, Challenging and Sweet describes Marcus.” This could then be open to challenge and debate. Alternatively, you could read out the judgements, and of whom they were made, and ask the subject to identify who saw them that way. Or … Heck, make up your own.

LAZY

HAPPY
ELEGANT
UNDERSTANDING
NAÏVE
PASSIONATE
SENSIBLE
ELOQUENT
CHALLENGING
THOUGHTFUL
COURAGEOUS
WITTY
IMPATIENT
OUTSPOKEN
SENTIMENTAL
STUBBORN
CHARMING
PATIENT
LOVELY
SWEET
INSECURE

Ninety-nine plus one

2011-10-25T21:27:00.004+01:00

Here’s an idea. Over the last few days, I’ve seen various kinds of items priced at £2.99, or suchlike. When decimalisation came in, in 1971, this was a marketing ploy to try and fool people that they were paying £2, rather than £3. Obviously we all saw through that pretty quickly, and nobody falls for it any more, if they ever did. But the practice has persisted; indeed, it wasn’t anything new even back then: I remember price tags such as £1/19/6d, and of course there used to be the pernicious guinea (which worked the other way).

So, instead of giving the customer the 1p change, let’s devise a system that feeds all those pennies into some kind of kitty (preferably local rather than central), which can then be fed back into the much-needed process of bottom-up economic recovery. The vendor loses nothing, and the purchaser won’t really notice in the larger scheme of things. Obviously I haven’t done the maths, but I bet there’s a huge amount of money involved.

And for those who want to opt out, we can always introduce a 99p coin.

Ladies? Birds? Bugs?

2011-10-24T22:19:00.001+01:00

I couldn’t get any pictures, but here’s a delightful one from a favourite photo-artist:

feliciti - hang loose

But yesterday, when the sun was full on the back of the house, there were several dozens of them. Far more than the forty-two I rehabilitated last week during the Great Grape Picking Adventure. At one point, I felt like a beekeeper. I’m ashamed to say that I became less than solicitous in my behaviour towards them, and a few got swatted. And as for the ones that decided to come indoors – well, there are rules about invasiveness, aren’t there? They shouldn’t be immigrating hidden up my sleeves or in my hair. I respect their right to inhabit the outdoors; they should equally respect my right to an insect-free house. They do leave a nasty orange stain on the carpet as well.

Most of them were lurking around the back door. I gather that this is fairly usual at this time of the year, as they look for warm places. But I’ve never seen it on this scale before. I can only put it down to the grape vodka. I’ve told them and told them that it won’t be ready till the New Year, but they just don’t listen. Tuh.

Dancing Help - The Results

2011-10-22T21:01:00.000+01:00

Thank you all so much for your contributions. Here's the consolidated playlist, insofar as the songs can be found on Spotify:

Dancing help

The polls are still open - vote early and often. But I am only allowed two candidates on the RSVP card (which has to be sent off quite soon), so in the spirit of modern democracy I am ignoring all your votes and doing just what I choose, which at the moment is:

Roadrunner, by Jonathan Richman And The Modern Lovers (sadly not available on Spotify), and

Express Yourself, by Charles Wright And The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band (on the playlist).

The wedding is on 5 February, so please feel free to stick this playlist (as amended) on and bop on down with us at about 10.30 p.m.

Dancing? Help!

2011-10-21T23:00:00.000+01:00

I'm going to a wedding in February. The invite instructs me to name 'two songs you love to dance to'. I've come up with 'Roadrunner' by Jonathan Richman, and 'There Must Be An Angel' by Eurythmics. I know that none of my readers are invited to the wedding, but it'd be fun to get your suggestions anyway, and they can be stored up for future reference. Dave's ideas would be especially welcome.

Grandma

2011-10-21T21:51:00.000+01:00

This is my father’s mother. She was a figure of awe in my family, until she died at the age of ninety in 1960, when I was eighteen. She was called Emmeline, a good Victorian name that has been carried forward in the family to my niece (whose fortieth I will be celebrating in a few weeks’ time, as it happens, but who is not at all Victorian).

Grandma was Victorian, and suitably formidable. Her maiden surname is also my middle name, and I firmly believe (without a shred of evidence) that this naming protocol, which continues down the generations on the male side, may have been one of the conditions of my parents being permitted to marry. The surname is still eminent in Jersey.

Her husband, my grandfather, although born in the same year, 1870, died in the thirties, so I know nothing of him apart from a couple of old photos. She was evacuated to England before the invasion of Jersey, and I think she spent much of the rest of her life being shuttled between various relatives. She was one of numerous siblings, which I guess is how the family fortune got dissipated. Certainly there was an uncle who absconded to the Argentine and lost a bundle on ill-advised railway investments.

Of course, I was too young to know any of this background firsthand, so I’m doing a certain amount of reconstruction here. It’s a fact to be pondered that the historical record inevitably gets diluted, even for famous people, never mind the likes of us; and there are probably now only four people alive who have direct memories of Grandma.

She’d come to stay with us for some weeks during each summer, in the fifties. This was a cause for domestic repositioning in our household. My mother was stressed out for weeks beforehand. And Grandma played to her strengths, more or less reordering things in her own image. She was pretty good at that. A friend of mine makes great play (in a knowing self-referential way) of the ‘controlling female’ stereotype – she should have asked my grandmother for a few tips.

And yet, I remember her as mostly kind and wry. If you saw the photos, you’d see that in her face. Every late afternoon, she would retire for a while to her room; I later learned that this was for her gin. She once criticised me for using too much toilet paper, making some joke about rationing. And one year, it must have been about 1953, we kids had been allowed, on a hot summer day, to play in the garden with the hose. This had to be stopped before Grandma came, but the evidence can’t have been fully concealed, because when she arrived she enquired what had been going on and elicited a confession. I can hear her now, in her rich Victorian voice. “Oh, don’t be silly, it’s very hot. Of course they can play with the hose. I almost wish I could join them.”

Thanks to my sister for details; more memories please!

And thanks to Z for sowing the seed.

Caravan diaries: end of term report

2011-10-20T17:09:00.000+01:00

Not much to report really. Everything drained and shut down for the winter. Very cleverly, I managed to use the last drop of water from the tank when shaving this morning, which saved some crawling around underneath the van.

The robin came in to say hello again yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, this time he left a calling card - well, more than one actually. Luckily, for some reason I had some Vanish Carpet and Upholstery Ultimate Stain Remover, which got lavishly applied. I read the list of ingredients: anyone know the difference between Anionic Surfactants and Non-Ionic Surfactants? I only ask.

Halfway back up the M4, I thought I'd left some milk in the fridge. That might not have been nice by next Easter. As it turned, I hadn't, it was there in the coldbox when I got home. It was just that I couldn't remember having taken it out of the fridge. Is there such a thing as a false non-memory?

I have promised myself to get down there more often next season. The flush toilet will definitely be installed by then, which hopefully will encourage visitors (of the non-avian sort).

GV progress report

2011-10-16T23:16:00.000+01:00

The grapes had to be picked and processed today, for three reasons: one, risk of frost; two, some turning into raisins; and three, avian invasions. Here they are.

The ripe ones were stripped off the stalks, and 43 ladybirds (I counted them out, you can see the first one) returned to the wild, mostly back onto the vine. I hope they're grapeful. Plenty of grapes were left for the birdies.

Further ingredients then had to be added:

... and here is the progress so far:

The label on the sweet jar is, of course, designed to deter any burglars who might otherwise have been tempted. And the glass of wine is, of course, totally irrelevant.

Next update somewhere around December 17th.

I am not making this up

2011-10-16T12:45:00.000+01:00

Last Monday I decided to cook some BlackBerries with my Apples, for breakfast. I suspect I'm not the only one. The Law of Unintended Consequences...

Speed

2011-10-15T19:49:00.001+01:00

My neighbour, whom I’ll call John, is pretty slow now, physically. It took ten minutes to get him from his chair to the car, one step at a time, supported by his stick in one hand and my arm in the other. He has his techniques for these familiar manoeuvres, though – stick in left hand descending the steps whilst gripping the rail with his right; get bum onto car seat first, stow the stick away and, if necessary, call for assistance in getting legs in and clear of the car door, and so forth – John is ninety-one in his body but, thank goodness, still in his seventies in his mind.

The reception girls at the dentists’, when we got there, rallied round to get him into play. One of them said to me afterwards that this was what she liked best about the job – “Well, it’s a bit of fresh air, isn’t it?”, but I think it went deeper than that for her. As we were getting him out of the car, he glanced down. “Oh my goodness, I’ve come out in my slippers!” He grinned impishly, seeing a way through the pain. “Do you think I should go back and change?”

Eventually, when he was installed in the chair, the diagnosis was as expected: an incipient abscess behind the right canine. I took notes about the details of the treatment and prognosis (antibiotics followed by a further consultation in a week, basically), to be passed on to his daughter (call her Barbara), whose emergency call at 8 a.m. had got me involved in the first place, and we loaded John back into the car. The dentist and his nurse transformed into carers and opened the French windows in the surgery to make this easier. I delivered John back home, administered the first dose of drugs, phoned Barbara to make sure she would be au fait when she got in, made sure he was comfortable, and raced back next door for a stiff sherry.

I called this ‘Speed’, because, for John, it was a fast-moving adventure despite everything, and for me, the morning whizzed by. It’s all relative, isn't it?

Burst Water Main - A Metaphorical Tale

2011-10-13T21:44:00.000+01:00

At 11.30 a.m. on Tuesday, a mains water pipe at the top of the hill burst. The water continued to flow – an awful lot of it out onto the road, down the gutters and pavements, washing leaves and litter (McDonalds cartons, Tesco bags, lager cans, fag packets) down the hill, distracting small children on their way to nursery and scaring their mums, ending up (as water does) in a lake at the bottom, beyond the capacity of the already rather feeble drains, rat-running cars and vans having to steer round it. This went on for a day and a night.

Once a team from the water company had turned up, closed the road and started up their drills and diggers, the flow, which had turned yellowish-brown by now, went down to a rill, then a trickle, then ceased, leaving a load of silt in the gutters and on the pavements. By Friday, they had filled in their hole, re-opened the road and departed, leaving the silt behind. Rat-run traffic got back to normal. No long-term harm done. The rain washed the silt away down the drains.

The above is all true. What follows is made up.

Turns out that the reason the water main burst was that, in order to supply the new housing estate, the water company felt obliged to increase the pressure down the main, so that’s what they did. But the housing estate was uninhabited, because the houses couldn’t be sold. So the increased pressure had nowhere to go. By a bizarre coincidence, everyone in the avenue happened to turn their mains taps off at exactly 11.30 on that Tuesday. The pipe couldn’t cope.

The authorities knew that water companies are too big to fail. They quickly installed even more powerful pumps at the top of the mains pipe, to ensure that this near-catastrophic supply failure could never happen again. They also took measures to ensure that, if anyone should be silly enough to move into the new housing estate, they wouldn’t be able to afford water. And they outsourced silt disposal to a newly-formed Russo-Chinese consortium.

OK, here you go ...

2011-10-11T22:23:00.001+01:00

June Tabor – Ragged Kingdom

'Love will Tear Us Apart', I feel. But it's all pretty emotive.

Civility

2011-10-11T17:18:00.001+01:00

It’s a nice old-fashioned word, isn’t it? The Young Foundation, as I’m sure you’ll have seen, has chosen it to describe the quality people seem most to value in their community. To quote from the summary on their website:

“[The report argues that] civility is the largely invisible ‘glue' that holds communities together and that experiences of incivility cause hurt, stress and deeper social problems, and has a bigger impact of people's sense of social health than crime statistics. Perhaps most significantly it shows that civility operates on a reciprocal basis and that it is ‘contagious'.” It goes on, though, to warn that “… people, while quick to see incivility in others, seem far less aware of how their own behaviour can offend.”

At the risk of sounding cynical (moi?), I think there’s a third dimension lurking in there, which is the risk of one’s well-intentioned civil behaviour inadvertently causing, at least, irritation. Just this morning, I spent half an hour circling an inadequate multi-storey car park in search of a space. Many other drivers were doing the same. This car park has clear ‘give way’ markings, which unfortunately give precedence to incoming traffic, an obvious design flaw. So some new arrivals, recognising that I had a kind of moral precedence, would pause and wave me through. Very decent of them; but by the time we’d resolved the conflict between their desire to be civil and my wariness at breaking the rules, between us we’d probably added several minutes to the process of deciding it was all a waste of time and heading off back home.

There are many other permutations of how the principle of civility can result in discomfiture. Just one example: you are walking along a country path. In the distance you see someone approaching. Civility requires that you acknowledge each other with a smile and perhaps a word of greeting. But at what point do you do this? Too soon and it’ll be missed, and they’ll think you’ve blanked them; leave it too late and they’ll think the same. It can be very stressful. I could go on (I said “well done” to a small child who’d succeeded in balancing all the way along the top of a garden wall, and the mother rather obviously thought I was a pervert); the point is, being civil can be more complicated than just being rude.

I leave you with a literary illustration, from ‘The Virginian’ (Owen Wister, 1902):

‘Trampas spoke. "Your bet, you son-of-a --.” The Virginian's pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas: "When you call me that, smile."’

Ideative Plagiarism?

2011-10-08T22:58:00.002+01:00

I do hope not. But recently whenever I start to compose a comment, it ends up as an essay or a rant, and I don’t think it’s polite to post essay-sized comments on other people’s blogs, let alone rants. (Or is it? No idea. I don’t really know the rules of blogiquette.)

Anyway, this one is about tasting wine. (You know who you are!) Quite a few years ago, I went to a wine-tasting at my friend P’s. He was, at the time, a stakeholder in a small mail-order wine merchant, and he’d organised this event, ostensibly for promotional purposes. P lives just round a few corners, so I was able to walk there and (theoretically) back. This was a Saturday evening.

The guy who ran the show was absolutely brilliant. As C (Mrs P) supplied suitable snacks and canapés, he took us through fifteen wines, carefully and informatively leading us from the lightest of light Loires to a dense, almost treacly Barolo, and you really did taste the differences as we progressed. It was a memorable evening, or would have been had the ‘no swallowing’ rule been rigorously imposed. As it was, I wanted to order a case of something or other, but the order form somehow became indecipherable. I seem to remember dancing later on. And the journey home was, well, staggering.

What I really wanted to say was, it’s impossible to quaff in those quantities nowadays. Obviously age and degeneration are factors here, but it’s also very hard to find a wine under 14% these days. I forgot my glasses a while back, so couldn’t read the small print and accidentally came back with two bottles of something which proudly claimed to contain sixteen per cent alcohol. Sixteen per cent! That’s practically sherry. I don’t want to swig near-sherry with my dinner. Do the producers honestly believe that all we want from our wine is ever-increasing amounts of alcohol?

Anyway anyway, talking of glasses, I found two of these

at the back of the sideboard, and now I’m going to be sleeping all night with that infuriating jingle.

Oh, and whoever is constantly hitting my blog with Googlebot, please stop doing it, it's really annoying. Thank you.

The Quality of Stuff

2011-10-06T21:51:00.001+01:00

This was going to be a comment on somebody else’s blog, but it ran away with itself. As I’m inclined to do, too.

Robert Pirsig went mad trying to define the idea of ‘quality’, or so he claimed. But he was a philosopher; I come at it from a more practical perspective.

The question is: why do we, or some of us, retain unmanageable quantities of objects which have no intrinsic or practical value? It can’t just be inertia (although that plays a part, at least for me). Certainly, I know that my attic contains at least a dozen items of redundant hi-fi equipment that just got dumped up there when upgrades took place; and I know that I can get rid of most of these (once I’ve recruited a willing helper to get them down from the loft – I’m not doing that on my own) by a wide variety of means. But then I think about just one of them – a beautiful Technics turntable with a smoked Perspex lid and anodised aluminium bodywork – and its elegance is projected into my mind, even though I haven’t seen it for ten years and I know it doesn’t work. This obviously has some aesthetic worth (it probably belongs in a design museum somewhere) – but that’s not where the quality resides. That resides in what it did.

I have about 400 vinyl LPs in various boxes up in the third bedroom (aka the dustbowl). And that’s not counting the other hundred or so in the sideboard down here. Most of them are worthless, financially (although if anyone wants to make me an offer for a near-mint first pressing of ‘Led Zeppelin’, the one with the turquoise sleeve lettering, start bidding); many are musically too. But they all, every single one, have this thing I’m calling ‘quality’. So this afternoon I went up and plucked out just three, more or less at random. Here they are, with what gives them quality, for me.

The Crusaders : Street Life. Dancing to the title track with a girl called Victoria at a boring party in about 1984, when my divorce was blossoming. I never saw her again.

Blood Sweat and Tears : Child Is Father To The Man. 1968, trying to persuade the horn section to play more like those guys. A very intense drunken debate with all the enthusiasm on my side.

Little Feat : Feats Don’t Fail Me Now. An inexplicable visit to a stoner friend of a friend somewhere in Surrey, desperate to take a puff but not allowed.

I could go on, but you’re asleep. But you get my drift. Every object contains quality, to the extent that it contains the past. They are all, more or less, Madeleine cakes.

Does anyone else have this problem?

2011-10-05T18:59:00.000+01:00

Most of the Blogspot sites I visit allow me to comment as my Google account, by default. But others require me to 'select profile'. I select 'Google account'. It tells me to sign in (even though I already am), and when I do so I get the following very helpful message: 'Cookie value is null for FormRestoration'.

Any hints/tips? I'm reluctant to throw this into the seething swamp of Google's so-called 'help'.

Anyway, if you're craving comments from me but not getting any, it's not for lack of trying!

Prolepsis, and other words

2011-10-05T14:14:00.000+01:00

He doesn't actually start speaking for another 15 minutes, min, but 'The World At One' and other sources reliably, proleptically inform me that amongst other things, Cameron is going to say words to the effect of 'There is light at the end of the tunnel, and my path leads there', and also that 'We can turn the ship around.' And that we don't need to pay off the Mastercard after all.

I'm a bit confused now, because not having a visual imagination I can't quite construct the metaphorical imagery being called for here. So, there's this tunnel we're in, right, with more than one path through it? And there's this light at the end of it? And it's wide enough to turn a ship around in? Oh well, I'm sure it'll all be clear by teatime. But, my credit card bill, £29.02 (Waterstones and Spotify, since you ask) is due in three days' time. Am I meant to pay it off, or not, or seek independent financial advice? Come on, Dave, help me.

Turning to far more important matters, today is the centenary of the birth of Brian O'Nolan, aka Flann O'Brien, aka Myles na Gcopaleen. I shall speedread 'The Third Policeman' this evening to mark the occasion. Here's Gerald Scarfe's cover illustration.

Fun with yoghurt

2011-10-04T21:04:00.000+01:00

If you open your fridge door, you will probably be able to see a gap, down at the bottom, between the door shelf (the one where you keep the fruit juice carton, the jar of olives and the half-empty bottle of sauvignon blanc) and the wall of the fridge. If you get the angle just right, it is possible, whilst getting out your Tuesday night left-over meal, to knock a tub of yoghurt off an upper shelf and make it lodge very accurately into this gap, without you noticing.

You then have to slam the fridge door quite vigorously. Get it right, and the yoghurt tub will split precisely down its vertical axis and distribute its contents neatly all over the newly purchased fresh vegetables and salad in the cooler tray.

I haven’t yet tried this with a full tub of yoghurt, this one was three-quarters empty, but I did conduct a comparable yoghurt-related experiment earlier this year: exciting curry

[Count yourselves lucky, I was going to write about Theresa's black cat in Plymouth or wherever it was, or Gideon, or worse.]

Same Difference (Caravan Diaries)

2011-10-02T20:32:00.000+01:00

It was meant to be very different from my last visit. But of course, a lot of it was the same. No obvious disasters, except the grass, which I was expecting: my propensity towards fantasy always leads me to hope that the Flymo fairy has visited in my absence – it did actually happen once. But no, everything’s the same. The usual number of rabbits are bouncing around, scuttling off into their hedge-holes whenever they sense an approaching human (they’re right, we’d kill them if we caught them). A flock of guinea fowl stroll across the field, insouciantly bluffing that they’re not lost. An unknown butterfly perches on the top of the toolstore. I open the windows. My local robin pops into the kitchen, looks up at me, and decides that exit might just be the best strategy. Robins know exactly where the pushing edge of their luck is. Within ten minutes, six buzzy flies have entered, immediately claiming that they didn’t really mean to do that. What is wrong with them? Don’t they like it out there? They’re not even politicians, for God’s sake.

I cut the grass. I walk through the tunnels to the village to get a newspaper. (It takes more than two days to break addictions.) I wander down to the low tide line, checking to make sure the geology hasn’t changed too much in fifty years. (The streams, though, never carve the same course twice across the sand.) I catch up with a few neighbours. Kids, grandkids, all doing well. I manage to intercept Henry, pay the rent and chat about events. He tells me "Oh well, you're young", which pleases me no end, especially his shocked reaction when I tell him my actual age.

Last time, back in June, it was different. I’d just come from my first and last face to face meeting with someone, after a long long-distance relationship. I believed I was deeply in love. I didn’t want to be at White Park Farm, because there’s no contact with the outside world – no internet, not usually any phone signal – and those were the things I was craving. I didn’t know what I was doing there. Late one evening, extraordinarily, the mobile rang. The call lasted only a few seconds, but I knew who it was. So I climbed up to the top of the hill and perched on the stile, where there’s usually a signal, called back, and had the conversation.

Yesterday evening, I stuck on an iPod playlist on shuffle. It gave me ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, from Blood on the Tracks’. It all came back, and I realised it wasn’t really different at all.

The M4 beckons

2011-09-28T22:55:00.000+01:00

I will be in the car by ten-thirty. I'll drive through the heatwaves of Swindon and Bristol, across the beautiful bridge into and through the swampy horror of Newport and the blandness of the new Cardiff bypass, until it all gradually fades down into the soft, shrugging and smiling oldness of Carmarthen, before it all dwindles into the road down from Red Roses into Wiseman's Bridge (careful down the hill, 4x4s whoosh up there as if it was the M4) - and then I'll find out - and this is the best bit - I'll find out whether the tide is in, or out, or halfway.

Verbiage Factories

2011-09-27T19:46:00.001+01:00

On the day that our greatest industrial benefactor, British Aerospace (BAE) announces it's sacked 3,000 skilled workers because the demand side seems to be drying up (possibly due to the falling off in their traditional customer base of fascistic murderous dictatorships), it's obvious that our economy needs to rebuild its manufacturing base around a different paradigm, and I'm pleased to announce that I have found the answer - self-perpetuating words!

I am not talking about the magnificent energies that are dedicated every minute to the generation of literature, constructive journalism, poetry and lyrics, or even blogs: all of these engender real outcomes, whether tangible, intellectual or, sometimes, emotional. I am talking about factories which produce and engender nothing but words which in turn produce and engender nothing but more words, until they end up with a miasma of self-perpetuating verbiage, like one of those fractal images that dissolve forever into themselves without anything new ever emerging.

you need to look at this to see what I mean

So, Think Tanks looks like our only growth industry. If this is so, let's encourage more of them, by whatever monetary, fiscal or nudge measures we can manage. Shall we start one? Nah, we probably don't need to. That list is a year old, and just today I noticed three new ones: 'The Council for the National Interest', 'The Human City Institute', and 'The Financial Inclusion Centre'. They should be able to sort it out between them.

Insubstantial pageant?

2011-09-25T22:49:00.000+01:00

Well, I don't know about that. The last time I wrote about the replica theatre called 'Shakespeare's Globe' (just in case of confusion with anyone else's), it was about getting there, rather than about the rather flaky performance of 'The Danish Play', which frankly is too packed with quotations for its own good.

So this time, it's going to be about the actual play. 'Doctor Faustus', by his so-called rival Christopher Marlowe. I was dreading it. I kind of assumed, (not knowing anything much about Marlowe other than that he was murdered on some river steps in Deptford, possibly by the KGB, this gleaned from a half-remembered Anthony Burgess novel), that it was going to be a bit of a slog. The legend of Faust - sell your soul and body to the devil for twenty-five years and then take the hit - well, it isn't exactly a Dan Brown plotline, is it?

As usual, I'd failed to take into account that plays only really work when they are staged and acted. Why didn't they teach us that at school? We spent countless hours force-reading this stuff on the page, failing to make any sense of it at all. I now know that that wasn't my fault - the teachers didn't really understand their material. If I was writing my ideal EngLit curriculum (ha ha, as if), I'd start with 'Don't let a child read a play until s/he has seen it performed', and take it from there.

Anyway, on the stage, it was a romp. High comedy, both verbal and slapstick, scary beasts and spirits and politicians and priests (the Pope was definitely modelled on Peter Cook's cameo in 'The Princess Bride'), and even the tragic ending (can you guess what happens?) was just precisely overacted.

Can't wait for the next one.

Neutrinos

2011-09-24T20:32:00.000+01:00

It would be a good idea to stockpile these now, if you can source some. It seems that experiments at CERN have sent these cheeky little fellows some 400 kilometres to somewhere in Italy, at a speed slightly greater than that of light. This is causing some consternation, and the scientists responsible are being rightly cautious (they’ve only repeated the results some 15,000 times, so it’s early days); but it appears that, if suitably peer-reviewed and confirmed, this opens up the possibility of time-travel.

I haven’t yet developed the theoretical framework which would support any practical implementation of this, but I’m sure the guys at Apple are working on the iTime as I write. It shouldn’t be too hard – after all, photons, when organised properly, can carry vast amounts of information (including these words), so why shouldn’t neutrinos be trained to do the same? It’s already commonplace to ‘print’ three-dimensional inorganic objects following a blueprint, so organic ones, like people, can’t be far behind. All we need to do is send an organic printer back to a pre-determined temporal location, scan oneself at this end, and hit ‘send and print’. The neutrino waves will do the rest, and there we’ll be, watching ourselves conduct that first fumble in the bus shelter. Or looking over Einstein’s shoulder as he gets special relativity wrong. Or observing that butterfly flapping its wings in the Brazilian jungle.

Of course, we mustn’t ever intervene. It’d be tempting though, wouldn’t it? There are quite a few things I’d be tempted to change given the chance.

PS To my regular silent watchers, greetings, you are very welcome. Feel free to say hello.

Clothesline

2011-09-23T15:35:00.000+01:00

The Federal Reserve’s calculated decision to sell $400bn of short-dated treasury bills to finance the purchase of 6 – 30 year debt, rather than embark on another round of quantitative easing, may alleviate some immediate pressures, but it entails several risks, which are worth spelling out in detail –

Eh? Oh, I am sorry, I seem to have strayed into the wrong blog there. I do hope I haven’t caused too much distress.

Right, I’m okay now. I was asked to explain how I came to possess a spare clothesline. But first I have a confession to make. In fact, when my old one broke under the weight of too many trousers and shirts, I did not, as implied, install the new one. Instead, I tied a knot in the old one, hauled it back up until the trousers were no longer dusting the patio, and took off into town to buy some CDs and books, and guitar strings and fingerpicks. I should have taken photos, it would have made this even more interesting.

So, why do I (still) have a spare clothesline? Serendipity, or perhaps synchronicity. Two weeks ago, K (who’s 88) announced that hers had broken. I offered, on my visit next day to Majestic for a top-up, to pop into the Range store next door and pick up a replacement, which I duly did. £1.40 for 20 metres, that’s not bad, is it? An hour after I got home, she phoned me to let me know that her kindly neighbour, Ray, had nipped up to B&Q, bought her a new line, and installed it. We both found this quite amusing. She offered to pay me the £1.40, but I said don’t be daft, I’ll hang on to it. It might come in useful, you never know.

Does anyone know what they’re on about?

2011-09-22T19:14:00.000+01:00

Our economy here in the ‘United’ ‘Kingdom’ is apparently set to ‘grow’ by ‘only’ 1.1%, and this is a bad thing. Other so-called statistics bear this out (the ‘bad thing’ bit I mean): unemployment is 2.something million and rising; government borrowing has gone up (yes, up!) to an all-time high of £16 billion for August; and consumer spending is trenching (unless you’re buying Mulberry or such stuff). And at least one kind of inflation is running at 4.5%.

Anyway, the economy will ‘grow’ (in my version of the language, that means ‘get bigger’) over the next twelve months, by 1.1%. That’s a positive rather than negative number. So why is it bad news? And how does ‘growth’, however meagre, reconcile with all those other negatives? How come, for example, unemployment is rising whilst the economy is getting a bit bigger? And how come we need to borrow more whilst we’re brutally slashing our outgoings?

I have pondered before the question of whether it makes sane sense to base all our policies and expectations on the premise that economies can, and must, go on getting bigger and bigger, for ever, or be doomed. But that’s for another day. For now, I just don’t get it. And guess what, I don’t think they do either.

Daritism

2011-09-20T21:41:00.000+01:00

I have received many requests to provide definitions for Blogger’s word verification, um, words, of which this is the latest. Exhaustive analysis allows me to reveal that they fall into three categories: words that look as if they might mean something, but don’t; words that could never by any stretch mean anything; and garbled obscenities. This leads me to believe that there are not two (as I previously thought) but three teams of verbaliverificationalists at work there: 1) the munchkins, who tease you with blunt-edged neologisms that send you scurrying to the dictionary, then giggle; 2) the oompa loompas, who throw the alphabet up in the air then run across the field kicking letters at each other until they form a pattern which makes them all giggle; and 3) underdeveloped schoolboys, who just giggle then snigger.

For the record, ‘datirism’ (n) means ‘a compulsive impulse to fail to make any sense (or anagram) of a given item of input.’ But that’s not important now.

More to the point, I was led to remember a recent complaint that there were far too many words which all mean the same thing. I disagreed, but now I’m thinking about the converse: one word which, though spelt and pronounced the same, means two or more quite different things. Diverted by this idea, and exploring ‘pan’, ‘lie’ and ‘waffle’, I was diverted by Chambers’ totally irrelevant definition of ‘page three’, which I can’t resist quoting in full, because it’s classic Chambers: ‘the page on which, traditionally, certain popular newspapers print nude or semi-nude photographs of female models with well-developed figures.’

Don’t you just love that ‘traditionally’? I could quibble with the syntax – a photograph cannot be nude or semi-nude – but that’s not important either.

So, to come to the important point, consider the word ‘bid’. This has two distinct meanings, from two quite different roots, which can be summarised as 1) to offer, and 2) to command. Here is a snatch of dialogue, possibly from Jane Austen or P G Wodehouse:

ARCHIE: I bid you, Clarinda –

CLARINDA: In what sense, Archie, do you say ‘bid’?

ARCHIE: Forgive me, my darling. I said ‘bid’. I meant to say ‘bid’.

Catch this!

2011-09-17T22:55:00.002+01:00

Wynton Marsalis And Eric Clapton

Bailey

2011-09-16T21:49:00.001+01:00

Here's Bailey, in a barrel in my garden.

I believe this cat to be called Bailey purely from an overheard conversation in the post office quite a few years ago. He's not telling. But he looks like a Bailey's, doesn't he? He often lounges around in the garden, and occasionally plonks himself on my back doorstep: it's brick and faces south, so it's a nice warm snuggly spot for a cat to snooze; especially a confidently controlling one. When I turn up from the car, Bailey thinks about it then decides physical contact is not appropriate, so he slopes off a couple of yards away, sits down and challenges me with his eyes. He's the rule-maker.

Bailey is huge. When I first saw him from the bedroom window, I thought a white panther had escaped from a local zoo, until I realised that there aren't any local zoos around here. But that's not conclusive. Here near the centre of Reading, there have been sightings of deer, pheasants, parakeets, red kites and grey wagtails and, once (admittedly a few miles up the road) a wallaby.* Life is wild around here!

* Sorry, can't resist an old SIHAC definition: 'Wannabe: someone aspiring to be a kangaroo.'

Ironies

2011-09-14T19:32:00.000+01:00

Haven't got time to work these up into deathless prose, so here's the raw material:

Youth unemployment soaring, so make old people work longer.
Must reinforce parental control over feral youngsters, so chop parents' benefits and evict them.
Houses can't be sold, so build lots more of them, on fields.
Internet makes face-to-face meetings less necessary, so build more railways.

That'll do for now, because I'm hungry. I have more.

Fiscal dilemma

2011-09-09T21:29:00.000+01:00

I received a pile of envelopes from HMRC this morning. I’m not going into details, naturally, but the upshot is that they've concluded that they have been overtaxing me for the past three years, and will be sending me a big cheque (let’s just say four figures, but I’m not telling you which four). I haven’t a clue whether they’re right, or how they know all this, given that I haven’t completed a tax return for at least five years, because they haven’t asked me to. I’ll be showing it all to my accountant on Monday evening, over the second G&T, and I think I know what he'll say.

So where’s the dilemma, I hear you ask. Well, clearly I don’t need this money, as I have comfortably survived the last three years without it. So what shall I do with it? I could donate it to Warren Buffett, just to ease the pain - but I don’t have his account number. Or I could donate it to charity – but which one? I could hand it back to the Treasury, requesting that they leverage it and hand the proceeds over to Mervyn to help out with the next round of QE – but I’m not doing that. I could go down the shops - I received a wonderful birthday card a couple of years ago:

Or I could just throw a humungous party. But that’s a lot of disruption for you all. Oh dear, I didn’t have this problem yesterday.

Triple crown magic? (3,5)

2011-09-08T19:33:00.001+01:00

Well done! I have just completed the Guardian Cryptic Crossword (that's the big people's one) for the third day on the trot. Should I:

a) Wallow in hubris?
b) Complain because they're getting too easy?
c) Throw away the dictionary and the crossword list book? or
d) Get out more?

Postscript: it's not often I select a word which means exactly the opposite of what I intended. I meant, of course, 'amour propre'. I will try to avoid antonymy in the future.

Mishearings, innuendos and doubles entendres

2011-09-07T22:24:00.001+01:00

Ensuing from a series of comments on another blog, involving a crude particle-physics-related anagram, I was prompted to put on an ancient Beach Boys album, containing amongst other joys (and a lot of carp), their cover of the Crystals' 'Then I Kissed Him' (for obvious reasons retitled 'Then I Kissed Her').

My mind was obviously running on some rather dubious tracks, because I heard the line 'I kissed her in a way that I'd never kissed a girl before' and thought "hmm". (This brought to mind a Guardian correspondence from many years ago, concerning the correct plural of ... no, I'd better not say. (If anyone knows what the French Connection I'm on about, please get in touch.))

But it did remind me of just a couple of famous mishearings, which I'm sure everybody knows but I can't resist repeating anyway, because they still make me laugh:
From the Shirelles' 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?': "Can I believe the magic of your size?'
And from Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze': "Scuse me while I kiss this guy!"
Any more, anyone?

How does that work, then?

2011-09-06T22:27:00.000+01:00

My washing machine broke down about seven years ago. It was, then, itself about fifteen years old. I wanted one exactly the same: after all, despite the twelve different options on the rotary programme selector and the five mysterious pressable buttons, I'd only ever used it for three purposes: whites, coloureds and occasionally delicates (when I couldn't be bothered to handwash a pullover).

So when the old one broke, it was dead easy. I went to John Lewis and said: "Can I have a new Bosch Lavamat 3100 please?"* The salesman didn't bat an eyelid. "I'm sorry sir, that's a very old model. Obsolete, in fact." He frowned. "What you need is the Bosch Lavamat 6100." My heart sank.

He showed me one. "Hang on," I said. "That's pretty much identical to the 3100, isn't it?" He smiled. "Outwardly, yes. Of course, the internal technology has been radically -"

I cut him off. "I'll take one."

He smiled again. "Very sensible, those Germans."

Thanks to Z for opening up this rich vein of potential bloggery.
* I may have made up these model numbers.

Useless grapes

2011-09-04T11:06:00.001+01:00

Useless for eating purposes that is, consisting as they do mostly of skin and pip - although they are quite tasty.

I turned them (and some vodka and sugar) into grape vodka last year, quite successfully, applying exactly the same technique as you use for sloe gin. (see here.) I started it in October, when they were more or less ripe, and it was ready for Christmas. It didn't last long into the New Year.

Stately homes of England (a very occasional series)

2011-08-31T21:23:00.002+01:00

We had agreed to meet up at midday at Buscot Park, with a view to proceeding up the road to Kelmscott Manor for our picnic, as Buscot didn't open until two. In the event, although Buscot House and gardens themselves (the bits you pay for if not a NT member) were not yet open, the car park and picnic area were; so, as we were both starving, events were reversed. We scoffed the picnic, luxuriously seated on sets rather than camp chairs or the ground (and invaded by only two wasps), then drove the long way round to Kelmscott to kill a little time until two o'clock.

I had no expectations at all. My experience of so-called stately homes resides mostly in the North and West of England. We parked ten minutes' walk away, opposite the church, and strolled up to the Manor, past an enticing pub (I don't know my friend well enough yet to suggest stopping off for a swift half). But the walk up through the village was delightful. Dry-stone walls are an art form created by craftsmen. (Hey, there's a buzzword - Arts and Crafts.) I could have stood and stared at them for tens of minutes.

Kelmscott is not National Trust, so can charge what it likes: £9 in this case. We didn't intend to visit there anyway - "I've had enough of Pre-Raphaelites", said my companion - so we made our way back to Buscot. (Mind you, Buscot charges £8 to non-NT-members, but I think you get a bit more for your money.) But what a fantastic place! I use that adjective carefully - there's a lot of fantasy in there. You wander into the next room and are confronted by a Gainsborough or a Rembrandt juxtaposed (in your mind) against an intimate Faringdon family portrait. Futuristic glass sculptures sit next to genuine Egyptian godesses and Rossetti houris. Eclecticism was possibly the crowning glory of the Victorian age; I was reminded of the Burrell collection.

So, having achieved cultural saturation, we wandered around the gardens and the park. The water garden with its wide lake reminded me of Stour Head; mock temples around the edges. The Swinging Garden (which I had been informed was for adults) was a disappointment; I'd expected it to be full of swingers behaving badly. But I think I was too tired for that by then.

And I haven't even mentioned the terracotta warriors.

There's a kind of hush

2011-08-27T21:44:00.000+01:00

I live within earshot of Rivermead, the location of the Reading Festival at this time every year. Usually, I flee the country (to Wales), but for a couple of reasons (wind, rain) that hasn't been possible this year.   So I was rather dreading it. I love music of nearly every kind (except finger-in-the-ear yokel-folk and massed bagpipes), but I'd rather select it for myself than have it, so to speak, thrust down my lugholes.

But, so far, something's wrong. I can hardly hear it. Admittedly the wind direction is variable, which makes a difference - so maybe Caversham is getting the best of it. But even allowing for the wind, it's just not loud enough! Time was, here half a mile away, windows would be trembling, chimneypots wobbling.  What's wrong with the kids of today? Don't they know how to make a proper noise any more? I didn't even notice much loud music during the riots.

As I write, I'm ducking between BBC3 and the garden.   Jarvis is giving the performance of his life on the telly, but all I can hear outside is the twiddly synth bits. I've turned the TV up to 11 (38 actually), and it still sounds tinny. Crank up the bass, guys, FFS. I should be down Notting Hill, where they used to know how to do loud. Still, Elbow are headlining tomorrow; I might wander down Cow Lane, G&T in hand, at about eight.

Is That All There Is?

2011-08-24T19:10:00.000+01:00

I wanted to show the actual YouTube video, but for some reason they won't let me embed videos in my blog anymore. So here's the link, in honour of Jerry Leiber, undoubtedly the greatest lyricist of the last fifty years, who died this week.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M&feature=player_embedded

Urgent enquiry

2011-08-23T22:00:00.000+01:00

Are these still valid?

And if so, what's their current market value?

One-liners

2011-08-21T21:24:00.002+01:00

A man walks into a bar. He says "Ouch!"
(Apologies for the misprint in earlier editions of this post.)

I dreamed this one:
I bought a tin of rat poison. In the small print it said "Rat Not Included."

Q: Why did Madam Blavatsky cross the road?
A: To get to The Other Side.

Come on, you can do better than that ...

VIX

2011-08-19T13:50:00.000+01:00

This is seriously loopy. To put it simplistically, the Volatility Index is a measure of the levels of 'fear' in financial markets, using data drawn from the renowned and reliable, not to say infallible, ratings agency Standard and Poor's. It's been around in Chicago for years. So far, so pointless. But the fun starts here: not only do they measure today's fear, they also calculate predicted fear levels in thirty, sixty and ninety days' time. Fear futures, in other words. And best of all, you can trade these futures in the marketplace. You can buy and sell bets on how afraid market traders might feel by Christmas. A quick search will put you in touch with people eager to help (at a price of course).

I'll shut up about that now, because my virtual pet snake has just started to eat its own tail again.

In other news, I understand that the markets are seriously jittery at the moment because they don't believe that governments are doing enough to regulate the markets.

And more importantly, have they found Yvonne the Bavarian cow yet?

Reading List

2011-08-18T21:33:00.001+01:00

In the absence of anything better to do with my leisure time (apart of course from consulting all your lovely blogs and firing the occasional inane comment at them), I read a lot. Every fortnight or so, I tramp down to Waterstones and buy whatever of the latest '3 for 2' offers catch my eye. [Should that be 'B3G1F?] Failing that, I trawl my shelves for rereadables. All that may change soon. In the meantime, here are my twitteresque reviews of the latest half-dozen:

Gods Without Men, Hari Kunzru: Sub-early-Pynchon without the jokes. Can the peyote, Coyote.
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Jonathan Coe: I did laugh a lot. Good vignettes, and an outrageously outrageous ending.
Killshot, Elmore Leonard: Anyone wanna write a thriller with real people on both sides? Bring it on. (Actually, 'both' is misleading. There as many sides as there are characters.)
The Free World, David Bezmozgis: Beautifully written sub-Tolstoyian epic of Russian emigres to Italy in the late seventies. Easily the best new thing I've read in months. [Spoiler alert: some of the endings are happy (I think).]
At Home, Bill Bryson: A miracle! Bryson has managed to write a bloated, humourless, really boring book.
Life, Keith Richards: You had to be there. And understand open five-string tunings. I was, and I do.

And your off-the-shelf bonus ball: The Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker.

The wee beasties will win

2011-08-15T13:53:00.000+01:00

In a neat pull-together of several recent threads, I can report that this tiny spider

builds its web, as often as is necessary, between my two grey bins. This has been going on for some weeks now. Whenever I go to wheel the bin out, or sometimes even just open a lid, spider seems to see me coming and whizzes off to the nearest bin, quite happy to sacrifice its finely wrought habitat to a greater power in the interest of survival. Just after I'd taken the photo, a feral wasp stumbled into the web. I was hoping to capture a battle royal, but the wasp escaped. The web was trashed though.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I have absolutely no idea what it is.

The Cost of Nothing

2011-08-12T17:18:00.000+01:00

My local council collects what they call green waste. You get given a special green wheelie-bin, and once a fortnight a Vulture comes round and empties it. They take the waste away, process it and compost it, and you can go up to the depot and buy nice bags of good organic peat-free compost at a very reasonable price.

Last March, everybody received a letter informing us that, from April, the council could no longer provide the free green bin service, and felt obliged to make an annual collection charge of £21.50. Invoices for this amount would be issued during April. We could, of course, opt out, but would have to make our own arrangements for disposal of our green waste. Amazingly, some people chose that course, evidently calculating that the cost of the petrol needed to take it up to the tip for a year, plus the plastic bags and their own time, would amount to less than £21.50. But most of us shook our heads in wry amusement and took the hit.

I personally thought this was an admirable scheme, fully in accordance with the spirit of modern economics. It was rather like a sub-prime mortgage - in which you sell somebody something and then take it away from them, charging them for the privilege - in reverse.

Anyway, April came and went, and no invoices appeared. For some reason, nobody seemed particularly surprised, and indeed most of us had more or less forgotten about it. The bins continued to get emptied. And then, early in May, there were some local elections, and the balance of power in my council changed. 'Ah-ha', we thought. The first duty of a new government is of course to do its best to undo everything the previous one did.

Sure enough, this morning the green bin collection team came down the road as usual, emptied the bins and delivered a letter, from the Interim Director of Environment Culture and Sport no less, to each house. The Interim Director apologised for the delay in updating us, but was pleased to announce that it had been decided to 'abandon' this charge. To quote:

'This means garden waste collections will remain free ... If you told us at the time that you were not willing to pay the new charges you can still place your bin out for collection.' And anyone who was nutty enough (there were some, apparently) to pay the £21.50 in advance will get a refund, in due course.

Without wishing to labour the point, I can't help wondering what the full cost was of this exercise in doing precisely nothing.

Feral

2011-08-10T19:13:00.002+01:00

It's the word of the week, and for once the journalists, and some members of the public, have nailed it. It means wild, or even better, reverted to the wild, and that's exactly what's happening. For the people in question, there wasn't far to go. I'll come back to that. First, four frontline suggestions:

1. Be like the Turks. I'm not particularly proposing vigilantism, but those Turkish shopkeepers who just stood up in front of their property and said 'bring it on', and got a result, had the right approach.
2. Parental responsibility. Any child, that is someone under eighteen living at home, who intends to go out without a very good reason has to be grounded. If they refuse, then the parents must tell them that the locks will be changed and they will not be allowed back in the house, ever. If the child calls the bluff, follow through.
3. Car boot sales or equivalent. We all know that there's a vibrant hidden economy built upon stolen or dodgy goods. (It's not as bad here as it is in Greece or Spain or Italy, but it's rife.) So downgrade all that. All that looted stuff is going somewhere. There's a limit to how many HDTVs or Imodium capsules you can steal for your own use. The police should be prowling those places over the next few weeks.
4. Arrests. Two people were openly interviewed on BBC TV this evening, effectively defending the violence and looting. They must be arrested and charged with incitement.

But of course none of that cuts to the quick. The trouble is that looting is the cultural norm. A letter to today's Guardian expressed it better than I can, but just consider: bankers, MPs, media slags, police, kids ... they're all looters. The more that moral decline persists and blooms, the less chance there is of us getting back to decency and compassion and fairness.

We're all going feral. 'Agenbite of inwit'. That's what we're losing. Remorse of conscience.

The Ben Cotta-Al Bergo AllStars

2011-08-07T14:10:00.000+01:00

Nobody today remembers this legendary Italian band which, for a brief scintillating moment, encapsulated the zeitgeist of the world-changing musical revolution that swept the southern European avant garde in 1967. Drawing on sources as diversely esoteric as The Flowerpot Men and The New Vaudeville Band, whilst unafraid to flirt with ‘popular culture’ (Brian Poole and the Tremoloes were a particular influence), the AllStars won a cult following in locales such as downtown Piacenza, the dockland areas of Portofino and the secret fleshpots of San Gimignano.

The band’s personnel is hard to nail down, shifting as it did in response to physical and mental circumstances, casual invitations to ‘sit in’, and of course the match or otherwise between the availability of musical instruments and people capable of playing them. But the core membership seems to have been: Ben Cotta, woodwind and air guitar; Al Bergo, cornetto; Sty Zitter, banjo, angklung; Con Limony, bass; Franco Bollo, banging things; Terry Motta, banging other things or sometimes the same ones as Bollo, including each other; Frank Cooler, very high-pitched calming noises; and of course the delightfully clad Bella Feager on occasional vocals.

Quite what contributed to the AllStars’ eventual demise, and the ongoing lawsuits, is difficult to discern. It has been suggested that ‘lack of musical differences, or similarities’ may have been a contributory factor, but it seems equally likely that the members’ growing amaretto habit, sometimes involving post-gig binge sessions until one or two in the morning, would have tipped the balance between success and ignominious collapse.

Sadly, no recordings of the AllStars have survived. Nor, apart from an undated entry in a mouldy old exercise book of mine, does there appear to be any documentary evidence that they ever actually existed.

Do The Default

2011-08-05T19:04:00.000+01:00

I have solved the world's financial problems several times here since I started blogging, but my proposals - abolish the financial markets, everybody join the euro, and so on - have been totally ignored. I can only assume that this is because they are not radical enough. So it's time to take the velvet glove off.

Somebody recently asked (in the Guardian, of course): if practically everyone is in debt, who do they owe it all to? Nobody came up with the obvious answer, which is 'each other'. And nobody has yet explained to my satisfaction how the inverted pyramid of piss which seems to be causing all this trouble came about, or why anyone puts up with it. On the radio only this morning, I heard an apparently important person, from a position of some authority, explaining in all seriousness that the problem was that governments were not doing enough to convince the markets that governments were doing enough to constrain the activities of the markets. I simplify, but not by much.

So, let's all default on our debts. Let's all - countries, corporations, families, people - say 'nope, sorry, can't repay you.' What would happen then? Susan from over the road would ask me to lend her £350 to buy a new iBrow or something. I'd say 'fine, I'll just nip next door and borrow it from Crispian.' Crispian would gladly say yes, because he knew that Kimberley two doors up would be good for it ... We'd all be happy, because we'd know that we'd be welcome round Susan's place any time to play with her iBrow. And the people who make iBrows would be perfectly happy.

Pretty soon everyone would get fed up with wasting all their energy whizzing money faster and faster around the planet, and hunker down to making and doing things that are actually useful to each other.

Meanwhile, I can't even buy a decent cheese grater. The company that used to make them has gone bust.

Things to do with the Moon

2011-08-04T21:55:00.000+01:00

How about this? I know you're all Grauniadistas so have probably read all about it already, but here's my take on it:

About a squazzillion years ago, a Mars-sized planet crashed into the raw embryonic thing that was to become the Earth. It left a huge hole, which much later became the Pacific Ocean. But the debris flew off into space and became two moons.

After a while, the laws of physics caused the smaller moon to collide gently with the bigger one, so that they merged into one. They agreed that we would struggle with this truth, once we came along - we needed a bit of time to work out the details. So they came to a deal, an orbit whereby we would only ever see one side of their marriage. The two sides were of course very different.

But we have outfoxed them. We can see the dark side, which is very different. Craggy and mountainous, rather than smooth and lightly pitted. I can't see the moons as I write, because they're new. But it comforts me, in some odd way, to imagine that I came from the same place and will go back there.

1987, what if?

2011-08-03T20:43:00.000+01:00

http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?PID=1419147&T=4147

Logic vs. emotion

2011-08-02T13:00:00.001+01:00

Some situations are born out of emotion, and one way of dealing with them is by applying logic. You write down all the emotional triggers that led you to where you are, and you demolish them, one by one, with cold, ruthless logic. "Was that true?" "The evidence indicates that it wasn't." "Why did that happen?" "Because someone was acting on signals which may not have been intended." "How come somebody said what they did?" "They felt it was true at the time." "Would that really have happened?" "No." And so on.

It doesn't work very well. But at least you know that whilst the emotions will fade away, given time, the cold ruthless logic will endure.

Some of you know what I'm talking about. Others will just have to guess.

Shibboleth

2011-07-29T20:48:00.000+01:00

Basically, I just wanted to write that word, because it has a tang about it. Some words do that - you would never use them in everyday speech, but you wish you could. 'Visceral' is another one; I don't even know how to say it, but I do know exactly what it means. Shibboleth, of course, is the Gileadite testword to distinguish an Ephrainite, who could not pronounce sh. But that's not important now.

The particular sh word I have in mind at the moment is 'Growth'. (Okay, let's assume they couldn't pronounce th either: I couldn't until I was about seven.) The U.K. economy has apparently grown by only 0.2% over the last quarter. This is a bad thing. Well, I don't know about you, but I don't really particularly want to grow any more. I'm quite happy with the size I am; certainly no more vertical, and I'll stick with or even reduce the horizontal. So, given that an economy is, when you get down to it, no more than a bunch of people, why exactly is it a good thing for it to get bigger all the time? Can't we just steady down, live with what we've got and get on with our lives?

And of course, actually there is no such thing as growth. There's only redistribution.

Single currencies

2011-07-27T21:40:00.000+01:00

There are two different sorts of economy in the Eurozone, which I can characterise (because I'm the one writing this) as Northern and Southern. They have separate financial policies, because they're separate countries, but they are governed by a single set of interest rates and exchange rates, because there's only the one currency. The only solutions to this inherent contradiction seem to be either to bust the whole thing up and go back to pesetas, drachmae, lire and escudos, or to muddle through somehow: which is the option currently being leant towards. Both ways will lead to catastrophe.

So, how about the middle road? Instead of fissiparating the Euro into seventeen old currencies, how about two? We can call them the Seuro and the Neuro, if you like. They get exchanged at a rate of 1:1 on the cutover date, then they go their own separate ways. I haven't worked out the details yet, it's only nine-thirty, but I can't see any insuperable problems. The Americans will be a hiccup, but heck, it's all their fault anyway; and the Irish'll just have to decide whether to jump into the Atlantic or the Med.

Prescription drugs

2011-07-22T19:32:00.000+01:00

Many years ago, I was in a queue at the chemist's when I overheard the lady in front of me tentatively ask the pharmacist whether it was safe to drink alcohol whilst taking her tablets. The pharmacist drew himself up to his full height, and pronounced for the whole shop to hear: "Madam, I regard alcohol as a contra-indication for ALL medication!" The poor woman slunk away, humiliated (and of course none the wiser from a strictly medical perspective).
I was reminded of this when the other day I had to collect a prescription for antibiotics to deal with a minor infection in, let's just say, a certain location. I'm not sure which was worse: the memory of that awful piece of unprofessional bigotry; or the tiny smile of sympathy that my pharmacist slipped me as he handed me my prescription.

So when I got home, of course I immediately read the leaflet carefully, three times. Thankfully, the word 'alcohol' didn't appear once. The dosage instructions were a bit tricksy though. 'Take four a day, evenly spaced, with food.' I thought about it. I normally eat three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. But that's not a problem - I can easily sneak a snack of some kind in there to make it up to four. So: 8.00am, 12.30 pm, 5.00pm, 8.30pm - job done!

But then I began to wonder what they meant by 'day'. Is it my normal waking day (which can vary significantly in length); or is it a twenty-four hour period? If the latter, then I'll only get six hours' sleep before I have to get up and have a meal.

At least the list of possible side-effects wasn't too bad. There's a probably apocryphal drug which takes you through just about everything from itching to beri-beri, and ends with the word 'death'. After that there's the usual instruction: 'In case of any of these, consult your doctor immediately.'

I've settled for plan A, and it seems to be working.

Hackgate

2011-07-20T21:00:00.001+01:00

I first read this word in yesterday's paper, then twice in today's, and I've heard it at least three more times on the radio today. It had to come, because the suffix '-gate' has been applied to pretty well every political scandal since 1972, and has become easily the most insidious journalistic cliche of the past fifty years. Of course, as Marina Hyde points out in the Guardian, the original had nothing whatsoever to do with water, or, for that matter, any sort of gate. Watergate was just the name of a building. I'd like to be able to identify the first journalist to appropriate the last syllable of this word as a generic suffix, and have a word with them, but I haven't the energy.

What gets me about this particular piece of linguistic abuse, though, is that it misses the point. The current discourse should no longer be about phone hacking. That was merely the entry point, the little crack in a huge wall, into which a much bigger wedge needs to be driven. The 'Hackgate' neologistic cliche plays into the hands of the Murdochs of this world, because it enables them to trivialise the much bigger issues at stake. (I presume you all know what those are, but just in case, I'll summarise them in Lord Acton's two words: 'Power Corrupts'.) By keeping it at that level of specifics, it lets them damp it down (with carefully orchestrated play-acting - did anyone see Murdoch's performance yesterday? It reminded me of Ernest Saunders - and was the foam-pie thrower briefed, or employed?) and get on with the more important business of launching the Scum on Sunday. And buying the next generation of rotten politicians and policemen.

Phew, that felt good! Haven't had a good rant for ages.

Sun Burn

2011-07-14T19:00:00.000+01:00

I'm lucky or smart enough to have a retirement income that slightly exceeds my fairly modest day-to-day needs. I could of course expand those needs to soak up the surplus. But all the extra things I'd spend it on would be time bound. Every CD or movie you buy, every new car or boat or helicopter, these all require the consumption of the one commodity none of us can buy more of - hours.

So what drives these people? It's obviously not money, I've just proved that. You can't eat, drink, shelter under, smoke, have sex with money. Money doesn't get you a sunrise or a great conversation or an emotional crisis that expands your consciousness. So what's left?

It must be power. They must be deluded enough to believe that power - which is, when it comes down to it, the ability to use money to worsen other people's lives - is paramount, above all else. How sad.

So what I suggest is that next Tuesday, when Rupert and his fellow-cancers are being dragged kicking and squirming to account for themselves and their insidious corruption of all that used to be good in this world, we all go down the local shop and buy every single copy of the Sun newspaper. They only cost 30p each, so a fiver should cover it. Get there early and barge your way to the front of the queue. Then take them home and have a bonfire, preferably in the street.